Blue Noon (3 page)

She steadily gained control again.

Then Melissa noticed Rex sniffing the air, eyes twitching as his nostrils flared.

The chant was making him anxious as well.

“It’s like a hunt,” he hissed. “This is how they got themselves ready in the old days.”

Melissa touched Rex’s hand and for an awful moment felt the crowd as he did. Little humans, weak and frail—but
so many of them.
It had been rituals like this one that had helped them conquer their fear of the darklings. And one day they had begun to hunt their own predators, packs of humans armed with fire and their sharp, clever stones.

Finally a band of them had gotten lucky, taking down a young darkling that had thought itself invulnerable. And some of the dread that the master species had always depended on was lost forever. The oldest minds still remembered that moment, when the balance had begun to shift. Humans had slowly become more confident, scratching pictures of their kills onto rocks and into mud, the first hated symbols of their mastery.

Melissa pulled her hand away, burned by the memory.

Maybe this pep rally wasn’t such a joke. After all, high school was all about the oldest human bonds—the tribe, the pack, the hunting party.

Rex’s hands twitched. He was struggling with the part of him that wanted to flee.

“You need to leave?” she whispered.

He shook his head grimly. “No. This is important. Have to learn to keep control.”

Melissa sighed. Rex could be a moron sometimes.

She often remembered a line she’d read once on a bathroom wall:
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
As Melissa watched the sweat building on Rex’s upper lip, she knew that he was making the same mistake as the bathroom wall guy.

Not everything made you stronger. It was possible to survive, yet still be crippled for your trouble. Sometimes it was okay to run away, to skip the test, to chicken out. Or at least to get some help.

She firmly took his hand, not letting him pull away, and reached inside herself for a place that Madeleine had shown her, an old mindcaster trick for chilling out. Melissa closed her eyes and entered Rex, gently pushing the crowd’s chant out of his mind.

She felt him relax, his fear of the crowd—and of the beast inside him—slipping away.

“Whoa,” he said softly. “Thanks, Cowgirl.”

“Any time, Loverboy.”

“Okay. How about tonight?”

She opened her eyes. “Hmm?”

“Maybe later we can—” Rex’s voice choked off, his grip suddenly tightening. “Something’s coming.”

“What do you—?” she started, but then she felt it too and slammed her eyes shut again.

A taste was thundering toward them across the desert, vast and ancient and bitter, tumbling over itself in a rushing wave. It grew stronger as it advanced, like an avalanche pulling down more snow from the mountainside, burying everything in its wake.

Then it struck, washing through the gymnasium, sweeping away the puny energies of the pep rally, obliterating the surrounding mind noise of Bixby leaking in through the walls. It consumed everything. Only Melissa’s connection with Rex remained, his shock and alarm reverberating through her like the echoes of a gunshot.

She opened her eyes and saw what had happened. The blue light, the frozen bodies, a leaping cheerleader hovering suspended in the air. The whole world struck by…

Silence.

Melissa looked at her watch in amazement. It was just after 9 a.m.

But the blue time was here.

Midnight gravity flowed into Jessica.

She clenched Jonathan’s hand harder. “What the…?” Her voice trailed off into the sudden and overwhelming silence, her heart pounding as her eyes scanned the frozen pep rally.

Everything was blue.

The shiny Lycra uniforms of the football team, the Bixby town seal in the center of the basketball court, the motionless tendrils of a pom-pom thrust into the air—it had all turned the color of midnight. And everything was perfectly still.

“Jonathan?” Jessica looked into his face, hoping to catch some glimmer of comprehension. Maybe this had happened before here in Bixby, a weird hiccup of the blue time, and Rex had simply forgotten to tell her about it.

Jonathan didn’t answer. His eyes were wide with shock.

“This is messed up,” Dess confirmed in a quiet voice.

Jessica gripped the edge of the bleacher she sat on, felt the grainy reality of the wood. This was not a dream—this was the blue time.

Her eye caught movement across the gym. Rex and Melissa were slowly rising, looking strangely isolated among the frozen human forms.

His paralysis suddenly broken, Jonathan let out a cry and sprang out of his seat. Jessica instinctively clung to his hand, and as he left his feet, he pulled her softly into the air after him—they were both light as feathers.

