As long as his human half stayed in control…
“It’s okay, Cowgirl,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”
The hallway was as unpleasantly bright as always, sunlight spilling through the doors, the fluorescents buzzing overhead in a constant drone.
Rex squinted in the light, reminding himself to buy sunglasses. That was one advantage since the change: his vision was much sharper. Rex didn’t even need his eyeglasses at school anymore. A strange kind of Focus clung to everything here: the marks of human passage and invention, a million prey trails piled on top of one another, making everything crystal clear and somehow… appetizing.
It was almost too much. Sometimes he wished that school could be blurry and soft again, distanced behind the thick glasses he’d worn since third grade. Everything was so sharp now. It wasn’t just the buzzing fluorescents that annoyed him; Rex could feel the fire alarms and public address system behind the walls, those razor-fine wires that clever humans always laced their buildings with. It felt like being in a metal cage with electrified bars.
And human places were so ugly. Rex noticed for the first time in his two years at Bixby High that the tiled floors were the exact same yellow hue as his father’s nicotine-stained fingers. Whose idea of interior decorating was that?
At least the halls had been emptied by the pep rally.
As he headed for his locker, Rex ran a hand across his scalp, feeling it prickle his palm. When Jessica’s white flame had freed him from the darkling body, big patches of his hair had burned away, his gothy haircut totaled. So Rex had cropped it to a half inch all over with the electric clippers that his father had once used to shorten the thick coat of their dog, Magnetosphere, for summer.
Rex’s own reflection still brought him to a halt when he passed shop windows, and he found himself touching his scalp all the time, fascinated by the hairs standing up so straight, as hard and even as Astroturf under his palm. Maybe this meant that Melissa was right, that he was still human: even after all the other changes that had racked his body and mind, a new haircut still took some getting used to.
Rex reached his locker, letting his fingers open it by feel. The tricky part was not thinking of the numbers, that cleverest and most dangerous of human inventions. Fortunately, there weren’t any multiples of the Aversion in his combination. It was hard enough already when his fingers faltered, and Rex had to start over, forcing his way through the sequence number by number, like some freshman on his first day of school.
When he looked at the locker’s dial, he hardly even saw the Aversion anymore—it appeared as a wavering blurry spot between twelve and fourteen, edited out by his mind, like an FBI informant’s face on the news.
He was thinking of taking Dess up on her offer to pull apart the lock and hack it, changing the combination to a smooth string of twelves and twenty-fours. She was already doing his math homework these days. Too many combinations awaited on every page that could paralyze the darkling half of his mind, leaving him with a snapped pencil and a pounding headache.
Math was deadly now.
Success on the first try. He heard the tiny click of the last cylinder lining up and pulled the locker open happily. But distracted by his thoughts of numbers, Rex realized too late that someone had crept up behind him. A familiar scent swept through him, setting off old alarm bells, fearful and violent memories suddenly rising up.
A fist struck the locker, slamming it shut again. The sound echoed through the empty hallway as he spun around.
“Hey, Rex. Lost your specs?”
Timmy Hudson. That explained the trickle of fear in Rex’s stomach—the boy had beaten him up almost every day back in fifth grade. As strong as any flash of darkling memory, Rex recalled being trapped behind the school one day by Timmy and three friends, punched in the gut so hard that for a week it had hurt to piss. Though it had been years since Timmy had done anything worse to Rex than slam him against the wall, the tightening in Rex’s stomach remained as knife-edged as it had ever been.
“Didn’t lose them,” Rex answered, his own voice weak and plaintive in his ears. “Don’t wear glasses anymore.”
Timmy grinned and stood closer, the smell of sour milk sharp on his breath. “Contact lenses? Huh. The funny thing is, makes you look like even more of a retard.”
Rex didn’t answer, struck with the sudden realization that Timmy Hudson was looking up at him. At some point he had grown taller than his old nemesis. When had that happened?
“You must think you’re getting pretty cool these days, huh?” Timmy punctuated the last grunted word with a hard shove, and a combination lock rammed into the small of Rex’s back, hard as the barrel of a gun. The feel of it focused his mind, and he felt his lips begin to twitch, pulling away from his teeth. His mouth felt suddenly dry.
Something was moving through Rex, something stronger than him.
He shook his head no. He was Rex Greene, a seer, not an animal.
“What’s the matter? Too cool to talk to me these days?” Timmy laughed, then squinted up at Rex’s scalp. He reached out and ran one hand across its bristly surface.
“And a new ’do?” Timmy shook his head sadly. “You trying to look tough? Like everyone doesn’t remember what a little pussy you are?”
Rex found himself staring at Timmy’s throat, where the blood pulsed close to the surface. One shallow rip through the frail skin and life would spill out, warm and nourishing.
“Think your little extreme makeover makes you Mr. Cool, don’t you?”
Rex found himself smiling at the words. What had happened to him was so much more extreme than anything Timmy could imagine.
“What’s so funny?”
“Your weakness.” Rex blinked. The words had just popped out of his mouth.
Timmy took half a step back, blank-faced with shock for a moment. He looked one way down the empty hall, then the other, as if checking the reaction of some invisible audience.
“My what?” he finally spat.
Rex nodded slowly. He could smell it now, he realized, and the scent of weakness had triggered something inside him, something that threatened to spin out of control.
His mind grasped for some way to master himself. He tried to think of the lore symbols, but they had all flown out of his brain. All he had left were words. Maybe if he could keep talking…
“You’re the kind we cut from the herd.”
Timmy’s eyebrows went up. “Say what, retard?”
“You’re weak and afraid.”
“You think I’m afraid, Rex?” The boy tried to put on an amused smile, but only half his face obeyed. The left side seemed frozen, taut and wide-eyed, his fear leaking out into his expression. “Of you?”
Rex saw that Timmy’s pulse was quickening, his hands shaking.
Weakness.
“I can smell it on you….” The words faded as Rex finally lost control. He watched the rest of what happened like a passenger in his own body. He took a step forward until his face was as close as Timmy had dared come a moment before.
The fear in Rex’s stomach had changed into something else, something hot and cruel that surged through his chest and up into his jaw. His teeth parted, lips pulling back so far that he felt them split, baring his teeth and half an inch of gums. His whole body grew as taut as one long trembling muscle, swaying for balance like a snake ready to strike, arms out and fingers locked in rigid claws.
He made a noise then, right in Timmy’s face, a horrific sound that Rex had never heard before, much less produced himself. His mouth still open wide, the back of his throat cinched tightly closed, a breath forcing its way out with a long and shuddering hisssss—a mix of fingernails on a chalkboard, the shriek of a hawk, and the last rattle of a punctured lung. The noise seemed to coil in the air for a moment, wrapping around Timmy’s shuddering frame, squeezing the breath from him.