Magic Kingdom (Dragon Born Alexandria Book 3) (27 page)

“She’s a Convictionite agent,” he said.

“What?” Alex said, surprised. Of all the explanations, she hadn’t been expecting this one. “How long have you known this?”

“I’ve suspected something since she showed up at the summit hall. I could smell the lies on her. I got my confirmation when I followed her here to a meeting with a band of Convictionites. They were plotting how to rescue the ones we captured this afternoon. Or how to kill them before they could reveal their plans. They were still debating it when I killed them.”

“That’s why you wanted to stick close to her,” Alex realized.

Zinnia winked at him. “And once he was here, he couldn’t keep his hands to himself.”

Logan shot her an icy glare. “My mate told you to be silent.”

There was something exhilarating about hearing him call her his mate. The sour look on Zinnia’s face was just the icing on the cake.

Logan took Alex’s hand. “Surely, you didn’t think I came here to enjoy her company.”

Alex choked back the instant denial that tried to spring to her lips. She had been jealous. There was no denying that. As Marek and Eva walked up behind her, she felt boosted by their presence.

“I dreamt about killing her,” Alex finally said.

Logan laughed.

“You should have told me you knew she was evil. I was feeling guilty about killing her in my dreams.” Well, kind of. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He expelled a slow, patient sigh. “Because you would have run in and attacked Zinnia. And I needed to spy on her, to figure out what she was doing. Which is just what I did.”

“You should have trusted me. I wouldn’t go into a rage and…” She stopped herself. That wasn’t true. She’d been having trouble with controlling her rage lately. “I would have had your back anyway,” she told Logan.

“I’m sorry.” The hard look in his eyes softened, if only a little. “I’m so used to working alone, and I just wanted to protect you, especially after what happened in London. I couldn’t bear to see you get hurt.”

“You don’t get to decide my battles for me, Logan.”

“What’s wrong? Trouble in paradise?” Zinnia taunted.

Magic burned Alex’s eyes, fueled by her fury. “Shut up.”

“Alex is reckless and always falls in way over her head,” Marek said to Logan. “But she will always have your back.”

“Always,” Eva agreed.

“Always.” Alex punched Logan in the arm. “Next time, don’t make me find you. You can’t do everything alone.
We
can’t do everything alone.”

He rested his forehead against hers. “You’re right,” he said, the words falling against her lips.

“And you remember that.” She nipped his lower lip, drawing blood. She flicked her tongue and licked up the drop. Sweet, sensual magic exploded in her mouth. “Next time you forget, I’ll kick your ass.”

He cracked a smile. “You can try, Vigilante.” His voice dipped lower, rumbling in his chest. “You can certainly try.”

She kissed him softly. “Don’t tempt me.”

Zinnia yawned loudly from the other side of the fire barrier.

“What happened?” Marek said to Logan. “Why are you fighting her instead of standing over her dead body? I thought you always kill from a distance.”

“I was discovered.” His mouth tightened.

“You?” Alex said in shock. “But you’re basically invisible.”

“Not invisible.” His eyes were hard pools of malachite. Incompetence was way up there on his list of mortal sins. “Just really good at blending. Most people don’t ever notice me. But Zinnia is like me.”

Zinnia shot Alex a triumphant smile.

“What do you mean
like you
?” Alex demanded.

“Apparently, the Convictionites enhanced her with magic.”

Alex looked at Zinnia. “So not a hybrid who was attacked by a vampire?”

Zinnia shrugged. “It makes such a good story.”

“Is there a single thing you’ve ever said that’s not a lie?” Alex asked her.

Zinnia’s lips curled. “I wasn’t lying about all the places Logan and I had sex.”

Alex’s wall of fire blazed up.

Zinnia clucked her tongue. “Temper, temper, my dear.”

In Alex’s mind, Zinnia exploded in a ball of purple flames. And it felt so damn good.

“I knew her story about the vampire was a lie,” Logan said. “Her scent changed.”

Her magic probably had too. Alex hadn’t noticed. She’d been too busy hating her guts to think straight. There was probably a lesson in all of this.

“The magic the Convictionites infused her with manifested differently in her than in me. She has good hearing and vision, though not as good as mine. She has my strength and speed but not my healing capabilities.” Logan indicated the cuts across her arms. “But she can wield magic. Just like the Sultan.”

