Lock and Key

by Evangeline Anderson

  “Who knows?” Avery shrugged. “Like I said, this is all just legend and speculation. There are a lot of things attributed to Corinne Latimer besides outlawing Blood magic and forming and enforcing the Edict. She was kind of a legendary figure in the Other world—like George Washington is for America.”

  “Wow.” Kaitlyn looked at me in apparent awe. “You really are royalty, Megan.”

  “She does have an extremely impressive lineage,” Avery agreed.

  “Whether I can live up to it is the question,” I murmured pessimistically. How could I possibly hope to follow in my illustrious ancestress’ footsteps if I still couldn’t access my magic or even find out why Griffin was attracted to me? And me to him, for that matter.

  “You’ll live up to it,” Emma said and yawned widely. “Sorry guys but I am so tired. Having all these late nights in a row is rough.”

  “I agree—we should get to bed.” Kaitlyn yawned too. “I have an exam tomorrow—I’m glad I’ll have some extra time to study during study hall,” she added.

  “Thanks to Griffin, you mean,” Emma pointed out as we all heaved ourselves off the floor and put the cushions back on the couch. “Without him you’d still be in gym.”

  “Which is such a pleasure,” I said dryly. “Coach Vasquez has us playing softball now and I can’t hit the ball to save my life! I have zero hand-eye coordination.”

  “I’m sorry you’re all alone in that class,” Kaitlyn said. “But at the same time, I’m very grateful I don’t have to be there.” She ducked her head shyly. “Will you please thank Griffin for me for that? It was very kind of him to see my problem and solve it for me.”

  “Of course I will,” I said, smiling at her. And it really had been kind of him, I thought. Who was Griffin really? A bloodthirsty Nocturne who wanted to drain me dry? Or a chivalrous knight who wanted to serve and protect me and the ones I cared for?

  I wondered if I would ever know…

  40

  I thought the time between Thursday and Saturday, when I would have to decide if I should meet Griffin or not, would drag horribly. But as it turned out, there was plenty on Friday to distract me from my impending decision.

  I was in the middle of not being able to perform yet another elementary spell which all the much-younger girls around me were doing with ease when a runner came to the door.

  There wasn’t an intercom system in Nocturne Academy—not because the castle was too old but because Headmistress Nightworthy didn’t believe in interrupting classes with “frivolous announcements”—at least according to Avery. So the school’s office employed a series of runners called “gerrunds.”

  These were a type of Fae only about a foot and a half in height with tall pointed caps which were brightly colored to aid with visibility. They didn’t want to get knocked over in the hallway, after all—which was a distinct possibility given their diminutive size.

  To me, the gerrunds looked like cute little garden gnomes in their homespun peasant outfits and colorful pointy hats and long beards, which they tucked into their belts. But when the one that came to Elementary Casting called my name in his piping voice and told me I was to report to the Headmistress’s office immediately, there was nothing cute about the situation.

  “You may go, Miss Latimer,” Ms. Yasmeen said, giving me a penetrating stare. “And have a good weekend—I will see you on Monday. I hope.”

  This last statement put a knot in my stomach. Did my Casting teacher know something I didn’t?

  I thanked her and followed the little gerrund, who ran with surprising quickness down the hallway and around the corner. I expected him to take me back to the office in the North Tower, where I had first come with my acceptance letter what felt like a lifetime ago, though it had only been a week.

  But instead, a new hallway I had never seen opened up suddenly to my right and the gerrund ran down it. I gaped at it stupidly for a moment—it shouldn’t have been there.

  Nocturne Academy castle was in the shape of a square with the four towers at its corners and the long stone hallways between each tower serving to connect them and house many of the classrooms. There weren’t supposed to be extra little hallways leading off from the main one.

  Because there was no place for them to go.

  The castle was surrounded on three sides by a narrow wedge of land, mostly taken up by hedges, and then by the lake, which might as well have been a moat since it cut the castle off so completely. On the fourth side—the back of the castle—the land extended further but it was completely taken up by the track and the broad green field where PE classes were held.

