Elemental Magic by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

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Imogen Stewart’s Fifth Avenue mansion rose far from the squalid streets where creatures of the night, filthy immigrants, and pathetic paupers eked out a wretched existence.

Imogen was made for better.

True, she had arrived in Castle Gardens as an immigrant herself, long ago, in a different life, a Scottish lass in search of the father who had abandoned their family for a new world of luxury.

She never found him. She suspected her father James had experienced the American Dream as nothing more than a snare and a nightmare, and that he had died somewhere in the gutter. He was too fond of pleasure, dreaming of Easy Street, good times, nothing more.

The American Dream was real. But it demanded human sacrifice.

Imogen had lived on her wiles—and her magic. The Fire magic, untamed, that had killed her own mother by accident, only grew more hungry and insistent across the great ocean separating her from her native land.

Elementals had crossed that great gulf as well. So when Imogen summoned dragons and compelled them to do her bidding, she knew then that she could conquer the streets, make them, like the dragons, hers.

She did not reckon on the corrupting effects of treasure. As the years flew away on their massive wings, slow at first but then faster, and faster still, Imogen added to her wealth, created an empire.

But her riches were never enough. The more she amassed, the greater the hunger for more. Imperceptibly, from moment to moment, from conquest to conquest, Imogen Stewart, lady robber baroness and denizen of the highest New York society, became possessed by the lust of her dragon.

At first, she only burned factories and workshops to gain a financial advantage over her commercial rivals. But once she discovered the power contained in the lives that she immolated, Imogen burned the tenements and the sweatshops to harvest the richest treasure of all.

Souls.

For souls fueled her power, made her all but invincible. The city itself was a pearl trapped in her talons. She was on the verge of destroying the mightiest of the Wall Street titans, Gould, the reclusive, all-powerful financier.

She had planned the burning of the orphanage for some time. Such a plunder of young, tender, untarnished souls would have fueled her destructive power beyond all redemption. But for the first time, her arson did not unfold as she had planned.

Instead of dying in the fire, the orphans had somehow escaped the flames. The two that had died, died instantly, without pain, their souls escaping her before she could trap them. And one of the others . . .

One of those miserable little wretches . . .

Had not run from the flames, but chose to burn. Danced in the inferno.

Stole Imogen’s own power.

Imogen sensed a great Fire magic had risen in opposition to hers. The snow and ice that had come in the previous day’s storm had blunted that raw power, contained it.

But New York City was now in thaw.

Imogen planned to strike her enemies dead, fast, before another

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