But then she noticed the thirteen-pointed star mounted next to the door and felt a lot better. Realtors always told new arrivals in Bixby that in the old days, the plaques showed which houses had fire insurance. This was only a half lie. The tridecagrams were insurance, all right, but not against infernos.
The star was a good sign. She couldn’t imagine darkling groupies leaving a tridecagram stuck onto their house. Her eyes hunted for more reassurances and easily found them: the walkway was thirty-nine flagstones long, the chimney 169 bricks high. Perhaps this run-down shack had once been the headquarters of that Ladies’ Anti-Tenebrosity League that Rex was always talking about.
Dess started to lean her bike against the old willow. But then she saw the marks and froze.
A foot long and at least an inch deep, three parallel gouges had been cut into the thick bark. Giant claws had swept through the old willow, like carpet knives lacerating flesh. The yellow-green sap had welled up like blood and congealed. Judging from the size of the claws, the Wound had come from a very old darkling of the saber-toothed variety.
She touched the marks; still sticky. She didn’t need Rex to tell her this had happened recently… probably within the last two weeks.
Dess swallowed, the thought flooding through her again that she really shouldn’t have come here alone. This place could be hiding anything.
A few moments after Jonathan had handed her the captured coordinates of Darkling Manor, the pattern of minutes and seconds had coalesced in Dess’s mind. She understood now why Melissa had never spotted the unspeakable transactions taking place out in Las Colonias. There were dead zones in Bixby, places where midnight’s arrival threw up imperfections, like bubbles trapped in Lucite. There Melissa’s ability was useless, the shape of frozen time itself too tangled for her mind to penetrate. When Dess had done the math, the numbers on her new toy had led her here.
Right in the middle of the suburbs, not that far from where Jessica lived, this house squatted on the deadest of the dead zones.
Dess stood there for a while, trying to get her teeth to grip the worn-down nubs of her fingernails. Finally, though, she grimaced and let her bike fall against the tree It was broad daylight; no darklings lay in wait. And the thirteen-pointed star showed that one of the good guys had made this his home back in olden times. Dess had worked for days trying to understand how coordinates bent the rippled surface of midnight, and this discovery was hers to make. Alone.
She walked up the path.
The house was standing open behind a closed screen door. Dess pressed a button hanging from the door frame by a single screw, but nothing happened. Lowering her sunglasses to squint through the crumpled and pitted screen, she made a fist to knock.
Out of the darkness, a pale face peered back at her.
They stared at each other for a moment. The old woman was wrapped in a dark red nightgown, worn so thin that it shifted in the barely perceptible breeze that pushed past Dess and through the door. The woman’s eyes were wide open, the whites glowing in the darkness, but her expression showed more curiosity than fear.
“Come in,” she said. “It’s taken you long enough.”
16
2:54 p.m.
AFTER-SCHOOL SPECIAL
Thirty seconds before the scream of the last bell rang out, Melissa’s headphones were in place, her tape cued to her lancing song.
She leaned back, closing her eyes. Across Bixby High she could feel fingers gripping the sides of desks, books and pens gathered, backpacks zipped closed under the exhausted and complicit stares of teachers. The minds around her whirred with anticipated routes, the quickest way to lockers, to the nearest door and onto the bus, the fastest way out. The noise escalated maddeningly in the last few seconds and filled her head like a cafeteria chant pounded onto a table…
Out, out, out!
Finally the scream sounded, and the building exploded around her.
“Ooooh,” Melissa said. Last bell didn’t compare to midnight’s arrival, but it was still the second-best moment of her day.
She hit play and tipped her head back. Metal power chords detonated in her ears, drowning out the scrapes of desks and sneaker squeaks around her. She felt bodies struggling past each other in the halls, fingers attacking locker combinations, and unbottled conversations gushing through the halls.
Then the flow reached the doors and the pressure that had tormented her mind all day began to subside, like a lanced boil spilling its runny contents at last.
She sighed, opening her eyes. Mr. Rogers stood over her. The classroom was empty except for the two of them. She snapped off the tape.
“Melissa? Are you all right?”
“Never better.” Her satisfied smile only disturbed him more. Last semester she’d trained her final-period teacher to deal with the lancing ritual. She hoped Rogers wasn’t going to give her any trouble.
“Do you do that after every class?”
“No, just this one. I like to relax for a moment after the rigors of a hard school day. I hope that’s all right with you, Mr. Rogers.”
“You know, listening to music isn’t allowed in classrooms.”
Her eyes narrowed. I don’t turn it on until the last bell rings. When class is over. When school is over.”
She could taste the answer before he opened his mouth. The rancid butter flavor of a petty mind grasping for control.
“Still, Melissa,” he said, “this is a classroom, and I’d appreciate it if you waited until you were out in the hall before turning that thing on.”
A sharp retort curled her tongue, but Melissa let it slide. These last few days her temper had become easier to control.
Besides, as her social studies teacher liked to say, there were always productive ways to channel protest.
“Certainly, Mr. Rogers,” she said pleasantly. “Do you happen to live in Bixby?”
“What? Yes, over by the Dr. Pepper plant. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing. Just curious.”
She smiled. Mr. Rogers lived close enough to visit, one of these nights during the midnight hour.
Asshole.
The empty bleachers reeked of defeat. Melissa never paid attention to football, but sitting here she could tell that the Bixby Tigers were losers and had been for a long time. Her mind was filled with futility and the bleak taste of cheering for a team that didn’t stand a chance.
Wafting up from the hidden spaces underneath, she also caught the scent of secret pleasures, along with a lingering fear of getting caught. Lifting her sunglasses to peer down through the bleachers, she saw cigarette butts hiding in the slatted shadows. Melissa could always sense hidden places—the narrow alleys between temporary classrooms, the janitors’ closets and basement doors that drew truants to them. They all had the same taste: sweet momentary freedom spiced with nervous glances over the shoulder.
She wondered what was keeping Rex. Bixby High was mostly empty, leaving only the tastes of band practice, a drama rehearsal, and the football team, who were doing mindless calisthenics on the field in front of her. Melissa closed her eyes, inhaling deeply to relish the peace of after-school depopulation.
Suddenly a picture began to form in her mind, a remnant from the scant minutes she’d been connected to the woman in Darkling Manor. Angie—that was her name—full of confidence and contempt for her partner. Melissa had fished only fragments from Angie’s mind before the half-thing had chased them off, but here, waiting for Rex, the long benches of the bleachers triggered a fleeting image. It floated before her eyes now: the construction in the desert, a road stretching out into the salt flats until it simply… ended.