Blue Noon (13 page)

He laughed. “Think you can change my mind?”

“I’d never do that to you, Rex.”

“Do you swear, Cowgirl? No more of that, on me or anyone else, unless I’m there.”

“Absolutely.”

He took her hand, and Melissa let the surety of her promise flow into him. Whatever Rex was turning into, whatever crazy risks he decided to take, she would never twist or change a single thought in his brain…

Not even to save your life.

They crossed the tracks, pausing to look at the rip in the blue time. A red glimmer ran along its boundaries. It was about the size of an eighteen-wheeler now, much bigger than when Cassie had stepped through while her grandmother, only a few yards away, had remained frozen. The leaves from two trees caught within it were drifting down.

Rex stepped into the rip and caught a leaf. He dropped it, and it fell again.

“Feels different in here somehow.” “Is it spreading all the time? Like, right now?” He shook his head. “Only during the eclipse, Dess says. It’s like a fault line shifting during an earthquake.”

She pulled him away. This whole rip business gave her the creeps. The last thing Melissa needed was a bunch of annoying human minds invading midnight. “Come on.”

Cassie Flinders’s house was an old double-wide trailer, its concrete teeth sunk deep into the hard soil, gripping tenaciously against the Oklahoma wind. Halloween decorations were already up on the door—a grinning paper skeleton with swinging joints, orange and black bunting that glowed blue.

Rex stared at the skeleton for a moment.

“Friend of yours?” Melissa asked.

“Don’t think so.” He pushed open the screen door, and its rusty hinges rang out in the blue time. The wooden door inside was unlocked. Rex smiled. “Good country folk.”

They pushed into the blue-lit home, the floorboards creaking as they walked. Melissa wondered if the old wood stayed pressed down until the end of the secret hour, then popped up with a final complaint—letting out a sudden chorus of creaking just after the stroke of midnight. Flyboy was always wondering about stuff like that. If she was ever on normal speaking terms with the rest of them again, she’d have to ask him.

An old woman sat at a kitchen table, a bowl of something glowing an unappetizing blue in front of her. Her eyes were locked on a blank-screened TV. Melissa avoided her and the motionless cloud of smoke that rose from the cigarette clutched in her fingers.

Cassie’s room was in one corner, the door plastered with drawings and more Halloween decorations. Rex pointed at the black cat. “Funny, even after last night she didn’t take that down.”

“Cats.” Melissa snorted. “Smug, self-centered little beasts.” Then she remembered to add, “Except yours, of course.”

“Daguerreotype’s smugness is part of his charm.” He pushed the door open.

The room didn’t reek of thirteen-year-old. No boy band posters, no dolls. The walls were covered with more drawings, crayon landscapes of Jenks, the Bixby skyline, and oil derricks, all drained of their color.

“Not bad,” Rex said. He pointed to a music stand, a clarinet leaning against it. “Creative kid.”

“Good. Nobody believes the artistic ones.”

Cassie was lying on her bed, eyes closed and sheets tangled around her—a bad night of sleep in the making. Melissa wondered if being frozen for fifteen hours had given the girl some sort of jet lag and cracked her knuckles. She could fix that.

Even Rex’s crazy plan to visit the darklings hadn’t taken the edge off her excitement. This was her first serious mindcasting since Madeleine had started tutoring her.

“Featherlight,” she murmured softly.

She rested her fingers lightly on Cassie’s waxy skin, her hands like a pair of pale blue spiders splayed across the girl’s face. Melissa closed her eyes, entering the cool domain of a mind frozen in time.

Low-level nerves were scattered throughout Cassie, lingering shock from her trip into the secret hour. The taste of dread stung Melissa’s lips, anxiety that the black cat would return, terror that the spider thing was still out there in the woods.

The girl had an artist’s eye, Melissa had to admit. The slithers, the old darkling, the midnighters’ faces were all in there, as crisp as if she’d snapped photographs. As she soothed the fears away, Melissa blurred the memories into shadowy figments.

This was so
easy
now, she thought. Not like the clumsy attempts she’d once called mindcasting. Thoughts and memories stood before her like chess pieces awaiting her command.

