“Rich? The darklings pay well?”
“In a way, yes. The oldest of them know what lies in the desert, the veins of rock, and the ancient hollows of water. Like a metallurge.” She smiled at Dess’s confusion. “A talent you’ve never heard of—there are many others, poor girl. Suffice it to say that the darklings can taste the earth, just as they taste your clever little mind at midnight.” Madeleine narrowed her eyes, and Dess felt a chill pass through her. “So the three were paid. Oil for blood.”
“Oh.” The word oil sent a chill through her. She remembered the name on the letter that Jonathan had found at Darkling Manor. “Were any of those kids called Grayfoot, by any chance?”
“Very good.” Madeleine’s excellent teeth appeared in the dying light of the afternoon. “You may have a chance yet, young lady.”
Dess frowned. “But I thought the darklings hated oil wells.”
“They do. But the darklings also tell the Grayfoots not to drill. They use their human allies to preserve their own places.”
Dess nodded slowly. “And eventually these… allies came and got you.”
“With their hired help. It only took one night, in the wee hours after midnight, and we and our closest daylighter allies were all but finished.” She swept her eyes around the cluttered room. “We were prepared for an attack from darklings, not from men. All this metal… useless.”
“At least you escaped.”
Madeleine nodded. “I had snuck out of my parents’ house that night to play some of those games I mentioned earlier. We came here, knowing this was the safest place in the secret hour, a contortion so deep that the darklings didn’t know of its existence.” She rapped a bony knuckle sharply against the grain of the table. “And still don’t, knock on wood.”
“We? There are more of you?”
Madeleine shook her head slowly. “There were. One left Bixby a few days later at high noon, and we never heard from him again. The others grew old and died, one by one. Here in this house.”
Dess took a deep breath, the musty smell of the room suddenly taking on a disturbing flavor. She had expected to find a mystery here, some strange new terrain of midnight amid the tangled minutes and seconds. But this place held only tragedy, isolation, and lingering death.
Madeleine smiled, her expression reminding Dess of Melissa again. “You did ask, my dear. I can’t be blamed for answering.”
Dess snorted. “Hang on, you called me.” She frowned. “Why did you call me, again?”
“Because I’m tired of hiding.” Madeleine took a sip of her tea. “And I have also become quite sure that without my help, none of you shall survive.”
Constanza Grayfoot led a busy life.
In one afternoon she’d led them to the veterans’ hospital on I-35, on a long visit to the stores of downtown Bixby, and through the tempest of the Tulsa Mall. And now, nine dollars in gas money later, they had wound up where they should have started—down the street from her house, waiting for midnight to fall.
Only one problem: they were practically unarmed. Rex stared out the front windshield at a stunted, gnarled mesquite tree, the most immediate sign of the nearby badlands.
“This is not good.”
“I thought you said the house was clean,” Melissa said.
“It is.” In a few slow drive-bys Rex had determined that Constanza’s house didn’t have a lick of Focus on it. If her family was working with the darklings, they were doing it somewhere else. “But won’t they feel us out here?”
Melissa shrugged. “If they’re looking for us, they will.”
“Yeah, well, I blew all my weapons on Sunday night. This is not a great time for a rumble.”
“We can always do another brilliant improvisation,” she said. “And Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation is in the trunk, as yet untouched by inhuman hands. By the way, I’m still waiting for you to stick it back on my tire. Any day now would be fine.”
“We should wait,” Rex said. “Drive back into town now and come back after we get some more weapons from Dess.”
“From Dess?” Melissa laughed. “Haven’t you noticed? That girl’s too busy with her own projects to make anything for us. She’s about as useful as Jonathan these days.”
Rex shook his head. “Dess’ll be pitching in soon enough. We’re going to need her to find whatever’s out in the desert. Until then, she can play with all the maps she wants.”
“You think Dess can turn the pictures I got from Angie’s mind into coordinates?”
“That might be complicated.” Rex looked at her and frowned. “You might have to…” He didn’t bother to finish. They were miles from the mind noise of central Bixby, it was late at night, and the emotion was strong in him; Rex knew she could read the thought.
She smiled and reached over to touch his arm with a gloved hand.
“Don’t worry, Loverboy. I wouldn’t think of besmirching your honor that way.”
