Blue Noon (23 page)

She held out both her hands, palms up.

Melissa caught Rex’s eye, and they joined hands first with each other, waiting for a moment until their connection was complete. Her heart was pounding, and even though she was certain that the memory was all part of a big lie—propaganda, like Angie had said—Melissa recalled that long-ago mindcaster gathering, letting her wonder at those ancient images shared around the fire calm her.

As her mind stilled, she felt herself drawing strength from Rex’s dark confidence. Whatever the horde of old mindcasters inside Madeleine had in store for the two of them, at least they were facing it together.

“Come now. Don’t lollygag,” Madeleine snapped.

As one, they raised their other hands and let her grasp them, completing the circle.

As Madeleine stilled herself, she changed, becoming a congress of minds.

Melissa was always awestruck at the vastness of it: memories stretching back to shadowy recollections of the ice age, when glaciers could be reached in a month’s walk to the north. Ten thousand years of history, hundreds of generations, thousands of mindcasters.

She squeezed Rex’s hand. Facing that accumulated mass of minds, she was glad for his dark presence beside her.

“What have they done to you?” Madeleine murmured. She was probing the black sphere of Rex’s darkling half, searching its smooth surface for purchase. As the fingers of her mind settled in and began to pry, Rex’s hand flinched in Melissa’s.

“It’s for your own good,” the old woman muttered. Her concentration deepened, her raspy breathing slowing in Melissa’s ears.

After a long moment the darkness inside Rex began to swell, like something viscous and heavy coming slowly to a boil. The muscles in his fingers twitched again in her hand, a dry taste stirring among the patterns of his mind.

Eyes closed, Melissa watched the changes shifting through him and wondered if Madeleine really knew what she was doing. Melissa could taste arrogance in the mass of memories, their certainty that they could control anything and anyone. But they’d never faced something like Rex.

Then bitter metal filled her mouth, like old pennies on her tongue.

A seam had begun to open in Rex’s mind, his darkling inner core shivering, its surface cracking. Melissa tasted Madeleine’s satisfaction.

Rex made a pained sound.

Melissa sent calming thoughts toward him, but Madeleine pushed her back.
You don’t know what you’re doing, girl. Stay clear.

The old mindcaster turned her attention back to Rex, pressing harder, and the darkness inside him began to split—a black and radiant shaft spilled across the mental landscape, bleeding color from it like the dark moon’s light. Images of an ancient Samhain flowed from his mind: masked humans piling up the bones of cattle and setting them alight, fires dotting the landscape for miles, raising up a slaughterhouse smell. Melissa felt a twitch of hunger at the scent and realized that the reaction was a darkling’s. Soon she was ravenous, feeling the call to hunt, to kill.

Abomination, whispered the mass of memories.

They meant Rex—seer and darkling mixed; he horrified them.

Madeleine grew bolder, her mind prizing into the cracks of Rex’s darkling half. He let out a short cry, and his fingernails dug into Melissa’s hand.

“Stop!” Melissa whispered hoarsely. “You’re hurting him.”

Abomination, a thousand voices hissed. The mindcasters’ memories had known nothing like him before; he had to be constrained, controlled.

But the darkness inside Rex only grew, swelling into a huge black storm cloud in Melissa’s mind, spilling more visions: Bixby as the old ones had seen it fifty years ago, a psychic spiderweb of midnight glittering across the desert. In the darklings’ eyes the town was an infected organism, the tendrils of a parasite extended into every fiber of its host—mindcasters quietly toiling, spreading obedience across the city, certain that it was only natural for them to rule.

Even the darklings knew what you were, Melissa thought.

Madeleine made a choking noise, the mass of memories inside her roiling as it beheld its own reflection in Rex’s mind. He was an abomination, and his thoughts were an insult to ten thousand years of history.

He had to be destroyed.

A shudder of horror passed through Madeleine at the thought, but she couldn’t pull her mind back. She couldn’t go against the mass.

“No,” Melissa whispered.
Egotistical morons!

They ignored her. She tried to wrench her eyes open, to reach over and separate Madeleine’s hand from Rex’s, but her muscles were locked rigid.

