Melissa nodded slowly, remembering the drawings all over Cassie’s walls. She hadn’t thought to check for that. “The little sneak. Okay, let’s go.”

“No. Just me. I remember the way.”

Melissa frowned. “Listen, I know you don’t like me, but I can—”

“It’s not that.” Jessica glanced at the row of houses by the railroad; more of them had been swallowed by the expanding rip. “They need you here.”

“But what am I supposed to do without you?”

“Light the fireworks when the darklings come. There are other people in Jenks who need protection. Listen, Melissa, I know I’m being selfish. I shouldn’t only be thinking about my sister. So you stay here.”

“But I can’t even… Oh, right.”

Jessica had taken out a lighter and thrust it into one of the hurricane lamps. She adjusted the wick until it was burning bright, then handed Melissa a sparkler.

“Let’s just make sure this really works,” she said.

Melissa nodded and thrust the sparkler into the flame of the lamp. It burst to life, shooting out a blinding shower.

“Damn, that’s bright!” Melissa said, dropping it to the wet gravel and stamping on it until it sputtered out. A swarm of spots remained brutally burned into her vision, but she found herself smiling.

Maybe Samhain really was a holiday if Melissa was going to do some flame-bringing of her own. “Okay, get moving! I’ll be fine here.”

Jessica nodded, cramming highway flares into her jacket pocket. She skidded down the embankment and thrashed her way into the trees. Melissa closed her eyes, following in her mind as Jessica found the path that Cassie, and then Rex, had taken three weeks before.

She let her mind drift back to the cave. Cassie was getting nervous now, and Beth was a basket case. Their flashlights had extinguished when the blue time had fallen, and though most slithers had left this area permanently after the flame-bringer’s last visit, Cassie still imagined she heard snakes in the darkness. They were making their way slowly out of the cave.

Which was a bad idea. There were young darklings not too far away, probing the edges of the rip, wondering if they could take a few quick prey before their elders arrived in force. Melissa just hoped that the scent of the flame-bringer would keep any midnight creatures away from Cassie and Beth.

She turned her focus back toward the city, where Rex’s mind still tugged at her. He was growing more anxious as the rip built up speed, heading toward him down the Bixby-bound railroad line. It was moving at running speed now.

Then it became a little clearer: he needed help to get there before the rip arrived.

Don’t worry, Loverboy, she called. Jonathan’s coming.

Opening her eyes, Melissa looked down at the trailer houses along the railroad right-of-way. Someone had wandered out of the house next to Cassie’s, an old man wearing only a T-shirt and undershorts. He was looking around wide-eyed at the blue-red world, tasting of fear and wonderment.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” she murmured.

Then she twitched, a taste reaching her from the deep desert again.

They were coming… daring to issue from the mountains now. They flew slower than their offspring, their muscles creaking with age, with millennia of disuse. But their ancient hunger drew them toward Bixby, with its hated spires of metal and glass.

Finally we hunt again.

Melissa shivered, then something reached her from in the middle distance—a human mind awakening in the desert, at the farthest end of the rip from Bixby. Someone was camping out there, she realized with horror, out with the spiders and the rattlesnakes. And tonight with much worse things…

They were already waiting for him, a trio of young darklings.

Melissa felt it all, the tastes surging into her mouth like stomach acid. They tore into his tent the moment the rip arrived, only seconds after the earth’s shudder had pulled him out of his slumber. He fought back against them, swinging a flashlight whose stainless steel case brought a howl of pain from the youngest darkling. But it wouldn’t light, and it had no thirteen-letter name, and soon their claws had cut across his face, then his chest, then finally found his throat.

And then the darklings were eating, slaking their thirst with the man’s still-warm juices, reveling in his last gasps, fighting over scraps…

Melissa felt bile rising in her throat, and her brain spun with the darklings’ killing frenzy. She struck her own head with her hands, trying to drive the images out, and stumbled half blind across the tracks, dizzy and close to vomiting, her mind caught in the whirlwind of hunger and death.

Then pain shot through her outstretched hand, a sharp sensation of burning, and she heard glass breaking.

She wrenched her eyes open, tried to tear her mind back into her own body.

Fire was everywhere, its white light blinding in the secret hour. She’d overturned the hurricane lamp, and it had shattered, spilling its oil across the fireworks. Through the dazzling flames Melissa saw fuses beginning to sparkle.

It was too soon; the darklings weren’t here yet. She had to put the fire out before the rockets and flares and sparklers began to explode, wasting all their ammunition.

Melissa threw herself down on the gravel, rolling across the flaming oil, trying to stifle the flames. Her long black dress was still soaked, wet from trudging through the falling rain from Jonathan’s car. Waterlogged enough to protect her body. But her hands burned, and she inhaled the bitter smell of her own hair igniting, its damp, sizzling strands shooting across the corners of her vision. A rocket shot into space beside her, climbing until the upward edge of the rip silenced it.

Melissa rolled back and forth, spreading out her dress as far as she could. She smelled its singed cotton, felt the muffled hiss of a bottle rocket trapped under her, its detonation like a quick jab to her ribs.

When she opened her eyes a moment later, they stung with smoke, but she saw that the fire was mostly smothered. The last flaming tendrils of oil spread across the wet gravel, sputtering out.

Melissa sighed with relief. Her hands and face were blistered, her hair felt like a total disaster, and she smelled like a wet dog that had been set on fire. But she’d saved the cache of fireworks. Jenks wouldn’t die because of her mistake.

A second later she frowned, realizing her new problem.

The hurricane lamp was destroyed, her only fire extinguished, and Jessica was off chasing her little sister. Until the flame-bringer returned, Melissa was defenseless.

She sent out her mind and soon found a coppery taste on the midnight landscape—the familiar, metallic flavor of flame-bringer. Jessica was still moving, thrashing through the rain-heavy trees on her way to the cave. She hadn’t reached her little sister yet.

Off to the east Jonathan was just now closing in on Rex, climbing toward the last-stand building in leaps and bounds.

And from the deep desert darklings were coming, old ones.

Lots of them.

“Come on, Jessica and Jonathan,” Melissa said, rising to her feet. “Hurry the hell up!”