Guardians of Magic: A Reverse Harem Fantasy Romance (Guardians of the Fae Book 1)

by Elizabeth Hartwell

  “You feel so good inside me, so full," I moan as Jacob adds another finger, his eyes daring, turned on and amused as he stretches me more. When I’m moaning, pushing back into his pumping fingers, he withdraws them, taking his rock-hard cock in his hand and lining up with me. I entwine my fingers with Cole and Tyler, willing myself to relax as I feel Jacob’s cock press against my sphincter, spreading me open. Gods, this is going to feel so good—

  “What the fuck are you doing?” a shrill female voice says as suddenly, the living room is filled with four women. “Her Highness sent you to retrieve the target, not fuck her!”

  Jacob pauses, and I look over to see a tall, golden-haired woman along with a trio of others. All of them are beautiful . . . and all of them are pissed.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, you couldn’t have waited ten minutes?” Jacob says, pulling back and turning to face them. “We’re leaving in the morning.”

  Who is this? I ask, my body still trembling.

  Four of Queen Cassina’s Handmaidens, Noah replies. Led by Lysette, one of her most personal guard and trusted advisors.

  Tyler, visibly annoyed by the sudden interruption, gets up. “Lysette, please. We have been busy with our mission and—”

  “You lie!” Lysette screams, her hand flying out. In it is something that looks like a whip, a white lash flashing across the room to strike Tyler in the chest and send him stumbling backward. “We were sent because you four . . . cretins weren’t doing your duty! Your duty is to the queen, not this foul creature!”

  “Excuse me?” I ask, finally managing to get up. I know this Lysette is an important person in faerie world, but this bitch just hurt one of my men and called me a foul creature. “You need to—”

  “Silence!” another screeches, trying to whip me, but Jacob steps in front just before the lash can find my skin, taking it across his back and driving him to his knees. He stumbles, pushing me back as he’s whipped again mercilessly, all four of them pulling out lashes and letting their glowing lengths drop to the ground.

  “Don’t do it, Cole,” one of them says, looking at him as he rises to defend his brothers. “We’ll flay the skin off your bones if we have to. This . . . what is she, some Halfling?”

  Their rage continues to pour out on Jacob. Cole and Noah are watching, but they’re naked, unarmed, and in a pretty helpless situation. Jacob!

  Princess . . . it’s . . . Jacob tries to reply, but there’s so much pain in his mind, so much agony. The whip is enchanted, I can tell, and as Jacob absorbs a hard kick to his ribs, he coughs, rolling and showing me a bleeding, ugly welt on his skin. I drop down next to him, trying to cradle his head as he coughs and red droplets spray over my face. Something . . . unlocks.

  “Stop!” I growl, glaring at Lysette. “Now!”

  For the first time, Lysette seems to consider me, her lip curling in disgust. “Halfling whore . . . they and their bodies belong to Her Majesty.”

  “They . . . are . . . mine!” I growl, my voice dropping somehow, and two beams of light fly from my eyes. The world goes a vibrant, neon green, as if I'm looking through night vision goggles as I pour my anger and darkness into everything, and suddenly, one of the Handmaidens starts screaming and her eyes go wide with panic and confusion. In a flash, she bursts into sickly green flames that flare for an agonizing instant before she crumbles into dust.

  Before the last specks of dust settle, two more handmaidens begin screaming, drawing my attention. As soon as I look at them, they both burst into flames too.

  Noah is closest to me, and a steadying hand on my shoulder begins to help the anger recede. Lysette jumps behind the door, cowering as she yells, "Demon!" I close my eyes and hear the slam as she runs away in terror.

  I stumble back, horrified at what I just did. “What . . . how?”

  Cole leaps up, his eyes full of shock and bewilderment. “Eve, what did you do?”

  I blink, looking at Jacob, who’s bleeding on the floor, and Tyler, whose chest looks like someone hit him with a baseball bat, and I groan, holding my head. “I . . . I don’t know,” I whisper, rubbing at my eyes. They feel grainy, burning. “Dear God, what did I do?”

