Scott Westerfeld - Blue Noon

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.

“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.