  Of course, I remembered that I had caught Griffin sneaking out of a side hallway which led off one of the main corridors that first night when he had warned me to stay away from him. But that had been a short one—barely more than an alcove.

  This new hallway which had suddenly opened up where none had been before was long—almost as long as the bridge that led from the land to the castle’s front door, I estimated, looking down it. It was also narrow and gloomy, lit only by a few flickering candles in holders that looked disturbingly like golden hands, cut off at the wrist and jutting into the corridor at irregular intervals.

  As I looked, I realized the gerrund who had come to get me was rapidly disappearing into the gloom of the strange narrow hallway. His pointy blue cap was nearly lost in the shadows when I finally got hold of myself and stepped into this new, mysterious area of the Academy.

  I walked as quickly as I could, trying not to notice the way the golden hand candleholders would occasionally flex their fingers, as though trying to get a better grip on the silver candelabras they held. Despite my speed, I never quite caught up to the gerrund, who was scurrying along at a tremendous pace, his short little legs a blur and his pointy blue hat bobbing as he ran.

  I didn’t pass any doorways or windows at all—there was nothing but blank gray stone and the creepy hand candleholders. Also, no matter how far I went, I never seemed to get any closer to the end of the corridor—or should I call it a tunnel? Because that was what it felt like—like it was somehow underground. Maybe the walkway was tilted ever so slightly downward and the farther I went, the deeper it got? I didn’t know if that was accurate but it felt true.

  It seemed I had been walking forever and several times I turned my head to look back. But every time I did, it appeared that the entrance where I had come in was exactly as far away as the faint light at the very end of the tunnel. Was it an optical illusion? Or something more sinister?

  I began to get really nervous. Was I walking into a trap? What was going on?

  “Hey,” I called to the gerrund and cringed when my voice echoed back at me hollowly down the long stone corridor. Hey…hey…ey…

  Still, I couldn’t go on like this forever! I had been walking for what felt like half an hour already. I needed to get some answers.

  I steeled myself against the echoes and tried again.

  “Hey,” I yelled at the scurrying little gnome-man. “How much farther are we going? Are we almost there yet?”

  He didn’t answer but as though my question had called it into existence, a large black door suddenly appeared in front of me, not three feet from my face. I was so surprised I nearly ran into it face-first and barely stopped myself in time. On the door in golden script were the words,

  Headmistress Nightworthy

  I suppose I should have opened the door and gone in at once, but I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I looked around, wondering how the seemingly endless hallway had come so abruptly to an end. I wanted to ask the gerrund but he was gone—vanished into thin air, apparently, since there was no place for him to go but back and I didn’t see him anywhere along the long, long…

  Wait a minute!

  I had turned my head to look for my guide, expecting to see the long, unbroken stretch of stone hallway I had been traveling through for the past thirty minutes to get to my destination. Instead, I saw that the main corridor
the tunnel-hallway had branched off from was only three feet behind me.

  Literally one large step would have taken me back to my starting point.

  I was about to take that step, just to test and see if I could really get back the way I had come so quickly, when the black door opened behind me and a voice said,

  “I think you’d better not do that, Miss Latimer. It will take you too long to get back to my office again and my time is limited.”

  Turning, I saw the ageless face of the Headmistress, her sleek, silver cap of hair feathered around the temples and her piercing blue eyes which seemed to be able to look right through me. She was dressed as she had been the first time I met her, in a fashionable black dress and sky-high heels.

  “Please, come in,” she said, holding open the black door and ushering me inside. “We have much to talk about.”

  41

  Stepping into the Headmistress’s office was like stepping back in time, I thought—specifically, stepping back into the Victorian era.

  There was a grandfather clock with a golden pendulum ticking quietly in one corner and a plush oriental rug in maroon and forest green and muted china-blue on the floor. A stately mahogany desk with elaborate scrollwork dominated the center of the room and there was an old-fashioned high-backed wooden chair behind it.