Zinnia’s smirk faded, displaced by a vicious sneer. Oh, a touchy subject, was it?

“You mean the guy I turned to ashes?” Alex asked, smiling.

Zinnia jumped forward, snarling through the fire barrier. “You killed my brother. I will kill you.”

“Oh, so that’s what you’ve been trying to do. Annoy me to death.”

“Your death will be slow. Painful. I will take away everything you love before I kill you. You will suffer as I have suffered,” Zinnia promised with sick pleasure.

“Ok, so I have to tell you that your brother was crazy,” said Alex. “But then again, so are you.”

Zinnia made a strangled noise in her throat, something between a hiss and a bark. Yep, crazy.

“You never suspected she was working for the Convictionites, not once in all the years you knew each other?” Alex asked Logan.

He kept his face blank. “No, I never suspected that. I met her shortly after I left my family. I was working as an assassin and a thief. She was a thief. We stole some things together and split the money. Every year or so, we’d run into each other again and do another job together for old time’s sake. To be honest, Alex, we didn’t talk much about our lives.”

“We were too busy,” Zinnia said with a suggestive twist of her lips.

“You’re an idiot,” Alex told her. “Why do you think you never talked about your lives? Because he didn’t really care about you.”

“Stupid girl,” she spat. “You cannot even begin to fathom the depth of my connection with him.”

“No, Alex is right. I was just looking for adventure, money, and a good time. As were you, so cut the crap, Zinnia.”

“Fine. I was.” A devious look sparked in her eyes. “But I was also keeping an eye on you for your mother.”

Any hint of emotion washed from Logan’s face, which meant he was surprised or pissed off. Or both. His magic hummed the death note of hell.

“And all those dangerous, complex jobs we did that I was working on and needed a partner for when we just
happened
to bump into each other?” Zinnia winked at him. “Convictionite jobs.”

“What?” Logan said, his voice dipping to glacial temperatures.

“That’s right, darling.” Zinnia set her hands on her hips. “You were working for the Convictionites too, stealing things from supernaturals that we could use in our war to purge the world of their impurity.”

Alex could feel Logan’s rage bubbling through their connection. He hated the Convictionites. He’d always refused to do jobs for them. Finding out that he had been helping them all along was eating him alive. The self-control he’d told her had weakened since bonding with her was on its last strings. And Zinnia wasn’t helping matters by taunting him.

“Logan, come back home,” she said. “Your mother will forgive you. She’ll even let you keep your little mage as a pet.”

The fire barrier snapped out at Zinnia, forcing her to jump back.

“Oops,” Alex said.

Zinnia brushed the cape from her shoulder, and that’s when Alex felt it. The cape had magic. Familiar magic. It felt like one of the Ornaments of the Dead.

“The Midnight Cape,” she muttered.

As soon as she noticed it, she could sense that same flavor of magic from Zinnia’s gloves and the tiara she was wearing. She was wearing three of the Ornaments of the Dead. And Alex had only just realized that now, even though she’d been in this hall for a few minutes. She really needed to get her head back on straight. She kept missing things. Important things.

“The Fairy Crown,” Alex said. “The Dragon Skin. And the Midnight Cape. What are you doing with Ornaments of the Dead?”

“Collecting them.”

“The necromancer is collecting them,” Alex said.

Zinnia’s haughty smile wilted. “Yes, Majestic is making a real nuisance of herself.”

“Majestic? That’s the necromancer’s name?”

“Yes. Garish, isn’t it? She thinks she’s a goddess just because her master gave her a few showy powers like that green fire magic. But before he gave her those powers, she was nothing but a second-rate necromancer.”

Since Zinnia seemed to be in the mood to answer questions, Alex asked another. “Who is her master?”

“Alden,” Zinnia said. “You might know him as the Grim Reaper. Another silly name. The members of his cult have such delusions of grandeur.”

“As opposed to your cult.”

Zinnia stiffened. “We are
not
a cult. We are a revolution.”

Whatever. “What do Majestic and Alden want with the Ornaments of the Dead?”

“Isn’t it obvious, dear? They want to summon an army of undead soldiers to wipe out humanity.”

“You mean wipe out the Convictionites,” said Alex.

“No, all humans,” Zinnia told her. “If Majestic succeeds in summoning the undead from hell, the earth will be overrun by death’s army. The Convictionites cannot hold them back. Our magic doesn’t work on the dead. Our divine mission to defend humanity would fail.”

