the wrought-iron gate. Etta, his neighbor, who had to be close to ninety, sat on her porch, drinking coffee. Even as early as it was, she already had on a dress, stockings, and heels, and her silver-white hair was curled perfectly in place. As far as Avery knew, Etta didn’t even own a pair of jeans or a tracksuit. She wouldn’t be caught dead out of her house with anything like that for sure.
“Morning, sweetheart,” she called quietly to him.
“Morning, Etta.” Avery waved.
She and her husband, Clancy, had taken him in a bit when he’d first moved into his little cottage. He didn’t have his own family, so he’d appreciated her homemade treats and invitations to holiday dinners—especially before he’d made a social circle of his own.
“Have a good day,” he added.
“You be safe out there,” she told him.
Sometimes she treated him like a kid. He supposed he still looked like one, instead of the thirty that had recently come out of nowhere and shocked the hell out of him.
Avery swung his leg over the bar of his bike, tightened up the strap on his messenger bag, and headed down the street for the college... where he’d hopefully be a tiny bit early rather than barely on time.
He was almost exactly on time, but there were still students lined up outside the lecture hall like they were waiting for the doors to a concert to open. They looked everything from anxious to ready to burst. Avery tried to hold in a sigh. It was going to take him a while to get into the lecture hall.
“Professor Cook, did you get my paper on banshees? I emailed it last night.”
“Professor, did we need to do the reading on the Carter brothers? I wasn’t sure if that was today or next Monday.”
Welcome to the week.
He was usually greeted with a barrage of questions that could all easily be answered by his rather detailed syllabus or at the very least over email, but he supposed there was some comfort in getting a personal answer.
He’d probably been ten times worse back when he was in school. Of course, he’d started college at fifteen and had looked about twelve. Self-management hadn’t been one of the skills that came easily to him.
“I haven’t checked my email, and yes, vampires are starting today. You have about ten minutes to skim the chapter if you haven’t yet.”
A few students in the crowd chuckled. Like they hadn’t been looking forward to this section since the start of the term.
“Everyone, the hall is empty. You can head in and take a seat. I need to do my setup. I’ll answer the rest of the questions during my office hours as usual.”
He wove his way through the crowd until he managed to get to the door and cracked it open to slip in.
Avery used the few minutes he had to shuffle through his notes, open his PowerPoint, and get mentally ready. He’d been teaching his Origins of Myth and Legend class for quite a few years and knew it like the back of his hand. Hell, he’d written one of the books they used back when he was a kid who was too young and too smart and probably annoyed the hell out of the other students back at Yale. He didn’t know why it always made his hands sweat, like somehow he wasn’t local enough to be a real expert and someone, someday, was going to call him out. He supposed it was too late to worry about that.
Local Legends. His favorite and somehow least favorite unit.
Time to get started.
Avery always opened the unit with vampires. He knew that was what they all wanted, and even if there were so many other things—stories of wolves and voodoo queens, hauntings and curses—he always felt like they held their breath until he uttered the V word for the first time, so he got it over with quickly and then let the class settle into the rest of the section.
There was no point in teasing them, after all.
He began his lecture with local legends of girls brought from Europe, smuggled in caskets like some old-school Dracula, locals coming out of the swamps bloodthirsty and ready to feed, brothers who hid in plain sight, murdering innocents until one finally escaped—all fiction, if fascinatingly so. And it told so much about the culture of the city and its inhabitants at different times during history.
The students were so silent he would’ve been able to whisper and