Dog
Days: The Complete Saga (Dog Days #1-4)
by Sierra Dean
Release
Date: 07/07/15
Summary
from Goodreads:
Collecting all the Dog Days novels, this volume includes the complete,
epic story of Cooper Reynolds: a boy cursed to become a coyote on his
eighteenth birthday, and Lou Whittaker, the girl who can either save or ruin
him.
Combined here for the first time, you get all four Dog Days novels:
Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer
Autumn:
Cooper Reynolds's life is going to the dogs... literally.
As if being a high school senior in a small Texas town wasn't hard enough,
Cooper has bigger things to worry about than who he'll take to prom and whether
or not the Poisonfoot Padres will win homecoming. He has less than a year
before his eighteenth birthday, when a curse placed on his family will doom him
to live in coyote form forever.
The last thing he needs to complicate his already messed-up life is a girl, but
fate has other plans in mind for him when it brings Eloise "Lou"
Whittaker to Poisonfoot. She's grouchy, sarcastic and has no love for her new
Texas home, but she might be exactly the right person to help Cooper break the
curse.
The clock is ticking, and Cooper will have to decide if he's willing to let Lou
in on his dirty little secret before it's too late.
Winter:
Eloise “Lou” Whittaker can’t shake the feeling she’s forgetting
something.
After surviving the explosion of the Poisonfoot Library, she struggles to find
her footing again, and she’s grateful Archer Wyatt is there to make sure she’s
all right. But Archer seems to be around an awful lot and Lou has trouble
controlling herself when she’s with him. She should be thrilled the most
popular guy in school wants to be with her, but still, there’s that nagging
feeling…
Cooper Reynolds knows he ought to let Lou go. He was putting her at risk by
letting her in the first time, and now that she’s a blank slate he should just
let her go on blissfully unaware of his curse. But she’s given him a taste of
something dangerous… hope.
Can Cooper and an unlikely ally help Lou break free from the spell she’s under?
And can they do it before a new force threatens to destroy the whole town?
Spring:
Just when Cooper Reynolds and Lou Whittaker think they’ve weathered the
worst of their trials, they come face to face with the most dangerous, clever
villain they’ve ever experienced. One Wyatt brother was bad enough, but now
that Archer has called on his brother Christopher for help keeping Lou and
Cooper apart, the young couple is about to learn what real trouble looks like.
Christopher has come home determined to get Lou away from Cooper once and for
all, and he isn’t afraid who he hurts or what bridges he burns to get the job
done. With Cooper’s time running out and Lou struggling to control her growing
powers, the last thing they need is more conflict. Too bad things are never as
easy as they hope.
With a mysterious pair of FBI investigators in town and the clock ticking,
Cooper and Lou need to learn to work together before they’re torn apart
forever.
Summer:
The thrilling conclusion to the Dog Days series!
Cooper Reynolds has been missing for months.
The whole town of Poisonfoot, Texas believes he has run away, proving they were
right not to trust him. They believe he left like his brother and father before
him: another good-for-nothing Reynolds man leaving the small town in his dust.
No one is looking for him.
No one but Lou Whittaker.
Lou knows Cooper was taken, she just doesn’t know where he is or how to get him
back. With the help of budding witch, Max, and an unlikely ally in her former
enemy Archer Wyatt, Lou is determined to find Cooper and bring him back in one
piece.
But time is running out. Summer is upon them, and if they don’t find Cooper
before his 18th birthday, they’ll be bringing home a wild animal instead of
their beloved friend.
EXCERPT:
If
Eloise Whittaker had to narrow down the worst things ever in her life to a list, the top three would go as follows:
3) Uncooked chicken. When it’s all,
like, pink in the middle? Gross.
2) Her father dying. Which was really
tied for number one with…
1) Moving because her dad died.
She’d honestly rather eat a thousand
raw chickens than be stuck in the front of a stupid U-Haul, driving for a
million miles with her mom from Fresno to Texas. Texas. It was like moving to Jupiter. She was going from having a
life that involved sun and easy access to Starbucks, to living in a town called
Poisonfoot.
Poisonfoot.
Seriously, what kind of name was that?
It sure sounded like a red-carpet, welcome-wagon kind of place. Welcome to
Poisonfoot, Texas. Get out.
Lou propped her bare feet up on the
dash of the car and pushed her pink Wayfarer sunglasses onto the top of her
head. She’d been struggling for hours to find a comfortable position but was
finding it impossible to get into a groove. The seat of the rental moving truck
was lumpy, and the air conditioning didn’t work, making her sweaty and
miserable.
