Burning Midnight (21 page)

Sully didn't answer.

“Please, Sully. We have to do this.”

“You mean
you
have to do this.”

They faced each other, silent. Sully had said everything he wanted to say. And so, evidently, had Hunter.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I hope you can forgive me for this.”

Hunter turned and went back into Holliday's office.

“Excuse me, Mr. Sullivan.” Cosette whisked past him carrying the Midnight Blues, one in each hand. She disappeared into Holliday's office as well.

Sully headed outside.

Dom and Mandy were on Fifth Avenue, waiting in the SUV. When they spotted Sully, they jumped out.

“What happened?” Dom asked.

“They made a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

Sully had trouble looking Dom in the eye. He didn't want to tell them.

“What kind of deal?” Dom repeated.

“She agreed to hunt for Holliday exclusively. For five years.”

They gaped at Sully, dumbfounded.

“I tried to stop her.”

“Sully.”
It was Hunter, running toward them. She was carrying both Midnight Blues.

People on the street immediately began to notice the Midnight Blues in Hunter's hands, or maybe it was Hunter herself who had them staring.

Sully turned his back on her, but Hunter came around and forced him to look at her.

“I don't blame you if you hate me. You're right—I've been a selfish asshole. You've been nothing but good to me, and I took advantage. But can't you see I'm not doing this for me? It's for the kids out there with no homes to go to, for the moms who've gone crazy. For the old people in hospitals dying of Alzheimer's.” She held out the Midnight Blues, one in each hand. “I don't know if this will help them all. I don't know what it'll do. But can't you see I have to try? I'm giving up everything, giving up my freedom, to do the right thing.”

Dom and Mandy were watching, their faces stony.

Sully believed her, though. It didn't make it okay, but he believed her. Burning the Golds had almost driven her out of her mind, and here she was, ready to burn the Midnight Blues, with no guarantee it wouldn't be even worse for her.

There'd been that day at the flea market, the second or third time he'd seen her, when Sully had thought,
This girl could make a big score one day.
If only he'd known.

She was right: this was bigger than him and his hurt feelings. Things didn't get any bigger than this.

Sully looked into her golden eyes and said, “What's it going to be, Bronx? You going to burn them, or what?”

Hunter looked down at the spheres. “That's the plan. Only my hands are shaking so bad, I'm not sure I can.”

Sully took the Midnight Blues from her. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Dom glowering, but Dom didn't try to stop him, even though Sully was about to burn a hundred million dollars' worth of marbles. Maybe Dom saw it as well: they'd gone too far to turn back now.

What would the world be like in a few seconds? Sully wondered.

Different. That much was certain.

He lifted the Midnight Blues and touched them to Hunter's temples.

They looked around.

When the second wave had come, at least one or two spheres had been visible just about anywhere you happened to be, but this time nothing had changed that Sully could see.

The Midnight Blues began to fade, becoming glassy, chalk-colored.

“So where are they?” Dom asked.

In the distance, someone screamed.

Another scream, closer. Higher pitched.

A moon rose silently over the buildings. It was Forest Green, and blotted out half the sky.

“Oh, my God,” Hunter cried. “There it is.”

When Hunter had said the spheres would be bigger, Sully had expected them to be the size of bowling balls. This was a small moon, soaring just over the rooftops.

As it passed out of sight, Sully spotted another—a Lemon Yellow, higher up, like a balloon carried on the wind. His heart was tripping wildly. Did people realize what they were? Were they making the connection?

“What is
that
?” Dom asked, pointing down Fifth Avenue.

A few blocks away, in the direction of the Empire State Building, something was sliding along the ground. It was ink black and eel-like, with dozens of yellow-tipped tentacles jutting from what must have been its head.

“What
is
it?” Sully asked Hunter.

She squinted, frowning. “I don't know. Neither does the Gold.”

The thing had no eyes or nose that Sully could see, nothing like a face, but it looked alive.

People were running from it, wide-eyed and screaming.

“There's another!” someone shouted.