  Everything was polished to a high shine and the desktop was meticulously neat with only a single piece of parchment and a quill pen made of a large black feather sticking out of an ink pot. A brass light fixture hung from the ceiling, casting a dim golden glow over the entire office but the illumination it shed wasn’t quite bright enough to cast light into the corners of the room, which remained in shadow.

  Across from the desk were two uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs and both of them were occupied.

  Sanchez was sitting in one—an angry, sullen look on his beefy face. On his left cheek, the blue outline of my hand still showed prominently. It hadn’t faded a bit, I saw as my stomach clenched.

  When he saw me, he glared at me, his eyes yellow and filled with hate. The look made my stomach clench even harder but I was determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing me afraid. I lifted my chin and gave him a blank stare before turning my attention to the other person in the room.

  Sitting in the chair beside Sanchez was a woman who looked to be in her late forties, I thought. She had black hair twisted up into a bun at the back of her head and a pair of librarian-type glasses perched on the end of her nose. Her eyes were black as well and very sharp as she looked at me.

  I thought her mouth was disproportionately large compared to the rest of her features. Her lips, which were painted a bright shade of mauve—seemed to take up the entire bottom part of her face and when she smiled at me in a business-like way, her teeth were large and square and ever so slightly yellow, as though she might be a smoker.

  She was wearing a business suit with a skirt and blouse and jacket, all in the exact same shade of mauve as her lipstick. It was too much of the same color and it seemed too loud in the Victorian office where the brightest thing was the muted colors of the rug.

  “Miss Latimer,” Headmistress Nightworthy said to me. “Do you know why you have been called to my office?”

  Well, why is anybody ever called to the Principal’s office? Because they’re in trouble, of course. Great. Just great.

  I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and my mouth didn’t want to work but I made myself say in a calm voice, “I’m afraid not, Headmistress.”

  “Bullshit!” Sanchez burst out. “That little puta knows why she’s here—she knows what she did to me!”

  “Mr. Sanchez!” The Headmistress turned on him, her blue eyes blazing. “Your disrespectful term for Ms. Latimer is not disguised by your use of another language. I am fluent in many different tongues, including Spanish and the Drake dialect. If you ever use a word like that to insult a woman again in my presence you will have cause to regret it. Your misogyny has no place here—do I make myself abundantly clear?”

  Sanchez’s beefy face paled a little at the threat in her low, intense tone and he nodded shortly.

  “Right. Sorry, Headmistress.”

  “You will be if you forget yourself again,” she snapped. “Now, then,” she went on, turning back to me. “Ms. Latimer, you are here because Mr. Sanchez alleges that you struck him Tuesday morning this week and gave him this permanent mark on his cheek.” She pointed to the blue handprint. “Is this true?”

  I thought about apologizing or making excuses about how I hadn’t known what I was doing. But the steely glint in Headmistress Nightworthy’s blue eyes convinced me that would be a bad idea.

  “Yes,” I said, lifting my chin, “It is.”

  “Very good. I thought as much.” She nodded briefly. “Very well then, this is Ms. Winifred Rattcliff, a very powerful witch of my acquaintance.” She nodded at the lady in mauve with the two-big mouth who rose and nodded at me.

  “Hello, Megan,” she said, smiling at me and revealing those yellowed teeth behind her large, rubbery mauve lips. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person. I knew your mother well.”

  “You did?” I frowned, trying to place her. I had never seen her before in my life, though I realized now who she must be—Nancy’s mother. I wondered if she knew what a bully her daughter was and if the Headmistress had told her about the incident we’d had in the Dining Hall my first day of school.

  “Oh my yes, I knew her,” she said, her smile widening in a friendly but somehow unpleasant way. “But of course, this was before you were born. We were classmates right here at Nocturne Academy together. We were coven-mates too as well as friends. Winny and Ginny, people used to call us. We were inseparable.”

