He listened to the car alarms and forced himself to hope that everyone down there was listening too.
Just before midnight fell, a peal of thunder started to roll, sounding directly over their heads. And then the earth shuddered, the blue time descending over everything, freezing the rain into a million hovering diamonds around him, cutting off the thunder, the car alarms, everything.
“Can you see it from here?” Dess asked.
Rex looked toward Jenks, and his seer’s vision picked out the slim red glimmer of the rip. It was starting to swell.
“Yep. The red time is on its way.”
“Good going on that fuse.” Dess breathed out a slow sigh. “Guess now we just sit back until the fireworks start.”
As per the plan, the other three midnighters were out in Jenks. Soon they would light the first fireworks display to forestall the main force of darklings. Once that was going strong and before the darklings started to flow around them and into town, Jonathan would fly Jessica and Melissa back here, where the five of them would make their stand.
At least, that was the way it was supposed to work.
“Whoa, Rex! Look at that!”
Dess was pointing back toward downtown. Rex turned, following her gaze to the Mobil Building, the tallest in Bixby. The neon winged horse at its summit hunkered just under the low ceiling of heavy clouds, strangely illuminated against their dark bulk.
Rex’s heart began to pound. “Oh my God.”
“Have you ever seen anything like that?”
“No, but I’ve always wanted to. Melissa and I have been looking for one of those since… forever.”
A frozen bolt of lightning reached down from the cloud, its motionless fire forking into a hundred tendrils that caressed the metal framework of the neon horse. In Rex’s midnight vision the arrested lightning was mind-bogglingly complex, every inch of it divided into a million burning zigzags.
He remembered all the times he and Melissa had set off on their bicycles as kids, tunneling through the rain toward some frozen flicker of light on the horizon. They’d never made it before the secret hour finished, always having to plow back through the resumed storm empty-handed.
But they’d kept trying; one of the first fragments of lore Rex had discovered was all about frozen lightning, though it had never explained what you were supposed to do when you found it.
Still, there was something in his mind….
He felt the fissures that Madeleine had made, the still-tender wounds of her attack, begin to throb. He saw it now, thrown whole into his mind by the sight of the frozen lightning. This was the last remnant of what the darklings had hidden from him.
Rex blinked. “Oh, no.”
“What?”
He couldn’t answer, a shudder passing through him. Suddenly he knew what tonight was really all about and what had to happen before the rip reached downtown and set the lightning free again. He knew the instructions that the Grayfoots had never received before their halfling had died.
And finally he understood the real reason why the darklings were so afraid of Jessica—why they had always wanted her dead.
He looked out at Jenks; the glowing red of the rip was still moving toward them. “We can stop this.”
“What, Rex?”
“We need Jessica here.”
“But they haven’t even lit the—”
“Shhh.” Rex dropped to his knees and let his head fall into his hands. In planning tonight he’d put Melissa on the front line for two reasons. She could guide Jessica and Jonathan safely there and back, through cops or darkling invasions as needed. And Rex had also known that if anything went wrong, she could taste his thoughts for miles across the secret hour, just as she had when they were eight years old, when she’d made her way across Bixby wearing only pajamas covered in pictures of cowgirls.
Now he needed her to hear him again.
“Rex?” Dess said softly.
He waved her silent and focused himself, setting all of his will to the task of summoning his oldest friend.
Cowgirl… he thought. I need you now.
27
12:00 A.M..-
Long Midnight
IN THE RIP
Silence…
Midnight fell, extinguishing the mind noise of Jenks, turning the world blue and still and… red.
Here in the center of the rip everything began to glimmer purple—red and blue mixing together, time arrested, yet… not. The rain pattered down for a few more seconds, then petered out; the rip hadn’t expanded enough to include the heavy clouds above their heads. Melissa wondered if when it reached them, the rain would start again.
Weather in the secret hour. Just when I thought I’d seen everything.
“Where is she?” Jessica asked.
Melissa closed her eyes, trying to ignore the flame-bringer’s coppery, panicked taste. She sent her mind across the rip, feeling it growing, stretching in the opposite directions toward downtown and the mountains. It was moving slowly now, but she could already feel its speed increasing.
No little sisters in it, though.
“Sorry, Jess. I can’t feel her.”
“Why not?”
“Your sister’s not inside the rip. Not yet, anyway. She must still be frozen, so I can’t taste her mind.”
“But Cassie’s house is right there!” Jessica pointed down at the double-wide at the edge of the tracks. The red-tinged boundary had already swallowed it.
“Yep. And I can taste her grandma in there, still sleeping,” Melissa said. “But nobody else is home.”
Jessica’s face twisted into an expression of fury, her mind all fiery peppers and burned toast.
“That little creep snuck out!” she cried.
Melissa raised an eyebrow, suddenly relieved she didn’t have an older sister of her own. Madeleine’s interfering had included making sure that none of her pet midnighters in Bixby had siblings—and this was why.
“Calm down, Jess,” Jonathan said. “She can’t be too far away. Once the rip reaches her, we’ll deal with it.”
Jessica looked at Melissa. “And you’re sure you’ll recognize her mind?”
“I know Cassie’s taste. They’ll be together, won’t they?”
“What if they aren’t?”
Melissa sighed. “I have an idea what your sister tastes like, okay? I’ve been to your house at midnight.”
Jessica stared back, her fury twisting into new shapes as she realized what Melissa was admitting. “Damn you!” she said, and turned and stalked away.
“I never touched the shrimp,” Melissa said to Flyboy. “Just the parents.”
He offered a shrug, then went to calm the flame-bringer down.
Melissa let out another sigh, feeling weighed down by her long, rain-soaked dress. She and Rex should have admitted what they’d done to Jessica’s parents a long time ago. They always figured that it would come up eventually and at a time like this, when everyone needed to stay calm.
They had the fireworks already in place, rockets stuck into the gravel, flares and sparklers divided into separate boxes, all of it covered with a tarp from Jonathan’s trunk. Melissa decided to make herself useful while the other two were stressing. She flicked the tarp to knock the rainwater off, then pulled it from the fireworks.
The arsenal looked formidable: candles and hurricane lamps so that Jessica didn’t have to light every fuse herself, Roman candles and rockets to bombard the main force of darklings when they arrived, and highway flares that would last for hours, giving the residents of Jenks a fighting chance after the three of them had retreated downtown.
How long now?
Melissa closed her eyes again and swept through the expanding space of the rip. More humans were inside it now, startled by the sudden silence of their TVs and the strange shimmery light that had come over everything.