Melissa felt hatred rising up in her, disgust at the conceited, clueless pride of her predecessors. She focused all of her loathing—everything Angie had said about the reign of the midnighters, their greed and child-stealing and brain-ripping—and hurled it at Madeleine as hard as she could.

The mass of memories reared at the insult and turned on her in a flood of contempt and arrogance. They had borne the secrets of midnight for thousands of years; Melissa was an upstart, an orphan, a nothing.

That which sticks up must be pounded down.

But before the mass could do any pounding, Melissa’s mouth filled again with the taste of darkling. She’d distracted them just long enough.

The thing in Rex was
really
boiling now….

Like a predatory cat, it sliced straight through the mass, down into Madeleine’s own memories, her deepest secrets. With a hunter’s instinct it found her fears… and ransacked them.

“No, Rex!” Madeleine gasped, but he was a wounded animal now, pitiless and rabid. Melissa watched aghast as fifty years of terror erupted from the depths of the old woman’s mind, every nervous minute of hiding since the Grayfoots’ revolution.

You gave them Anathea, he hissed, and decades of guilt surged up in Madeleine. The mass of memories spun in a tempest, unable to order themselves in her churning mind, like rats in a house on fire.

Melissa tried to focus her mind.
Rex… that’s enough!

“We’re knocking at your door!” he said aloud, his voice inhuman. “We’ve found you at last. We’ve come for you!”

A single choked scream of terror came from Madeleine’s lips, darklings from a thousand nightmares shredding her mind; her hand jerked once, then slipped from Melissa’s.

Suddenly the mass of mindcasters was silenced, Madeleine’s mind gone; Melissa found herself alone with Rex in the blackness behind closed eyes. The darkling thoughts moved through him, still powerful, still hungry. Melissa watched in horror as her oldest friend transformed, the darkness consuming still more of his humanity.

She wondered if she was next.

Rex, she pleaded.
Come back to me.

“Unconquerable,” he said softly, his voice dry.

The storm began to subside, and what remained of Rex’s humanity settled over the boiling darkness. She felt his sanity return.

With a
snap
her muscles were her own again. Melissa pulled her hand from his and opened her eyes.

Madeleine lay on the attic floor unmoving, shards of her shattered teacup strewn about her. Her face was locked in an expression of horror.

“It worked,” Rex said, his voice calm.

Melissa stared at the stricken woman on the floor. She was still breathing, but her eyes were glazed over, her fingers twitching.

Melissa looked up at Rex, and his eyes flashed violet. “You call that
working?”

“I remember now.” His lips curled into a smile. “I know what Samhain really was.”

Melissa tried to gather her wits and tore her eyes from Madeleine’s twisted face. The darklings were coming, and thousands of lives were at stake. “Can we stop it?”

Rex shuddered for a second, as if one last memory remained fugitive in his mind. But then he nodded slowly.

“We can try.”

Every night it seemed like the secret hour took longer to come.

Jonathan drummed his fingers on his windowsill, waiting for the cold wind to be silenced, for colors to blur together into blue, for weightlessness to pour into him. He didn’t look at the clock, which never worked. Knowing how many minutes of Flatland were left only made the torture worse.

These stretches right before midnight were always the hardest. Jonathan wanted to be out there
now,
soaring over the still cars and softly glowing houses, feeling his muscles propel him across town.

To pass the time—to force the time to get
moving
—he counted off the coming days on his fingers. It was Thursday night, tomorrow was Friday, exactly two weeks until Halloween. If Dess was right, he would only have to endure this wait fifteen more times, including tonight.

And then he would be free of gravity altogether.

His eyes closed. Jonathan realized, of course, that the weakening of the blue time was a disaster; it would give the darklings free rein to hunt down thousands of people, maybe a lot more than that. His father, his classmates, everyone he knew was in terrible danger.

But he couldn’t keep his mind off one fact: for however long the frozen midnight lasted, Flatland would be erased, and the world would have three dimensions. For a guilty moment Jonathan let himself feel the pleasure the thought gave him—being able to fly for days on end, however far the blue time expanded.

Maybe it would swallow the whole world.

At last midnight came, almost surprising him in his reverie. The earth shuddered, dropping its claims on his body, the chains of gravity finally falling away. He drifted upward, sucking in a deep, rib-cracking breath. Only at midnight did his lungs feel like they filled completely, no longer constrained by the suffocating weight of his own body. The weight of Flatland.

