Song of the Guardians

Song of the Guardians

About the Book

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

About The Author

by Erin Lark

* * * * *

Song of the Guardians

Copyright © 2016 Erin Lark

Cover art © 2016 Erin Lark

Song of the Guardians
is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All organizations, places, and events are created from the author's imagination.

E
mma’s insistence her best friend’s a talking wolf landed her in the psych ward. When she’s released six years later, it’s the wolf who takes her in. But the creature she bunks with in Maine isn’t anything like the one she remembers from her childhood.

Tucker—a wolf shifter whose sole purpose is to sacrifice himself to heal the Earth—hasn’t shared his bed in over a century. Falling in love the first time around ended with him having a broken heart inside the body of a wolf. It’s a sacrifice he’s not willing to repeat.

But when he tells Emma, a feisty blonde whose touch is as fiery as her personality, about the pact he has with his not-so-immortal life, she’ll do whatever she can to change his mind. Falling in love wasn’t part of the plan. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Emma becoming the pack’s newest alpha is.

With the land crumbling beneath their feet, can Emma save the pack and the wolf she loves without endangering the Earth? Or will she make the ultimate sacrifice?

Excerpt:

He kicked the door shut behind him, his body tensing against the cold. Warm muscle rippled under my hands, and when I realized I was staring, I didn’t look away. I half expected him to notice the fire, but his eyes never left mine. He gave me a full head-to-toe inspection and made a sound of approval. I did the same.

His shoulders were broad, his muscles defined. I brushed the side of his face, stubble kissing my fingertips when he leaned into my caress. Taking a breath, I moved my hand again, this time to the curls at the nape of his neck.

I wanted to kiss him, to feel his arms around me, but for whatever reason, I didn’t move. We stood there for a long moment, me staring at the clothes he’d strategically placed over his groin while his eyes focused on my breasts.

Before I could lose the little courage I had, I drew him toward me, my hands on his face, our lips barely touching. Something dropped to the floor.
His clothes,
I realized as he placed a hand at the small of my back and tangled the other in my hair.

"I really want to kiss you," he said.

My heart skipped a beat. "Then why don’t you?"

He caressed my face. "It’s been a while since I..." His voice trailed off.

"At least you have." I drank in his scent, which was stronger than before.

He touched my chin, coaxing my head back until he could see my face. "You haven't?"

I shook my head. Never had sex. Never been kissed. Not by someone I liked, anyway.

He pressed his forehead to mine so I was looking right at him, right into the eyes of my wolf. My whole body tingled. I wanted this. I wanted to feel him. To feel everything.

I moistened my lips. Alarms rang in the back of my mind.
He’s part wolf. You just met. You know nothing about him.
I ignored every single one. I didn’t care if I kissed a wolf or a man, just like I didn’t care how new or how real this felt.

There was something about him, something deep down that told me this was right. That I was meant to be here.

* * * * *

E
mma

My parents said it was a dream. That the wolf I saw so clearly in the middle of the night was a figment of my imagination.

The nurses at the ward weren't any better.

But I remembered him. My wolf. His silver eyes. His warm fur against my skin.

I could almost feel his hands on my face, his wolf's cold nose on the palm of my hand. It was how I woke every morning, bleary-eyed and much too soon for the dream to end.

Too awake to return to my wolf, I blinked at the early morning light. White walls with bars on the windows surrounded me. The ratty old mattress screeched under my weight as I rolled over to look at the piles of books collected in every corner of the room.

Books about wolves, werewolves, and anything else I could get my hands on. But no matter how much I read, no matter how hard I tried to remember, nothing explained what my wolf had been or why he hadn’t come back for me.

The staff at the ward insisted I hadn’t seen him at all, and if it weren't for how real my dreams felt, I might have believed them. For years, I'd struggled with the truth. Six years later, and I still remembered him.

He’d taken me as far into the woods as we could go. And, pressing his forehead to mine, he’d shown me events that hadn’t happened yet and things he’d experienced long ago. A black tree. The Earth’s essence—a green stream of energy siphoned from the ground with heavy machinery. The more we took from the Earth, the darker the ground became.

The Earth was dying, and even though everyone else at the ward could see it, I was the only one who could hear it. When my folks couldn’t stand my stories any longer, I was dumped here—far away from home and, more importantly, my wolf.

Rousing myself, I fixed my nightgown, then closed my hands around the bars guarding the window. I studied the world outside and searched for Tucker's silhouette just as I'd done every morning since I'd arrived. He wasn't there.

A bleak sky hung overhead, but I knew better than to hope for rain. Broken roads and tall cranes jutted from the ground in place of the trees I remembered from my childhood. There were no colors, no green grass or wildflowers like the ones from my books. That part of my world had disappeared shortly after my fifth birthday, into memory and fiction.

Storms of ash and rain scarred the landscape, painting the world in gray undertones. As the Earth died, mankind tried to save what they could by building machines, ones capable of draining the essence from the Earth. This essence, or the core as some called it, was hidden far beneath the surface. It was what brought life to the flowers, fields and farms.

We'd discovered the stream by mistake. Wherever the green streams touched, flowers bloomed. Consumed by greed, we built even more machines—turning the Earth’s essence into useable energy.

