Guardians of Hellfire (Guardians of the Fae Book 2)

by Elizabeth Hartwell

  Guardians of Hellfire

  A Reverse Harem Fantasy

  Elizabeth Hartwell

  Contents

  Also by Elizabeth Hartwell

  Guardians of Magic

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Guardians of Magic

  About the Author

  Also by Elizabeth Hartwell

  Guardians of the Fae Series:

  Book 1 - Guardians of Magic

  Book 2 - Guardians of Hellfire

  Book 3 - Guardians of Moonlight - Coming Soon!

  Guardians of Magic

  by Elizabeth Hartwell

  One strong female. Four hulking Fae Guardians. Even a dark secret that could destroy the world doesn’t stand a chance.

  Paranormal detective Eve Carter knows things. She's always had uncanny gut instincts. When a run of supernatural murders take place, Eve thinks she may be the only one who can save her once idyllic hometown from the dark threat.

  What she doesn't expect is four sexy Fae warriors to save her from a vampire attack. Or the mysterious bond that she feels with them.

  Guardians Noah, Tyler, Jacob and Cole have spent centuries protecting the Fae, so when there is a breach of the veil between the realms, they are ordered to investigate the disturbance.

  But what they find is shocking. A beautiful woman with the gift of the Fae . . . and a compelling desire to serve her every need.

  Prologue

  Eve

  Growing up, I thought I’d gotten a 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. 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 I thought I knew changed forever. One car ride, one night, one attack later, and things were never going to be the same. I was orphaned again, this time with a little sister, in a world that wasn’t quite as kind to orphans as it had been before. After all, there were tens of thousands of us, victims of the Para Wars, and not enough to go around for anybody. 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 of the cops fighting for justice and peace.

  The price was that I hated Paras for the longest time. 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 vigilantes 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 neighborhoods and policing their own kind? Why were human cops being forced to take them on? It was a recipe for disaster.

  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 fates were put into awful situations and treated in a way 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 some might say fit the description. In the past forty-eight hours, I watched my hometown nearly go up in flames, torn apart by hatred and rioting. It doesn’t matter if it was inflamed by evil magic or if the people were treated 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 that not only am I Faerie, but in one terrifying instant, I learned that I’m also part demon. At first, when I blew someone’s head up with just a thought, I’d tried to deny 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 that 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 to Para justice.

  But now I’ll be the hunted.

  Chapter 1

  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, like 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 stomach. 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 bloodthir
sty 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 and only 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.”

  “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.

  I remember the visions I had at times, the shadow that seemed to always precede one of my outbursts of destructive power. I didn’t put much weight in them, but what if they were the ways Joe was fucking with me?

  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. “No, I can’t think of anything. 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 . . .”

  Jacob raises a perfectly sculpted brow, making me blush even more. “Is that so? Well, I know who the all-star of that dream was,” he brags. The horny fucker. His cock even twitches and swells slightly as he looks at me, a smirk on his face. “Let me guess, you screamed my name so loud that we got kicked out of the Garden? How many times did I make your toes curl up or your eyes roll back in your head?”

  “Hmm,” Noah says thoughtfully, paying Jacob no mind. He’s so used to his antics he doesn’t even bat an eye. “The dream may have been your subconscious trying to decide which of your powers it would choose to be dominant and which would remain latent. The
golden apple represented your Fae powers, and the green represented the Hellfire inside you. I’d say you picked wisely.”

  “If that’s so, why did this happen?” I demand, my worry growing by the minute. “If I chose my faerie powers, why didn’t the demonic side, I don’t know, remain buried?”

  “Perhaps the heightened emotions in the moment of seeing Jacob and Tyler being hurt was enough to make it emerge,” Noah supplies, but the tone of his voice carries doubt, making my anxiety levels rise. “Or perhaps . . .”

  I lean forward, hanging onto his every word. “Perhaps what?” I press.

  “The demon side of you saw an opportunity to reveal itself,” he says. “Perhaps it was looking for the perfect opportunity. Your guard was lowered, your emotions red-hot, a Fae enemy stood before you . . . and it struck.”

  I look around at each of my Guardians in turn, not seeing any answers or comfort in their expressions. Even Jacob, for all his silliness and bluster, looks worried.

  “What does that mean?”

  All four of the Fae exchange glances, none seeming to want to be the one to be the bearer of bad news. Tyler shifts from side to side, his face paling, and Jacob rubs at the side of his face, wincing as he shakes his head. Even Noah looks unsettled, and the man’s got the outer façade of an arrogant mountain.