“It’s yours?” he asked me in a low voice.
I gave a quick, jerky nod, unable to speak.
“All right,” Mr. Barron snarled, slapping down his cup of coffee so hard that the bitter brown liquid slopped over the side and splattered his newspaper. “I said whose is it?”
“Which pocket?” Bran asked me softly.
I frowned at him, what was he planning to do?
“Number seventeen,” I whispered back.
He nodded and then looked at the shoe rack, concentrating so hard it almost seemed like he was trying to burn a hole in the plastic pocket which held my phone with his eyes. I thought I saw him whispering something to himself but none of the words I heard made sense to me. They sounded like they were in some other language—one I’d never heard before.
Suddenly my phone cut off in mid-ring. I threw an amazed glance at Bran. Did he do that or was it just a coincidence?
Whichever it was, I wasn’t out of hot water yet. Mr. Barron was stalking over to the phone holder, a scowl still on his face. He looked like he was dying to suspend someone.
“Whose was that?” he demanded, glaring at the class. “I don’t care that it stopped ringing, whoever owns that phone had better come up here and turn it off now, so it doesn’t ring again. If you get up here quick I might only give you detention for a month.”
Detention for a month? That would spell the end of my after-school job and then I wasn’t sure how Mom and I would make ends meet. She earned enough as a medical transcriptionist to pay the rent on our crappy little apartment and keep the electric on but my salary from the I Scream was what mostly bought the groceries and paid the water bill.
Still, detention was better than suspension. Maybe my boss, Joey down at the I Scream would let me take a leave of absence or maybe just come in an hour later. I doubted it—he wasn’t exactly the most understanding manager—but I had nothing else to hope for.
Slowly, I began to raise my hand.
Only to hear Bran say, “Excuse me, Mr. Barron—I’m afraid that was my phone. It sounded like my ring-tone, anyway.”
“All right then get up here and turn it off, O’Connor,” Mr. Barron snarled. “And you can count yourself lucky all you get is detention.”
“Yes, Sir.”
As I stared incredulously, Bran made his way to the front of the room, fished my phone out of pocket seventeen, and turned it off. Thank goodness I didn’t have an overly-girly phone case like Morganna’s. My plain green case really did look like it could belong to Bran or any other guy in the class for that matter.
“All right, good,” Mr. Barron grumbled as Bran let the phone slide back into its pocket. “And it had better not happen again, O’ Connor.”
“No Sir, it won’t,” he promised and came back to slide in beside me at our lab table.
I waited until everyone had gone back to their lab, including Morganna Starchild who was staring with sharp interest at the two of us. But when she finally turned around and focused her attention on flirting with Elian Darkwing again, I felt free to talk.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I murmured to Bran. “I mean thank you—it was amazing—but you really didn’t have to do it.”
“I know.” He gave me a smile that was surprisingly attractive on his homely face. “But chivalry isn’t dead—at least where I come from. I couldn’t leave a lady in distress.”
“Where did you come from?” I asked curiously as we resumed doing the lab. “I mean, I know you’re not from this armpit of a town but where did you transfer in from?”
“Someplace very far away,” was all he said but there was a distant and almost melancholy look in his no-color eyes that touched me somehow. Wherever he came from, it seemed like he missed it and wished he was back there instead of here in Frostproof at Nocturne Academy.
Not that I blamed him—Frostproof isn’t exactly the most exciting place on the planet. It’s just this tiny little town in the belly button of Florida, right in the middle of a bunch of orange groves. The town’s website likes to point out that it’s a short distance from Legoland (if you call an hour and a half drive through the middle of nowhere short.) But really, the orange groves are all it has going for it. In the spring when the orange blossoms bloom, the whole place smells amazing.
And that’s it. That’s the nicest thing I can say about my hometown.
God, sometimes I wanted to get out of here so badly I could taste it.
We finished taking each other’s pulses, making small talk as we did, and I was surprised to find that Bran had a quick, witty sense of humor. Several times he made me laugh and I found myself really enjoying his company. There was just something about him…I didn’t know what it was but it was definitely there, like a gem buried just under a thin layer of dirt.
Which may not seem like a very nice description of a person, but it was the best I could think up.
As class was about to end, Bran reminded me that I’d better take his cell phone on the way out the door and he would take mine.
“I’ll walk with you to your next class and we can switch there,” I told him.
“Works for me,” he said, giving me that smile that had no business being so attractive again.
I was a little dazed about the fact that I’d just offered to walk with him even knowing that Morganna Starchild was going to make jokes about us. But suddenly I didn’t care so much what she said.
Yes, she might make my life here at Nocturne Academy hell, but I wouldn’t be here forever. Someday soon I was going to get far away from this crappy little town and never look back.
Of course, at that moment I had no idea how soon my exit from Frostproof was going to be or how far I would go.
But I was about to find out.
2
“Hey, have you guys noticed anything…different about Bran O’Connor?” I asked, as I got in line with the rest of my Coven to get supper in the vast stone Dining Hall with its four long tables. A banner hung over each table—one for each supernatural group who came here to Nocturne Academy. Royal purple for the Faes, green and gold for the Drakes, red and black for the Nocturnes, and blue and silver for the Sisters.
This segregation used to be necessary, since the Edict kept different species of Others from mixing. But now that it had been gone for a couple of months, you could see some inter-species flirting was definitely going on—especially between the Drake and Nocturne boys and the perfect, blonde Fae girls.
Of course, when I say “Coven” your mind probably jumps to witches. And actually, two of our Coven-members were witches—really strong ones, too. Megan, who has long auburn hair and smoky green eyes, turned out to be an incarnation of the Witch Queen, in fact, which is a pretty big deal. She, in turn, brought Griffin into our Coven—he’s a Nocturne, not a witch, but he’s really nice once you get past his scary reputation. His dark good-looks don’t hurt either.
Avery, our other witch, is a guy and would be normally classed as a warlock. But he takes the title of witch because he’s not interested in any of the traditional male magic done by warlocks. He’s got blue eyes, dark blonde hair and he’s out and proud and has been pretty much all of his life, despite the friction it causes in his family. His dad is a big-shot warlock working on reversing Climate Change—and not having much success, according to Avery—and his mom is a Null—a person from a magical family with no magical powers of their own. His mom accepts him and his dad tries to stay away from home whenever Avery is there.