It slid around the corner half a block away, sideswiped a pickup truck, and plowed into the back of a double-parked car before moving around the vehicle. It was huge—like a giant, bloated eel—and was covered in oily spines that rippled in the breeze. The tips of this one's tentacles were pink instead of yellow. It moved quickly, eagerly, winding this way and that as if searching for something, yet it was oddly clumsy as it bumped its way along.

A young woman came bolting around the same corner. She jolted to a stop when she saw the thing, then turned to flee back the way she'd come.

The creature was lightning fast. A tentacle snapped out, wrapped around the woman's leg, and yanked her to the ground. She shrieked, thrashing, trying to break free as more tentacles snared her waist, then her arm. They dragged her toward the thing.

A mouth opened among the tentacles, strands of saliva stretching and snapping as it opened wider and wider. The woman clawed at the blacktop as first one leg was dragged into the mouth, then the other. She reached down, tried to push against it with her free hand, tried to stop it from pulling her in, but it was too powerful. For an instant nothing was visible but her screaming face; then she was gone. The mouth snapped shut.

As the creature moved away, Sully could hear the woman's muffled screams from inside it.

Hunter clapped her hands over her ears. “Oh, my God.”

Another creature, this one with tentacles bloodred at the tips, was heading toward them. Sully wrapped an arm around Hunter and steered her toward the front doors of Holliday's, with Dom and Mandy on their heels.

“What did I do? God, what did I do?” Hunter said as they merged into a crowd of hundreds who were staring out the store's window. Her eyes were wild with shock.

“Shhh. Keep your voice down,” Mandy said.

“We need to get out of here.” Sully spotted Alex Holliday being whisked toward the back of the building by a bodyguard. Any minute, Holliday was going to snap out of his initial shock and realize Hunter was the key to this, and he'd send people for her. They had to get out of there, but they didn't have a vehicle.

Sully was still clutching the spent Midnight Blues. He dropped them and tried to call Mom, but reached a recording saying all circuits were busy. Everyone in the city was trying to call someone.

Or was it everyone in the world?

The roar of jet engines rose outside. The people closest to the window looked up. Sully and his friends drew closer so they could see.

Three fighter jets in formation flew right at an Aquamarine moon. They fired missiles that left contrails, and the jets pulled off sharply as the missiles struck the moon with a cracking, booming explosion that reached Sully's ears a half second after he saw the flash.

When the smoke cleared, the moon looked no different. It wasn't even singed.

Sully yelped as one of the creatures slammed into the window, tentacles splaying across the glass. It turned in a wide arc, pushing a car out of its way and bending a lamppost before finding a path between them. It was fast and powerful, but clumsy as hell.

It circled back around as the crowd surged away from the window. People screamed, panicking. Someone stepped on Sully's foot, stumbled, and fell against him, bringing them both to the floor. Boots and sneakers landed around his face as people rushed past. A foot landed on his fingers, and lancing pain shot through them.

“Sully?” Hunter shouted, trying to reach him.

The man on top of him managed to roll off and get to his feet as the crowd fled deeper into the store.

Hunter grabbed Sully's arm and helped him up. His fingers were throbbing, already swelling.

He spotted Dom pushing against the surging crowd. Dom shouted, “We gotta get out of here!”

Sully tried to think. They needed a plan; they couldn't just run blindly from these things until they were exhausted.

The storefront window broke with a crash. The creature burst into the store and came right at them.

Hunter yanked Sully's hand, pulling him toward the long service counter. Sully sprinted after her; they dove over the counter and landed on the floor. An instant later, Dom and Mandy appeared, farther down the counter. The creature would be too big to reach them in such a narrow space, but its tentacles could. They needed to find better cover.

When the creature didn't immediately appear above them, Sully ventured a peek over the counter.

It was gone. It had moved on.

Deeper inside the building, someone screamed.

“Why didn't it come after us?” Sully asked. It seemed important to understand, if they were going to survive.

