Touching Darkness

31



12:00 a.m.



CONCUSSION



Midnight didn't feel so good.



It hadn't brought its usual awesome silence. Instead there'd been a sudden burst of noise and mind-wrenching pain that had left her here, swimming in this dark place.



Melissa remembered driving fast, glancing at her watch, letting her foot off the accelerator, slowing as she waited until the last moment to put on the brakes.



Oh, yeah. Really important to put on the brakes...



With an effort she opened her eyes. There were stars in front of her, pinpoints of light dancing against a cold black sky.



Can't get distracted. Brakes...



Melissa moved her arm painfully, bringing her wrist in front of her eyes. She had to fight to bring the numbers into focus.



The watch face was cracked, the hands stopped at eight seconds to midnight.



She let it drop back to the salt, finally understanding.



"Stupid cheap quartz watch..." she muttered.



Then her head began to pound. Melissa knew all about headaches. She'd felt her own and everyone else's since the day she was born. Totaled up, she'd probably spent years of her life with a headache. But this one... this was the worst ever.



She swam in the darkness for a while, the pain spreading like a bruise all the way to her fingertips. Then she heard footsteps pounding across the hard desert floor.



"Melissa!"



Stupid noisy flame-bringer. Jessica's buzzy brain tasted like a nine-volt battery pressed against Melissa's tongue.



"Quiet," she commanded, wondering if her eyes were shut. Open or closed, there were stars in front of her.



Loud as a car alarm.



"Don't move her."



Maybe that was Jonathan's voice. His bouncy Flyboy taste was around here somewhere.



Melissa decided to open her eyes. The voices weren't going to go away until she glared at them. Glaring was good for making annoying people shut up.



Jessica's blurred, concerned face appeared.



"I'm fine." Everything was fine... except for the dizziness and the feeling like she was going to puke and the headache. Anyway, there was a bottle of aspirin in her glove compartment, like always. Where was her car, anyway? She lifted her head to look. Jeez, it was miles away.



"Lie still," Jessica advised.



Yeah, I was just about to start dancing. Melissa thought.



Then a piece of memory fell out of the starry sky - why she'd been driving so fast. And even though speaking hurt, she said, "Go get Rex, you morons."



The three of them looked at each other, and no one said what they were all thinking, while precious seconds ticked away.



Finally Dess said, "All right. I'll stay here."



Melissa closed her eyes. Poor Dess, always the odd one out. Couldn't fly, couldn't flame-bring. They should all three go, leaving her for the darklings. Being eaten couldn't hurt worse than this headache.



But arguing would hurt too.



Their voices and thoughts got even louder. Dess kept telling Jessica which direction to go. Flyboy was anxious to get started and also quietly relieved to have only one passenger to carry. And all the while, not even a mile away, the arid taste of dark things was gathering.



"Go," she tried to say.



If Rex was out there, he wasn't conscious; Melissa couldn't taste him. But she'd driven ahead following the flavor of a familiar mind. Angie wasn't far away, her brash confidence silenced now by midnight.



Oh, if only Melissa could crawl that mile, the things she would do to Angie. Rex's dad could tap-dance around her after Melissa was done.



But lying still was better. So she lay still for a while longer.



"Wake up."



Only Dess now. The other two had faded, finally flying off to help Rex. Polymath thoughts filled the air as Dess pounded stakes into the ground, protection from the dark things all around them.



"Wake up! You've got a concussion. If you go to sleep you could die."



Melissa groaned. "Fine with me."



"What a coincidence. Fine with me too."



She opened her eyes, looked at poor lonely Dess, tasting bitter as burnt rubber. Dess thought she'd been robbed of her secret friend. Didn't she see what Madeleine was? What she had done to them all? Abandoned them. Left them pathetic orphans, when she knew all the tricks.



And anyway, Melissa had had no choice.



She licked her lips, desperately wanting a drink of water. "I'm sorry I touched you, Dess. But they took Rex... I had to find him."



