Reagan is the youngest in this generation of Guardians. Because she is much younger than the others, she was never as close to the Guardians as her siblings. Thankfully, when her older brother found his mate, she had a younger sister, Meadow, who was Reagan’s age. The two have become best friends and they have the same close friendship that her siblings share with the other Guardians. Kieran is an Alpha who lives in the western part of the country. He has been waiting a long time to find his mate. He’s refused to take a chosen mate, but at twenty-six, he’s becoming feral, and time is running out. He must either find his fated mate, take a chosen mate, or be put down by his pack. Because she is the last of the Guardians, Reagan’s eighteenth birthday has been opened to all eligible males throughout the country. Her birthday is considered the event of the century, with Alpha werewolves, royal elves, royal vampires, and even warlocks attending. As Kieran's last chance, he attends. The moment he smells his mate, his wolf pushes forward, marking her without consent. Amid the fury of the Guardians and others in attendance, Reagan decides to give Kieran a chance to prove himself before marking him and completing their bond. She leaves the only home she’s ever known to travel across the country, with Meadow insisting that she come. When they arrive at Kieran's home, Reagan finds a pack in chaos. Bullying, manipulation, and subterfuge have been used to run the pack while Kieran has been fighting his demons. Can Reagan, with Meadow’s help, turn the pack around, or will she decide that Kieran isn’t worth the effort, rejecting him and returning home, leaving him to go feral?
view more**This book is the 8th in the Guardian's Next Generation series and 12th in the overall Guardian series. It can be read as a standalone novel, but scenes and historical incidents will be referenced without going into full detail of what happened. It is recommended that you begin the series at the beginning with The Broken Warrior's Daughter.**
Reagan
“Are you excited about your birthday?” my best friend Meadow asks me.
We’re sitting in my bedroom at my parents’ house. We alternate between my house and hers in the city where she lives with her sister, Maeve, and my brother, Xander. It’s a toss up as to which house is more uncomfortable to stay at; mine because you’d think my parents were rabbits instead of werewolves, and Meadow’s because Xander and Maeve just had twins, increasing the size of their family to seven. They’ve only been together three years, but that hasn’t stopped Maeve from pushing out pups as fast as Xander can give them to her. And that doesn’t even include Maeve’s and Meadow’s younger brother, Tate. It’s crowded and loud at her house.
We used to be able to spend time with my brother Cayd who also lives in the city, but now that he’s found his mate, it’s like he and Xander are in a contest to see who can give their mates pups faster.
“In some ways, yes. I mean, it will be nice to find him and share the love that we see with the others.”
“What’s the ‘no’ part of the sentence?” she asks. She’s currently spinning some of her witchy lights around in front of her. She’s been practicing using color and light and blending them together. She’s actually a pretty fantastic witch. Her family is descended from very powerful witches who were murdered because they refused to work for some terrible witch. Somehow, Maeve was able to hide the fact that she was underage, raising her sister and brother alone. That is, until Xander found her. He’d taken her under his protection and therefore the protection of the pack and that’s how I met my bestie. We clicked right away and we’ve never looked back.
I look at her until she focuses on me. “What in the Moon Goddess’ realm would have ever made my dad or Rich think that I would want all this pomp and circumstance for my birthday?” I ask her.
My brother, Rich, has been Alpha of our pack for nearly six years. He’s a great Alpha. It wasn’t a seamless transition into his role, and I know there was a time when my father was ready to take the pack back from him. But he got it together and since then, he and his mate, Emlyn, have run this pack in near perfection.
My father calls Rich and I his bookends, the only two children out of seven that take after him. My other brothers and sisters are very much like our mother, and I have a lot of her traits too, but like Rich, I prefer sparring to putting on fancy clothes.
Even though I’m young, I’m very strong. Part of that is because I am my father’s daughter. But the biggest part of that is because I’m the daughter of a Guardian. My mother’s wolf, Alessia, is blessed by the Moon Goddess with the Guardian spirit. That blessing has passed to all of her daughters and the daughters of the other Guardians, Aunt Grace and Aunt Cara. It makes us stronger than Alphas, including our Alpha brothers who are stronger than most.
“You’re the last available Guardian in this generation, Reagan. You know the history, how Alphas used to force the Guardians into mate bonds to make themselves stronger. And look at your sister and Lily, they’re both queens now, one the Queen of Vampires and the other the Queen of the Fae. Maybe your mate will be a prince or a king and you’ll become a queen too.”