“We're not Lemon Yellow,” Hunter said under her breath.

“What?”

“That's what the Gold thinks. The creature's tips were Lemon Yellow, so it's attracted to Lemon Yellow.”

Sully gaped at her. He had no idea what she was talking about. The thing wasn't going after Lemon Yellows, it was going after
people….

Then it registered. “You're saying they sense the spheres that people burned?”

Hunter swallowed, nodded. “It's all about colors to them. Remember how I see them? The parents—the big marbles in the sky—they're like that. They can't see or hear or smell, so we're invisible without the colors. These things work the same way. That's why they're so clumsy: all they sense is the colors—the marbles people have burned.”

What the Gold was saying lined up with what Sully had seen of the creatures—they were running into things as if blind and deaf, but went after people as if they knew right where they were. Before Christmas, Sully hadn't burned a single set of spheres. Neither had Hunter. Now, if the Gold was right, Sully could be eaten by creatures that had tentacles tipped with Mustard, Cream, Aquamarine, Chocolate, Periwinkle, Turquoise, Olive, or Seafoam Green.

“Does the thing inside you know how to make this stop?” Mandy asked.

Hunter shook her head. “It doesn't understand what's going on. They're just children. They—” Her eyes widened as she stared at something outside.

It was a minivan chased by a creature with Army Green tentacles. The minivan flew around the corner and slammed into the back of a UPS truck parked in the middle of the road. The front of the van crumpled.

The creature paused at the driver's-side door of the van, then moved on.

“We have to get out of here,” Dom repeated.

Sully eyed the UPS truck that the minivan had crashed into. When the driver took off, would he have bothered to take the keys?

No way.

In fact, exhaust was spewing from the tailpipe. The truck was still running.

Sully pointed out the truck to the others. They looked up and down Fifth Avenue: two creatures were in sight, both a few blocks away. One was Vermillion, so theoretically they had nothing to worry about. The other was Turquoise, which they'd all burned except Mandy.

“Let's go. Fast as we can,” Sully said.

They ran. All of them but Mandy had also burned Seafoam Greens in the past week, so they were fast. Not as fast as one of the creatures, if that was what it came down to, but fast.

Sully jumped into the driver's seat, Hunter the passenger's. As soon as Dom jumped in behind Mandy, Sully threw the truck into drive and gunned it, heading for the West Side Highway.

“Sully, I'm so sorry,” Hunter said. “I was so sure.” She covered her eyes. “They're the only thing I ever believed in. I'm so stupid. I am so stupid.”

“Don't.”

He checked a passing street sign, saw they were on Fifty-First Street. The on-ramp to the West Side was on Fifty-Seventh.

Barely slowing, Sully hung a right and headed uptown, trying not to look at what was happening outside the windows.

“Look out!”
Mandy screamed.

Sully swerved, just missing a gray-haired man running across the street. A Forest Green creature was closing on him.

On the next block, a trio of cops was hammering one of the creatures with automatic rifle fire. It wasn't bleeding, but it jerked and twisted as hunks of it were shot off by the high-caliber bullets.

As they flew past, Dom turned to keep watching.

“Did they get it?” Sully asked.

“It's in pieces, but it's still moving.”

Sully hung a left onto Fifty-Seventh Street. He stabbed at the power button on the radio. A newscaster's voice came on at deafening volume, speaking rapidly, breathlessly.

Hunter turned the volume down.

It was happening everywhere. The newscaster, at least, hadn't connected the attack to the spheres yet.

A creature snaked from behind a parked truck, right into their path. Sully slammed the brakes, instinctively raising one arm to protect his face.

The impact hurled him forward; his chest slammed into the steering wheel, the crown of his head cracked against the windshield. The truck rolled to a stop.

“Sully?” Hunter, who'd slammed into the dashboard, reached for him. “Are you all right?”

Sully took a couple of breaths to clear his head. “Yeah. I think so. Dom? Mandy? You okay?” Mandy's lip was bleeding.

The driver's-side window shattered.