It was crazy to feel guilty about the joy this gave him. It wasn’t his fault the world was ending.

Jonathan launched himself out the window, passing over his father’s car and up onto the neighbor’s roof with one well-practiced bound. There his right foot landed on its usual spot, a circle of cracked shingles marking where so many nightly flights began.

Then he pushed off toward Jessica’s and—as he watched for flying slithers and power lines, calculating the best course down empty roads and across newly harvested fields—his mind kept returning to one thought…
Only two more weeks of gravity, and then I’m free.

“Okay, everyone,” Rex said. “Madeleine went into my mind last night.”

Jonathan frowned. The five of them were meeting in Madeleine’s house, seated around her scuffed dining table surrounded by the clutter of tridecagrams and other tangled shapes. But the old woman hadn’t appeared tonight, and Rex had started talking as if she wasn’t coming down. Wasn’t she home?

Where else could she be at midnight?

“You actually let her
touch
you?” Dess asked.

“Melissa was there to protect me,” Rex said.

Jonathan glanced at Jessica, and they both flinched, waiting for the nasty response they knew was coming, but Dess just coughed into her fist and rolled her eyes. Eerily, the scar the darkling had left over her eye was shaped just like one of Melissa’s.

Jonathan was glad she kept quiet. Tonight Rex was scary enough without anyone provoking him. His expression seemed vacant somehow, as if there were some other creature inside him, showing off the Rex mask it was going to wear while trick-or-treating.

He looked weird enough in daylight, but in the secret hour the new Rex was almost too much to face.

“The darklings remember Samhain,” Rex said.

“So that goth holiday is the real thing, huh?” Dess asked, shaking her head.

“It isn’t a Gothic holiday,” Rex answered. “The Goths were from Asia. Samhain was Celtic.”

“From Asia?” Dess said, then groaned. “No, Rex, not the guys who conquered Rome. I mean the kids in black.”

“Um, Dess?” Melissa said. “Mirror check.”

“This dress is
charcoal
,” Dess said.

“Probably the Goths had something like Samhain too,” Rex kept going. “A lot of cultures have festivals at the end of October. The Feast of Souls. Something called Shadowfest. The Death of the Sun.”

Jessica raised an eyebrow. “Shadowfest? That sounds… festive.”

Dess let out a long sigh. “Why are we even talking about this? All that pagan stuff is from the Old World, but here in Oklahoma, Halloween is just an excuse to sell a bunch of candy and costumes to little kids. Like Angie said, the darklings hid themselves way before any Europeans got here.”

Jonathan cleared his throat. “Actually, Dess, it’s not just a European thing. You know the Day of the Dead down in Mexico? Even though it’s the same day as All Hallows’ Eve, the natives already had a holiday around then.”

Rex nodded. “And some Native Americans had festivals celebrating the Old Crone around this time.”

Dess laughed. “Excuse me, Rex. The
Old Crone?
” She looked around at the others. “And what were those other ones? Shadowfest? Death of the Sun? Dawn of the Dead?

Is it just me, or do all these holidays have a trying-too-hard-to-be-creepy ring to them?”

“Of course they do,” Rex said, his scary mask unruffled by her teasing. “Look at the bare trees outside, the gray sky, the dead grass everywhere. The word
Samhain
is Celtic for ‘summer’s end.’ The beginning of winter.” Suddenly Rex’s voice sounded dry, like he’d been out in the desert without water for a few days. “The dying of the light, when warmth turns to cold.”

Everyone was silent for a moment, even Melissa looking a little spooked by Rex. Jonathan heard a creaking noise above his head. So Madeleine
was
here. But why was she hiding upstairs?

He glanced at Melissa, wondering what exactly had happened between the three of them the night before.

Dess broke the mood, letting out an exasperated breath. “This isn’t about spooks and ghosts, Rex, it’s about
numbers.
The eleventh month plus one is twelve. That’s all it is.”

Jonathan frowned. Back in Philadelphia, his mother had always taken him to church on All Hallows’ Eve. Even the Catholic version of Samhain had given him the willies.