“You’re lucky we made it,” came the man’s muffled voice, his footsteps audible on the stairs.

Melissa controlled her breathing. The way sound echoed through the empty house, one bump against the wardrobe door and they’d be discovered.

“I didn’t ask to break down. Next time I won’t bother to call you.” Her voice was low and controlled, not out of breath like his. Her mind held none of his fear of being late. Melissa felt the woman check her watch—a burst of satisfaction as she confirmed that everything was on schedule. Now that they were inside the house, Melissa could taste them clearly.

“Promises, promises,” the guy shouted from the master bathroom. A rush of release filled his brain just as the trickling sound of piss reached Melissa’s ears. She shuddered at the intimacy.

“Like you could handle this on your own,” the woman said in a voice so soft that it mostly reached Melissa as thought. She had a lock on Angie’s mind now: it was saturated with a sickly sweet contempt for the man. Angie didn’t need him here in the first place—he could barely interpret lore symbols, couldn’t see the big picture, was always lugging around his stupid camera, which of course never captured the spooks anyway. If he wasn’t related to the patriarch…

The woman’s mind grew closer, her slow footsteps carrying her through the upstairs hall. She came to a halt just outside the room they’d hidden in.

“Did we really need this big a house?”

Rex’s shoulder muscles tightened under Melissa’s grip, his mind clouding hers with a wave of fear. Relax, she willed him.

“Location, location, location,” the man said. “That’s all the spooks care about. Anyway, if this field is as big as they say, we should make about a hundred times what this cracker box cost.”

The woman took one more step into the room and flicked on a light. A blinding wedge of illumination forced its way through the crack between the wardrobe’s double doors. Melissa squinted, feeling as if the light was slicing her in half from top to bottom. Rex had stopped breathing.

Melissa closed her eyes, trying to tease from the woman’s mind what she was thinking, why she was staring at the closet door. But Rex’s terror drowned out those smooth, collected thoughts.

“Come on, Angie! Thirty seconds.”

The woman didn’t move. Melissa made a fist with her free hand. One solid punch to the gut would put anyone down for half a minute. Long enough.

“Angie!”

Finally the footsteps retreated, quick and determined now. Melissa heard the clatter of dominoes being spilled in the other room, felt anticipation growing in the two intruders as relief flooded through Rex.

And then, seconds later, always glorious…

Silence.

8

12:00 a.m.

HALFLING

“Come on! We’ve got to run!”

Melissa shook her head and tore away from him. Her eyes shone with the terrible clarity they always had in the blue time; freed from the tumultuous mind noise of humanity, she could be fearless, imperiously bold.

Rex sighed. She could also be a pain in the ass.

“I am so going to rip this woman,” she said, pushing past him and into the master bedroom.

He followed, coming to a halt at the door. The two normals were frozen on either side of the clutter of tiles, the man kneeling, the woman standing. The man’s face was obscured by a camera pointed at the floor. Rex noticed that his watch was set exactly to Bixby midnight and that its face was marked with the tiny glittering eyes of jewels.

“Well, what do you know?” Rex said. “He stalks darklings as well as Jessica.”

“She’s the one that matters,” Melissa said.

The motionless woman was tall and fair, dressed in business clothes. Midnight had caught her expression: awe and fear mixed with expectation. All the tiles were facedown on the floor, ready to be turned over and arranged into messages.

Rex shook his head, still unable to wrap his mind around it. How could a darkling communicate using hated midnighter symbols? And where had these people hidden themselves for fifty years?

Melissa stood before the woman, reaching out her hands.

“There’s no time!” Rex shouted. “The desert’s only half a mile away. Whatever’s coming will be here soon!”

“She’s the smart one, Rex. You should have felt her mind. She knows what’s going on.”

“What’s going on is we’re about to get overrun by darklings!”

“Get ready, then. I’ll be downstairs in five.”

Rex flinched. Why didn’t anyone ever listen to him? Especially at times like this, when it really mattered. However expensive it looked, this house was a darkling place. Not for humans. He could see that; Melissa couldn’t.

He noticed that the sliding glass door of the balcony was now open.

“Make it three,” Rex said coldly, and ran downstairs.

He burst through the front door and ran to the car, not bothering to check the skies. They had a few minutes, anyway. Even Jonathan Martinez couldn’t have gotten here this fast.

Perversely, he hoped that something big was coming. The oldest ones lived in the deep desert and would take longer to get here. And having to face something really scary might convince Melissa to listen to him next time.

Of course, if it did turn out to be just some second-string darkling and a few slithers, Rex wasn’t going to complain.

He reached into the backseat and pulled out his duffel bag. It was depressingly light; they hadn’t brought any serious metal tonight, thinking they’d be facing a human threat and not some darkling house party.

Rex cursed. The awesome power of the flame-bringer had made him overconfident.

The duffel bag’s zipper caught in his nervous fingers, but he managed to yank it open. A big plastic flashlight, useless without Jessica to spark it up. A ball-peen hammer called Arachnophobia. A bag of assorted screws and nails for throwing. And a tire iron with the name Stratocumulus that Rex only now remembered had been used to ward off slithers before. Its power had probably sizzled down to nothing. Melissa only kept it in the trunk to change tires.

That was it.

Time to break out the big guns.

“Back left, back left,” Rex muttered to himself, slamming the door and running around the car. He pried at the Ford’s left-rear hubcap with Stratocumulus, useful for something at least. As he pulled, Rex allowed himself a satisfied grin. He and Dess had worked hard on this one, agreeing to use it only when absolutely necessary.

Which would be now.

The hubcap sprang off, clattering to the street. Around its inside edge were a host of tiny symbols, Stone Age pictograms, thirty-nine of them, etched by Dess as per Rex’s instructions. She had used a drill bit stolen from shop class, made from a tungsten alloy so high tech, it could bore through steel like wet plaster.

Rex shoved the hubcap into the bag, hoping it would be enough.

He ran back to the open front door and shouted up the stairs.

“Melissa!” She didn’t answer. “Come on!”

Then he heard a sound from above.

She was whimpering.

Rex found her on her knees before the woman, her fingers still splayed in their mindcasting grip, shaking her head and moaning.

“Something’s coming…

He sighed. “Like I said.”

“It’s so sick, Rex…”

He swallowed. It wasn’t like Melissa to freak out at darkling thoughts. She always said their ancient, arid minds were a hundred times easier to tolerate than those of humanity.

“Come on.” He hauled Melissa to her feet and pulled her toward the stairs. She didn’t fight him, just trailed along, making hiccuping noises, like a kid trying to keep from crying.

Rex tried not to think about what she’d seen.

The front door was still ajar, and he kicked his way through. The house across the street looked occupied, hopefully full of shiny metal and modern machines. Rex had one more trick up his sleeve—or stuffed into the buckle of his right boot, actually.