Born to be powerless, Imgrace finds her true skills, not in her talent, but in her ability to bring it out in others. On a world where everyone has a superpower and the powerless die before puberty, Imgrace is not in for a long and lustrous future. She learns at nine that she will never have a talent, and when her family pretends she never was, her life becomes a routine monitored by bots. Being asked to help the Guardians in an experiment is one thing, finding out that she has something to offer her people is another. Imgrace is shocked. Shadow was indifferent to the young woman who had lived her life powerless, until she kissed him. One moment turned his focus from his people to this young, frail woman who had been rejected by every means. He was about to pursue her when his commander shipped her to the Citadel, and then, he had to wait. Training at the Citadel is surreal, and finding out that she isn’t what she thought shocks her to her core but fills her with purpose. She left a void, but she is returning a Guardian.

A wish to be normal and a life that becomes everything but. A Mermaid’s Wish.Taem wants to be a normal mermaid, unremarkable and blend into the background. What she finds is that she is the kind of woman who makes things happen, and while her body is unremarkable, her personality gets her noticed.Sardu is the prince of mermen who notices the sharp-tongued organizational wizard, and he wants her for his own. The trouble is, how can he get to her with protocol blocking his every path?

Tales of the Citadel 20 A Guardsman wakes a deadly weapon of mythic proportions, Rathi, and she must choose sides with only his earnest gaze to go on. Hidden does his work in secret and silence. Searching for the deadly weapon known as the Destroyer of Ichadra, he insinuates himself into an archaeological team looking for the ancient power. The woman he finds is young, strong and can rip him apart at the molecular level with the wave of her hand. Rathi can remember over sixteen hundred years, but she has slept for the last thousand. The handsome male who wakes her entreats her to do what is right and that alone wins her agreement. When she sees that her world is dead, she must choose to align herself with a current power, and nothing will convince her like a kind word and an offer to help discover what happened to those who came before.

Tired of being a sex object on Earth, Bella tries to leave in order to find herself by hiding what she truly is. Confused? She is. Bella has been trying to find a man who will see her for the smart and charming woman that she is. She wants them to look beyond the obvious. When she joins the Volunteers, she finds herself on a world where everyone around her hides their faces and you have to deal with their minds and positions in society. It takes getting used to, but she thrives. Lord Akking runs a club where aliens can meet with the Kloa traders face to face. As Minister of Trade, Akking is cut a lot of slack, but when he has her assigned as his assistant, he has a lot more than just being face to face with her in mind. Becoming the object of his affections is startlingly direct, and with nowhere to hide, she has to deal with her own desires and be honest about them.

It is time to take the battle to the aliens, and a weapon to pluck them out of the sky is on the agenda. With a grasp of the situation and a weapon that can reach a descending ship required, the engineers get to go back to doing what they do best. Those who aren’t designing have the past coming up to bite them, the pilots are getting tired of the run to the city. Learning that alien hostages were held in stasis under the city seems to be just one more thorn in the sides of the pilots, but what they discover opens everything that they thought they knew into complete and shocking light. The future may be interesting, but the honest past will shock them to their cores.

A woman with vision finds a man who can help her reach heights she never imagined. Riasa has been working with the resistance to warn talents of the scanning bots flying overhead on schedules. The warning of eyes in the sky saved lives and families. Rescued before she could be caught, Riasa begins life at Citadel Teklan, but she knows something is very wrong. Confronting her suspicions, she calls in help and destroys the only home she has been offered before getting assigned to a flyer with wings of stone. Natu was disgruntled to be picking up a farmer’s daughter on Resicor, but once he met Riasa and saw her talent in action, he had to admit that he had been in the right place at the right time.

Going from researcher to hero is almost easy compared to falling in love with an alien world. Lydra wanted to live a life as a researcher and focus on solving mysteries of genetics. She never intended to become one of those mysteries. Trapped in an experiment gone wrong, she ends up blue and powerless on her own world, so she decides to be a freak amongst freaks elsewhere. Locals populate guardian Base Vidiaro, but Lydra gets by by doing her crime scene analysis until the day that the experiment that started on her own world takes its course. She goes from an anomaly to a hero and isn’t sure which she really wants to be.

Tales of the Citadel Twenty-Three Out of her body and lost in space, Wiyra finds solace and help in the form of a tracker who has his own designs on her physical self.   Wiyra is an astral investigator. She can leave her body and search any specific point in space that she wishes. She merely has to know its location before she leaves herself. A problem arises when she leaves to examine some mineral deposits and returns to the place her body should be, only to find it missing. Her entire home is missing. Her cousins, grandfather and brothers are all gone with no trace. There is only one person she can turn to, and while it makes her grit her astral teeth, she heads to Citadel Reevish. Master Tracker Burin is woken from a sound sleep by an astral hand in his head, and while he is startled, delight soon follows. Wiyra has come to him for help and the Citadel does nothing for free. He has her right where he wants her…as soon as he finds her.

