Title: Death Days
Author: Lia Cooper
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: August 6, 2018
Heat Level: 3 - Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 70000
Genre: Paranormal, college, teaching, magic, dark, slow burn, age gap, vampires, shifters
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Synopsis
By day, Professor Nicholas Littman works
as an itinerant professor at a small college in the Pacific Northwest. He
teaches seminars on mythology and the intersections of folklore and magic in
the ancient world. By night, he’s the local necromancer, a rare magical talent
that has left him alienated from other practitioners.
All Nick wants from life is to be left
alone to run his magical experiments and teach kids the historical context of
magic without anyone being the wiser. Unfortunately, his family is sworn to sit
on the council of the Order of the Green Book—a group of magicians dating back
to the Crusades—and they aren’t willing to take Nick’s no for an answer.
As though that wasn’t bad enough, a
coven of Night Women has arrived in town, warning Nick that there are wolves at
his door he had better take care of. But what can one necromancer do when every
natural and supernatural card seems stacked against him?
Excerpt
Death Days
Lia Cooper © 2018
All Rights Reserved
One: The Professor
“Today we’re talking about the elision
that occurs between Thoth worship in pre-Ptolemaic Egypt and early Greece.
Let’s break into four groups for seminar,” Professor Nicolas Littman said,
eyeing the half-empty teaching theater. He divided the room with a sweep of his
arm and glanced at the clock on the back wall.
“We’ll meet back here in thirty minutes
to discuss your thoughts as a group. And I want every small group to come up
with a question to pose to the rest of us.”
He felt gratified at the way they began
shuffling together into little clusters without further prompting.
“One of you should go use the lounge
outside,” he said, waving absently at the small group at the very back of the
room.
He didn’t care if they took the
direction or not. He trusted in every student’s desire to escape the four walls
of the classroom given a millimeter of freedom. All that mattered was that he
now had thirty minutes of his own time in which to play hooky.
Nick grabbed a book and the vape out of
his bag, and slipped out of the left-hand exit.
Why someone in the administration had
decided to give him a corner theater for this class was beyond him. Four
credits on Hermetic Mythologies and Cosmologies was hardly in demand.
Especially when it was offered as a four-and-a-half-hour option on Saturdays.
But if it meant they got a spacious room and the otherwise empty SEM II C
building to themselves, he shouldn’t complain. His students could spread out to
their hearts’ content, leaving him to steal outside to smoke without anyone
around to gripe at him.
“Not even a proper smoke,” he muttered,
flicking the round silver device on, warming the metal under his hand.
Nick sat on the concrete with his back
to the building’s cement exterior and his knees bent, pressed the tip of the
vape between his lips, and held down the button for a long, comforting drag. He
closed his eyes to the bright sun and tipped his head back against the wall.
Vapor streamed out of his pursed lips in a thick, fragrant cloud and pooled in
the air above his head.
“Hiding from the students again?” an
amused voice asked from above.
“I’m not hiding,” Nick grumbled.
A thin body lowered itself down onto the
ground next to him, all long spidery limbs that folded with the kind of soft
careless agility Nick hadn’t felt in a decade or two.
He looked over at his—teaching assistant
wasn’t the word. Technically, Josiah didn’t work for him at all. He was just an
independent contract student working on an eight-credit history project, but he
let Nick use him like a TA so that’s how he always thought of him.
“What do you call this?” Josiah asked,
knocking their shoulders together.
“Seminaring.”
Josiah’s face crumpled up with
amusement. His flexible mouth stretched into a laugh while his shoulders shook.
Nick held out the vape on offer and waited for Josiah to notice.
“Is it peppermint?” he asked.
Nick nodded.
“No thanks.”
“I’m not buying cake or whatever it is
you like.”
“Are you trying to say there’s something
wrong with cake?” Josiah returned Nick’s stony look with a nonplussed
expression.
“It’s unna—”
“First of all: I don’t remember tobacco
ever coming in ‘peppermint flavor’ before, and second: everything you do is
unnatural, so that’s not a valid argument coming from you, Professor Littman.”
Nick grimaced. “Don’t call me that.”
“Nick.”
He sighed and took another long drag off
his vape, waiting for the nicotine to soothe the flutter in his heart that
Josiah’s words had kicked up. Nothing he did was natural. The kid had no idea
just how right he was. Nick glanced down at his empty hand, automatically
checking his nails for pesky traces of dirt, but there was nothing unusual to
see. He’d scrubbed up hard the night before. Done a thorough job not to leave
any of those unnatural traces that might have given Josiah a better-formed
picture of what his professor and academic adviser got up to in his free time.
Shit, even in his head, he sounded like
a pervert.
“You’re wrong. Some things I do are
perfectly natural.”
“Like what?”
Nick gave the young man a slow look.
“You have a very active imagination, Mr. Wexler.”
“The imagination is a hungry organ,
seeking perpetual nourishment. I like to think that it’s not so much I’ve got
an active imagination, but rather a well-fed one.”
“That you feed on thoughts of me?” Nick
smiled, playing the comment off as a joke even though it left something low and
hot in his body to sit up with interest. A curl of amused interest that
quivered at the thought of a bright young man captivated by thoughts of him,
even if they were merely frustrated or prurient or the passing whim of childish
fancy, as he suspected was the case.
“Sometimes,” Josiah admitted, looking
away.
The two of them sat in companionable
silence until the phone in Nick’s pocket hiccupped its alarm to let him know
that the requisite thirty-minute small group had passed, and he had to return
again to face the lethargy of his classroom.
“Did you need something?” he asked,
using the wall to push himself to his feet, and slipped the vape back into his
pocket.
Josiah pulled out a sheaf of printouts
from his backpack and held them up for Nick to take. “Two new chapters. I
wanted to get your thoughts on them before I continue. It took a—the narrative
took a direction we haven’t discussed before.”
“All right. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks.”
“Do you want to come in?”
“Nah, I’ve got to meet Jen. Talk to you
next week?”
Nick nodded.
Above them, the sky had dimmed as sure
as if someone had taken a dimmer switch to the sun. Dark clouds cast a clear,
watery gray light over campus, the edges of the quad hemmed in on all sides by
towering dark trees that only helped to feed into the illusion of night
creeping over them. The air smelled as though it were about to rain, bitterly
cold and damp.
“Do you think it’s going to snow?”
Josiah asked, climbing to his feet.
Nick shook his head. “Not a chance.”
He filed back into the teaching theater
behind the stragglers. Sixty minutes for discussion and in-class readings, and
then he’d be free for the rest of the weekend. Nick perched his feet on the
edge of his desk, saw the streaks of mud clinging to his shoes, and dropped
them again. He cleared his throat and looked out at the crowd for the first
person to meet his eyes.
“Ah, Amelia, why don’t you start us off
with a brief summary of what your group discussed.”
He folded his arms over his chest and
listened with half an ear while his focus strayed repeatedly to the darkening
sky and the promise of rain.
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Meet the Author
Lia Cooper is a twenty-something native
of the Pacific Northwest, voracious reader, pop-culture addict, and writer. She
cultivated an early interest in writing through fandom and completed writing
her first full length novel with the help of NaNoWriMo.
In the years since, she’s dabbled in
catering, barista-ing, and working as a pastry chef before finally returning
full time to the thing she loves most: storytelling.
When she’s not glued to Scrivener, Lia
enjoys playing video games with friends and reviewing books for her booktube
channel.
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