“Jonathan!”

“What the hell?” His voice faded as midnight gravity carried them helplessly up and over the crowd, spinning around each other like two balls on a string. “Is this really…?”

“Yeah, really happening,” Jessica managed, gripping his hand still harder. The floor looked miles below, and she flashed back to Climbing Day in gym class—peering down from the top of the thick, knotted rope, terrified of falling.

As their flight peaked and they began to descend, reflexes honed by countless hours of flying together kicked in. Jonathan twisted to bring their spin to a halt, and as they settled back onto the gym floor—right on the Bixby seal, as if they’d been aiming for it—Jessica’s knees bent for a soft landing.

She looked back up at the bleachers and swallowed. The frozen crowd were all staring right at her and Jonathan. It reminded Jessica of her least-favorite recurring nightmare: being in a play she hadn’t rehearsed, the motionless audience waiting for her first line. It was stunning to see so many people captured by midnight. Their faces were waxy and pale, their eyes lifeless, like an army of plastic dummies.

“Never seen this many stiffs before.” Melissa’s soft words carried across the gym, echoing Jessica’s thoughts.

“Outside, quick!” Rex called. He was running down the bleachers, jumping over the frozen bodies like hurdles. Dess and Melissa followed him toward the door to the parking lot.

Jessica looked at Jonathan, who shrugged. “Might as well see what’s in the sky,” he said.

“Oh, right.” If this were midnight, the dark moon would be up there, bathing the world in its cold blue light.

But this
wasn’t
midnight. This was a Monday morning pep rally, which was just about as far away from the magic of the blue time as you could get.

“Come on,” Jonathan said, his knees bending.

They jumped together, covering the distance to the door in one easy leap, landing just as Rex got there. The three of them burst out into the parking lot together, staring up at the sky.

Behind a few frozen and wispy clouds, the dark moon was huge and fully risen. Its vast bulk seemed perfectly centered, blotting out the whole sky except for a thin sliver around the horizon, hiding the sun. A few white stars glittered at its edges, their light dulled, as if they were being squashed down against the earth by the huge moon’s weight.

Suddenly Jessica needed the feel of solid ground under her feet. She slipped her fingers from Jonathan’s hand, letting normal gravity fall back across her. Dizzied by the weird, absent light of the moon, she dropped her eyes down to the asphalt.

Its cracked surface shone uncanny blue.

Dess and Melissa charged through the door, staggering to a halt as they stared upward.

“This can’t be happening,” Rex murmured.

“Yeah,” Dess said, gazing at her own blue hand. “But it kind of…
is.”

For a long moment they all stood there in silence. Jonathan pushed off from the ground nervously, rising a few feet into the air.

Jessica checked her watch. The numbers were still pulsing: 9:05 a.m. Just like during a normal midnight hour, her flame-bringer’s magic kept its electronic numbers flashing.

How many minutes had it lasted so far? Two?

“The moon isn’t moving,” Rex said.

“Isn’t what?” Dess asked.

His skyward gaze stayed steady, his eyes flashing violet. “It’s just stuck up there, halfway across.”

“How can you tell?” Jessica asked, glancing up at the huge, baleful eye above them. The dark moon crossed the sky much faster than the sun, taking only an hour to rise and fall, but it was still like watching a minute hand move on a clock. “Isn’t it sort of too slow to see?”

“For you, maybe.” He smiled. “But I
am
a seer, you know.”

“Oh, right.” Jessica glanced at Jonathan, who shrugged back at her. These days it was easy to forget that Rex was gifted with special sight and deep knowledge of the lore. The transformation out in the desert had left him…

different. Lately his gaze was so freaked out and wild-eyed that he seemed more like a stoner than a seer.

“So the moon didn’t rise?” Dess asked. “It just appeared out of nowhere?”

“Or it rose really quick.” Rex glanced at his own watch; on a midnighter’s wrist, windups worked in the blue hour. “We got out here in less than three minutes.”

“Why is it such a big deal what the moon’s doing?” Jessica asked quietly. “I mean, isn’t this all completely screwed up anyway?”

“The moon makes the secret hour, as far as we know.” Rex looked up again as he answered her, staring at the sky with a frown. “If it’s not moving, there’s no way to tell how long this will last.”

