Only: Creature Cravings

By Rachel H. Drake

Nothing can keep me from her, not even the heavens themselves.

 

I've watched over countless humans from the shadows, a guardian angel sworn to protect them from afar. But when I laid eyes on Astoria, everything changed. Her captivating soul and heart of gold drew me in like no other.

 

As I sensed a dangerous stalker closing in on her, I knew I had to intervene, even if it meant breaking the sacred laws that bound me. I revealed myself to Astoria, knowing the risks, but unable to resist the pull of our forbidden love.

 

Now, with the council of angels looming over us, ready to enforce the ultimate punishment, I face an impossible choice: obey the rules and lose Astoria forever, or risk everything to keep her safe.

 

WHAT READERS CAN EXPECT: Only is a spicy guardian angel forbidden romance, following a male angel POV. This is a novella set in the Creature Cravings series, where every paranormal romance gets a happy ever after. Books in this series can be read in any order. A full content guide is available on the author's website as well as a bonus epilogue only available for newsletter subscribers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aria James Publishing
• Release date: Jul 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781959427179

Book preview

Prologue

The rules of the guardian angels are as follows:

Do not reveal yourself to humans.

Do not speak with your true voice, instead only your whispers.

Use your whispers for the good of your charge, not for personal gain.

Do not form attachments; you must move on.

Chapter 1

Whispered

I felt a strong sense of pride in being chosen to help ghosts move on. After all, only the elite of the angels were charged with helping ghosts. But nothing was working with this particularly challenging subject. It was embarrassing after I had hundreds of years of success.

My ghost assignment for the last twenty-plus years had started normally. A little boy ghost haunting a girl just shy of his age. The child ghosts often haunted other children, looking for companionship, and there wasn’t usually anything terrifying about it. Mostly, it was sweet.

It’s the adult ghosts with their traumas that you have to look out for. But, to my surprise, William grew up.

How did a ghost grow up? It’s complicated. He was probably the only one that has.

My ghostly charge not only aged, but fell in love with his haunt. She ended up loving him back, even performing magic to bring him back to life.

Which brings me here, as I turned my winged back away from my now-alive charge propositioning his girlfriend in public.

Do you want me to fuck you in this alley? William asked his girl, Emily. From the groan I heard behind me, she must have agreed.

Neither William nor Emily could see me, no human could unless I intentionally revealed myself. Angels could see other angels, however. It was jarring to feel like I had all the privacy in the world, no matter who was around, only to make eye contact a few times a month with another winged being.

The loneliness felt permanent until you saw another angel. Suddenly, you realize you weren’t the one who imposed the solitude and overwhelming responsibility on yourself. The council claimed it was for the greater good, but was it really?

Can the council of angels actually be good for the world, when all I know about myself is that I woke up one day as an angel without any information on who I was before? Information on my mission was pushed into my head, while the rest was cleared out.

My first given task was to choose my name. I guess my original one wasn’t good enough anymore. When I saw my black eyes in the mirror of the angel wake-up center, Cole was the first thing that came to mind. It fit.

I rarely interacted with the council and I’m glad for that. Sometimes I wanted to throw all my work away and leave this life behind, but that rage came and left. For now, I'd be as helpful as I could. That's what was most important to me. If the council needed me, they'd call. It felt like a ringing in your ears when they needed you, and if you were caught up with your charge when they did, the ringing would get louder and louder until it was unbearable.

Supposedly, if you kept ignoring the call, your head would explode. Maybe the council made up that rumor to ensure our compliance, but I don’t plan to test the theory.

I sighed and flew away, going where I really wanted to be—the local museum. With how active William and Emily have been lately, I’ve been watching them less and less. I’m here to help, not be a voyeur, not that William would accept my help anyway. I’ll admit to staying around the first few times they were intimate, because I didn’t know if there would be any side effects to a human being with a ghost intimately, even one that now had a heartbeat. Once everything proved to be safe, I made a point to leave them when things got heated.

I saw my official charge less and less these days. I started straying from his side three years ago, when Astoria moved in next door. For the past few months I've watched her almost exclusively, checking in on William and his love sporadically.

Every guardian angel started with guarding the living. The best angels then moved on to help the dead. You would think the opposite, or that ghosts weren’t included at all, but there was more at stake for ghosts. If we couldn’t help them move on, they would cease to be, or in the worst cases, become malignant spirits that corrupted everything around them.

