Blue Noon

7

11:53 P.M.

PREY

Melissa's eyes rolled back in her head, her nose wrinkling. Rex saw a shudder pass through her body from toes to fingertips.

"What, did they stop already?" Rex asked.

She shook her head. "No, Flyboy's still got his pedal all the way down. They'll get here in time, more or less. But the flame-bringer's not in a very good mood."

Dess glanced up from her GPS device and snorted. Rex shook his head. Great time for a lovers' quarrel.

He swept his eyes across the railroad tracks again. This place was wrapped in Focus, inhuman marks corrupting every piece of gravel in the rail bed, every blade of grass shooting up through the wooden cross-ties. Darklings and slithers had danced here. Even the steel spikes in the iron rails bore the traces of their claws and snouts and slithering bellies.

All this Focus couldn't have been laid down in twenty-one minutes. They must have come here before the eclipse.

Of course, Rex thought, there were always a few midnight places on the outskirts of town. Perhaps it was only a coincidence that this weak spot had been visited before.

He knelt to take a closer look at a slitherprint, a sinuous line that wound down the railroad tracks as far as he could see. It didn't look especially fresh, not like a trail left only fifteen hours ago.

But Rex frowned; his new hunter's nerves were twitching with all the metal around him. Why would a slither travel down a railroad line that reeked of iron rails, steel bolts, and buried telegraph lines? Most darkling places on the city's edges were open fields and empty back lots, places where little patches of the wild still clung - stands of native plants, snake holes, or small creeks not yet erased by buildings and concrete. But this iron path was an artery of the rail system, an old and powerful symbol of human cleverness and dominance. Only a hundred years ago it had represented the highest technology that humanity possessed, yet the darklings had embraced this spot. They must have come here with a purpose.

Rex saw how far the Focus stretched up and down the track, how it trailed off into the brush and extended even to the ramshackle houses backed up against the right-of-way. He wondered how far into the mesquite trees it went. The small town of Jenks was close to the Arkansas River, and the scrub in these parts was impenetrably dense, hiding much of the landscape from his new predator's eyes.

But old darklings had been here, of that Rex was sure. He could see deep, clawed footprints in the soil and a broad tree branch that had almost cracked under the weight of something huge and winged. There were slither burrows scattered throughout the underbrush; darklings young and old hid from the sun out in the deep desert caves, but some of their little minions nested closer to town, buried under the earth.

It took time to layer a place with this much Focus, this many signs. They must have begun months ago, maybe a lot longer than that. Melissa and Madeleine had felt their celebrations out in the desert: the darklings had somehow known that the eclipse was coming and exactly where it would happen. Which meant they'd probably also known what Dess had discovered today, that this first tear in the blue time would spread like a rip along the seam of an old T-shirt.

Maybe it had always been their plan that the blue time would one day come apart. But what would happen then?

Suddenly something caught Rex's eye. One of the railroad track cross-ties stood out, a halo of red surrounding it. He looked closer and smelled the inherent strangeness of the spot. The blue time was paper-thin here.

The old wood of the cross-tie was marked with a sliver of Focus, looking out of place here among the stains of darklings. He drew closer and saw in the half-moon shape the distinctive tread of a sneaker.

That was why it looked different - that other kind of Focus clung to it, the kind Rex had only learned to see over the last couple of weeks.

"Prey," he said softly.

"Five minutes," announced Dess, nervously rocking the long piece of steel pipe that rested on her shoulder. "How's the flame-bringer doing?"

"Close," Melissa said. "But they're slowing down. Wimps."

"Not everyone appreciates the subtle pleasures of flying through a windshield, Melissa," Dess said.

"They've got five whole minutes before midnight, and Flyboy's already parking it!"

"How far are they?" Rex interrupted.

"A few miles."

"Not good." He followed the trail of human Focus with his gaze. The glimmering footprints left the rail bed and headed down into the dense undergrowth. "She went this way. On foot, not being dragged."

"Who? Cassie?" Dess asked.

Rex nodded.

"You can see that?"

"I can see the traces of humans now," he said, pointing at the trail. "And these footprints look like they were made in the blue time. Cassie must have left them during the eclipse."

Dess's face twisted into a skeptical expression. Other than Melissa and Madeleine, none of them yet understood how different he had become.

Rex knelt on the tracks and sniffed. He could smell the uncertainty of the lost girl, could see her fear in the tentative distance between the steps. It made his mouth water, his palms sweat. This was a young one, weak and ready to be cut from the herd.

"Get a grip, Rex," Melissa said softly.

He shook the hunting thoughts from his head. "Okay, I'm going to track her. She might still be close by. You guys stay here. But yell out a countdown for the last thirty seconds, Dess." He slid down the loose gravel bank of the rail bed and plunged into the thick bushes.