More miserable than the move alone.
They were barely halfway through
Nevada, and already she was missing things. Their house, her used RAV4 they’d
had to sell before the move, and all the friends she’d grown up with who would
be moving on to their junior year next week without her.
Who was going to veto Priss’s texts
when she wanted to tell Bobby Fletcher his hair smelled good? Who would Kel and
Anthony turn to for insight into the female mind? And who would Parker
Davenport take to junior prom now that she wouldn’t be there?
Everyone promised to keep in touch with
texts and Facebook, but Lou knew the reality of her situation. Out of sight,
out of mind. Soon enough they’d be saying, “Remember Lou?” and not long after
that, “Lou who?”
She sighed, bumping her head against
the seat.
“You okay, sweetie?” her mom asked, not
looking away from the dusty highway in front of them.
“Real answer or smiley answer?”
“Real answer, of course.”
“This sucks.”
Her mother frowned and tightened her
grip on the wheel. “Eloise, we’ve talked about this.”
“I know, but you said real answer.”
“I suppose I did. But you know we had
to do this. We couldn’t afford that house, not without your dad’s income, and
especially not after the hospital bills.”
Lou didn’t know all the details. She
was only sixteen, which was old enough to drive but not old enough to decide if
she got to keep her car. From what she’d gathered listening to her mother’s
tense phone conversations with lawyers, her father’s six-month stay in the
hospital had very nearly bankrupted them. At least badly enough they’d had to
sell the house and didn’t make enough money from it to buy another one.
It wasn’t bad enough her dad had died,
she’d had to lose her home and everyone she knew, too.
She was grateful to still have her mom,
but sometimes she resented everyone involved with this stupid move. Why didn’t
her mom have a real job? Why didn’t they have better insurance—wasn’t that the
whole point of insurance? And more
than anything, why had some stupid, idiotic, pointless higher power decided to
give her dad cancer and not provide him the strength to beat it?
The world sucked.
And now they were moving to Poisonfoot
to live with Lou’s grandmother—her father’s mother—who had been “kind enough”
to invite Lou and her mother to live with her. “Kind enough” was her mom’s
phrase for it.
Sounded more like perpetual punishment
to Lou.
She hadn’t been to Poisonfoot since she
was six. Ten years was a long enough absence she had only the foggiest memories
of the place. She recalled sweet tea with lemon and her grandmother making
grits—not a fond memory, that one—and
the dark, musty staircase she hadn’t been allowed to explore. Everything else
was snippets—blue-and-white china wallpaper in the dining room and a stuffed
owl over the fireplace—things that didn’t paint a whole picture.
Lou had better memories of Granny
Elle—the Eloise she’d been named after—from the visits she’d made out to
Fresno. But Granny Elle, like Lou’s memories of Texas, sometimes felt more like
a dream than a real thing.
She wasn’t the kind of warm and cuddly
grandmother who snuck candies and dollar bills into Lou’s hands while no one
was looking. That’s how Grandma J—her mom’s mom—had been before she got
Alzheimer’s.
Both her grandfathers had died long
before she had a chance to remember anything about them, even fragments. She
had a picture of Grandpa Chuck—her mom’s dad—holding her as a baby, but that
was it. Granny Elle’s husband, Ronald, was rarely discussed and usually in
hushed tones.
Sure, all families were supposed to be
crazy in their own way, but Lou got the feeling her dad’s family had been extra
nuts. Why else would he have bailed after high school?
Oh, right. Because he’d lived in Poisonfoot.
Lou adjusted again, sitting in a
cross-legged yoga pose on the seat, and pulled the elastic out of her hair,
untangling the messy bun she’d made that morning. Her hair was getting
long—maybe a bit too long now that it fell halfway down her back—and not for
the first time she debated the merits of chopping it all off for some bold,
edgy pixie cut. Maybe she’d dye it blue or something.
But her father had loved her hair,
always doing it in long braids for her as a child and telling her it made her
look like an elf from Lord of the Rings.
Whenever she considered cutting it, she thought of his last attempts to braid
it, when he was so weak he could barely lift his hands off the hospital
mattress, and she chickened out.
Like cutting it off would strip away
those memories.
Her hair was still damp—both from the
morning’s shower and the sweat beading on the back of her neck—so she finger
combed it then pulled a Dodgers baseball cap out of her bag and plopped it on
her head, cramming a messy ponytail through the hole at the back.
The hat was another link to her father.