I frown at my friend. “Do you even know me at all?”
She laughs, letting her balls of light spread all over the room. “So, what? You’d prefer a muscle-bound Alpha who is a fighter to some nearly immortal royal?”
The truth is, I don’t really know what I want besides having someone who loves me the way my father loves my mother. I already know that no matter who my mate is, I’ll be stronger than he is, so does it really matter if he’s wolf, vampire, fae, or warlock? Probably not. But for me, I feel drawn to the packs. I like living in the forest, letting my wolf, Alayla, run hard and fast, smelling the scents of the world around us.
“I think I’d prefer a wolf mate. I love forest. I don’t want to leave and I definitely don’t want to live in the city. That place is hideous.”
“So, an Alpha ...” she says, as if thinking. Her lights begin moving again and as I watch, they begin to form the figure of a man, a tall, very muscular man.
“Do you really think that anyone is going to be more muscular than the sons of the Guardians?” I ask her, watching as the muscles on the image continue to increase in size. “Big doesn’t always mean strong, you know,” I tell her.
“Hmmm, true,” she says and the muscles begin to decease into someone whose muscular body looks deceptively lean with ropey muscles along his arms and legs. I know from experience that these are the fighters who are lethal. The big ones rely on their brawn and because of that, they don't use their head in a fight, making them easy to take down. The ones who are underestimated are the ones you have to watch out for. They not only have strength, but they use their brain in a fight.
“And since we know that you like the tall, dark, and handsome look, let’s give our guy dark hair,” she says. She’s right. My entire family has either my mother’s white-blond hair or my father’s sandy-blond hair. For me, I prefer the opposite – dark and dangerous. She continues working on the image in front of us, giving his face the chiseled features of an Alpha, with a dangerous look to his eyes.
“There you go! That’s him. When we find the guy who looks like this, I’ll take him,” I say.
Meadow looks over her creation, tilting her head back and forth. “I don’t know, Rea, I might have to fight you for this one.”
One of the reasons that Meadow and I have remained friends is our mutual respect for the other’s strengths. Meadow may not be a fighter like I am, but she’s a very powerful witch. In a fight between the two of us, I’m not sure I would win. I do know it would be one hell of a battle. That equality of strength, along with an innate desire to help others, to protect the weak, is what has forged our unbreakable friendship.
“Rock, paper, scissors?” I ask, teasing. She and I do share a type. I like dark and dangerous, and she likes dark and broody.
I watch as she splits the image into two. “How about twins instead?” she asks.
“Who are they?” my father asks. I turn and see him standing in the doorway of my bedroom.
“Our fake mates,” I say, smiling at him. “Now you and Rich can cancel this stupid party.”
He gives me a pained look. “Are you going to break that news to your mother and sisters? Quinn just gave birth to Little Eli and Malin is pregnant again. If you think I’M telling them to call this off, you can think again. Even Emlyn seems to be getting excited about all of this fanfare. AND, they all start arriving tonight.
I sigh. It was worth a try.
My father frowns at Meadow’s images of the men standing in my room. “So, if I see anyone who looks like this, I need to take him out before you see him?”
Now I chuckle. “You can’t kill my mate, Dad.”
“Are you sure about that?” he asks arrogantly.
“Okay, you probably COULD kill him, but you can’t because he’s my mate. Unless he’s a terrible person and I reject him, then you can kill him,” I shrug.
“Deal,” he says, glaring at Meadow’s images again.
“Did you need something, Dad?” I ask him.
“Yeah, I wanted to know if you wanted to spar before everyone starts arriving.”
I hop up excitedly. “I absolutely do!”
