The The Wardens of the Wild series

The Wardens of the Wild

Cryptid monster romance

“Ancient things have been holding the land together. One of them just stepped out of the tree line.”

Slow-burn monster romance with cryptid heroes — fully sentient, ancient wardens who have kept their ground for millennia, and the competent modern women who finally see them. Explicit 18+ novels with standalone HEAs, plus non-explicit prequel novellas. Its eight closed-door companion short stories are free to read in full here.

Monster romance
Cryptid hero
Slow burn
Forced proximity
Dual POV
HEA

Prelude
The Hundred-Year Watch
“He kept the law for a hundred years. He has never forgiven himself for it.”
Colorado, 1923. Harrakh has been warden of the Marrow Creek glacier since before the canyon had a name. The law is old and simple: a warden who is seen cannot hold what he holds, and the thing sleeping beneath the ice must never be noticed.
Then a geologist named Penna crawls to the edge of the ghost town, sits down in the snow, and begins to write — to the gap in the boards, unmistakably to Harrakh, as though he has always known something was listening.
Harrakh does not cross the tree line. The law holds. Penna dies. And Harrakh spends the next hundred years erasing Marrow Creek from every map and every frequency, until the canyon is officially nothing.
The origin story of the warden of Marrow Creek — the wound he is already carrying when Alma Cortez walks into his valley in Winterteeth.
Heat note: this is a prequel origin story, not a romance. There is no love interest and no intimate content in this novella.
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Free
Companion to Book
Thirty-One Degrees Below
“The third legal pad was the problem.”
The first two were clean. Storm onset at 14:07, Priya’s fall at 14:23, radio check to dispatch at 14:31, the station at 15:04, Alma’s last transmission at 15:09, the airlift window at 17:42. Six days flat on his back with a fractured pelvis and nothing to do but reconstruct the sequence, and the sequence is very nearly a complete thing.
The third legal pad is where the completeness ends.
Everything Marco tells the investigator is true. The storm. The fall. The bivouac. The cold — extreme and sustained, he says, and does not say the rest of what he thinks about the cold, which is that at moments it seemed intentional. What he leaves out is not a lie. It is a hole, in a document that will outlive him, in the shape of something that does not fit the box marked nature of incident.
A free companion story to Winterteeth, the novel it hands you on to.
Heat note: the free companions close the door — the wanting and the consequences are on the page, the act is not. The Wardens of the Wild novels are explicit, 18+.
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Free
Companion to Book
What the Glacier Keeps
“The stratigraphy was wrong.”
Yolanda has been drilling ice long enough to know what wrong looks like — the off-rhythm vibration in the core barrel, the colour shift a metre above where it has any business appearing — and long enough to have learned to log the anomaly first and let herself be interested in it second. The interest is what gets people into trouble. The interest is how you end up in the literature as a cautionary note.
She does the arithmetic twice. The marker layer puts the inclusion eleven thousand years older than the organic structure allows, which means the structure is misread, or the marker is contaminated, or she is looking at something she does not have a category for.
She photographs it from four angles. She writes possible contamination artifact in the small, controlled handwriting she uses when she is being careful.
Then she picks it up again without putting her gloves on.
A free companion story to Winterteeth, the novel it hands you on to.
Heat note: the free companions close the door — the wanting and the consequences are on the page, the act is not. The Wardens of the Wild novels are explicit, 18+.
Read it free, here
Free
Companion to Book
The Warmest Thing in the Room
“The sat-phone should not have rung.”
Dez knows the frequencies the way she knows her own resting heart rate — baseline data, checked and filed. The unit on the shelf in SAR dispatch is configured for a specific band, and whatever is coming in is not on it. She stares at the lit screen for two rings. Not three. Two is still a decision; three would have been a habit.
It is Alma — six weeks gone, the paperwork a disaster — and the first thing she asks is not are you all right. It is: is the team okay.
Then she gives Dez a coordinate string, asks what she sees when she pulls it up, and tells her not to write it down.
A free companion story to Winterteeth, the novel it hands you on to.
Heat note: the free companions close the door — the wanting and the consequences are on the page, the act is not. The Wardens of the Wild novels are explicit, 18+.
Read it free, here
Book One
Winterteeth
“He has kept this mountain for ten thousand years. He has never let anyone in.”
Alma Cortez is the medic Colorado SAR sends when the outcome is already bad. A freak glacier storm has sealed Marrow Creek canyon, two climbers are down, and there is no radio, no extraction, and no way out of a ghost town that dissolved off the official maps in 1923. So she does what she always does: inventory the resources, stabilise the wounded, survive.