"Rex!" Dess shouted. "There's only four minutes left! Get back here."

"Quit showing off, Rex," Melissa called. "Once midnight falls and her brain starts up again, I'll find her right away."

Rex glanced back. The two of them were standing inside Polychronious, a large and complex tridecagram that Dess had laid down on a patch of clearing, using a spool of fiberoptic cable stolen from Oklahoma Telecom a few midnights ago. The cable smelled bright and buzzy to Rex, like cleaning detergent fumes going up his nose, and the thirteen-pointed star Dess had woven with it made his head spin. They would be safe from darklings inside it, even if the flame-bringer was a few minutes late.

"Just give me that countdown," he called back.

"Rex!" Dess wailed.

He noticed that she and Melissa were standing as far apart as they could inside the tridecagram, like two rival cats locked in a small room together.

Whatever. They'd live.

Rex pushed his way deeper into the underbrush, fighting the bare, brittle branches of mesquite. He could see in the dark better than ever now, and the spaces between leafless trees and scrub seemed to open up before him. He soon realized that his prey's slender marks of Focus followed a narrow path, probably an old animal trail.

As Cassie's footsteps went deeper into the brush, they began to grow more sure and purposeful, as if after the first few minutes of confusion in the blue time, she'd headed for someplace where she felt safe.

A branch caught Rex, bending taut, then whipping backward, leaving a long rip in his shirt. The girl must have grown up around here to move so easily through this overgrowth. He could tell she was much shorter than him - from her footprints, she had walked almost upright underneath branches that he was forced to crouch beneath.

Her footsteps grew farther apart; moving more swiftly now, as if coaxed forward by some goal. Rex swore - he wasn't going to find the girl before midnight fell. She'd had twenty-one minutes to get wherever she'd disappeared to, and he had only...

"Thirty seconds, Rex!" Dess's voice called through the trees.

He paused. To make it back to safety, he should turn around now and start running. Inside Dess's ring of protection, they could wait for the flame-bringer. In the blue time Melissa would be able to taste the lost girl's thoughts even if she were miles away.

Of course, Cassie couldn't have actually gotten that far in twenty minutes unless the darklings had swooped down and carried her off. And if that had happened, she probably wasn't alive and certainly wouldn't survive the long minutes it would take Jonathan and Jessica to reach her.

Rex sniffed the trail before him. An electric trickle of fear still lingered in the human scent, mixed with excitement and wonder. It made something within him grow hungry. This was the smell of those young, adventurous humans who tended to stray too far from their villages - the call of easy meat.

Part of Rex knew that he should do the sensible thing. He should head back to safety and get everyone organized: keep Dess and Melissa from fighting with each other, tell Jonathan and Jessica what to do when they arrived, maybe fly along with them to the rescue. No one but he could be the leader that the group needed.

But the smell of the lone girl drew him forward, calling his entire body down the narrow path. Cassie Flinders felt so close. His hands tingled with how near she was, and a raw imperative filled him...

Reach her before the others do. She's yours.

Rex took an unsteady step forward. He had to get there first.

"Fifteen!" Dess's distant cry reached him. "Where the hell are you, Rex? Ten. You're-an-idiot-nine, get-back-here-eight, you-dimwit-seven...."

Rex plunged deeper into the undergrowth.

Seconds later the earth shuddered under his feet. Blue light swept through the brush and across the sky, dulling the stars and bringing every branch and blade of grass into sharp relief, his vision suddenly seer-perfect.

He breathed in the hungry essence of the blue time, the mental clarity of midnight.

Ahead of him in the distance Rex's sharp ears caught a small cry of surprise and fear... Cassie waking up in the blue time.

It made him hungrier.

Only a minute after midnight's fall, things were beginning to stir in every direction. Slithers were worming their way up out of the deep burrows that protected them from the sun, signaling one another with their strange, chirping calls. It was like first light on some weird spring morning, the birds waking up and making a ruckus.

There were lots of slithers out here. Suddenly the steel hoops around his boots didn't feel like enough protection. He swept his eyes back and forth nervously across the dense brush, searching for the sharp Focus of their burrows, imagining the icy sting of a slither strike catching him on the leg. Rex had once worked on his grandfather's farm in Texas during harvest season; every step through these burrows reminded him of the anxious moment of lifting a hay bale and not knowing if an angry rattler lay underneath.

Another cry reached his ears, and Rex tore his eyes from the forest floor. Through the trees he saw a wedge of stone jutting up from the earth, cut in two by a narrow fissure. It was a tight fit even for a little kid but enough cover to hide Cassie from the sun.

