{Blog Tour & Character Spotlight} The Faerie Guardian by Rachel Morgan

So, what's better than Faeries? Absolutely nothing...seriously! Rachel Morgan has written an incredible novelette about protecting humans from Fae and the complications of a relationship thrown right in the center.

Title: The Faerie Guardian: Book 1

Series: Creepy Hollow
Author: Rachel Morgan

Synopsis:


Protecting 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.

[This short ebook forms Part I of the novel The Faerie Guardian.]

Characters Beings Spotlighted on this Blog Tour

Violet: the main character in The Faerie Guardian

Nate: the human who follows Vi into the fae realm 

Tora: Vi’s mentor at the Guild

Ryn: Vi’s rival, the guy who’s tried his best to make her life a misery at the Guild

~  ~  ~

Name: Tora

Age: 35

Family: My parents are both still around, though neither of them work for the Guild anymore. I have one brother, Flint, and he works for security at the Guild.

Likes: Liquorice loops (the ones that change color), the smell of new reed paper, pegasus racing (don’t tell, but I’ve actually placed bets before—and won a few times!), 

Dislikes: Crowds, paperwork, that vine around the Guild’s main stairway that keeps growing down our corridor and tripping everyone, my cooking, my bed (I wish I could sleep more and work less!).

Current life status: A mentor at the Guild in Creepy Hollow.

Current purpose in life: Get my star trainee Violet to graduate top of her class (which should be easy as long as she doesn’t mess up now).

Plans for the future: Well, I plan to be with the Guild for at least the next few decades. After that ... I don’t really know yet. I’ve still got centuries laid out before me!

Special skills: I’d say the patience required to deal with trainees every day is an incredibly special skill—and I’m not even sure I have it sometimes!

Anything else you’d like to add: I’m the youngest mentor working at the Guild in Creepy Hollow, and I know it really ticks off the older mentors that my very first trainee is one of the best the Guild has seen in years. Apparently you’re only supposed to have that kind of bragging right once you’ve been a mentor for a while. Anyway, this probably makes me a bad person, and I’d never tell Violet because I’m supposed to be a good role model and everything, but sometimes I just want to go up to those stuck-up mentors and say, In your face! Yeah! (Wait, who sees the answers I’m filling in here?)

Excerpt:

(Told from Violet’s point of view)

I bite my lip and push the door open. Tora sits behind her desk, scrolls of reed paper piled neatly around her. She crosses her arms and leans back in her chair, watching me. Light shifts across her youthful face as the giant glow-bug on the ceiling squirms and settles down.

“It’s called rule number one for a reason, Vi,” she says, nodding her head toward the two chairs in front of her desk. I move to the one on the right. After a moment’s hesitation, Nate sits down beside me. Tora doesn’t acknowledge him, holding her hand out instead for my tracker band. 

I unclip the strip of leather from my wrist and push it across the table. Tora smoothes it flat beneath her forefingers and whispers something under her breath. Tiny black markings appear on the leather. Markings that tell her whatever she needs to know about the assignment I just completed.

“Well,” she says, leaning back, “you got rid of the reptiscilla in excellent time, but that means nothing considering you not only revealed yourself to a human, but also brought him back into our realm. And—” her eyes slip from my face down to my arm “—just to top it all off, you got yourself bitten.”

“What? A single bite costs hardly any points.” I glare at the two crescent shapes of healing skin. They’re at the pale pink stage, about an hour away from being perfectly healed.

“Nevertheless. You still broke the Guild’s two most important rules. This is serious, Violet.” She never calls me that. “You know why we have to enforce these laws.”

***REVIEW COMING TUESDAY***