When I was assigned to watch William, I did not expect to watch him fall in love. Nor did I think watching their love unfold would make me admit my loneliness and get me to doubt everything I knew. But, even for an immortal, there was a first time for everything.

The council of angels gave guardians a few tasks: help keep humans safe, and guide the ghosts that had a shot to move on to the afterlife, without either of them knowing we were there. Guardian angels should not interfere, despite the name. We guided, with a suggestive voice that whispered in their mind. It was what humans often called intuition.

If an angel couldn’t help their ghost move on, that was the end for their ghost. Humans had almost a hundred years, in the best scenarios, to get things right before they died. And if they died and became a ghost, having unfinished business as William did, the blame fell on the guardian angels—whether or not they had one. Not every human was given the right to an angel, and even so, there was free will.

It felt unjust that not all humans were protected, and yet we were responsible for ghosts. There were so many factors to whether a soul ended up in the afterlife. But, I didn't make the rules. That was council business. If they wanted to track the rate of human-to-ghost soul transformation as an odd guilt tactic to hold over the guardian angels, that was up to them. Whether or not it made sense didn’t matter.

Arriving at my destination, a local art museum attached to the Lily Hills community college, I followed my secret charge for a few hours.

While I was frustrated that William wouldn't listen to my suggestions, part of me was happy that he and his haunt found love. That was something precious few ever got to experience, especially the dead. Still, my role as a guardian angel was to guide him to move on from this life, and his inability to hear me meant I had no purpose. That was the drive that got me looking around the apartment complex for someone else to help unofficially. I didn’t have to look far.

Astoria, the neighbor next door, did not have an angel. William and Emily were too busy to notice her crippling loneliness, or that she had a stalker. Not that I blamed them, most stalkers weren’t that obvious and mental health concerns were easy to ignore when you weren’t close to a person and looking for clues, but I could see it.

And in many ways, I understood it.

It was forbidden to help her, for she was not my charge. I had been off the rotation of living charges for longer than she had been alive. Yet, I couldn’t look away from her, especially in the last few months. She was in danger. Why hadn’t the council assigned someone to her? I couldn’t rely on them to pick someone for her anytime soon. We were never given more than one charge at a time, and there was only one angel for every hundred humans and ghosts.

She was vulnerable.

If William could break the rules of the universe, couldn't I?

Hi, I’m Astoria. Was there a particular painting in the exhibit you were looking forward to seeing today? Astoria asked her assigned group. She mainly worked as an assistant to the museum sales team, helping with curation, and attending to any visiting artists. When things were busy, she also helped with the tours. Some days, it felt like she did every job this museum had.

Are there any unicorn paintings? the littlest child in the group asked. The older kids scoffed, but Astoria bent down to her level and smiled.

There are some horse paintings that I think are secretly unicorns, but the artist didn’t paint their horns to protect their privacy. I’ll point them out to you, okay? Astoria said conspiratorially, her voice hushed even though everyone could hear her.

Watching her smile at little children pulled at my heartstrings.

Invisible, I took the tour with the group, listening to her talk through who was being exhibited that month. I phased through the guests when they paused, making sure I was always next to my favorite redhead and the little girl who had glued herself to her.

Watching her interact with museum-goers, I wondered what I was like before I was an angel. Astoria was primarily good and moral. She never seemed to cheat, lie, or betray. At least, not when the rules made sense to her. She did bend the rules when it was more fair to others to do so. I admired that about her, especially since I was doing the same to watch her.

I didn’t remember my life as a human. Angels given the guardianship never do. When we wake up as an angel, we instinctively know that our lives were too traumatic to remember, leaving us unable to move on. It felt like we underwent a selective brain surgery, retaining only useful knowledge.

Unlike ghosts who could make new choices and go on to the afterlife, angels were stuck without their past and had no hope for a future besides helping their charges. If I had been a traumatized human with no chance of moving on, wasn’t that also an angel’s fault by that logic? And yet, I was now an angel?

It seemed counterintuitive for formerly traumatized humans with the gift of wings and immortality to guide more potentially traumatized humans.

But all in all, ghosts were supposed to have one last chance,