He smiled back at her but felt his face flush. There was no point in denying the stab of jealousy he felt at the thought of Melissa touching Dess, sharing her mind as she’d shared it with him. It had been bad enough that time with Jonathan out in the desert. But there was no choice, Rex reminded himself. If she hadn’t, they’d all have been darkling meat.
Speaking of which… He looked at his watch. Over an hour.
Enough time to get back to home and safety before midnight. “Maybe we should come back with Jessica. We wouldn’t need weapons with her around.”
“Ah, the mighty flame-bringer. Too bad she’s grounded.”
Rex sighed, wondering if any seer in history had ever had to deal with such a motley crew of midnighters.
“Of course,” Melissa continued, “she could have spent the night with Constanza this weekend. Then she’d be here waiting for us, flashlight in hand. Only she’d be way too chicken now. Too bad you and Flyboy had to blab.”
Rex stared at her. “What else were we supposed to do? Just ‘forget’ to tell Jessica about Ernesto Grayfoot? Let her spend the night out here, not knowing the danger?”
“Yeah, you’re right. Jonathan would have told her anyway,” Melissa chuckled. “Plus it’s wrong to keep secrets. And as far as secrets go, you wouldn’t want Jessica to witness any serious mindcasting, would you? She might wonder why her parents let her go to that party last week.”
Rex just kept his mouth shut, not rising to the bait. Melissa had changed so much these past three days. She could almost tolerate school now, had kept her cool even in the Tulsa Mall, and had picked up Constanza’s scent every time they’d lost her on the road. Her mind seemed clearer all the time.
But certain things hadn’t changed. Rex knew firsthand how caustic she was on the inside, still wounded from sixteen years of physical isolation. Not to mention the eight years of loneliness before the two of them had met, a childhood spent fighting off the collective mind storm of humanity all alone. He wondered if Melissa would ever recover from being born the only mindcaster in Bixby.
He looked at his watch. “Well, it’s not that late. We could call her from that Seven-Eleven back on Forty-four and tell her and Jonathan to come here tonight.”
The smile on her face flickered again with amusement. “Requesting help from Flyboy?”
“He saved your life, I seem to remember.”
The smile faded. “Oh, that. My secret shame.” She let out a long sigh. “Fine. Here’s a quarter.”
The kitchen window opened easily, but climbing in turned out to be tricky. Especially while carrying Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation, which Rex had brought along just in case there wasn’t time to make it back to the car. When he blindly planted his foot in a sink full of dirty dishes, the clatter echoed throughout the house.
“Christ, Rex,” Melissa said from behind him. “It’s lucky you’re not a real burglar. You could wake the dead.”
“I’m thinking more haste than stealth, Cowgirl. Taste anything yet?”
She lifted her nose to the air, her eyes catching the rising arc of the moon with a violet flash. “They’re curious, but nothing wicked this way comes. Yet. And Jonathan’s headed toward Jessica’s right on schedule.” She frowned. “That’s funny. I can’t taste Dess anywhere.”
“Maybe she found one of her blind spots,” he said. “Anyway, come on.”
The house was even bigger than it had looked from the outside, the living room long enough to hold a bowling alley. As Melissa stopped to plunk out a few notes on the grand piano in the corner, Rex searched for signs of Focus. But the house was clean on the inside too.
He smiled. Maybe they would get out of here without a rumble.
“Upstairs?” he suggested.
When they found Constanza’s room, Melissa let out a laugh. “This is Jessica’s only friend?” She shook her head. I don’t know why we bother trying to compete.”
Rex had to chuckle. Clothes were scattered everywhere, as if a whirlwind had emptied the two huge closets. One entire wall was covered with mirrors, in front of which a frozen Constanza posed, trying on one of her purchases of the day. The floor was littered with discarded price tags, any one of which represented Rex’s clothing budget for the decade.
“She’s up late,” he said.
“Why sleep when you can look at yourself in the mirror?”
“Just be careful with her.”
Melissa snorted. “I’ll try not to damage the shopping lobe.”
