Tomas has lived a carefree life, his family is gone, and he has no one to cater to but himself, so he spends his nights drinking and paying for it with magic. It was supposed to be a small spell to let young lovers have a night together without the interference of the lady’s fey godmother. It was little enough to do; he simply waited until the appointed time and opened a rift in the wall of magic around the woman in question. He really should have asked her first. His client tried to kill her, and Tomas ended up sentenced to having his magic bound to him for fifty years. Only one spell would come when he called, and it was the balancing spell. He was now a servant of the Crossroads, glyphed and bound. Trill is assigned to keep an eye on his adjustment to the Crossroads, and a more reluctant parole officer has never been seen.

Aster was cut off from her tree in a weird turn of events that had her planting her tree in sacred soil and waking a forest god with the power of her oak. Her life was in a static spiral from there. She joined the human world, started a business, and enjoyed spending her time with trees that grew at her slightest request. Life was good until the fiancée of the fey king contacted her and asked her to join the queen’s court. Aster thought about joining the fey, and she agreed to do it, on one condition. She wanted to visit her tree. A flurry of arrangements brings her to the Crossroads, and she confronts the being who had possession of her tree and asks him to let her visit. He says yes on one condition. She has to visit as his mate or the barrier will remain. She has to think about this.

Roxanne has spent her adult life as a seeker, looking for fugitives for the guild. She is very good at her job, and she considers the trade of her mother’s medical care for her service to be fair. When the shifter bride asks her to go to the Crossroads in exchange for some fey healers, Roxanne agrees. Cancer is relentless and forces her hand. She goes to the Crossroads to seek out a mate. She always finds what she is looking for. Moriven is the best hunter at the guild, and he never misses. When he finds out that Roxanne is at the Crossroads, he heads there immediately, hoping to catch the bloodhound of the guild. There have been rifts between them, but he doesn’t want her marriage to another male to be one of them.

Mistress of shadows meets the cutest shifter she could imagine, and he sweeps her off her feet... eventually. Sireno has grown up knowing that she is the key to the magic that keeps her parents apart. It hasn’t been a fun burden to bear when her mom announces that it is time for her to head to the Crossroads to break the binding. Aeric has seen Sireno in action, both as a shadow who can lift objects and testifying fearlessly in the Mage Guild courts. Her beauty and wit only match her versatility. Without lying outright, she obfuscated enough to make him doubt what he had witnessed. What a woman. Once she is at the Crossroads, she is ready to settle in, but she gets an emergency call. She sends her shadow out to get two shifters out of trouble, but she is shocked when one of them returns to the Crossroads, looking for her. With a stunned realization, she finds that she was waiting for him all along.

Teal was content in her place as the swan prime. She helped her people recover from wounds and officiated shifter weddings. Life was serene until her mother lets her know that her husband has been chosen, and the wedding is going to be that very day. Not likely. Tony has been watching the white-haired swan for years. Every meeting with the heads of the clans and the primes has had her sitting directly across from him, usually in a charming dress. When he runs across her at his family gas station, she is not her normally ladylike self, and he finds that the scrappy swan is even more intriguing than the elegant one. When a dragon appears and makes them an offer, their futures cease to be theirs to control as they pledge themselves to the Crossroads... and each other.

She’s a wood elf who makes trees bear fruit constantly, he’s a partridge shifter who can’t shift completely. He can’t go all the way and she’s got wood. Zekila was sent to the Crossroads as an attempt to dilute her powers. There was a problem and her affinity for fruit trees took over, wrapped around her and transformed her into what she loved. She watched the years pass through her leaves and branches and when a young shifter with partridge wings starts to hang out in her vicinity, she finds out that after all the years of watching the shifters come and go, she can still find a man attractive and want to be with him. He visits her for a few weeks until the longest night of the year. He dresses her tree up and wishes her the best of the season, and in the darkness, she emerges from the trunk of the tree that had held her safe. New day, new year, time to start again.