KieranI’ve had knots in my stomach all day. I know I shouldn’t, but it’s finally happening. My mate is finally becoming my Luna. I know that her accepting and marking me meant that she would never leave me, but this is one of the last ways that she will bind herself to me and this pack. This and getting pregnant with my pup, which I’m working harder on than just about anything I’ve worked on in my life.Samson snorts in my head. ‘Yeah, you didn’t even work this hard to keep me from going feral.’‘That is not true. This is just a lot more fun than trying to keep you from going feral,” I say, thinking about last night when I made my mate come so hard she couldn’t hold back her cries of pleasure, even knowing her family was all around us. If I have to hear her family going at it like fucking rabbits, they can bloody well hear my mate screaming her pleasure.And it’s not just her family, it’s all the Guardians, their mates, and now even Meadow and Asmodeus. I haven’t been able to walk in
ReaganI’m so excited! Today is the day of my Luna Ceremony and the day that our pack starts fresh. We have so much to celebrate and on a hunch, I asked my mother to join me for a ‘walk’. When we got to the pack hospital, I took the test and excitedly shared the news with my mother before swearing the doctor to secrecy.“So, you’re adopting a daughter and you’re pregnant with Kieran’s child. How do you feel about having a family so soon after marking and mating,” she says.I find a place away from the packhouse where my mother and I can sit and talk. While I’ve always said that I am my father’s daughter, and in a lot of ways, I am, I am also my mother’s daughter. I may not be like my sisters; I may be more savage than any of my siblings other than Rich. But I am a Guardian, and I have always accepted the responsibility that comes with that. Somewhere inside me, the gentleness and kindness of my mother has resided. Now, I realize that the desire to give my mate a packhouse full of pups
KieranMy mate made a point of showing me just how happy she was with me last night. After so long of desperately waiting for and wanting my mate, being blessed with a strong, Alpha female, a Guardian no less, is something I never would have imagined. And as much as Samson, the pack, and I suffered while waiting and nearly going feral, Reagan makes every moment of the struggle we went through worthwhile. And holy mother Moon Goddess does my mate have stamina. It makes me want to make that woman happy every minute of every day for the rest of our lives.This morning, I pulled Prince Asmodeus aside. I asked him if he and Meadow would be willing to take Tessa away from the pack while we held the trial. While Tessa will officially become our daughter, she was still born an omega, and she is still a young teenager. She does not need to be exposed to the violence that is about to occur.But beyond that, I’ve been thinking about what Alpha Rik and I talked about on the way to the airport and
ReaganI’m pretty sure the woman at the dress shop has never felt quite so overwhelmed. Of course, everyone wants a new dress for my Luna ceremony and my family isn’t shy about shopping. It’s a relatively small shop with only the store owner and one assistant, and my family is already running them ragged.Kieran gave me the name and address of this shop, saying that it was run by a nearby pack. They, like Kieran and his pack, have never seen a group like ours apparently.“So, who is the new Luna?” the shop owner, Melanie, asks.“That’s me. I’m Reagan,” I tell her.“And you’re mated to Alpha Kieran, Luna? We heard he was going feral,” she says.“He was. But he’s fine now that he and Samson have found Alayla and I,” I tell her.“And all of you are Lunas?” she asks, looking around."I'm not," Madelyn says.“And we’re not. We’re just witches,” Maeve says, pointing between her and Meadow. “Well, I guess you’re Princess Witch now,” she says, smiling at her sister.“Princess?” the other woman
KieranEvery day it’s something new in this pack. Today, before we go get the last of Reagan’s family from the airport, Asmodeus and Meadow walk downstairs hand in hand, with Meadow wearing a new mate mark.Almost as one, Reagan and her family lift their heads and howl their happiness for Meadow. It doesn’t take long before our entire pack realizes what has happened and is howling along with them.My head feels like it’s spinning with the speed of everything that’s happening. Thankfully, my mate’s happiness is the grounding force that makes all of this worthwhile.Today, I’m going to pick up the last group of people with Alpha Rik, Alpha Liam, and Alpha Eli. The women are all taking my mate dress shopping and apparently the sprites are excited to be able to do hair and make up for all of the Guardians.Since we still need two vans to collect the newest arrivals, Alpha Rik rides with me.“How are you holding up, Alpha Kieran?” he asks, giving me a knowing look.“It’s a lot. Don’t get me
MeadowIt feels so good to be with Maeve again. Our life has been a rocky road, but my sister did everything in her power to keep us together after our parents were murdered. She became a surrogate parent for Tate and I, keeping us safe, even when her own life was at risk. So, having her here, feels like I have my mother here with me.“Tell me about your handsome vampire,” she says as we work together to make large strands of witchy lights to the delight of the sprites that are chattering excitedly all around us.“He is handsome, isn’t he?” I ask, looking over to where Asmodeus is sitting with Xander, Drake, and several warriors that they sparred with this evening. I’m not sure if he heard me or if feels my gaze on him, but he turns and gives me a smoldering look that sends heat straight to my core and makes every bite mark he’s left on my body light up as if his mouth is on me. Based on his smirk, he knows EXACTLY what he’s doing to me.“Personally, I prefer tall, blond, and growly, b
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