About Notice
by M. Raiya
176 pages / 50200 words
ISBN: 978-1-61040-287-3
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High school teacher and dragonshifter Adrian Kendall is given notice in
his classroom, which means someone is out to get him. He doesn't know which
student left the notice. He doesn't know how the attack it warns of will
come. All he knows is that his three very carefully separated lives are
about to collide.
There’s far more at stake than Adrian’s sanity. The clan of dragons who
depend on him will be left vulnerable. The teaching career he treasures will
be over. And if all his secrets are spilled, then the peaceful world he's
built with his flamboyant and passionately gay human lover, Josh, will
implode. As a thousand years of hatred take aim right at Kendall, all he can
do is offer himself as the price of peace.
Review
Jane Davitt, author of Hourglass, writes: 'Notice' is a fast-paced,
imaginative story that captured my interest from the first page when the
peace of a classroom is disrupted in a most unexpected way. Adrian Kendall
-- Varian -- is a dragon in human form, who finds himself faced with a
knight whose sole aim in life is to slay him, a knight with powers beyond
any that Varian's seen before.
With the traditional roles of good and evil impossible to assign, the story
raises some intriguing questions about loyalty and personal choice and we're
given glimpses of a conflict that's raged for centuries with no clear victor
possible.
Varian is the story's narrator and in the space of a short time we see him
grow and evolve, realizing his full potential as dragon, lover, and leader.
Varian isn't perfect and that gives him an appealing vulnerability as he
realizes how close he's come to losing his lover, Josh, a character I
adored, and how much he's underestimated him.
The book is peopled with characters who are vividly real, from the knight
hunting Varian to Varian's protectors. The revelations of how closely bound
Varian and Huntington are and the difficult choices they have to make give
the book depth.
This modern fantasy, with a sweet romance running through it, is a fresh and
unusual read.
Sample
I was a creature of many secrets.
The three aspects of my life -- my human teaching career, my dragon life,
and my homosexuality -- stayed so separate that only two people alive, my
bodyguards, knew everything, and I kept even them on the fringes. My dragons
only knew that I also taught human children, but my students didn't know
about my dragons and certainly not about my sexuality, and my lover only
knew I was a teacher and had no idea that I was also a dragon, and I liked
it that way very much.
My worst nightmare was to have my three lives collide. I knew who would be
the causality if that happened.
I taught history in a small high school in northern Vermont. Fifteen minutes
into the last period on the first day of school for the year, everyone was
tired, hot, and ready to go home. As I collected the papers from the wire
bin where the students had put the "getting to know you forms" they had just
filled out, I was thinking wistfully about fresh mountain air and moonlight
on my wings.
And about someone who would be lying on cool sheets in our bedroom, freshly
showered, waiting for me...
I shuffled through the papers as I walked to the front of the classroom, and
I suddenly felt my heart stop for an instant.
One of the forms in the middle of the pile was blank, except for the words,
"Consider this your official notice."
A student? My thoughts dissolved in horror.
The knights were after me again.
And had sent a student to kill me.