No answer, just the pounding of stakes into the hard ground. Every stroke was like an ice pick through Melissa's brain.



Finally the hammer paused. "They know about her now, don't they?"



"They already knew." Melissa closed her eyes. Here, half conscious in the middle of the desert, she was awash in darkling thoughts, their slow rhythms easier to take than those of buzzy, headache-making humans. It hadn't been Madeleine's first slipup when she'd popped directions into Jonathan's and Jessica's brains. Over the years the darklings had sniffed her existence. They could hardly miss the spate of young midnighters appearing in Bixby. And the oldest, most paranoid ones had always suspected that someone had survived.



Then she realized the obvious.



"That's why they let us live," she croaked.



The pounding stopped.



"What?"



Talking hurt, but at least Dess wasn't driving tent stakes while she listened. Melissa lifted her head a bit and rolled painfully onto one side, feeling bruised shoulders and salt scraped hands.



"We weren't a threat, not until Jessica came along. So the darklings were clever: they let us survive. To find Madeleine."



And to let Rex mature, she thought. They'd taken Anathea too young; that was why she was dying after only two years of darkling time.



They wanted Rex to be their slave for centuries...



Melissa groaned, her head sinking back onto the salt.



"Can you sense her?" Dess asked.



Melissa sighed. Casting that far would hurt her head, like everything did. She could feel blood trickling down her face now, its progress as slow as thick oil. But she owed Dess an answer.



She sent her mind past the edge of the desert into the silent town, searching for the null spot that Dess's numbers had uncovered, hidden behind the contortions of midnight.



Just in time Melissa felt them watching and realized what she'd almost done. The darklings were all around, leery of the barrier Dess had made but paying close attention. They had almost followed her thoughts to Madeleine.



Melissa smiled and let the knowledge she'd taken from Dess scatter like shattered safety glass. One thing about going through a windshield, it made it easy not to think. They would sift Madeleine's secret place from her mind eventually but not tonight, not with this concussion raging in her head.



"Madeleine's fine," she said. For now.



Dess started pounding stakes again. The protection might not even be necessary - the darklings had bigger fish to fry. A dark mass of them boiled furiously nearby, excited by something in their midst...



"No," Melissa murmured, and her head sank back to the hard ground. She let herself be overwhelmed, drifting in and out of the merciful sleep that might kill her, consciousness too painful to bear.



Of course, she really ought to remind Dess about the car poised sixty feet away. It was frozen now, but the old Ford was still doing better than forty miles an hour and headed straight toward them with no one at the wheel.



But the words of warning couldn't seem to form in the jumble of her mind. Amid the gathering darklings was a distracting flavor, the most familiar taste she knew... but different now.



Not far away, Rex was waking up.



32



12:00 a.m.



DEFENCELESS



The world was spinning, his heart beating out a panicked rhythm. He wanted to run, but his legs felt like they were sunk in something dense and bitterly cold. Then he remembered it was too late - they had already taken him.



Rex feebly moved his hands, clawing at the wall that pressed against him. Then the world tilted again, and he slowly realized that the hard expanse was the ground. He was lying flat and facedown. His lungs labored against some terrible weight as if a huge, unconscious body lay on top of him.



And he was blind.



He coughed, tasting salt and blood in his mouth. Breathing wasn't easy; whatever his kidnappers had used to knock him out still filled his head.



Rex tried to force open his eyes, but some sort of muck clung to his face. He also felt it smeared across his chest and between his fingers. Viscous, warm strands of the stuff tugged at his lips when they parted to let out a groan, as if he'd been dropped in a ditch filled with fresh entrails from a slaughterhouse.



Images of spiders filled his mind, and Rex remembered the old darkling at Constanza's spitting steaming mucus as it died. His heart began to pound again, panic welling up and his hands clawing blindly. But real tarantulas didn't shoot webs, he reminded himself.