  “Eve, that . . . that wasn’t Fae power,” Cole says quietly. “The color, the anger I felt over our link. That’s a demonic power.”

  Jacob rolls over, slowly getting to his knees. “I don’t give a fuck if it was Fae or demonic. She saved my ass. Tyler’s too.” He looks at the three burned husks and whistles. “Still, Princess . . . holy shit, that’s a mess.”

  “What does this mean?” Noah asks. “Is she not Fae?

  “She is Fae,” Cole says, his voice dripping with anger as he turns his head. “We have seen her use Fae powers. She is . . . she is a Halfling.”

  He turns back to me, his eyes sad. “But not half human,” he whispers, taking my hands. “Eve, the other half . . . look.”

  He leads me over to the window, where the glass is just reflective enough for me to see it . . . the greenish tint to the whites of my eyes, just like Joe’s.

  “It can’t be,” I whisper, tears starting to trickle down my cheeks. “Cole, I can’t be a demon.”

  To be continued . . .

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  Prologue

  Eve

  Growing up, I thought I’d gotten pretty damn lucky hand in life. That might seem weird given that I was an orphan, but I got adopted and grew up in a middle-class family when most kids in my position ended up a lot worse. I can’t even remember spending time in the orphanage. All I remember is that I lived a mostly normal, comfortable life with a loving mother and father. I even had a little sister who thought I was the best thing ever. The feeling was mutual, and I thought that I was going to have a great life… until the Para Wars.

  It was then that the world that I thought I knew changed forever. One car ride, one night… one attack later, and things were never going to be the same. Orphaned again, this time with a little sister, in a world that wasn’t quite as kind to orphans. After all, there were tens of thousands of us, victims of the Para Wars. But through the ups and downs, I kept my sister by my side. I got tough, strong, smart, and became what I thought was one of the good guys, one that fought for justice and peace.

  The price was that I hated Paras for the longest. I fell into the same line of thinking as most others, that the vast majority of Paras were bad. Or weak, or just inherently evil. While I wouldn’t go as far as some of the Abolitionists, who advocated that all Paras needed to be ‘abolished’ to eliminate the disease of Paranormalism, I did believe they needed to be kept in check, lest their evil take over the world.

  In my eyes, even the supposedly good ones had to take the hit for all the evil that the bad ones did. Besides, a little voice inside me whispered, if there were good Paras, why weren’t they speaking out against their own?

  Why weren’t they cleaning up their own?

  Slowly, as I gained experience and spent more time on the streets, I began to realize that things are a lot more complicated. I saw that everything wasn’t so black and white. I saw Para families, their eyes filled with fear not only at what their evil kin would do, but by my mere presence with a badge and a gun. I saw anger and shame as people who hadn’t chosen their fate were put into awful situations and treated in a way that no one should be treated.

  More importantly, I learned that Humans could be just as evil.

  Evil. A word I would never use to describe myself. Yet in the past few days, I’ve done things that fit the description. In the past forty-eight hours, I watched my hometown nearly go up in flames, nearly torn apart by hatred. It doesn’t matter if it was inflamed by evil magic, or if the people were treate
d like chess pieces on a game board by a creature far more evil than I’d ever thought existed.

  I watched the world descend into a whole shit pie, and while I might not like it, I can’t shirk my responsibility. Everyone’s gotta take a big ol’ bite.

  But that isn’t the worst of it.

  I’ve been told not only am I Faerie, but in one terrifying instant, I learned that I’m also at least partly Demon. At first, when I blew someone’s head up with just a thought, I tried to deny it. Rationalize it. But with a flash of dark fire from my eyes, consuming three Faerie handmaidens and condemning them to a terrifying, agonizing death, I can’t deny it any longer.

  Good or evil, deserved or undeserved, the irrefutable fact is my powers are destructive. And if I don’t find out how to reconcile who I am, it might spell disaster.

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the hunter when it came towards Para justice.

  But now I’ll be the hunted.

