YA Fantasy
Date Published: March 14, 2017
Seventeen-year-old Violet Fairdale has one job: protect humans from dangerous fae. It’s a job she’s good at—until the cute guy whose life she just saved follows her back into the hidden world of magic. Now she’s broken Guild law, landing herself in a whole lot of trouble. The last thing Vi wants to do is spend any more time with the guy who got her into this mess, but the Guild requires that she return Nate to his home and make him forget the magical world he’s discovered. Easy, right? Not when you factor in evil faeries, plenty of mystery and intrigue, and inconvenient feelings of the romantic kind. Vi is about to find herself tangled up in a deadly plot that threatens not only her own life, but her entire world.
Excerpt
I cry out as the boy grabs hold of my arm. I stumble on the invisible path, my mind loses hold of my destination, and I tumble out of the darkness and onto the forest floor. I don’t usually exit the faerie paths so clumsily, but I don’t usually have a human boy on top of me.
I lie there blinking as the reality of what just happened strikes me like a slap in the face.
A human.
In the fae realm.
And I’m the one who brought him here.
No no no NO.
I give the guy a good kick and he lands on the ground beside me with a groan. “What did you do that for?” I yell, jumping to my feet. “You can’t follow me through! That’s not how this works.”
He sits up and stares at his surroundings—the wildly tangled trees; the creeping mist; the shifting smoke-like colors in the yuro plants’ leaves—with a mixture of horror and awe on his face. “That … was …”
“Probably the most idiotic thing you’ve ever done.” I doubt he’s listening to me though.
“I think you were right about the dreaming thing,” he says. “There’s no way this could be real. Am I high on something?”
“Ugh.” I clench my fists so tightly I can feel my nails digging into my skin. “It’s magic, you moron.”
He looks at me and frowns. “There’s no such thing as magic.”
“Well, you probably think there’s no such thing as faeries either, and yet here I am.” And here he is. In my forest. My home. I kick a flurry of leaves into the air. Their colors shift rapidly in protest, cycling through an endless palette: lavender, magenta, burgundy, sienna. I bury my face in my hands. I have so failed this assignment.
“No way,” he says, rustling the leaves as he stands. “You can’t be a faerie. You’re way too big.”
I lower my hands. “Excuse me?” I’ve been called many things in my seventeen years, but ‘big’ has never been one of them. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“Aren’t faeries supposed to be, like, really tiny? With wings and a wand and faerie dust?”
“I’m not Tinker Bell!”
He takes a step back. “Okay, okay. Since this is a dream, I guess you can be whatever you want to be.”
“Did it feel like a dream when I kicked you just now?”
“Actually, that did kind of hurt.” He rubs his leg.
I shake my head. “This is such a mistake. You should not be here.”
“So you don’t have wings then?” he asks, completely ignoring what I just said.
“Sure I do. They’re in my pocket.”
“Really?”
“No!” I’m trying to think of the best way to fix this, and I wish he’d keep quiet.
“Oh, wait, you do have a wand though. I saw you using it on my wall.”
“It’s not a wand, it’s a stylus. Just a stick, really.”
“But it—”
“You know, if it weren’t my sole purpose in life to protect humans like you from crazy magical fae, I’d leave you here to find your own way home.”
“Is that what you were doing in my room?” he asks after a moment.
I sigh. Why am I telling him any of this? “Yes. I was on assignment.”
“I was your assignment?”
Wow, you catch on fast. “Yes.”
He hesitates a moment, then grins. “That’s kind of hot.”
About the Author
Rachel Morgan spent a good deal of her childhood living in a fantasy land of her own making, crafting endless stories of make-believe and occasionally writing some of them down. After completing a degree in genetics and discovering she still wasn’t grown-up enough for a ‘real’ job, she decided to return to those story worlds still spinning around her imagination. These days she spends much of her time immersed in fantasy land once more, writing fiction for young adults and those young at heart.
Rachel lives in Cape Town with her husband and three miniature dachshunds. She is the author of the bestselling Creepy Hollow series, and also writes sweet contemporary romance under the name Rochelle Morgan.
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