Then Rex felt a flavor in his mind, not Melissa’s familiar taste—but something ancient and arid, like dust on his tongue, hardly words at all. Join us.

He swallowed, his throat parched, staring back at the darkling.

We will hunt again soon.

Rex tried to hiss again, to ward off the murmurings inside his head.

Then he felt a rush of fear from the beast, its cold heart suddenly pounding, driving its bloated body like a lash. The darkling turned away and twisted quickly into a new shape, growing thin and long and sprouting wings. Then with one last hiss of its own, it leapt into the air, a host of slithers whirling around it. A great dark cloud of them gathered as the darkling disappeared into the sky, the local burrows emptying, running for fear of the flame-bringer.

As the creature left his sight, a last thought trailed from it…

Winter is coming, halfling. Join.

Rex fell onto one knee, exhausted and shaking. His head was throbbing, one half of his mind warring against the other. The world around him seemed to flex and bend, his seer’s Focus overwhelmed by the warped vision of a darkling.

He’d actually heard the thing in his mind—not just caught fleeting tastes and emotions like Melissa casting across the desert. He could talk to them now.

“You scared it.”

The small voice sucked him back into reality and the cool light of the blue time, and Rex whirled around to face its source. Cassie clutched the hunting knife with both hands, staring back at him, her eyes wide with amazement. The patterns woven onto the knife stung his eyes.

“How did you do that?” she asked. “It was so big.”

Speechless, Rex found himself watching Cassie’s heartbeat pulsing in her throat, the blood close to the surface. The awe on her face was like the hopeless gaze of paralyzed prey, caught and cornered by its pursuers. Helplessly he felt the hunger rising inside him.

The other darkling had left this prey for him, small and alone.

Join us, Rex heard the beast’s words echo in his mind, and realized that he could end the awful struggle within himself now, with just one easy kill.

8

12:00 A.M.

NIGHTMARE INTERRUPTED

“There they go,” Jessica said.

A cloud of slithers was swirling up from the dense trees in the distance, like a flock of birds sent into flight by a gunshot. She and Jonathan were at the top of their arc, the straight line of the railroad track below them leading off toward the deep desert.

“Never seen that many before,” Jonathan said. “Not since…” His voice trailed off.

Jessica saw that the swarm had split, half of them wheeling around, heading toward her and Jonathan.

“What are they up to?” she said. The darklings had mostly steered clear of Jessica since she’d discovered her talent. But this flock of slithers almost looked intent on attacking. The creatures were spreading out, flying low, rushing toward them like oil spreading across the treetops.

“Not sure.” Jonathan squeezed her hand. “And I think we’re lost. Hold up a second.”

They were descending into a small clearing near the railroad tracks. She bent her knees on landing, the soft grass absorbing their momentum.

“Which way?” she asked. From the ground the trees looked the same in every direction.

Jonathan shook his head. “Don’t know. And we’re taking way too long.”

The trip from the car had eaten up precious minutes, but at least they’d been moving fast, bounding straight down a dirt road, then through a neighborhood of shabby houses set on large, junk-strewn lots. At the rendezvous point Melissa had pointed in the direction Rex had wandered off, saying he was only half a mile away. But the dense brush had forced them to take small jumps from clearing to clearing, weaving their way toward him. This was the worst kind of terrain to fly across; mesquite trees were dangerous, with their razor-sharp thorns.

After all this aimless bouncing around, Jessica figured that the other two were probably there already, charging straight through the trees under Melissa’s guidance. She just hoped they had enough Dess-made weapons to protect Rex and the lost girl—and themselves—until she and Jonathan finally managed to discover a flight path.

“I think it’s that way,” Jonathan said. “But what were those—?”

Suddenly a wave of silent shapes surged through the trees. The slithers’ wings were furled into their snakelike bodies, like black arrows launched by invisible archers. Jessica’s arms shot up just in time to ward off one flying toward her face. Acariciandote exploded with blue sparks, its charms glowing white-hot, but the icy needles of a slither bite shot all the way up into her shoulder.

“Jess!” Jonathan pulled her to himself, shielding her with his body. She heard the thunk of a slither plowing into his back, and he let out a grunt of pain.

With her good hand Jessica pulled Disintegrator from her pocket and turned it on, the beam of white light cutting through the blue time, turning a few of the darting shapes into flaming streaks of red fire.

She played her flashlight through the trees in all directions, the familiar glow of power moving through her. But the beam connected with nothing. The swarm had passed through the clearing in seconds flat.

Jonathan pulled away, groaning and stretching to reach the middle of his back. “Ow! Right on my spine! Little creeps.”

“What was that all about?” Jessica cried, flicking off the flashlight.

Jonathan opened his eyes, blinking away the white light. “Who knows? Maybe they didn’t realize it was you…. Down!” He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her to the ground.

Jessica heard the whistle of more slithers passing just overhead; they’d shot from the trees again, coming from a new direction, fearless of her flame-bringer’s power. She turned Disintegrator on and waved it randomly, missing completely as the last slithers disappeared into the trees.

“We need to jump!” Jonathan cried, his eyes shut tight against the white light. “They’re using the trees for cover!”

He pulled her up from the ground by her numbed hand, jumping straight up into the sky. They spun slowly around each other, their flight unbalanced from the uncoordinated jump.

Nothing was in the air with them, but Jessica saw another flight of slithers slicing from the trees and through the spot where they had stood a moment before. She angled Disintegrator’s beam downward, and soon the clearing floor was dotted with screaming, burning bodies.

“What are they doing? Don’t they know I’ll just kill them?”

“I think they’re trying to delay us.”

As they reached the peak of the jump, Jessica whipped the flashlight around, but nothing flew nearby. In the distance, though, the rest of the slither cloud had gathered itself around a rising black nucleus, a single darkling on the wing.

“That’s not good,” she said. The rescue plan had assumed it would take a while for anything big to reach Jenks from the deep desert. But apparently a darkling had come early, while she, the flame-bringer, had been late.

“Can I open my eyes?” Jonathan said as they began to descend.

She swept the flashlight across the trees below them one more time, but nothing sparked to life, and she flicked it off. “Sure.”

As they began to descend, Jonathan swept his gaze across the horizon swiftly, then pointed with his free hand. “That’s it over there.”

Among the low, gnarly mesquite trees a spike of rock thrust into the air like a rude finger. It was in the general direction Melissa had indicated, and she’d said that Rex had found the lost girl in some sort of cave.

“Come on. Let’s try to make it in one jump,” Jonathan said. “If they’re risking white light to slow us down, we should probably get there fast.”