Title: Blood & Dirt
Author: Corey Niles
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 08/02/2022
Heat Level: 2 – Fade to Black Sex
Length: 110200
Genre: Paranormal Horror, LGBTQIA+, Contemporary, paranormal, horror, urban fantasy, golem, students, homophobic attack, murder, revenge
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Description
Vincent depended on his boyfriend, James, to stand up for him—until a violent hate crime results in James’s murder.
Weeks after his funeral, James reappears, perfectly healthy but changed in ways that neither of them can quite understand. Now, Vincent must uncover what truly happened on the night they were attacked.
In the face of an apathetic police force and a growing number of missing gay men, Vincent and James work to identify the criminals who attacked them.
With James scarred from what happened to him in the weeks between his death and rediscovery, Vincent must learn to stand up for himself and face his real monsters or lose James—and himself.
Blood & Dirt
Corey Niles © 2022
All Rights Reserved
Vincent had wanted some time alone to think since the attack, and now he had it, he wished for a distraction. Sam and Henry wouldn’t be back until the following morning, and after a dinner consisting of baked chicken, steamed rice, and green beans that he did little more than push around his plate, he had the whole night ahead of him to mull over his discussion with the detectives.
Not that there was much to it. Nothing was adding up, and he’d reached a point where he didn’t think there was anyone else left who could answer his questions. The idea made it hard to breathe—to think he’d never know what had really happened in those woods. That James would just disappear from his life. There and gone in a blink of an eye.
It wasn’t long before he called for his nurse to hand him the remote for the mounted TV beside the door. He flipped through the channels, searching for anything to pull his focus. Every show seemed so grossly detached from his reality it only made him feel worse. Plastic women screaming at each other in lavish mansions. Eager people answering trivia questions for more money than they probably made in a year. Hour-long dramas and half-hour comedies where order is restored and a lesson is learned in the confines of an episode.
All that was left was the local news, and the possibility that he might run across a story covering their attack compelled him to turn it off. The ensuing silence was even more unbearable. He looked around his room for something else to occupy his time. Sam’s bag was on the chair closest to him. He couldn’t reach it, but she had already shown him what was inside. A set of clothes to change into after he got his restraints off. A few schoolbooks in case he wanted to catch up on classes. His laptop. They all seemed to belong to someone from a separate life.
Vincent lay there, trying to breathe and think about a happy memory and all the other shit James used to tell him when he talked him down from panic attacks. Nothing worked. All his questions tugged at his mind like a child on a parent’s pant leg. He tried to get in a comfortable position to fall asleep, but between his ribs and the restraints, it was a fruitless effort. He was too restless to sleep anyway.
A distraction wasn’t enough. He needed something stronger. Something to bring him as close as he could get to oblivion without dying. A couple of blunts or a bottle of vodka would do the trick, but they weren’t exactly easy to obtain when shackled to a hospital bed. It didn’t mean, however, that the hospital didn’t have its own perks.
He called for the nurse, and when she showed up, he explained, “I’m in a lot of pain, and I can’t get comfortable.”
He resisted the urge to actively wince, which was probably a wise choice because his night nurse, an older, no-nonsense woman, didn’t look convinced. “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
He stopped himself from going right to ten. Or nine. “Eight.”
Her expression didn’t change. “Okay, I’ll have your doctor order something in for your pain.”
The nurse returned half an hour later. Three syringes like before. When she finished, he asked her to draw the curtains around his bed; then he was floating again. The volume of his mind had been turned down to a faint whisper. The relief was so intoxicating that going to sleep seemed like an utter waste.
He looked around him at the pea-green curtains and the halo of light pouring in from the gap between the bottom of the curtains and the floor. How beautiful—the way it glowed. He could almost feel the warmth radiating off it as if it were sunlight. Even when he shut his eyes to rest them, he pictured it in his mind.
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Corey Niles was born and raised in the Rust Belt, where he garnered his love of horror. When he isn’t advising college students, he enjoys binge-watching horror movies and traveling to hoard American history in his cheeks like a chipmunk. He hasn’t met a creepy, isolated hiking trail he hasn’t liked.
After studying creative writing and gender and women’s studies as an undergraduate student, he went on to graduate from Seton Hill University with an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction.
In his spare time, he nurses his caffeine addiction and tends to his graveyard of houseplants. He is also a single father of a very fluffy cat named Alexander, who quickly forgot about his humble beginnings.
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