  I tried to imagine my mom hanging around with this woman and being close to her the way I felt close to Emma and Avery and Kaitlyn but somehow I just couldn’t do it. Also, my mother’s name had been Guinevere and she had always used her full name. I couldn’t imagine her shortening it to “Ginny.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said neutrally and nodded my head at her.

  “Ms. Rattcliff is, in fact, the head of the highly decorated Windermere Coven,” the Headmistress said blandly. “When the Healer failed to remove the mark of your hand from Mr. Sanchez’s face, I called her in to help, as a stronger and more experienced witch is almost always able to remove a spell laid by a younger one. But I am afraid she, too, has failed.”

  “However did you do it, Megan dear?” Nancy’s mother asked me, still smiling at me in that fake, ‘you can tell me,’ way I didn’t trust a bit. “I know you can’t have learned it here—Shaming-magic isn’t taught at Nocturne Academy.”

  “No, it is not,” Headmistress Nightworthy remarked, frowning.

  “Exactly.” Ms. Rattcliff nodded in agreement. “But you must have learned it somewhere—did your Aunt Delilah teach you? Because she’s registered as a Null. So I don’t see how—”

  “Aunt Dellie didn’t teach me,” I interrupted. “And neither did anyone else. It just…happened. I did it, but I don’t know exactly how,” I confessed, looking at the Headmistress.

  I was hoping the question of Blood magic wouldn’t come up, which was apparently how I had accessed my power. But I still really didn’t know exactly how the power I had tapped into had made the blue mark on Sanchez’s florid cheek. All I knew was that I had been angry and that anger had somehow transformed itself into a permanent mark on his face.

  “I see.” Mistress Nightworthy tapped one elegantly manicured nail against her cheek thoughtfully. “Well, maybe if you explain the events surrounding the marking, we can shed some light on the matter.”

  At this, I saw Sanchez shift uncomfortably in his hard wooden chair. Just as I had thought, he hadn’t told the Headmistress the whole story about why I had marked him. I had a feeling he was in for a rude awakening when she found out.

  I explained the incident quietly and without any kind of embellishment—it didn’t need any. T
he image of Sanchez hitting Kaitlyn in the face with the football and then laughing about it would have made anyone wince.

  “And then he came up to her and called her a freak and laughed at her while she was down on the ground crying and hurt,” I said. “And I just got so angry, I—”

  “Liar!” Sanchez shouted, jumping out of his chair. “This little—” he cast a glance at the scowling face of Headmistress Nightworthy. “This little witch is a liar!” he finished, scowling. “She’s saying things that aren’t true.”

  “Yes, that is the generally accepted definition of ‘liar,’ Mr. Sanchez,” the Headmistress said dryly. “And which part of her statement, exactly, do you contest?”

  “She’s acting like I did it on purpose,” Sanchez grumbled. “It wasn’t my fault the freak…er, that girl’s face got in the way of my ball!”

  Headmistress Nightworthy’s face darkened.

  “You accuse Miss Latimer of lying but you are the one I find myself doubting, Mr. Sanchez,” she said. She looked at Nancy’s mother again. “Ms. Rattcliff, if you would be so kind?”

  “Of course.” Winifred Rattcliff turned to Sanchez, who was still standing there with his hands curled into fists and a belligerent look on his face. She pointed one finger at him and spoke a single word. “Veritas!”

  Immediately I felt as though a shower of invisible sparks had settled over my skin. I jumped involuntarily and saw Ms. Rattcliff watching me from the corner of her eyes, as though gauging my reaction to the magic.

  “Thank you,” the Headmistress said briskly. “Now, Mr. Sanchez, please tell us—did you hit Kaitlyn Fellows in the face with the ball on purpose?”

  Sanchez opened his mouth—no doubt to lie—but then a strange look came over his face.

  “I…I…of course I did!” he burst out at last. “She’s an ugly little freak and I thought it would be funny to put her down on the ground where she belonged.”

  Headmistress Nightworthy’s face darkened but all she said was, “Is that so, Mr. Sanchez? Please go on—what did you do after you had hit Miss Fellows in the face with the ball?”