Page 3 of Cherished By Her Guardian

“We’re hitting the patrol path,” Declan said. “And next shift, you’re out here instead of one of us.”

“Damn it.”

Sebastian said, “I’ll call dibs.”

“You can’t call dibs,” Declan protested.

“Can and did. Suck it.” Before Declan could react—including the passing thought that he could punch Sebastian for calling dibs before he could—his cousin was gone, his laugh echoing in the darkness.

Turning his attention back to the job at hand, he walked toward the edge of Northernmost, where the magical barrier kept them all safe, and began his trek around the town. He’d think about finding his mate later when he didn’t have to be paying attention to the darkness and looking for Frost and his followers.

Someday he’d find his mate.

Someday soon, he hoped.

Winterlyn Brooks turned off her car in front of the garage and yawned. Her early shift at the coffee shop allowed her to be home before lunch, but that meant she had to get up at four a.m. to make it to the store by five. She was always glad to see the free-standing garage with an apartment over the double doors. She’d called the garage apartment home for the last few years when she wanted to get her own place but couldn’t afford the expensive rent in the neighboring areas.

Her parents were in the big house next to the garage and were happy she wanted to stay close. She was just glad to get out of their house.

Her parents were very protective of her, but that seemed to come with the territory since her parents were also alphas of their arctic fox skulk. At twenty-four, Winterlyn should have been mated with a few babies, but she was missing one thing: the ability to shift into her arctic fox. Her parents were both powerful shifters from long family lines of powerful shifters. As far as anyone knew, no one on either side of the family had evernotbeen able to shift until Winterlyn came along.

She couldfeelher fox, she just couldn’t turn into her.

That made her an outcast with the skulk, a weird member who wasn’t really a member, always on the outside of things.

She glanced toward her parents’ home and saw the circular driveway was empty, which meant neither was home. It was the day before the solstice and the skulk would hold a special celebration that included a big meal, a meeting to plan the events for the coming year, and a hunt once the sun went down. She knew that’s where her parents were, planning the big celebration.

Winterlyn hadn’t been invited to either the planning or the actual celebration, even though her parents were the alphas, because without her shift, it was useless for her to be there. She’d been on the outside of things with the skulk since her shift hadn’t come to her as a teenager. Ostracized and made to feel less-than, it was simply easier for her to not go to meetings and night hunts than it was for her to see the judgmental stares of the skulk and her parents trying to pretend as if everything was okay and that it was perfectly normal for her to not be able to shift.

It was anything but normal, of course.

Sighing, she grabbed her bag and headed into her apartment, the day stretching before her like the giant maw of some ancient creature.

Dropping her bag inside the door, she stood in the family room and wondered if this was just how her life was going to be forever. Part of the skulk but also not part of it, one foot in two vastly different worlds.

Her gaze landed on the small desk in the corner of the room, and she walked over to it. Sitting down in the hand-me-down desk chair, she wiggled the mouse to wake the computer and opened the internet browser.

She typed into the search bar:Would a shifter who can’t shift and a human have babies who could shift?

Pressing enter, she waited for the results to populate.

She knew the answer, though.

No one knew why she couldn’t shift. It was a freak twist in her genetics. Something that should have been turned on in her DNA to allow her to go from human to arctic fox hadn’t been tripped and that made her some kind of weird human-fox hybrid without the benefits of shifting.

Her healing abilities were accelerated, but otherwise she had no special traits.

No fangs or claws, no fur.

A human and shifter mating can produce children who can shift and those who can’t, the results depend on whether the child takes after the shifter parent or the human parent.

Which was not the question she’d asked. The results hadn’t included a shifter who couldn’t shift because it wasn’t really a thing. Shifters shifted, period. It was entirely possible she’d pass on her strange non-shifting genes to her kids, regardless of whether she mated a shifter or not.

She hit the wheel on her mouse and yawned, watching as the results scrolled by. As the mouse pointer stopped on a result, she hummed.

The link was for a chatroom on a website, and the question posed was:Can the Well of Magic help a shifter who can’t access their animal?

Annette Sheffield stared at the image of her grandfather on her phone, her heart in her throat. It wasunfairthat the last family member she had lay dying in her home, sent from the hospital to live out his last days as cancer ravaged him. She was a witch from a long line of powerful witches and couldn’t do anything to save him.

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