He’d been a big baseball fan, which was how she wound up with her slightly too
boyish nickname. Lou Whittaker had apparently been some impressive, famous
baseball player a thousand years earlier, and her father had taken to calling
her Lou as a kid. It stuck, and she liked it better than Eloise, so she began
using it on herself, and after sixteen years the only people who regularly
called her Eloise were her mother and her grandparents.
“Can we stop? I’m dying for a Coke.”
Her mother started to sigh, then
stopped mid-breath, perhaps thinking better of it. “I saw a sign for a rest
stop. We can pull in there for a break and to check the GPS, make sure we’re on
track.”
Ten minutes later they pulled into a
dusty gas station on the side of the road with honest-to-God tumbleweeds
bumping up against a rusted old truck.
“I feel like we’re about to drive into
a bad sequel for The Hills Have Eyes,”
Lou muttered, kicking her feet into well-worn flip-flops before climbing out of
the U-Haul.
“Which one was that?”
“Mutants who kidnapped tourists to make
them into, like, baby-making machines.”
“Eloise.
Who let you watch that?”
“Auntie Roan.” Lou smiled, knowing her
mother shouldn’t be shocked. Auntie Roan was Lou’s only aunt and her mother’s younger sister. She had a bad habit of
treating Lou more like a buddy than a child, so it should have come as no
surprise she’d let teenage Lou watch horror movies.
The stuff she watched by herself on
Netflix was ten times worse, but she didn’t bother pointing that out to her
mom, lest the parental controls be enabled.
“I need to pee, I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t go too far,” her mother warned.
“I’ll gas up and get us some drinks. Coke?”
“Diet Coke. And Twizzlers. Oh, and
maybe a magazine?” Lou was already halfway around the back of the building, so
she didn’t hear any of her mother’s protests.
Blessedly, the women’s washroom was unlocked,
but the space within was the most dismal, disgusting restroom she’d encountered
yet on their trip. Discarded wads of toilet paper stuck to the filthy floor
tiles, and the two sinks were stained reddish brown with rust from the leaky
faucets. An overhead fluorescent bulb flickered on and off like a strobe light,
swinging faintly from two chains on the ceiling.
“Ugh.”
At times like this she was jealous of
boys and their ability to pee standing up. If the outer area was any
indication, the toilets weren’t going to be terribly inviting to sit on.
She tiptoed over the mess, her feet sticking
to the floor in places, causing loud squelching noises when she tried to move
forward.
Pee
fast and get out, she told herself, angling into one of the stalls. As
expected it was disgusting, with broken white tiles on the back wall and a
large dent on the inside of the metal door like someone had kicked it with a
lot of force.
Weird.
Lou did her business in a hurry and got
out of the stall, touching as few things as possible. As she was washing her
hands, the overhead light began to flicker more erratically before shutting off
completely. Lou froze, the water in her sink still running, and wasn’t sure if
she should keep washing or just get the hell out.
The metallic shriek of the stall door
swinging settled it for her. There was no breeze or air conditioning in the
bathroom, so the only thing that could set the doors swinging was someone else.
Since she’d been alone the whole time,
she didn’t want to know who—or what—could have snuck in without her noticing.
Lou pivoted to grab the outside door,
but when her hand touched the metal knob, the overhead fluorescents snapped
back on, flooding the room with light. This time they were brighter than ever,
painting the walls in a sickly green hue.
Unable to resist the pull of her
curiosity, Lou looked back.
Empty.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she scolded
herself.
She stepped back to the sink to finish
washing her hands, making a mental promise she’d run like hell if the lights
went off again, and splashed some cold water on her face.
Maybe she’d been stuck in the car too
long and was starting to get a bit stir crazy. That was a thing, right?
She looked up and screamed.
Her father—her very, very dead father—was
standing right behind her.
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About the Author
Sierra Dean is a reformed historian. She was born and raised in the Canadian prairies and is allowed annual exit visas in order to continue her quest of steadily conquering the world one city at a time. Making the best of the cold Canadian winters, Sierra indulges in her less global interests: drinking too much tea and writing urban fantasy.
Ever
since she was a young girl she has loved the idea of the supernatural
coexisting with the mundane. As an adult, however, the idea evolved from the
notion of fairies in flower beds, to imagining that the rugged-looking guy at
the garage might secretly be a werewolf. She has used her overactive
imagination to create her own version of the world, where vampire, werewolves,
fairies, gods and monsters all walk among us, and she’ll continue to travel as
much as possible until she finds it for real.
She’s
also a book lover (of course!), obsessive collector of OPI nailpolish and the
owner of way too many pairs of shoes.
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