  Eve

  “What the hell was that?” I gasp, reaching up to touch the fangs that are making my upper lip bulge outward almost cartoonishly. They’re long, not quite pushing out of my mouth but very close. I lift my lip to look at them, a pair of long and gleaming white canines that come to a needle-sharp point. I stroke one with a finger, touching the tip with my left index finger.

  “Ow!” A pinprick of blood appears on the tip of my finger as my fangs retract into my gums with an audible click. My mouth suddenly feels almost empty, and a numb, surreal sense of horror washes over me as I look at the ruby red sanguineous jewel on my fingertip, quivering for a moment before my trembling hand overwhelms the surface tension and the drop rolls down my skin.

  I stare at the line of scarlet in horror, and then at my reflection, trying to deny what I just saw. What I did. What I’ve become.

  No. It can’t be. I’ve spent my entire adult life fighting Paranormals. This has to be some sort of a cruel joke.

  But it’s no joke. In the mirror behind me, I see the piles of ash that still glitter with sick green sparkles, the remains of the faerie handmaidens that I just consumed with fire from my eyes. Above them, I see a ghostly afterimage of an armored man on horseback, his stallion rearing before disappearing in a swirl of green sparks.

  Unconsciously, I bring the tip of my finger up to my lips and suck away the drop of blood. The liquid carries a sweet flavor, one that’s not totally unpleasant and that sends an almost sexual thrill to my core. It’s one that I could see myself getting used to, and that sends a totally different kind of shiver down my spine.

  I’m even starting to act like a demon too, loving the taste of blood like a bloodthirsty Vamp.

  I jerk my hand away, but no one seems to notice. They’re too busy trying to figure out what in the world just happened.

  Still, maybe if I deny it long enough, I can make it go away. “This . . . this can’t be real.”

  “Sorry to break it to you, Demonica, but I’d say Hell is calling and wants you back, reporting for duty with the way you torched those crazy bitches,” groans Jacob, rubbing his bruised chest while he stares at the pile of remains that were once the faerie handmaidens. He gets to his feet, wincing as his body starts to feel the sting of torn flesh from the handmaidens’ whips again. “Not that I’m complaining or anything. You just saved our collective asses.”

  “Demonica?” I growl as I turn to him, not amused. I’d just roasted a trio of a faerie queen’s handmaidens to ash and probably simultaneously signed my death warrant. Probably my Guardians’ warrants too. Humor is definitely not on my menu right now.

  “Hey, I think you looked sexy as fuck with fangs,” Jacob compliments, seeing I’m not laughing in the least digging himself a deeper hole. I’d swear I’d slap him if I weren’t scared I’d morph into some evil succubus from Hell that would suck the blood from his Fae veins.

  “Quiet, Jacob,” Cole growls, looking the most frazzled I’ve ever seen him. The de facto leader of my Fae Guardians, he’s never looked more than slightly perturbed before. “This is serious.”

  “It wasn’t serious already?” asks Noah. He’s looking at me with a masked expression. Gone is the look from before that would have me feeling butterflies in my stomach.

  “Sure, it was,” Jacob says, ever the wisecrack to Noah’s somber proclamations. “But we had things relatively under control until Cassina’s psycho bitch squad showed up. I think what Cole meant to say was, ‘Shit just got real.’”

  “G–guys . . . there has to be some other explanation,” I stutter, ignoring Jacob’s attempts at cutting the tension and racking my brain for a rational theory on what happened. “I mean, look at me. Besides the golden eyes, I look completely human. How can I be human, Fae, and demon?”

  “Well, you do seem to be growing fangs,” Jacob reminds me. “Don’t forget that.”

  “What if it’s some form of faerie powers that none of you have heard about? You’ve said that magic varies from Fae to Fae, so maybe I’m just—”

  “I’ve seen a lot of magic in my time,” Tyler, who’s been quiet up till now, says. He looks at me with both love and sadness because he knows what he’s saying hurts me, and him too. He was the first of my Guardians to really open up that side of himself to me. “But that was unlike any Fae spell I’ve ever seen, even the demonstrations that we’ve gotten from the queen’s own sorceresses. That was Hellfire.”