Rex laughed but turned away as her hands reached for the motionless figure. He could do without seeing Melissa’s expression of delight as she entered Constanza's mind. It was different with stiffs, of course, a one-way intervention completely unlike what the two of them shared. Even during daylight hours, if Melissa accidentally touched a normal human it only heightened her usual sensitivity. The only true connection happened between a mindcaster and another midnighter.
Still, he didn’t want to watch.
The upstairs hallway led him to another bedroom, even larger than Constanza’s. Two frozen figures occupied the bed, and Rex retreated from the room after one look at their pale, blank faces.
The last room on the second floor was a study, the desk crowded with papers and books. Rex sat down and began to leaf through them, looking for phone numbers, letters, or anything with the name Ernesto on it. Most of the papers had to do with oil drilling, federal regulations, and financial forecasts, long columns of numbers that possibly even Dess would have found boring.
After a few minutes, however, a bound sheaf caught his eye. The front page read:
Community Impact of
Aerospace Oklahoma Emergency Runway
Bixby Salt Flats
He took a slow breath, recalling the image that Melissa’s touch had left in his mind in the parking lot this afternoon. The long black highway, absolutely straight, stretching out into the glimmering white of the salt flats, ending in the middle of nowhere.
“A road in the desert…” Rex murmured. He remembered seeing an op-ed piece in the Bixby Register over the weekend, someone complaining about a new runway being built outside of town.
Of course. The groupies weren’t building this thing; they were trying to stop it from being built. Darklings hated human intrusions into the desert; highways, pipelines, and oil derricks forced them even farther out into the badlands. And anything built by Aerospace Oklahoma would bring advanced metals and fancy machines along with it—just the sort of new technologies that had chased the darklings into the secret hour to begin with.
Rex opened the folder and skimmed the report. It argued that the runway was actually being built to allow Aerospace Oklahoma to test experimental aircraft, huge planes whose thundering booms would wake up everyone in town in the middle of the night.
He raised an eyebrow. Rex doubted that anyone would ever want to land a plane near Bixby unless it really was an emergency.
He remembered the stolen thoughts that Melissa had shared with him: in Angie’s mind, the road in the desert and the halfling were strongly associated. But what could a runway have to do with a half-midnighter, half-darkling creature? They had to find Angie again or someone else who knew.
Rex searched the report, but the name of its author was nowhere to be found. He delved deeper into the desk, opening drawers and searching pigeonholes, no longer trying to conceal the fact that it had been rifled. There had to be more here, a list of names related to the report or some indication of a sponsoring organization, anything that would show who else was involved with the darkling groupies. But other than the one folder, he found only oil business documents, a few personal letters, a massive credit card bill, and a party invitation. Nothing more about an emergency runway, and nothing that mentioned Ernesto Grayfoot. There were maps and geological data that Dess might be able to make sense of, but he couldn’t tell what was important.
Finally Rex sighed and let the papers drop from his hands. He couldn’t make much headway through the mass of paper in what was left of the secret hour, not without help. But maybe knowing about the emergency runway would help focus Melissa’s casting. Constanza’s parents must have something useful in their heads.
Rex stood, clutching the folder in one hand, and turned toward the door.
Melissa was standing there, her face grim.
“What is it?” he asked. “Does Constanza know something?”
“Not a clue about darklings or anyone called Angie. But I found Ernesto Grayfoot in there. They’re cousins, I think.”
“Okay, that’s a start. I want you to…” His voice faded into silence. Melissa had closed her eyes, swaying on her feet. “What’s up?”
Her eyes opened slowly. “They’re coming, Rex.”
Fear clutched his stomach, like the time his father had pointed a loaded gun at him, dead drunk. “The halfling?”
“Not the halfling, nothing that exotic. Just three old darklings… hungry ones.”
He looked at his watch: it was twenty-five minutes into the secret hour. “Where the hell are Jonathan and Jessica?”
Melissa cocked her head, searching the psychic web of the secret hour for the familiar taste of their minds. “Miles from here. Over by Aerospace Oklahoma.”
“Headed this way?”
“No. Just sitting there. They’re… confused.” She opened her eyes. “I thought you said you talked to her.”
“I said I left a message. She wouldn’t let me talk to Jessica.”
“You left a message?
Who
wouldn’t let you talk to Jessica?”
“The girl who answered the phone. But she said she’d tell Jessica right away. I think it was her little sister.”