Guarded by the Nightmare by Cassie Alexander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
No one survives hiring me. Not even her.
Guarded by the Nightmare
I’m a Nightmare, a creature that feeds on fear, and I’m capable of boundless cruelty—which is why my services come at a steep the life of the person who hired me. As such, the only people who hire me on are those brought to me by fate, like Mina, a woman so desperate for revenge that she’s willing to spend her own life to get it.
I don’t usually care why I’m hired. Human affairs don’t matter to me. Food is food, and a job is a job.
Mina’s enemies will get what they deserve—and I’ll get what’s mine.
Her beating heart.
Awesome and original monster romance!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💚🖤❤️💜🩵
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: ☹️☺️😊🥰😍
The heroine: Mina – her and her best friend Ella were at college and drugged and something very bad happened to them and it was done by the members of a fraternity. Ella has been in a coma for six months and Mina has basically died inside when nobody believed her. She wants nothing more than to get revenge against the men and she knows that after doing so, she will probably get the death penalty, so she decides to go about it in a different way. She doesn’t care that she will be killed also, as it will just be an end to her misery and is worth it if she gets her revenge along the way.
The Hero: Sylas (a.k.a. the hourglass killer) – he was once human but that was a very long time ago. He is now a nightmare, a smoke and shadows monster that feeds on fear, terror and other bad emotions and eating the beating hearts of his victims. He was once free to roam about the world feeding on whomever he pleased until the great-grandfather of Royce Bannerman, the owner of the Monster Security Agency, bound him to his line and to the hourglass. Now lives inside the hourglass until it runs out, then he can be hired by someone who comes into the MSA to hire him. He is then bound to that person and can feed from whomever that person tells him to until the sands run out again, at which point he will eat the beating heart out of the person he is bound to. Then he goes back in his hourglass.
The story: Mina did extensive research on the hourglass killer and knows what he does, though she doesn’t know exactly what he is. There are all kinds of monsters in the world that are known by humans, not all is known about each kind. Though she does know after all her research, is that he is the perfect monster for her needs.
“Oh, tsk, Royce. I don’t sleep. I only make others sleep—sleep, and dream of me.” It was a portion of the quote inscribed on a swooping portion of my hourglass’s golden frame. And on the inside of that inscription, in a place only I could see, was the phrase: Time gives fate a reason. Fate gives time a point.
“Because sometimes—very rarely—people did get to hire me.
And on those occasions I would get to not only follow them for a time, but do their bidding, and I would be permitted to not just feed on fear and hate and terror, but allowed to cause it.
Personally.
Violently.
Up until their sand ran out and I finally slaughtered them.”
“I rolled the sleeve of my scratchy sweater up, to find that somehow I’d been branded with an hourglass, just like the images I’d seen on old coroners reports in my research—the sign of the Hourglass Killer.
But what those photos hadn’t shown was the inside of the brand, where the hourglass’s sand was.
It was tattooed red . . . and the ink was moving.
Draining from one chamber into the next, ever so slowly.”
“And you can’t tell me any of your other names?” Maybe they’d have a clue for me as to what he actually was, other than a death-dealing serial-killing smoke-monster that’d apparently been alive for a century.
This book was so original in a field of paranormal romance that have so many vampire and shifter stories that are just variations on the same or similar themes. I tend to love monster romance for that very reason and this one was even more original than most.
The world building in this book was terrific. The descriptions of what happened to Mina and Ella were done so well in flashbacks or dreams, that I was terrified when it was close to happening. It wasn’t quite what I thought it would be, but the fact that they had been set up for it to happen for six months prior to it that got my emotions all up in arms about it. Not only that, but they made her look and feel like a crazy person after it all went down.
The descriptions of what Mina went through made it much easier to not only stomach the brutal revenge but to know that it was more than well deserved however savage and cruel it would be. The story got better and better as it got more intricate, and the steamy parts were pretty hot as well. I liked both the romance and the revenge story and will definitely be looking into more books by Cassie Alexander. She wrote a few more in this same series, and I wasn’t really interested in those types of monsters, but after reading this book, I think I will try them next.
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