“Oh.” Jessica glanced at Jonathan, who had jumped to the top of a school bus to look around. “Um, then maybe…”

“Spot the problem, Rex,” Dess said. “Let’s do some math: zero velocity multiplied by
any
amount of time equals zero movement. What if the moon’s just
stuck
up there?”

“Stuck?” Jessica said softly. “Like, forever?”

“I didn’t say forever.” Rex dropped his eyes from the sky. “That would be . . . crazy.”

“This whole thing is crazy, Rex!” Dess cried. “It’s not midnight, except in Australia or somewhere, but it’s
blue.”

“Yeah, what’s happening, Rex?” Jonathan said as he bounded softly back to the group.

Rex raised his hands. “Look, there’s nothing like this in the lore.” His voice stayed calm. “So I don’t know why you’re asking
me.”

For a moment no one said anything, stunned by his words. Jessica realized that her jaw had dropped open. After all, that’s what you did when things got weird: you asked Rex what was going on.

With a cool seer’s gaze, he stared silently back at them for a moment, then smiled, his point made. “Okay, everyone, calm down and give Melissa some head space.” He turned to the mindcaster. “Can you feel Madeleine?”

“No, she’s staying hidden. But I bet you she’s just as freaked out as we are.”

“What about the darklings? Are they awake?”

Melissa stood in silence for a moment, eyes closed and head tilted back, casting her mind across the desert.

Jessica looked around at the others. It had been a while since the five of them had all been together. Probably since that night on the salt flats when everything had gone haywire—Rex kidnapped, Melissa thrown through the windshield of her car, and Dess…

Dess seemed the worst for it. She ate lunch with Jessica and Jonathan or alone these days—never with Rex and Melissa. She hadn’t forgiven the mindcaster for pillaging her memories that night.

Not that Jessica could blame her. Or blame Rex for being freaked out by his transformation into a halfling. And the scars on Melissa’s face from her accident still carried pink stitches.

But everyone seemed to have forgotten that Anathea, the young seer who’d been turned into a halfling back in the old days, had
died
that night. Which was a lot worse than anything that had happened to the rest of them.

Sometimes when Jessica watched the other midnighters interact, she felt like wearing a T-shirt with big letters on the front: GET OVER IT.

“They’re awake, all right,” Melissa said slowly. “I’m surprised you guys can’t hear them.”

“Hear them?” Rex glanced over his shoulder toward the badlands. “You mean they’re coming this way?”

Jessica reached for Disintegrator in her pocket, but it wasn’t there; she’d never expected to need the flashlight during the day. She had only Acariciandote, the bracelet Jonathan had given her. She reached to touch it, feeling the thirteen tiny charms dangling from her wrist.

Melissa shook her head. “Not coming, not moving much at all. Just so
loud
.” She winced, her face twisting into the pained expression she wore whenever too many people were around.

“Melissa,” Rex asked, “what do you mean by ‘loud’?”

“I mean screaming, howling, raising a ruckus.”

“As in afraid?”

Melissa shook her head. “No. As in celebrating.”

Jessica’s watch said 9:17 a.m., but it seemed like hours since the blue time had begun. The minutes seemed to drag along, as if time itself had become a formless, limping thing.

How could she even be sure if her watch was working right or not? It felt like they’d all been standing out there in the parking lot for hours.

“Get down from there!” Rex yelled again.

Jessica looked up and sighed. Jonathan was still on the roof of the school.

“I thought you said this could go on forever,” he shouted down.

“Yeah, or it could end any second!”

“Nah, midnight only comes in one-hour slices, Rex. You know that.” Jonathan laughed and took an arcing hop up to the top of the gym. From there he scanned the horizon, as if the Bixby skyline might hold some clue as to what was going on.

Jessica saw how high he was and swallowed. But she knew yelling at Jonathan was pointless. He always flew until the last moment of midnight, squeezing out every second of weightlessness; it hadn’t taken him long to convince himself that this unexpected blue time would last a solid hour. For Jonathan this wasn’t a terrifying mystery to be solved—it was a double helping of dessert, an extra recess, a free period spicing up an otherwise crappy Monday.