Why had she gone in there? It seemed like incredibly bad luck to have wandered into a cave hidden from the sun's rays.

Unless she had somehow been coaxed into coming here...

Rex pulled his gloves on. These days the touch of stainless steel made his bare flesh itch during the secret hour, but leather gloves allowed him a solid grip on his new weapon. Dess had decorated the hunting knife's blade with a superfine guitar string wound in patterns that made his eyes burn and water. The knife had the clever human smell of a finely tooled bicycle part - all modern alloys and precise proportions - buzzing with a thousand ingenious angles.

It make his head hurt to look at it, even to think its name, which meant that the weapon could fend off any darkling, at least for the short time it would take for Jessica and Jonathan to get here. The secret hour had begun almost three minutes ago - they had to be on their way.

From just outside the mouth of the fissure, he stared into the gloom. A blue glow emanated from the rocks, revealing layers of slither Focus in the cave, plus one slender trail of human footsteps. The crevice went deeper than he'd thought, the Oklahoma shale crumpled into zigzags by some ancient earthquake.

He paused to listen. The short, raspy breaths of a panicking thirteen-year-old reached his ears.

"Cassie?" he called.

The breathing caught, then a voice answered softly, "Help me."

The girl sounded much younger than thirteen; probably she was frightened out of her wits. "Are you okay?"

"My grandma froze."

"She's better now, Cassie," he said calmly. "But she's worried about you. Are you all right?"

"It hurts."

"What hurts, Cassie?"

"My foot. Where the kitty bit me."

A cat. Rex remembered the slither that Jessica had followed on the first night the darklings had tried to kill her. It had disguised itself as a black cat and scratched on her window, then led her out onto Bixby's empty streets to where a darkling awaited. They must have used the same trick on Cassie Flinders. With the whole world transformed into a frozen, empty place around her, she had innocently followed the only other living creature she could see.

"It's okay, Cassie. My name's Rex. I'm here to take you home."

She didn't answer.

"Cassie, you have to tell me: is there anything else in there? Anything besides the kitty?"

"It went away."

"That's good." The slither must have struck as the eclipse had ended, just before heading back to its burrow. It had hobbled Cassie to make sure she didn't wander out of the cave, out to where the sunlight would free her from the blue time. Cassie had been frozen for the fifteen hours since the eclipse - to her the cat had only run off a few minutes ago.

"But there are snakes in here, Rex," Cassie said. "They're looking at me."

He tried to ignore the fear in her voice, the way it made him react. He could tell from her breathing that she was sick and remembered from the news that she'd been home from school with a head cold. Easy prey.

It was going to be tricky coaxing her out of the cave. In his darkling dreams Rex had seen humans paralyzed by their own fear when cornered.

Standing sideways, he tried to push deeper into the fissure, but after only a few feet, teeth of sharp stone closed on his spine and ribs. "Cassie? Try to come toward me."

"I can't."

"I know your foot hurts, Cassie. But you can still walk."

"No. They won't let me."

Crap, Rex thought. The slithers had her trapped in there. He wondered whether even the beam of Jessica's flashlight could reach back to where Cassie was. He reached out with his hunting knife and struck the stone a glancing blow. A single blue spark flared blindingly, illuminating the jagged walls of the fissure for an instant.

"Did you see that, Cassie?"

"That flash?"

"Yeah. Good girl. I'm not far from you." Rex leaned his weight against the stone and stood on one leg, pulling the metal hoops from his boot. Then he reversed his stance and yanked them off the other. "I'm going to throw some things, Cassie. They're going to scare the snakes. You have to run this way when you see sparks."

"I can't. They're looking at me." Her voice had gone flat, as if hypnotized by the lifeless stare of the slithers.

"They won't bite you if you're fast, okay? I'm going to count to three, then scare them."

"Rex. I can't. My foot."

"Just get ready. One..." He held the hoops almost to his lips and whispered their names - Woolgathering, Inexhaustible, Unquestioning, and Vulnerability - the Aversions sending a shooting migraine through the darkling half of his brain. "Two... three... run!"

He threw the handful of hoops as hard as he could, and they careened deep into the cave, raising up a shower of sparks as they clanged off the walls. The bright, ringing sound of metal striking stone cut painfully into Rex's ears.

"You scared them!" Cassie announced.

"Well, run then, dammit!"

As the echoes of his shout died, Rex heard her sneakers' squeaky footfalls carrying her through the sharp angles of the cave. She came into view a few seconds later, limping and white-faced as she pulled herself down the narrow channel of stone. Rex reached out a gloved hand and pulled her from the crevice after him, out under the rising bulk of the dark moon.

Outside he stumbled to a halt. An army of slithers surrounded them. A host of the creatures covered the ground, and their winged forms filled every tree branch.

