Kiss Me Forever - M.J. O'Shea Page 0,2

the kids in the very back row could’ve easily heard.

Avery never ended the day with the real stuff, the origins, the insecurities, the disease, the fear bred in strangers to a new land. He liked to let them stew in the mythology for a little while at least and end the sessions with questions.

Well... liked was a strong term.

Maybe more found it necessary, because the questions happened whether he planned for them or not. It nearly always turned into a debate on what was “real” and what was totally fake, and the students got surprisingly heated about it. But still he sighed when he was done with the lecture and opened the floor to questions.

“Professor Avery, what do you think the police did with the records of the people the Carter brothers killed?”

“He already said it was an urban legend. Don’t be stupid. There are no police records because it never happened.”

Well, that didn’t take long.

Avery settled in for what was likely to be a very... fraught twenty minutes.

Even if he thought, underneath all the intrigue and interest, that there wasn’t anything to the vampire stories and they were all basically, well, silly capitalist bullshit at worst and cultural commentary at best, something about his local lore unit always had Avery on edge.

He remembered years ago, researching the stories, compiling them, interviewing experts—there were nights he barely slept, and that was back when he was just obsessed with New Orleans and its lore, not when he actually lived there, surrounded by buildings that had seen things he couldn’t even imagine.

After a day of teaching, a section of Pre-Revolutionary US History and two more of his Myth and Legend class, he was exhausted and beyond ready to get his office hours over with so he could go home and hopefully get a decent night’s sleep.

The students just asked so many questions... which of course they did. It felt like it took an eternity to wade through them.

And there were the ones who believed. The kids who had creepy, hard-to-explain experiences that seemed to lend themselves to things that went bump in the night. Their stories were enough to get Avery all jittery. Especially when he went home at night to his little old house that had been standing longer than he liked to think about.

It was all bullshit.

It was.

The more times he told himself that, the better.

Avery walked into his cramped little office to sit out his office hours, correct a few papers, and plan all the things he was going to eat for dinner, since he’d been too rushed and busy to manage breakfast or lunch. He collapsed into a chair that was a little too cushy to be good for his back— Jesus, he felt old, worrying about his back already—and gave a long look to the stack of theme papers he needed to grade for his history class. They were studying Roanoke, another subject that didn’t foster comforting thoughts.

Avery had loved the mystery back when he was a student himself, before the PhD, before the vampires and werewolves and ghosts of the French Quarter. He had loved it, and he loved it still. Sure as hell didn’t mean he wanted to read forty papers on it.

He looked at his phone and tried to remember when his TA got out of her seminar on Mondays. He could seriously use some help. Avery got to it, though, figuring one paper down was better than zero.

He was a few pages into the third paper when a loud crash made him jump.

“Shit.”

One of the books from his overpacked shelf had worked itself to the tipping point somehow and was currently sprawled open on the floor. Avery went over and picked it up. He tried not to notice that it was flopped open to a chapter on Delphine LaLaurie, one of the very real spooky stories of the French Quarter—no, worse, a story from his actual street. She had tortured and killed for years, only blocks from where he slept at night.

Creepy.

He slammed the book closed and shoved it back onto the shelf. Maybe it was time to stop teaching that damn class. It was seriously getting to him.

“You okay, boss?”

Avery jumped again and then laughed at himself. Get a grip.

It was Kelsey, his TA, who he was more thankful for than he could ever begin to say. Whatever academic gods had blessed him with her, back when the semester started, had been benevolent. She was smart, interesting, and more than eager to