Lock and Key (Nocturne Academy 1)

I realized, as I went, that I didn’t even know where my dorm—the Norm Dorm, as Emma and Kaitlyn had called it—was located. My class schedule simply listed my dormitory as “The Dungeon.” But where was the dungeon, exactly?

As I wandered around, looking for someone to ask in the deserted hallways (I figured all the groups of Others must have gone to their own dorms in the towers) I reviewed my day.

I had made a serious enemy in Nancy Rattcliff and possibly Sanchez as well, through no fault of my own. I had proven I was nothing but a Null who couldn’t even light a candle—an act of magic even girls years younger than me could manage easily. I had tried and failed to get myself into AP English and tried and failed twice to get myself out of classes I wasn’t suited for at all. Added to all that, my shoulders ached and throbbed from all the scrubbing I’d been forced to do and my stomach was painfully empty.

It was turning out to be a really crappy first day at my new school.

Not that there weren’t bright spots, I thought, as I found myself abruptly in a small hallway that dead-ended into a single door. Emma and Kaitlyn and Avery were all great and I liked them a lot. But were the three of them enough to keep me here, at a place I so obviously didn’t belong?

Don’t forget about Griffin, whispered a small voice in the back of my head.

At the very thought of the tall Nocturne, the key around my neck began to throb.

“Stop it,” I muttered to the damn thing, putting up a hand to still it. It was strange—when the key had first refused to come off, I’d been frightened of it and angry with it—wanting to get it off any way I could. But here in the strange new world of Nocturne Academy, the key had become—if not a friend—at least a kind of confidant. A fellow inmate in the bizarre old castle which housed supernatural beings and taught magic right alongside more banal classes like English Lit and Phys Ed.

But the key hadn’t been throbbing just at the thought of Griffin. As I turned to leave the strange, short hallway I found myself in—which really shouldn’t have been there, given the layout of the castle—I found myself face to face with the boy I had been thinking of.

Griffin stood there, looming over me like a specter in the gloom. In the dark hallway, his pale lightning and pitch eyes seemed to glow with a silver luminescence.

“Well, well—and what are you doing here, little witch?” His voice was mild but his eyes were angry, black brows pulled down low over his vivid eyes.

“I…I was…” I tried to talk but found that I couldn’t say a word. The key between my breasts was throbbing and burning like a live coal. Though I knew from looking earlier that it wasn’t really scorching my skin, it felt like it was burning a hole straight through me—as though it was trying to make a path to my heart.

This wasn’t the cool, handsome, sarcastic boy who had escorted me to English today, I thought. This was a different Griffin than I had seen before. Somehow the night had changed him …turned him into his true self. And his true self was a Nocturne.

Otherwise known as a vampire, whispered a panicked little voice in my head. As in, he drinks blood.

I suddenly remembered his flat, drawling voice when he’d been talking about our assignment to read Dracula that morning.

“He’s not after Lucy to offer her his eternal, undying love and devotion,” he had said. “He wants her for her blood. He wants to drink her dry—an ocean of blood wouldn’t have satisfied his thirst.”

Was he thirsty now? I just didn’t know.

For a long breathless moment, Griffin just stared at me. He didn’t touch me but he was so close I could feel him—feel his physical presence against my skin like a field of static electricity. It made all the short, fine hairs on my arms stand up and I felt as though my entire body had suddenly been charged, like a battery hooked up to a power source.

Then he stepped deliberately around me and headed for the door at the end of the hall, moving as silently as a shadow. He pushed it open noiselessly and I saw that it led to the outside.

A warm breath of humid Florida night air breathed through the hallway like the exhalation from a giant mouth. On it, I caught the scent of orange trees mixed with the flat, wet scent of the lake that surrounded the castle.

And running through it all was Griffin’s own scent—a cold, clean, somehow completely masculine aroma that flooded my senses and made the key throb even harder.