My Vampire Guardian

Brittany Baker has learned to keep her head down. Her father counts money and mistakes, her step-mother counts compliments, her step-sister collects hearts, and nobody counts Brittany — except her little brother Andy, who keeps his own records in a shoebox, because in their family records are how the small survive.

Then September hands the Baker house two new employees: a chauffeur named Dannis William who is more wolf than man, and an English teacher named Alexander Clitton — storm-gray eyes, two hundred and thirty-three years old, and unhappily aware of every one of them. Neither is there by accident. They are her guardians: two supernatural guardians assigned to one mortal girl, a pairing the old world calls unprecedented. Because the day Brittany walked into his classroom holding her books up like a shield, the mate-bond hit her teacher hard enough to stagger him in front of forty students, and it has been singing under everything since.

Guardianship comes with rules. Daylight conversations. No walking alone after dark. Nothing that could shame her, ever. And no invitations — because under the old law a threshold is only as strong as the weakest welcome, and something old has been courting her step-mother's attention all autumn. He is called Malachi. He eats the falling-in-love out of the world, town by town, and he follows the smell of a fresh bond like a shark follows one drop. He does not want Brittany's blood. He wants the bond itself, and he has already been invited to dinner.

In November the rules break. The night that follows leaves a monster dead in her own dining room, two families changed, and Brittany done with being kept. It also summons the Registry, the old world's clerks in gray coats, whose ledger says her guardianship expires the moment she turns eighteen — and whose assessor, Madame Voss, arrives on a bicycle to audit everybody: her father's books, her teachers' secrets, her heart's new arithmetic.

Brittany does not wait to be protected. Armed with Andy's shoebox of receipts, Sarah's green notebook, and a teenager's genius for terms and conditions, she drafts the first coalition instrument in the memory of the old world: a treaty written with every party, not about them, hospitality clause included, with a signature line left empty for a mortal. At the solstice sitting, three centuries of monsters learn what Andy has always known — records are how the small guys win.

And on the longest day of the year, Brittany Baker turns eighteen. She has read the contract her life became without asking her. So she asks instead — for the mark, for the years, for the two-hundred-year-old guardian who said the offer does not expire and has refused to take what he wants since September. She intends to collect, in plain words, on the record, before the offer ever can.

A slow-burn paranormal romance with bite: one heroine who fights with filing systems, one wolf who keeps the roads, one vampire who keeps the ledger, and a whole valley of witnesses to a love that signs its name out loud. Fade-to-black romance, found family, guaranteed happy ending — entered.