Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

Then one struck Jessica’s right shoulder, streaking in from below and sending an icy bolt of pain through her arm. She twisted the flashlight around, igniting burning slithers in all directions.

But there were so many of them, and she didn’t have another flare.

“Stop here!” Jessica cried as they landed, and Jonathan stumbled blindly to a halt. “There are too many!”

A shape loomed up before her, and Jessica reflexively brought her hand up to protect her face. The slither bounced from her wrist with a screech, leaving the charms on Acariciandote glowing. Through the darkness she saw sleek forms bounding across the desert, hunting cats carried toward them in thirty-foot strides.

She could burn them all one by one, Jessica knew, but in the meantime the swarming slithers would cut her to pieces. The darklings, however cautious and fearful after their long lives, were willing to sacrifice themselves to save their new halfling.

And kill Jessica Day in the bargain.

“What do I do?” she murmured.

“I’ve got you,” Jonathan said. Eyes squeezed shut against her darting white light, he wrapped himself around Jessica, protecting her back. “Just keep fighting.”

She felt his body jerk as a slither hit him from behind.

“Jonathan!”

He groaned. “Just fight!”

There wasn’t time to argue. She turned Unanticipated Illuminations on the nearest darkling, which stumbled and howled as flame skated across its fur. She swept the light across a flock of slithers to reach another great cat. The beast leapt sideways, but she followed it with a flick of her wrist until it was reduced to a scattering of bright motes tumbling across the salt.

Jonathan flinched again as something struck him, pulling her off balance as he swung Perambulation blindly. Jessica clenched her teeth and ignored his cries of pain, aiming her flashlight at another panther, whose purple eyes flashed, then boiled from its head. The thing screamed, launching itself up into the air, wings bursting into flame even as they sprouted from its back.

It crashed to the ground close enough to shake the desert under her feet, thrashing up a cloud that rolled across them, filling Jessica’s eyes with stinging salt.

Another slither flared behind her as Jonathan fended it off with his shield.

A whistling sound came from overhead, a huge darkling plummeting through the air. But Illumination’s beam transformed it into a bright, shrieking meteor tumbling to the ground. It was headed right toward them, a flaming pin-wheel of claws and teeth and wings. Jessica struggled, trying to move out of its path, but Jonathan was wrapped around her, still blinded by the white light.

“Jonathan! Incoming!”

He grunted and dragged her backward while Jessica kept the light focused on the beast. The creature burned away as it fell and crumbled when it struck the earth before them, scattering glowing embers around their feet, like the remains of a dying campfire kicked across the desert floor.

Howls came from all around them then, awful sounds of defeat and terror.

Jessica cast around for another black shape in the air or on the ground, but her beam found nothing but a few stray slithers. The other darklings must have given up, their age-old fearfulness finally driving them back into the night. In the distance she could just make out the tattered remnants of the swarm fleeing across the flats.

“I think that’s it,” she said in the sudden silence.

Jonathan’s arms slipped from around her, and he fell to his hands and knees.

Jessica whirled around. His sweat-streaked face was twisted with pain. Jonathan!”

“I’ll live,” he panted. “Go get Rex.”

He raised his head and squinted across the desert, pointing to the crumpled, smoldering heap where the halfling had fallen.

Jessica bit her lip, scanned the sky again. Nothing.

“Okay. Stay here.”

She fell into a dead run across the salt, playing the flashlight’s beam across Rex as she drew closer. The remains of his darkling body burned away in great gouts of white fire, the wings disappearing into sheets of flame, the outer layer of skin blasted from him like dirt under a fire hose.

When it was done, she turned the flashlight off and ran to where he lay crumpled on the salt.

“Rex!”

He looked up at her with wild eyes, hissing at her through clenched teeth.

“Rex, are you…?”

A shudder passed through his body. He looked down in amazement at his arms, pale and bare. His hair was half burned away, but his skin looked unhurt, as if Unanticipated Illuminations’s white fire had stopped at the limit of his humanity.

“Rex?”

“Did you see her?” he croaked. “The other one?”

“Anathea? Yeah, she’s back there.”

“Take me to her.”

Jonathan ran up, limping horribly. “Are you sure you can…?”

Rex rose, not a stitch of clothing on his body, and said, “Quickly. She’s dying.”

Freedom was killing her, she knew.

She’d thought of nothing else all this time, nothing but getting out of darkling flesh, back to Bixby, to Ma and Pa. In her tattered dreams Billy Clintock always came flying across the desert to save her, clinging to her as the sun rose up over the desert and set her free.

But the reality had turned out to be a grim one. She had grown too weak inside that other body. They hadn’t left enough of her to survive without her other half.

Still, it was good to be herself again. Human, more or less.

Anathea curled up on the salt, hoping she’d make it to sunrise or at least until the dark moon set.

When they came back, as the young acrobat had promised, there were three of them.

They landed hard, the other seer stumbling. He was naked until he put on his long coat that had been discarded on the salt, but the darkling flesh had been stripped away from him somehow.

Anathea found herself both angry and glad that they’d saved him, as no one had ever saved her.

The redheaded girl had said she’d brought her own sun Anathea wondered again at the strange, intense Focus that clung to her. She carried some sort of metal shaft in her hand, a weapon that Anathea had watched cut through a whole swarm to rescue their friend. And her eyes were wrong.

What talent was she? And why didn’t Anathea know any of them? Had it been that long?

“You’re Anathea?” the other seer asked her.

“Yes,” she said softly. Her voice had grown weak after all that time inside the darkling.

“What year is it?” he asked.

She frowned.

“What year do you remember, I mean?”

She hadn’t thought of years and months for so long… Darkling reckoning in twelves and gross counts seemed more natural to her now. “Nineteen and fifty-two?”

He nodded, as if glad for the information. She let her eyes drift closed.

“Do you know what happened?” he said. “To the rest of your people, the midnighters of your time?”

“My time?” She shivered, remembering now. There had been orders given by her own hands long ago, arranged out on the spelling blocks for villainous daylighters to read. But that had been so long ago, too long to recollect. She shuddered. “Terrible things. But it wasn’t my fault. She gave up the secret. Not me.”

“The secret?”

“No one was supposed to tell.” She shook her head. “That’s what started it all, that Madeleine Hayes telling secrets. Those Grayfoot boys knew what they were doing when they brought me out here…”

Anathea let herself sink back to the ground. Thinking about things that had happened before the transformation hurt her head. Maybe she wasn’t so human anymore after all. And talking stole her paltry breath. She felt herself slipping away.