He pulled one heavy hand toward his face and felt it drag across fine sand. Turning his head seemed impossible - as if it were trapped in a vise - but he forced his fingers to scrape at one side of his face until his right eye managed to open a slit.



Rex glimpsed blue light and for the first time noticed the silence. Only his own heartbeat pounded in his ears. He must have been unconscious for hours; the blue time was here.



A glimmer of hope passed through him. His kidnappers' understanding of the secret hour couldn't be perfect. They had never read midnighter lore, only taken orders from their "spooks" blindly, without real comprehension. Maybe they didn't realize that Rex would still be awake while they were frozen. Maybe they'd made a mistake.



But he had to get moving, had to stand up. The blue time might be just beginning or almost over. And this sticky stuff all over him probably wasn't a good sign.



Rex pawed at his face with two hands, tearing at the clinging muck until he could open both eyes. Blue desert floor filled his view through blurred vision; he still couldn't turn his head. He tried to push himself up, but his chest only rose a few inches from the ground before sinking back again. Scrambling to turn over, he tore with his fingers at the dirt, but the vast weight atop him pressed him firmly against the ground, almost paralyzed, breathless with the effort of struggling. He couldn't feel his legs at all.



What was on top of him?



With his face squashed against the dirt, Rex tasted salt. This was the flats, he realized. He'd been dumped far out in the desert, miles from humanity. Even if midnight had only just fallen, they would be here soon.



Then he heard something, a muffled cry.



He listened, and distant sounds reached him from every direction, shrill and inhuman. He weakly clawed at his ears to scrape them clean.



And suddenly the noise became deafening. The silence had only been because of the muck in his ears.



They were already here, all around him.



Rex felt his breath catch in fear and reached for Glorification around his neck. But the links of steel were gone, along with his jacket and shirt. He felt nothing against his skin except the clinging slime and the oppressive weight that pressed him down against the salt.



Something black and glistening slithered into view.



A small face, inches from his, looked up at Rex. A crawling slither, its soulless jet eyes peering at him curiously.



As his mind struggled to come up with a tridecalogism, he wondered what a slither strike to the eyeball would feel like.



"Decompression," he croaked.



An invisible fist struck his stomach, forcing the scant air from his lungs, as if the desert had bucked angrily under him.



The slither wriggled out of sight. Buoyed by this victory, Rex pushed against the desert floor again.



Suddenly the weight lifted from him, his whole body rising into the air. Rex's arms flailed weakly and whatever carried him staggered, the blue horizon tilting.



Through his blurred vision he glimpsed the shapes of spiders and worms, giant snakes and hunting cats, and things he didn't recognize, nightmarish beasts that mixed reptile and mammal and bird of prey. More darklings than he'd ever imagined, weathered and ancient. The ground beneath him seethed with slithers, writhing among the ankles of three frozen humans. Rex recognized Angie's motionless face, Ernesto Grayfoot with his camera.



A human sound came through the darkling chatter, like a child sobbing.



He forced his eyes to focus and saw a young girl among the dark shapes. She lay huddled on the ground, naked, a thin, strangled noise coming from her.



Another victim out here in the desert.



But Rex had no metal, no weapons of any kind, not even clothes, nothing but words to fight with. He pulled a painful breath into his lungs.



"Magnification."



Another blow pummeled him, and he staggered backward, wobbling too high off the ground, like an amateur on stilts. But balance returned, and he finally saw the great wings gathering the air on either side of him, pulling him upright. A glistening, viscous slime still clung to them.



He let his eyes close, finally understanding. Who the girl was; what he had become.



"Disappearance," he whispered.



The sharp and awesome pain struck again, as though he were vomiting up something spiked and huge. The thirteen-letter words were poison in his mouth, of course. Even thinking them made his mind split in half, tearing at the part of his brain that still could not believe what had happened, the part that was still human.



It was too late to run, too late to fight.



Rex was one of them now.



33



12:00 a.m.