She remolded the images trapped in Cassie’s mind, erasing the words they’d said in front of her, turning everything into the sort of nonsense mush remembered from a dream. Melissa softened the sense of danger, made it all vague and formless, divorced it from the reality outside the double-wide’s doors.

But she left intact one perfectly shaped bit of terror, a phobia a few yards across and a thousand miles deep…

Stay away from the railroad tracks at midnight. Something nasty
lives under them.

“Done.” Melissa smiled as she withdrew her hands from Cassie’s face. “Now,
that
was some awesome, featherlight mindcasting.”

“That’s it?” Rex asked. “You were so fast. Like thirty seconds.”

Melissa smiled. It had seemed like long minutes. “Bada-bing, bada-boom.”

“Has she talked to anyone? Told anyone what she saw?”

Melissa took a breath, stretching her muscles. “She’s been right here since I put her down, sleeping it off and doodling. Grandma didn’t even let her talk on the phone. Her whole day was bedsores and boredom.”

“But what if she told—”

“Relax, Rex. Even if Cassie made a full report to the National Guard, when she wakes up tomorrow morning, she won’t remember what she was babbling about. This is a done deal.”

“Maybe you should check her grandmother.”

“Rex, it’s not a problem. Trust me. We’ve been doing this for thousands of years.”

His breath caught, and Melissa felt a twinge of jealousy from him; she had reminded him of all the knowledge she’d received from Madeleine. He’d finally gotten over that time when she’d touched Jonathan, and he understood about Dess, but when Melissa and the older mindcaster went up to the attic, he lost all rationality.

Funny, he was the one who knew the history. How mindcasters used to pass on information with a handshake, silently spreading midnighter news and gossip throughout Bixby. Compared to those days, Melissa was hardly some sort of mind slut.

She took a step closer to him. “Come on. Let’s go back to the car. I’ll show you everything.”

“She saw what I almost became last night. Are you sure she—”

“Everything.” She drew him closer, silencing his lips with hers.

“So the
weirdest
thing happened yesterday.”

Jessica nodded. She’d been expecting Constanza Grayfoot to tell her all about it. “Yeah, I heard.”

Constanza came to a sudden halt in the hall, letting lesser mortals flow around them. “You did? From who?”

Jessica shrugged. For once she’d known what everyone would be talking about way ahead of time. “I don’t remember who told me. Wasn’t it on TV last night or something? How that lost kid just turned up in her bed yesterday morning, totally okay?”

“Oh, that.
Ancient
news, Jess. Pay attention here, please. I’m talking about something much weirder and much more likely to affect our lives. Especially my life.”

Jessica blinked. “Okay. What are you talking about?”

“My grandfather called me last night.”

Cold, dry fingers walked down Jessica’s spine. “He did what?”

“Called me, with the most incredible news. Come on, let’s get to study hall. And I hope you don’t have any stupid trig homework today because I’m going to need everyone’s full attention.”

“You’ve got it.”

As they made their way up to the library, Jessica’s heart pounded. Any mention of Constanza’s grandfather definitely got her attention.

Grandpa Grayfoot was like anyone else not born at midnight—frozen during the secret hour. But as a kid he’d been a sort of super-evil version of Beth, spying on everyone and uncovering Bixby’s secrets. He’d figured that the darklings were ghosts, or ancient spirits, or something equally creepy and had tried to communicate with them in secret midnight rituals. Eventually the darklings had answered, exchanging messages with him through a half-human, half-darkling creature—a translator between the two worlds.

Years of doing the darklings’ bidding made his family rich and powerful, but the things that the midnight creatures asked him to do got more and more hideous. Fifty years ago the Grayfoots and their allies had been ordered to wipe out an entire generation of midnighters. They had all but succeeded; only Madeleine remained.

Just two weeks ago the translator who had made the whole thing possible had been close to death. The Grayfoots had tried to kidnap Rex so the darklings could turn him into a replacement, another halfling.

But the other midnighters had rescued Rex, and Anathea—the halfling—had died, destroying the old man’s link to his masters. If he and his pals were still trying to contact the darklings, they were leaving messages that would never be returned.

Jessica followed Constanza into the library, wondering what on earth the old guy was up to now.

