THE FAERIE GUARDIAN by Rachel Morgan Excerpt

Yesterday, Rachel Morgan dropped by to chat about her book, The Faerie Guardian, and to offer up a copy for 2 lucky winners.
Today, we're giving you a sneak peek at what it is you could win.
Enjoy!

I give the boy 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 say. 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.”

He crosses his arms. “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 just 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 called 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 BOOK:

tecting humans from dangerous magical creatures is all in a day’s work for a faerie training to be a guardian. Seventeen-year-old Violet Fairdale knows this better than anyone—she’s about to become the best guardian the Guild has seen in years. That is, until a cute human boy who can somehow see through her faerie glamour follows her into the fae realm. Now she’s broken Guild Law, a crime that could lead to her expulsion.

The last thing Vi wants to do is spend any more time with the boy who got her into this mess, but the Guild requires that she return Nate to his home and make him forget everything he’s discovered of the fae realm. Easy, right? Not when you factor in evil faeries, long-lost family members, and inconvenient feelings of the romantic kind. Vi is about to find herself tangled up in a dangerous plot—and it’ll take all her training to get out alive.

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