SEERS



The first slither hit without warning.



A swarm hovered in the distance, marking the spot where Rex must be, but the flying snake seemed to come from nowhere, glancing off Jessica's arm and leaving it buzzing like a hammer to the funny bone.



Her hand half numb, Jessica pulled her flashlight out.



"Unanticipated Illuminations," she whispered, and turned it on. Power surged through her, and another slither flared up in its beam, filling the darkness with red flame and a shrill cry. Jessica swept white light across their path, igniting a handful more slithers before them.



"What's this thing called?" Jonathan asked, squinting from the light and gesturing with his shield.



"Uh... Dess said to call it Brogdignagian Perambulation."



"Is that English?"



"Yeah, it means 'walking tall,' sort of." She touched the shield and said the name again.



As they descended, Jessica caught movement on the desert floor below. She pointed the beam downward, igniting a nest of crawling slithers that had been waiting for them. "They're everywhere!"



"Trying to slow us down," he said.



Something fluttered behind them, and Jonathan cried out as a slither struck him in the middle of the back. He stumbled as they landed, dragging Jessica down into the salt before she lost her grip on his hand, normal gravity draping over her like a lead blanket. She fell onto dead slithers, the reek of burned flesh filling her lungs.



Jessica rose to one knee and spun around, trying to point the flashlight in all directions at once. Things lit up in the sky around her, but she saw another flying streak hit Jonathan on his leg before bursting into flame.



"The flare!" he called, deflecting another slither with Perambulation.



She pulled Explosiveness from her pocket and tore it in half, crying its name. The flare burst to life, half blinding her and filling the desert with jittering shadows. Screams rose up on every side as she thrust it over her head.



Leathery wing beats faded all around them, carrying the screams away.



Jonathan shielded his violet-flashing eyes from the flare. "How long does that thing last?"



"Half an hour, I think. But it'll go out if I drop it."



"Don't. I can't see a damn thing, but it's better than getting chewed to pieces." He held out one hand, keeping the other across his eyes, favoring his right leg. "You navigate. Tell me when to jump."



Jessica took his hand. Jonathan's lightness buoyed her, mixing with the wild energies flowing up through her body and into the hissing flare. She calculated their next jump, tugging at his hand to indicate the direction.



"Three, two, one..."



They leapt, but Jonathan's bitten leg buckled, sending them spinning around each other. Jessica corrected their flight with a twist of her shoulders, the second law finally and mystically becoming clear in her mind. Too late for any physics test, but maybe in time to save Rex...



They arced high above the desert, headed toward the swarm.



"Landing in five, four, three..."



Their feet touched down, and she pulled Jonathan into the next jump, perfectly this time. In midair she drew him close so that he wouldn't cast a wedge of shadow into the desert sky and open up a line of attack. He buried his face against her shoulder, flinching from the sparks of Explosiveness that swirled around them.



"One more and we'll be there," she said at the peak of their jump. Already the cloud of slithers and darklings ahead was scattering, terrified of the brilliant flare bounding toward them. Jessica smelled her own hair singeing in the veil of sparks, but, like soldering at Dess's house, the scent of combustion only thrilled her.



"Two... one..."



They landed and jumped again in perfect tandem, flying straight into the swarm.



It was like falling through a chorus of screams.



Flames spread in every direction as slithers too slow or too stupid to get away were ignited by Explosiveness. These flailed their burning wings and careened into others, carrying the inferno outward in an expanding sphere, like a great blazing eye opening around them. A darkling in the shape of a winged panther was caught by the spreading conflagration. It whirled in circles, trying to put itself out before tumbling from the sky.



"This sounds pretty intense," Jonathan said, his eyes glued shut.



"Pretty," Jessica answered. Her entire body hummed with the sputtering hiss of the flare.



They fell through the mass, a ring of fallen, smoldering beasts lighting the desert floor below them.



"We're coming down," Jessica warned, seconds before they landed and staggered to a halt.