“Okay, this is absolutely top secret. I’m not even supposed to be telling you guys, so everyone here must swear never to tell a soul. Well, at least not until this is all final.”

“Until what’s all final?” Liz asked.

“Whatever she’s going to tell us,” Maria said.
“Duh.”

“So, do you all swear?”

They went around the library table one by one, promising to keep the secret: Jen, Liz, Maria, and finally Jessica. By the time it got to her, Jess managed to get away with just a nod. She was pretty sure that she was going to have to tell the other midnighters about this in a big way, promise or no promise.

“Okay,” Constanza began once the ritual was complete. “Remember when my house got trashed by those weirdos?”

Everyone nodded, eyes wide. Jessica tried to put on her not-guilty face. She’d witnessed the aftermath of Rex and Melissa burgling Constanza’s house, back when they’d first been looking for evidence about the Grayfoot-darkling conspiracy. Not that the damage had all been their fault; there was nothing like a horde of midnight monsters showing up to leave a mess.

“Well, you probably remember how that totally freaked out my grandfather. He’s always had this thing about not living in Bixby.”

“You guys stayed with him in Broken Arrow after that happened, right?” Liz asked.

“We did. And let me tell you, I was totally sick of commuting to school. So…” Constanza leaned closer, indicating that the top secret part was coming up, and Jessica dared a glance at Dess, sitting in her usual corner. Dess held her trig book up to cover her face, which meant she was listening to every word. She needed to study trigonometry about as hard as a darkling needed to study scary.

“Well, Grandpa must have had a slow leak about me coming back to Bixby,” Constanza continued. “You know, he cut my dad out of the family oil business when he and Mom moved here, ages ago. He still hardly talks to them, even when we were staying out there. So anyway, he called me last night, trying to convince me to leave town.”

“What’s his problem with Bixby, anyway?” Maria asked.

Constanza shrugged. “He never tells anyone what happened. He grew up here, but something weird went down when he was a teenager. I think the Anglos chased the family out of town during the oil boom because we’re Native American and everything. He hasn’t set foot in Bixby in, like, fifty-something years.”

Except for slipping across the edge of the midnight border to leave his little messages, Jessica thought. Then a horrible notion occurred to her.

“He wants you to go live in Broken Arrow?” Jessica asked. She’d always wondered if the old man knew that Constanza and she were friends. Maybe he planned to finally bring his granddaughter into the real family business—working for the darklings.

“Excuse me, Jess? Me, living in puny little Broken Arrow?” Constanza shook her head and snorted. “No way.”

“So where, then?” Liz asked. “Tulsa?”

“No.” Constanza lowered her voice still further, and Jessica saw Ms. Thomas, the librarian, straining to hear. “You know how I’m going to be an actress?”

Everyone nodded, a few of them exchanging glances. You only had to know Constanza for about ten minutes to hear about that aspiration.

“Well, my grandfather said that if I wanted to start right now, I could come stay with him. Because in a couple of weeks he and a whole bunch of my cousins are moving to… now get this…
LA
!”

“Los Angeles?” Maria cried.

“No, Maria,” Liz said with a sneer. “Lower Argentina. That’s the new LA. Haven’t you heard?” She turned to Constanza. “Los
Angeles?
I hate you. You are
so
lucky.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Jessica said. Her mouth had gone dry.

“Grandpa’s got it all worked out,” Constanza said. “He’s already found a school for me there, and this movie agent who’s a business friend of his wants to meet me. And he says I can have an awesome allowance to pay for acting lessons and stuff.”

“I can’t
believe
you!” Liz said. “I’m going to
kill
you. After I come visit, of course. I can come visit, right?”

“So why exactly is he going to LA?” Jessica asked.

Constanza shrugged. “I don’t know. There must be oil wells there. Right?”

“In Los Angeles?” That didn’t seem likely. Nor did it seem very likely that the old man was concentrating on his oil business anymore. He seemed more focused on getting himself and his family as far away from Bixby as possible.

“Who cares
why
he’s going there, Jess? As long as the result is”—Constanza pointed both her index fingers toward herself—“movie star!”

“Girls!” Ms. Thomas called from her desk. “Could you
please
keep it down to a dull roar?”

Jen turned to the librarian. “But Constanza’s going to—”