Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

The knives shivered in the wood, lances of tremulous blue fire jumping between them. The scratching sound of claws traveled slowly down the door, and Rex could hear the harsh panting of a big cat. It had taken a hunting shape.

A carving knife began to wobble, almost slipping from the door, but Rex thrust it back into the wood. Brief contact with the glowing metal scalded his palm.

He brought the hubcap to his lips.

“Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation.”

The metal ignited, coursing with blue fire along its rim, the tiny pictures seeming to dance. The hubcap vibrated in his hand, giving off a buzzing heat that crawled up his arm and into his shoulder. Rex smiled grimly. He had seen what Dess’s really good work could do. So had the darklings.

The panting outside stopped for a moment, a catch in the creature’s breath.

A chuckle escaped Melissa’s lips. “Scaredy-cat.”

A roar answered from outside, a huge howl of pain and anger that made the whole room shudder. But Rex knew from the defeated sound that the darkling had sensed the pulsing weapon in his hand and had decided not to throw away its cold, lingering life.

The stairs creaked again as the darkling descended, the knives fading to a dull, spent gray, and the dread that had hung over the room slowly diminished.

Before the hour ended, Rex took one last look through one of the rips in the clawed and battered pegboard. He saw the halfling leave, making its ungainly way from the balcony of the master bedroom to the roof, then taking to its overburdened wings.

“Ready to run?” Melissa said.

“What?” he asked.

“They’re all leaving. The entourage too.” Melissa smiled. “We’ll have a couple of minutes, but I don’t think our motionless friends are going to like what we did to their house.”

He looked around the room. “Could be you’re right.”

“Damn kids with their senseless vandalism,” she said.

Rex sighed, thinking of the broken window downstairs. “They might have an alarm system, come to think of it.”

Melissa pulled Magnificently Instantaneous Gratification from the door.

“It won’t work any—” he started, but her expression silenced him.

“I also use it for the regular kind of protection, Rex. In case anyone tries to touch me.”

“Oh.” He looked at his watch. Two minutes.

They ran down the stairs. At the front door Melissa gathered herself for one last mindcast, then nodded. “All clear.”

They reached the old Ford as the blue hour ended. Rex had never been so glad to see blackness sweeping across the sky. At the moment normal time reached them, carried on a cold Oklahoma wind, a high-pitched ringing filled the night.

“Damn,” he said. “They did have an alarm.”

Melissa jumped in and started the car, and they pulled away with a screech. Rex stayed quiet as she drove, letting her mindcast for police. A few minutes later she pulled over and turned off the Ford’s headlights, huddling down out of sight.

Rex also slunk down in his seat, catching a glimpse of two private security cars as they zoomed past.

Melissa took his hand, her wool glove warm against his skin. “Get some poison, Rex.”

“Do what?”

“Something that kills fast. Like one of those snakes that stops your heart in twenty seconds.”

Had what she’d seen tonight finally pushed Melissa over the edge? “Melissa, you can’t—”

“Not for me, moron.” She shook her head. “You know the midnighter inside that monster?”

“Yeah?”

“She’s still alive in there, somewhere. I could feel her. They keep her mind alive so they can use the human part of her to think in signs and symbols. But she knows what’s happened to her.”

Rex put his face in his hands. After a few moments he said, “But how would we get the poison to her?”

“Not for her. You.” Melissa turned on the headlights, stared out the front windshield. “She’s sick, probably dying, and soon they’ll decide they need another one and come looking for you.”

He blinked, shook his head. “What…?”

“Think, Rex. They can already fly, they can already mind-cast, and they hate math.” Melissa pulled onto the road. “She’s a seer.”

“Have you heard the excellent rumors?”

Jessica sighed. “Only the one that I crashed and burned on my physics test this morning. Of course, that’s more in the fact than the rumor category.”

Constanza Grayfoot frowned and pressed closer to Jessica’s locker, letting a pack of freshmen past. “Oh, Jess, that’s too bad. Maybe your mom will finally let you bail on some of those advanced classes.”

Jessica lifted the weighty tome that was her trig textbook. “Fat chance.”

“Weren’t you studying with you-know-who?”

“Yeah, I was. Except we kept… getting distracted.”

A radiant smile lit Constanza’s face. “Jess, you wicked girl! That kind of distraction doesn’t sound too bad.”

Jessica returned the smile, but the expression felt shaky. If the interruptions had been what Constanza was thinking, it might have been worth failing a physics test. But spending all last midnight looking for frozen stalkers around her house hadn’t left any time for the good kind of distractions or much studying. Rex and Melissa hadn’t even bothered to show up and help. Maybe Melissa figured a threat from a mere human being wasn’t worth her time.

“Well,” Constanza continued, “perhaps this morning’s rumors will distract you from your physics tragedy. So it turns out that someone’s mother works for the sheriff’s department She’s like a forensic expert, or a police psychic, or something like that. Anyway, there was some kind of demonic vandalism last night out in Las Colonias.”

Jessica shoved her trig book into her backpack, wondering what else she should bring to study period. “Demonic what?”

“Vandalism,” Constanza repeated, then added in a whisper, “but with weirdo rituals. What happened was, this family’s all asleep, and suddenly their burglar alarm goes off—right at the stroke of midnight.”

Jessica’s hand froze, the zipper on her backpack halfway closed. “Midnight?”

“Yeah. Someone broke into their house while they were sleeping—and did all this psycho stuff without waking them up.”

Jessica took a slow, even breath. “And this was last night?”

“Yes, last night,” Constanza insisted. “Pay attention, Jess. I’m getting to the spooky part. So when the burglar alarm goes off, the family wakes up and looks around, but the burglars, or demon worshipers, or whatever are already gone. It’s like they just disappeared.”

Jessica nodded slowly, getting the head-rush feeling she always did when midnight intruded on the daylight world. Constanza was the only real non-midnighter friend she had here in Bixby. Hearing her talk about events that could only have happened in the secret hour made Jessica dizzy.

“So what kind of stuff did they do?” she said.

Constanza looped her arm through Jessica’s and pulled her toward the library. “The weird thing is they didn’t steal anything. Just trashed the house and left all these psycho symbols. Like for one thing, there was this door with twelve knives stuck into it. And blood on one of them.”

“Twelve? Not thirteen?”

Constanza blinked. “Well, that’s what everyone’s saying. Why?”

“Just… you know.” Jessica shrugged, trying to sound nonchalant. “Thirteen sounds much more demonic than twelve.”

“Uh, I guess.” Constanza giggled. “Maybe they were demon worshipers who couldn’t count.”

“I hope not,” Jessica said softly to herself. It seemed pretty obvious where Melissa and Rex had been last night. The scary thing was, she hadn’t seen them at school all morning.