Children started to vanish after that.

"It's the Earth's price,"
Tucker had said.
"It struggles to keep the balance, but it was lost long ago."

"Emma, are you awake?"

A knock on the door thrust me from my thoughts.

"Am I ever not awake?" I asked, going over to greet the nurse.

"Good point." An older woman poked her head into the room. She glared at my mess of hair, the unmade bed and the books lining the walls. She handed me a cup of pills and some water with a sigh. "I take it the new medication isn’t helping?"

Damn straight. It's not working because I’m not taking it.
I bit my lip and shook my head. As soon as the staff had stopped supervising me, I'd weaned myself off the mindless drugs—they'd been strong enough to put me out, but too weak to do much else.

"I'll have them up the dose, then," the woman said, rummaging in her pocket for a pad of paper so she could write it down. "Perhaps we need to do a few more tests," she mused, stepping into the hall to retrieve a tray of foodstuffs. After depositing my first meal of the day onto the table beside my bed, she paused in the doorway. "Will you be needing anything else?"

"I could use a new notebook. My last one’s full," I replied.

"But we gave you one last week."

"What else do you expect me to do in here?"

"You really should go to the activity room more often. They miss you down there."

My vision narrowed. "And waste my thoughts when I could be writing them down? No thanks."

The woman shrugged. "I have you scheduled for a shower later this afternoon. I should have a new notebook for you by then."

"I smell that bad?"

The woman smiled, her eyes wrinkling at the corners. "You look even worse," she teased, excusing herself from the room.

I pressed my back against the door until it clicked, taking a few short breaths before sliding my bedside table away from the wall. It was somewhere they never looked, not even during inspection. I stashed the new pills in the wall before replacing the table.

The food was as unappetizing as ever—an overcooked egg, a piece of toast slathered with so much butter it was probably cold, a few strips of bacon and a child’s juice box. I ignored it all, including my stomach, which protested when I moved to the other side of the room.

I was about to look through one of my notebooks when a second nurse knocked on my door.

The door opened, followed by a
whoosh
of cool air from the hallway.

"Gather your things," a younger woman ordered, her voice sounding more miserable than the first. "Someone’s come for you."

I turned on my heels, expecting the woman’s expression to be one of amusement, as if this were a practical joke. It wasn’t. The woman didn’t move, her lips as motionless as the rest of her. Something squeezed around my heart.
No one ever comes for me anymore. Not even to visit.
I knew it wouldn't be my parents. They’d stopped visiting years ago, and it had been almost as long since their last call.
It can’t be them.
Even if it was, if they’d had a change of heart, I wouldn’t go with them.

"My parents?" I asked, turning back to my collection of notebooks before picking them up off the floor.

"Your brother's waiting at the front desk with your papers."

Brother?
I didn't have any siblings. Then again, seeing as my parents dumped me here, maybe I had relatives they'd never told me about. Maybe even before I was born.

Feeling more self-conscious than before, I combed my fingers through my tangled hair and followed the nurse into the hall. As we walked single file to the reception desk, I considered the idea of my parents coming to release me into the world.
What’s left of it, anyway.
I pushed the possibility to the side, however, as soon as we rounded the corner.
That voice.

The man, the one Tucker had shown me from his memories, was standing at the front desk. I sucked in a breath. Heat rushed to my cheeks, and I averted my eyes.
Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out. Don’t. Freak—

"Hello, Emma," came an all too familiar voice. Wearing a thin leather jacket and a torn pair of jeans, Tucker looked as comfortable in his human skin as he had as a wolf.

This is a dream.
It had to be. Humans didn’t turn into wolves, and it certainly didn’t happen the other way around.

"And you said you you're her brother?" the gentleman behind the desk asked.

"Half-bother," Tucker said, pushing a hand through his short brown hair.

"You parents never spoke of..."

"Dad doesn’t know," Tucker added, cutting the man off. "I have our papers." He retrieved a set of documents from inside his jacket pocket and handed them in.

He was there, right beside me, and it took every bit of strength I had not to freak out. I reminded myself to breathe and hugged an arm around Tucker’s when he offered it to me. He flashed me a smile, and that recognition alone sent a shiver down my spine.

"She'll need to get dressed," the man behind the desk said, raising his eyebrows in my direction.

"We're only going to the car," Tucker said. "She'll sleep most of the way home anyway. She was always good at dozing off in the backseat. Isn't that right, Em?"

I swallowed hard and, after a long moment, I murmured an acceptable reply.
He's taken this long to find you. Shouldn't you look somewhat presentable?
He'd already seen me in a gown—twice, actually—and I refused to head back down the hall.

While I did my best not to fall, face first, onto the floor, Tucker collected my things and placed my notebooks into a duffle bag.

"Go on outside." He leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. "The car’s waiting out front."

Fire spread from his kiss, melting a hole through my skin long after his lips were gone. I wanted to ask him what car. What did it look like? Instead, I locked my jaw and did my best to hide the shaking of my hands as I wrapped them around his waist. Tucker glanced at me, his eyes a mix of emotions I couldn’t read.