The resource she didn’t inventory is eight feet of white-furred patience — and he left an elk at her door before she knew he existed.
Harrakh has watched humans make terrible decisions from the tree line for a hundred and eleven years without once stepping out of it. He steps out of the tree line, because the Sleeper beneath the glacier has woken up enough to learn her name.
Book 1 of The Wardens of the Wild. Standalone with a guaranteed HEA. Heat level 4, dual POV. Cryptid hero — fully sentient, fully consenting, and not a shifter.
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Interlude
What the Old Wood Keeps
“He has guarded this forest for two thousand years. He has never once been seen. Until her.”
Brannoch does not make mistakes. For two thousand years the warden of the Cascade old growth has kept his forest intact and himself invisible, dismantling every survey crew and leaving no trace that could not be read as weather or bad luck.
Then Kessel-Vane Timber sends a forensic auditor instead of another survey crew. She arrives with a colour-coded matrix, an unnerving habit of following logic all the way to its source, and no intention of finding what they hired her to find.
Brannoch has managed variables for twenty centuries. He cannot manage her. He does not, after the third night, particularly want to.
Told entirely in Brannoch’s voice. A complete standalone with no cliffhanger, and the doorway into the series.
Heat note: this novella is sensual and closed-door. The Wardens of the Wild novels are explicit, 18+.
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Companion to Book One
Thirty-One Names
“It was the kind of thing you did, when you had spent ten thousand years cataloguing what remained after something was removed.”
The hearing room is on the fourth floor of a building that has been three different government agencies in sequence, and the walls still carry the screw-holes from the last one’s signage. Harrakh counts them.
Two clerks. A three-person panel at a folding table brought in for the occasion, the power strip taped down with the optimism of a temporary solution that will outlast everyone in the room. Alma is in the third row of the gallery, second seat from the left, and she does not speak to him, because he asked her in the corridor not to. He told her he needed to come in with both hands empty.
He is no longer sure he understood what that meant.
The witness will confine testimony to matters within direct personal knowledge. He agrees. He has spent ten thousand years learning when to give someone what they need in order to proceed.
A free companion story to The Long Timber, the novel it hands you on to.
Heat note: the free companions close the door — the wanting and the consequences are on the page, the act is not. The Wardens of the Wild novels are explicit, 18+.
Read it free, here
Free
Companion to Book One
The Night Survey
“Dario had driven forty minutes of logging road to get to Station 9, and the machine was not vandalized.”
No broken glass. No spray paint. No dragged chains, no sugar in the fuel tank — none of what the union rep prepped him for on the phone at six that morning, in the voice of someone who has been through three of these already and is running out of calm.
A Komatsu 931XC sitting in the clearing like it decided to take a personal day. Boom folded down and locked. Stabiliser pads deployed. Engine cooling. The cab secured with the key-lock rather than the ignition switch, which means someone used a key, or someone knew about the secondary lockout.
Fifteen years on Cascade sites and he has words for most things. He stands there with his clipboard and two empty boxes on the form, looking at a machine that has not been vandalised so much as responsibly parked by somebody who is not on the crew list.
A free companion story to The Long Timber, the novel it hands you on to.
Heat note: the free companions close the door — the wanting and the consequences are on the page, the act is not. The Wardens of the Wild novels are explicit, 18+.
Read it free, here
Book Two
The Long Timber
“She came to find the saboteur. She found something far older than the crime.”
Forensic auditor Priya Nair has rebuilt her entire career on one rule: the file doesn’t lie. Six years ago a technically clean audit let a client bury a safety report, and four people died. She has never let a number go unverified since.
Sent to the Cascade old growth to identify whoever is disabling the harvest equipment, she finds a sabotage ledger too precise to be vandalism, a file clearly prepared for her to find rather than by her, and — on the third night — something vast and still watching her spreadsheets by firelight from between the old-growth trunks.
He is not her saboteur. He is her evidence. And she is the first auditor in two thousand years who might actually file a true account.
Book 2 of The Wardens of the Wild. A slow-burn monster romance with an eco-thriller spine. Dual first-person POV, guaranteed HEA, and it stands alone.
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Interlude
The Shape Before the Storm
“He came to hold a fault line. He stayed three days for a stranger, and he has been paying for it ever since.”
Vesperakh has held this stretch of Appalachian ground for two centuries. He arrives before the water does. He does not intervene beyond the work, he does not announce himself, and he does not stay. That is not restraint — that is the whole architecture of what he is.
Then a flash flood takes the hollow, and there is a person in the current who should not be there.