"Snakes..." Cassie said softly.

Melissa, Rex thought as hard as he could.

In the depths of his mind he heard the faintest word - Coming - and wondered if that meant Melissa and Dess were coming, or Jessica... or if something else was on its way.

"It's all right," he said, drawing Cassie closer and thrusting the knife out before them.

Then he saw the darkling.

It seemed to uncoil from the ground, its eight legs spreading out from its bulbous center like the blooming of some horrific flower. A tarantula, the desert spider of his nightmares.

Rex wondered where it had come from, whether it had flown here swiftly from the desert or crouched in some rocky warren out of the sun, waiting since the eclipse for this ancient delicacy - a rare meal of human flesh.

"Rex...?" Cassie said softly.

That had been the plan, of course: the slither-cat leading her to this spot, trapping her in the cave until its master arrived at midnight. Next the slithers inside would have driven her into its jaws... if Rex hadn't already coaxed her out himself.

"Go back inside," he whispered.

She only clung to him tighter.

"Go back in the cave, Cassie!" he shouted. "That thing can't fit in there!"

"But the snakes!"

Rex turned to look. The blue-lit depths of the cave were dotted with the eyes of slithers staring back at them.

"Here, take this," he said, pressing the hunting knife into her hand. "They're scared of it, and help is coming."

She held the knife loosely, looking down at it with wide eyes.

"It's name is Animalization," he said. His fists clenched in pain as Dess's pointed little tridecalogism passed his lips. "Keep saying that, and they'll be really scared. Animalization."

"But - "

"Go!" He shoved her into the fissure, hoping she would find the courage to go deep into the cave, far enough to escape the thin, reaching arms of the darkling.

He whirled back around to face the creature, crouching down into a fighting stance. Its eight legs had extended to full length, pressing against the ground to lift the central body mass up into the air. The legs were covered not with hair, but with glistening spurs, like thorns on some vast and hideous rosebush. The entire beast was dripping with a viscous black substance, as if it had been dipped in crude oil.

Rex flexed his empty hands, realizing that he was completely unarmed. He had no knife, no metal on his boots, and yelling thirteen-letter words would hurt him more than it would any darkling.

"Where are you, Jessica?" he whispered, daring a glance at his watch.

His heart sank. Only six minutes of the secret hour had passed.

She wasn't going to make it here in time.

The darkling's two forward legs raised and its body rested on its rear, the posture of a tarantula facing an enemy. Rex could see the fangs in its oily maw, shivering with the creature's hunger.

He remembered being forced to stand still at ten years old as his father's pet tarantulas crawled across his bare flesh. The weird slowness with which they moved, the interlocking motions of their eight legs, the sickening fascination that they compelled.

His father's voice came back to him: Relax, boy! They're not poisonous. They can't hurt you. Be a man!

Hairy spiders had crawled through every one of his childhood nightmares.

Rex waited for the darkling to strike. Its two forward legs made slow circles in the air, like the arms of a dog paddling in water. The sinuous motion threatened to hypnotize him, and he tore his gaze away.

He stared at the ground, his heart pounding, every muscle tensed, ready to fight a hopeless battle. But somehow, Rex realized, something in his reaction was missing. The gnawing fear in his stomach hadn't come yet; the spider didn't terrify him as it should have.

In fact, he couldn't remember having a single dream since the darklings had changed him that had included his father's tarantulas. He and Melissa had killed them after the accident had left the old man helpless, but Rex had always known their ghosts were lurking beneath his house, waiting to wreak revenge.

He looked up at the giant spider again and realized that the cold sweat of those childhood traumas had disappeared. His arachnophobia (his brain twinged at the word's thirteen letters) was gone.

Another moment passed, and still the creature didn't strike.

Rex bared his teeth at the beast, and a sound gurgled up from his throat - the same hiss that had turned Timmy Hudson into a puddle of melted bully.

Of course, the darkling before him wasn't so easily scared. It stood firm on its six hind legs, the dance of its spurs still mesmerizing, its bulk glistening in the dark moon's light. But as the long seconds stretched out, it didn't strike.

Slowly the reason dawned on him. The beast hadn't taken a hunting stance at all - Rex wasn't prey. This wasn't the kill at the end of a chase; it was a ritual between two predators, like a standoff over some carcass. The spider's dance was posturing and bluster, a challenge made, hoping that another hunter would back down. But Rex had gotten here first to claim the kill.

He stood his ground.

Wolves didn't eat other wolves, after all.

For a long minute he faced the creature, letting the motions of the contest move through him. His fingers clenched into rigid claws, slowly cutting the air like a familiar ceremony unfolding. Neither he nor the darkling advanced, held apart by mutual respect and fear.

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.