Melissa snorted, but Rex nodded again. “Sure. Except you can’t make it tell you what you need to know. It tells you what it wants.”
“Unless you ask it really nicely,” Melissa said.
She pulled a black velvet bag from her jacket and drew a knife from it.
Jessica swallowed. “How does this work, anyway?”
“The rock just needs a little taste of you,” Melissa said.
“A taste,” Jessica asked. “As in it’s going to lick my hand?”
Melissa smiled again. “More of a bite than a lick.”
Rex turned to Melissa and took the knife from her hand. “Stop it, Melissa. It’s not that big a deal.”
He turned toward Jessica.
“A few drops of blood will do.”
She drew a step away. “Nobody said anything about blood!”
“Just from your fingertip. It won’t hurt that much.”
Jessica clenched her fist.
“Come on, Jess,” Melissa said. “Haven’t you ever become a blood sister with someone? Or made a blood oath?”
“Uh, not really. More of a cross-my-heart kind of girl.”
Rex nodded. “Actually, the crossing of the heart was originally a blood oath. They used a knife in the old days.”
“The hope-to-die part was a lot more literal back then,” Melissa said.
“These are not the old days,” Jessica said. “And I don’t particularly hope to die.”
“What, are you too wimpy to cut your finger?” Melissa asked.
Jessica scowled. After everything she’d been through that night, no one was calling her a wimp. Certainly not Melissa, anyway.
“Okay. Give me the knife,” she said with a sigh.
“Let the blood collect right here,” Rex said. He pointed at a small depression in the shelf of rock, no bigger than a quarter.
Jessica inspected the knife. “Is this thing clean?”
“Absolutely. Nothing inhuman has ever—”
“Not that kind of clean,” Jessica interrupted, trying not to roll her eyes. “Disinfected clean.”
Rex smiled. “Smell it.”
Jessica sniffed the knife and caught a whiff of rubbing alcohol.
“Just go easy, okay?” Rex said. “We only need a few drops.”
“No problem.” She looked at her hand and curled it into a fist except for the ring finger. The knife glistened in the dark moonlight, and she could read the tiny words stainless steel on its shaft.
“Okay,” she said, preparing herself.
“Do you want me to do it for—”
“No!” Jessica interrupted him.
She swallowed, gritted her teeth, and pulled the edge across her fingertip. Pain shot up her arm.
As she watched, blood welled up along the cut. Even in the blue light of midnight it was a fresh, bright red.
“Don’t waste it,” Melissa said.
“Plenty to go around,” Jessica muttered. She held her hand over the shelf of rock and watched as a drop gradually formed on the fingertip, wobbled tenuously for a moment, then fell into the little bowl of stone.
A hissing sound came from deep inside the rock. Jessica jerked her hand away.
“More,” Rex said.
She reached out carefully, letting another drop fall into the bowl. The hissing grew louder as the blood ran. She felt a tremor build under her feet.
“Okay,” Rex said. “Maybe that’s enough.”
The shaft of stone in front of Jessica was trembling. Sand was slipping down into the center of the pit from all sides, and she had to pull one foot free, then the other.
“Is this what’s supposed to happen?”
“Um, I don’t know,” Rex said.
“We never actually did this before,” Melissa admitted.
“Great.”
“I mean, it’s usually pretty obvious who has what talent,” Rex said, backing away from the stone. It was shaking harder now. Dust rose up from the ground around them, and Jessica heard a huge gulping sound from beneath her feet.
She imagined the water below, cold and dark and waiting for centuries.
“So when should we start running?” she called over the rumble.
With a sharp boom the shaft of stone cracked before them, a fissure splitting it from top to bottom.
“I guess about right now!” Rex yelled.
Jessica turned, scrambling upward. The sand slid under her, carrying her back down the slope.
Suddenly the rumbling stopped.
The three of them came to a halt, looked at each other, then turned toward the stone.
“Nice going,” Melissa said. “You broke it, Jessica.”
The stone had actually cracked in two, a thin fracture running its entire length, but the trembling had stopped completely. Dust swirled around them, and lightning still flashed from the perimeter of the pit, but it seemed almost silent after the earthquake.
Jonathan landed softly next to Jessica, and she heard Dess running down the slope behind her.
“What happened?” he asked.
Jessica held up her finger. “I cut myself. Then things got earthquakey.”
Rex ran back down to the stone. He peered closely at the shelf.
“It worked,” he said softly.
Jessica came up beside him, staring into the little bowl. Her blood had twisted into long threads, turning dark and staining the rock. The threads of blood formed a symbol, what looked to Jessica like a crescent-shaped claw holding up a spark.
“What does it mean, Rex?”
He paused, blinking.
“Two words, linked together… flame-bringer.”
Jessica shrugged. “Which is what?”
He took a step back from the stone, shaking his head. Jessica turned around, looking at the other midnighters. They all looked as puzzled as she was.
“I don’t know,” Rex said. “Flame-bringer? There’s no such talent.”
“There is now,” Jonathan said.
“Well, it better be something good,” Dess announced. “Because in about five minutes we’ve got company.”
29
12:00 A.M.
FLAME-BRINGER
“What do you mean, Dess?” Rex asked.
“When the defenses ate Jessica’s darkling, my clean metal got very dirty. It’s starting to sputter out.”
Jessica looked up at the edge of the pit. The ring of lightning surrounding them looked weaker. The flashes no longer blinded when they shot up into the sky, the bolts of blue pale and tentative.
“I know,” Rex said. “But I thought you could fix it.”
“We did what we could. I don’t have enough clean steel. Someone left my duffel bag out on the desert.”
“You walked away from your duffel bag,” Rex replied, “when you were getting all Amazon with your spear.”
“Somebody had to kill that tarantula,” Dess shouted.
“You didn’t kill it, you turned it into an army,” Rex yelled, “which some of us almost drowned in.”
“You don’t drown in an army!”
“Stop it!”
Melissa’s cry silenced Rex and Dess. Jessica saw that their argument had drained the color from her face. She was doubled over in agony.
“Sorry, Melissa,” Rex said. He took a deep breath.
“There’s nothing I can do, Rex,” Dess said softly.
Jessica looked up into the sky. Through the sputtering ceiling of lightning she could see slithers swirling around the snake pit. At the lip of the crater a host of tiny eyes gazed down at her. The spiders had surrounded the pit and peered down at them expectantly.
“It’s up to you, Jessica.”
She looked at Rex helplessly. “What am I supposed to do? You all keep acting like I know something. Like I’m someone special.”
Jonathan grasped her hand, and she felt his reassuring weightlessness flow into her. “It’s okay, Jess. We’ll figure it out.”