Stealing an ancient artifact is a strange test, but going up against her family and the law adds a new level of difficulty. Imara wants nothing more than to find a different course, but stealth magic gives her the credits she needs to stay on track, and there aren’t any other options rearing their heads. Stealth Magic is not what she thought it would be, and the idea of breaking into a home to rob an ancient artifact for her final exam was a little daunting. Luckily, Imara has friends who are going to help her through training, some old and some new. Through some work with the XIA, she finds a tutor for her training and a place to do it. Ritual Space offers her a welcome, and the inhabitants set themselves to the monumental task of her training. The exam is getting closer and time is a factor. Mr. E just likes chasing the enchanted bunnies of Ritual Space.

Surviving a brutal disaster, Lee finds her calling and passion with a man whose touch can kill. Blown up, healed and grafted were things Lee never expected to see in her medical records. Waking up after a terrorist attack, she finds her father has signed her over to the Volunteer Project as long as they can keep her alive. Grafts, implants and slow regeneration are now her life, and she is assigned to the Guardian emergency response dispatch. Having no base, they travel from world to world and do whatever needs to be done from rescues, small incursions, to escorting treaty brides. Lukar has worked alone for quite some time, but the scientists at the Guardian Project assured him that he and Lee were a good match. He had no idea how right they were.

Terran Life out of her body was fun but when she tangles with a stellar avatar, life inside her own skin holds a lot of appeal. Dina has been going from assignment to assignment, helping out with mediations in hostile environments. Since she leaves her body in safety, her mind walks worlds that would kill her physical form instantly. When an offer from a nearby star gets her attention, she has to choose between a life out of her body, or a passenger in her very soul. Arci, the living star has been searching for a match for his avatar since Zakkar’s species disappeared. When the Terran seems to meet all of his avatar’s needs, Arci senses that she can fulfill some of the things missing is his own existence as well. It will take both of them to convince her to join them, but their threesome will eventually come together, mind, body, souls, and star.

Astral projection is great, but taking possession of a Guardian half a universe away is a job for a hero, not a ghost. Simry enjoyed her escape from a world of shunning and rules that did not apply to her. Life in the Citadel could be difficult, but it had its rewards in the shape of education and friendships. Being asked to seek out a Guardian and keep him sane from dozens of worlds away was one of the hardest assignments she had ever taken on, and it was also the most rewarding. She rescued the Guardian’s soul, kept his spirits up and made sure that he was able to survive until physical help could arrive. N’kad was on the edge of giving up when the ghost entered his mind and took over his situation by lodging herself in his soul. The stranger in his mind was brash, annoying, and yet, she kept his attention every moment that she was with him. He would travel quite a way for a woman like that. She was his hero, after all.

A woman, with a foul temper and her own spaceship, ends up an escort for a stunned ambassador. Her perfect mate. Leo runs her ship with precision and an attitude shaped by pain. Gathering an ambassador in stasis, she is surprised to find his ability to match her innermost desires, and he is surprised to find that she wants him in his own form and not the one she craves. Ambassador Wikkio is a Beholder. Born to a race that can change to match any other species right down to venom or scales, he is an ideal representative for races who are skittish around strangers. Meeting Govern surprises him. He had not thought to meet the woman of his dreams when he woke from cold sleep and never had he imaged that he would enjoy his woman sharpening her wit on his hide. The Gold Fairy brought them together, and now, she is determined to keep them that way.

Tales of the Citadel 8 Naka can use her mind to destroy a world, or she can save it. When nothing seems right, she calls the moon. Naka was adrift with no means to focus, but accidentally starting a tremor in her hometown lets everyone know what she is and sentences her to confinement. The Citadel sends a representative to take her away, but the information that he is given will make sure that she finds no friends off Resicor. Her life is no longer her own, but her talent begs to be used, and on the planet of Piq, she finds something very wrong. The empty world should not be empty. Its mind has been stolen and lodged in the moon. In his efforts to escape, the living mind of the planet has almost ripped his old body apart. With skills she didn’t know she had, Naka steps in to carry one mind back to its home. She hopes she will survive the process.

A runaway bride, a race of crippled giants and a woman whose genes can solve anything. Jill and the Genestalk. Jill has been traded to a consortium that wants to use her empathy for business. She wants nothing to do with their plans and runs away on her wedding day. A shuttle chase, a crash and a surprisingly soft landing begin a new phase of Jill’s life in which she offers her body to a race of giants for room and board. T’los is the man who pulled her out of her wrecked shuttle, and he is with her every step of the way until his people no longer need her. The moment she is free of demands, he makes her an offer and she falls for his charm. Caught in his arms, it is quite the distance to fall.