He pulls her out. He carries her to a decommissioned fire lookout on the ridge. And then, against every clause of the law he has kept without exception, he does not leave. For three days he stands watch through the storm while she works out, methodically and without panic, that whatever is out there is making deliberate choices about whether she lives.
She does not run. She signals. He answers.
The prequel to Lanternwing. Where the wound begins.
Heat note: this novella contains no romantic or sexual content. It is a rescue and a long silence.
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Free
Companion to Book Two
Every Hollow Has a Name for It
“I do not know what reviewing looks like for something without hands but I use the word because no other word is accurate.”
Ruthanne has a system. Box flaps open, left to right. Contents read for condition before she touches anything. The Sizemore donation came in on a Tuesday — four boxes the nephew described as grandmother’s things, mostly junk, but Mama said the county library ought to have first look. He had not looked himself. Ruthanne can tell. The tape is original.
County fair ribbons. Glass negatives. Three decades of Grit magazine. A 1961 road map of Virginia with hand-pencilled corrections on two of the mountain routes — corrections that are, she checks, accurate, which means somebody drove them, found the state wrong, and fixed it without telling anyone but themselves.
Under the seed catalogues, flattened by the weight of everything above it, a journal. March 14, 1921. Third meeting at the upper hollow. I have brought the survey maps from the county seat as requested.
Ruthanne reads it twice.
A free companion story to Lanternwing, the novel it hands you on to.
Heat note: the free companions close the door — the wanting and the consequences are on the page, the act is not. The Wardens of the Wild novels are explicit, 18+.
Read it free, here
Free
Companion to Book Two
What the Mountain Keeps
“The mountains did not care what Beckley reported.”
The propane truck jackknifed at 1:47 a.m. By 2:15 Delia has walked the south perimeter twice, clocked the trailer angle at thirty-eight degrees off-axis, and decided that anyone who thinks they are getting through before first light is welcome to try the ridge road and explain the results to their next of kin.
Her watch reads 29.78 and falling. The National Weather Service still has it holding at 29.85, because the Weather Service is reading Beckley and not this particular crease in the mountains — the same discrepancy she has been logging for six weeks in the second notebook she keeps in the left thigh pocket of her flight suit.
She hears him before she sees him: footsteps out of the north staging with the particular cadence of someone who learned to walk carefully after something went wrong with the mechanism.
A free companion story to Lanternwing, the novel it hands you on to.
Heat note: the free companions close the door — the wanting and the consequences are on the page, the act is not. The Wardens of the Wild novels are explicit, 18+.
Read it free, here
Free
Companion to Book Two
Brannoch in the Burning Season
“The smoke column was reading wrong.”
Priya Nair has her window down before the truck is fully stopped. The forecast has the column tracking northeast along the ridge, and what she is looking at is northeast plus something — a secondary lean that means either a terrain channel she has not mapped or a wind shift the models missed. The August night is the kind of hot that does not apologise, the kind that has been sitting on the county for six weeks and has stopped feeling like weather and started feeling like a condition of existence.
She logs it. Column lean ~15° from predicted track.
Then she sees him — or sees the wrong kind of stillness at the treeline, forty yards into the buffer, at the fire’s forward edge. Not watching it the way you watch a thing that might outrun you. She knows that posture, and this is not it.
She kills the headlights.
A free companion story to Lanternwing, the novel it hands you on to.
Heat note: the free companions close the door — the wanting and the consequences are on the page, the act is not. The Wardens of the Wild novels are explicit, 18+.
Read it free, here
Book Three
Lanternwing
“Something with wings keeps arriving just before the worst happens. She has spent four years deciding it is the cause.”
Cassidy Boone flies disaster response over Harlan County, and she is good at it the way only the guilty are good. Preflight in eleven minutes. Numbers filed on time. No margin unaccounted for. The one entry she never audits is her own: the mine collapse that took her brother, and the winged silhouette above it — the same shape she saw as a girl above a flood, the day everyone lived.
She has a word for something seen twice above catastrophe. Harbinger. She is wrong about what she saw.
The shape is a warden, two centuries into holding this county’s ground together, and the debt he holds is coming due all at once. He needs a pilot with eyes on the terrain and a radio the emergency networks will answer, so he lands and offers her an arrangement. What he does not offer is the rest of it: that he pulled her from that flood himself, stood watch for three days, and left before she could name him.
Book 3 of The Wardens of the Wild. A complete standalone with a guaranteed HEA.
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