  The guys look to each other, somber acknowledgment in their eyes, but I’m still working my way through the stages, moving past denial and rounding my way into anger and bargaining.

  “But it still doesn’t explain how this is possible. Does this mean I’m not human at all? And why is everything manifesting itself now?”

  “I’m not sure,” says Cole, stepping over and kneeling beside the nearest ash pile. He runs a finger through the sparkling dust, reestablishing himself as the leader and even-handed stoic warrior I first saw when I met him. It takes a lot to disturb the calm waters of his soul, but that soul is so noble, pure, and passionate that I thought I could immerse myself in it forever. He looks up at me, and I see the haunted look in his eyes that tells me he’s just as hurt as the others, but he’s going to pull the mantle of leader and warrior around himself and do what needs to be done for the team . . . and maybe for me too. “I’ve never heard of a mix between the two species before, or at least nothing that is buried in the annals of our lore—”

  “Your dad banged a succubi and it’s as simple as that,” Jacob cuts in.

  Cole growls over Jacob, “Perhaps it was the awakening of your Fae powers that triggered it. Or maybe . . . Joe brought it out of you.”

  A chill goes down my spine thinking about how I’d been so easily duped by Joe Gonzalez, my former partner, who I thought was a nice guy and a good cop. Unfortunately, underneath that whole ‘aw, shucks’ nice guy exterior was a demon lord who’d played this entire city like a fucking fiddle in his quest to bring me to meet . . . someone stronger than him. I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound good, that’s for sure.

  It was truly frightening to find out the truth about our relationship, to know that everything he’d told me about himself was all a lie. How could I have worked side by side, day by day with him for years and not even gotten a whisper of what he really was inside? How could I have let him dupe me so easily?

  Because you’ve duped yourself about every single thing that’s happened to you in your life, an unwanted voice whispers at the edges of my mind. It’s sensible but also merciless, somehow cold and seductive at the same time. Because you’re not able to accept what you really are.

  The words cut me deep. It wasn’t like I knew, and it wasn’t like my powers had manifested themselves in any way up until a month ago. Even then, until the Fae stepped into my life, I just thought I was overworked or possibly experiencing some kind of mental breakdown. That maybe stress was causing my migraines.

  I try to ignore my inner recriminations to listen to Cole as he looks at me carefully,
walking closer. It’s weird that he’s still as naked as the day he was born, but now, sex is the last thing on my mind. Considering how sexy all four of my Guardians are, that more than anything tells me how shaken I am. “Eve, there might have been signs that you missed, maybe things like how your faerie powers manifested. Was there anything else you experienced besides headaches and voices that might help us?”

  I think for a moment and begin to shake my head. There was the Shadow, but that doesn’t seem important. That’s obviously from Joe. “Other than getting lucky with my gut instincts a few times, I . . .” I stop, a chill running down my spine. “Actually, there was something. There were dreams.”

  Noah’s brows knit together with concern and he studies me with intense interest, his massive shoulders hunching as he sits down and sets his rock-hard chin on his steepled fingers. “What kind of dreams, Princess?”

  Noah’s use of their nickname for me reassures and steadies me, and I find myself settling down some.

  “They started the night you guys showed up,” I reply, trying to think. “One, in particular. I was Eve in the garden of Eden. I mean, full-on Old Testament style with a hard dose of LSD thrown in. The snake offered me two apples, one green, one golden. Both were glowing, and I debated for so long. The green one pulsed with a powerful light that promised me things I’d never had. It said I could reshape the world in any way I wanted, but there was something that said if I did, I’d be damning myself. At the last second, I took the golden one.”

  “And then what happened?” asks Cole.

  “And then you guys showed up.” I pause, blushing furiously as the four chiseled Fae warriors stare expectantly at me, their bodies each perfect in their own way, from the compact ninja Jacob to the tall and slender Tyler to Cole’s balanced physique to Noah’s mountain man hulking muscles. All perfect, and all of them able to give my body more pleasure than I’d ever experienced before. “And you know . . . we all um . . .”