“What about your friend?”

“He was headed somewhere in a hurry” She tasted the air. “Long gone.”

“Okay. But ten minutes max. We should be back in the car and a couple of miles from here before midnight comes.” He shook his head. “Don’t want to be crashers at a darkling house party.”

The door was unlocked.

“That’s interesting.” Melissa pushed it open, its new hinges utterly silent. The entrance hallway was grand and echoey, no rugs to muffle the sound of their boots across the polished wooden floor. No anything, she realized. The walls were bare of pictures, and no shoes or hanging coats cluttered the foyer. The two large front rooms were empty except for a portable phone. It sat lonely on a windowsill, its cord winding across the blank expanse of carpet, a demonic red eye showing that it was recharging.

And the place tasted completely dead. Not a leftover thought anywhere. Even the dull roar of central Bixby miles away seemed muted by its walls.

“Nothing to steal, I guess,” she said.

“But lots of darkling action.” Rex was looking up the stairs, into corners. “Just like outside, it’s all in Focus.”

“Maybe it’s some kind of darkling frat house.”

“I’ve never seen them set up shop in a human dwelling before. Maybe a tire yard or a vacant lot, but not a house. Of course, nobody lives here.”

“No,” Melissa said, “but the darklings aren’t paying the phone bill…”

Rex chewed his lip. “Good point.”

In the kitchen they found signs of habitation. Or maybe vandalism. The faucet had been yanked out from the sink, the handles of the cupboards torn off, every piece of metal removed. There were no appliances, and the lightbulb hung bare from the ceiling.

“A darkling-friendly kitchen. What do they eat, anyway?”

Rex just looked at her, sending out a stab of annoyance.

“Oh, right. Us.” Melissa didn’t think about it in those terms much, but that was and always had been the prime source of conflict between the two races: the whole foodchain thing. Funny how that could mess up a relationship.

“Let’s check upstairs,” Rex said, having gone through the drawers and cupboards and found them empty.

She checked her watch. “Okay. But five minutes and we leave.”

He turned his head slowly from left to right as they climbed the stairs, his eyes wide with the Focus. “Absolutely.”

Upstairs was divided into three empty bedrooms, the largest with a big balcony that looked out into the dark Oklahoma night. Melissa stared through the sliding door and realized something. She pulled off a glove and put her hand to the cold glass.

“You know, Rex, it’s warm in here.” Outside it was almost freezing, but someone had left the heating on, though they hadn’t bothered to lock the door…

“Look at this!” he cried, his mind flooding the room with delight.

He had pulled something from a closet, a box of small rectangular tiles that glowed white in the darkness. He squatted on the floor and dumped them out with a clatter. As his hands swept through the tiles to spread them out, she recognized the wooden sound.

“Didn’t know you liked dominoes so much,” she said dryly.

“Not dominoes.” Rex was flipping them all faceup. He hadn’t put on his glasses, so they must have been marked with Focus.

She knelt beside him and squinted at the symbols on the tiles. They were the spindly figures of lore, the secret alphabet used to record midnighter history for ten thousand years.

“Oh.” The thought that anyone besides Rex would use the ancient signs left her speechless for a moment.

“But they’re not quite the same,” he muttered. “It’s like a slightly different alphabet…”

Melissa didn’t respond. She steadied herself with one hand on the floor. The feel of him parsing the symbols was dizzying; his mind battered hers with a frenzy of calculation.

“Or maybe some of them are signs I don’t know,” he said, picking through them, lifting one for closer inspection. “Symbols for concepts that don’t exist in the lore.”

Melissa forced her mind to shut out his mental pyrotechnics. “But what are those things for, Rex?”

The question brought his brain to a spinning halt. “I don’t know.”

She thought of the stiffs they often found at the snake pit, frozen while staring at the piles of rocks that Bixby legend held would move at midnight. (Of course, sometimes Melissa moved them herself, just for fun—and to terrify the little trespassing morons.)

“Could someone use them to communicate with the darklings?” she asked.

“That doesn’t make any sense. Darklings hate symbols and signs, any written language. That’s one of the new ideas that scared them off ten thousand years ago, along with math and fire and metal.”

“But Rex, you’ve got your glasses off.”

“I what?” He put one hand to his face. Melissa realized that Rex had momentarily forgotten he wasn’t wearing the thick lenses. The house was so marked with Focus that he could see everything clearly anyway.

“So darklings have touched these,” he murmured, a few of the dominoes slipping through his fingers. “But how?”

“Rex…” A familiar taste was penetrating the overwhelming clamor of Rex’s excitement. “What time is it?”

He checked his watch. “You’re right. We should go soon. Just let me grab a few of these—”

“Rex!” It wasn’t impending midnight that had her worried; it was something she’d felt before, and it was rushing back toward them. The voice seemed to suddenly crack through the psychic silence of the house.

We’re just going to make it, no thanks to you, Angie.

Her head spun, trying to sort Rex’s mental turmoil from the approaching thoughts. They came through grim and determined, angry at some inconvenience, and, most of all, anxious.

“It’s him…” she whispered.

“Who?”

Keep it on the road, idiot. We’re almost there.

She recognized the exact kind of fear now; it was of a type familiar from a thousand school mornings. There was always at least one mind trailing in after everyone else had settled into their desks, rushing along panicked at the thought of punishment. That was what she tasted: fear of being late.

“He was in a hurry when he left,” she muttered, “but he was in a hurry to get back by midnight?

“The guy you heard?”

“Yes! We have to get out of here now.” She stood, still dizzy. For some reason, mindcasting in this house was like walking through syrup.

Rex was scraping at the tiles, trying to return them all to the box.

“There isn’t time!” She tasted the man’s bitter curses as he twisted at the steering wheel, felt his body sway on the quick turns, heard the skidding of tires…

Rex looked up. He’d heard the tires too.

Headlights crawled across the ceiling, and a screech came from the driveway.

“He’s here,” she said, too late.

“Don’t worry about him,” Rex said, taking her gloved hand softly as he checked his watch. “We only have to stay hidden for four minutes. It’s what’s coming after midnight that worries me.”

They shoved the darkling dominoes back into the closet and crept to one of the smaller bedrooms. Hopefully the man wouldn’t poke around the empty house with so little time remaining before midnight. Rex pointed to a wide, shallow wardrobe with sliding doors.

The sound of the front door opening carried up the stairs just as they made it into the darkness of the wardrobe. Melissa felt Rex breathing hard next to her, off balance as he tried to avoid touching her accidentally. She slipped her other glove back on and steadied him with that hand, whispering, “Relax. Let me concentrate.”

Rex’s mind calmed, and she could feel now that there were two of them downstairs, the man and… Angie. The woman radiated only calm; no wonder she’d been invisible to Melissa before now.