“Wow, that’s a really warped way to defend your genocide,” commented Eva.

“So, basically you’re telling me that Alden and the Convictionites are in a race to collect all the Ornaments of the Dead, which have the power to unleash the dead upon the earth?” Alex asked Zinnia.

“Yes,” said Zinnia.

“Another impending apocalypse.” Alex sighed. “It must be Saturday.”

“How astute of you, dear,” said Zinnia.

“It wasn’t just one person,” Alex realized.

Zinnia shot her an impatient look. “What?”

“At the thefts. It was two people: you and Majestic.”

Zinnia nodded. “Sometimes I got there first, sometimes she did. Majestic and I have been tracking each other. I used my tools to track her magic when it moved. She used her ghost spies. Why do you think I’m hiding underground now? It’s certainly not for the wonders it does for my complexion. I’m here because ghosts don’t like to go underground. In fact, they avoid it at all costs. It reminds them of the time their bodies were buried after death.”

Alex hadn’t heard that before. She filed the information away for future use.

“Majestic and I clashed a few times. That bitch hits hard.” Zinnia flashed her teeth. “But so do I.”

“I’m surprised you survived the green fire,” said Alex.

Zinnia turned a bit green herself.

“Oh, I see.” Alex didn’t even try to keep the smile off her face. “You didn’t fight. You fled like a scared little girl, using the Midnight Cape to disappear into the spirit realm.”

Zinnia didn’t say a thing. Her eyes, however, were screaming bloody murder. Alex made a show of pretending to wipe a tear from her face, which only incensed Zinnia further.

“So, we were looking at two different people at the theft scenes,” Logan said, ever serious. The man really needed to learn to dance over the grave of his enemies’ defeat. “Majestic was responsible for the green fire and the power to control the dead, a power that has been growing with every artifact that she collects. Zinnia was responsible for tearing doors off their hinges and was the one who seemed to disappear from sight.”

“Right,” said Alex. “But who unleashed the monsters last night?”

“That was Majestic, of course,” Zinnia told them. “She and that blasted Grim Reaper. He used his vile magic to make the beasts go wild. His minions melted roads, released caged beasts from their prisons and drew wild monsters into the city. They spiked some supernaturals’ drinks with rage-inducing drugs. They cast magic on plants to possess them to attack people. That Grim Reaper has some seriously nasty magic.”

“And they did all this to cover up their thefts?” Alex asked.

“Basically,” replied Zinnia. “They needed a distraction so they could hatch their vile plan. I, of course, would never do such a thing or put so many innocent lives at risk.”

Alex looked at Logan.

“She’s telling the truth. She didn’t do it.”

Zinnia batted her feathery eyelashes at him.

“But that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t do it,” he added. “She is absolutely capable of it.”

Zinnia set her hand over her heart in mock despair. “Logan, my love, you wound me.”

“The Convictionites have shown us time and again that they are perfectly willing to accept collateral damage—or cause it,” Alex said. “You were responsible for as much suffering over the past two days as Alden’s people.” She considered the thefts. “In fact, you were the one who stole the first Ornament of the Dead, the Midnight Cape.”

A smile tickled Zinnia’s lips. She brushed her hand down the cape’s sleek fabric.

“The second theft was the one across from the coffee shop,” said Alex. “Asunder, the magic sword was taken. The building was melted open, so that must have been Majestic. The third theft happened inside the new town hall. There was evidence of a fight there. It was more than just the dead guards. You must have ripped the door off its hinges. Majestic arrived and shot green fire at you. Then you turned tail and escaped with the Fairy Crown using the cloak.”

“Never in my life, have I ‘turned tail’. Never,” she hissed.

Alex ignored her hissy fit. “Then you jumped to the fourth location, to the Dragon Skin gloves, using a magic stream in the spirit realm.” She looked at Eva.

“It’s the only way she could have made it across the city so quickly,” Eva agreed.

“The fifth theft was Majestic’s doing,” Alex decided. “She rose the dead at the cemetery to cover her while she stole the pendant. The pendant must have significantly increased her powers because at the sixth theft site, she was able to grab the souls of the fairies she’d killed and use them to fight me and Logan while she escaped with Orion’s Belt. And the belt increased her power again. So much so, in fact, that when we went to the antique shop for the ring, she could summon mages who were longer dead, ones from the spirit realm itself.”