And—as Jessica knew from long experience—if anyone could turn a small amount of information into a big pain in the ass, Beth could.
Jessica wondered about Rex’s new policy against mindcasting. He hadn’t let Melissa mess with Angie’s brain, but Angie had known all about the secret hour for years. This was a different matter entirely. If rumors started to spread around Bixby Junior High that weird things happened near the Jenks railroad line at midnight, Rex might make an exception for little sisters.
Jessica decided not to mention any of this to him or even think about it too hard around Melissa. A quick look into Beth’s brain would reveal that she knew more about midnight than was safe.
Way more, now that she was friends with Cassie Flinders.
Jessica kept eating, trying to enjoy the mingled tastes of long-simmered tomatoes, number 18 spaghetti, and almost-too-many reduced onions. But as dinner continued—Beth glancing at Jessica knowingly whenever she got a chance—the familiar flavors turned bitter in her mouth.
“Mom?” Beth said as the meal drew to a close.
“Yeah?”
“Can I go spend the night with Cassie sometime?”
Jessica watched as her parents’ faces broke into smiles. Marching band had paid off, big time. Beth had finally made a friend here in the new town. Everything would be much easier from now on.
“Of course you can,” Mom said.
Beth smiled, and her gaze turned to her older sister, making sure to show that she knew there were more clues to find, more trouble to make, out there in Jenks.
Jessica tried to put on an innocent expression, as if nothing tonight had disturbed her, but she felt the smile wither on her face.
It was just too depressing. Even Beth Spaghetti Night had been touched by the blue time.
20
10:30 P.M.
MINDCASTERS
“Give it one more chance, Loverboy. Please.”
Rex didn’t answer, didn’t even stop climbing the stairs toward the attic. His expression didn’t change, as if he hadn’t heard her plea at all. Not that she’d expected him to sit down for a chat about it. Since that night in the desert, Rex put up a normal front for the others, but around Melissa he often let his not-so-human side show.
Even here in Madeleine’s house Melissa could taste the darklings inside him, as dry as a mouthful of chalk dust leeching the moisture from her tongue. Might as well talk to the desert sand as try to reach that part of him.
But this was Rex, after all. She wasn’t letting go that easy.
Melissa dashed after him, far enough up the stairs to grab his left ankle from below. She sank her nails into the leg of his jeans, bringing him to a halt with all her strength.
“Wait a damn second, Rex!”
He turned, looking down at her, emotionless. His eyes flashed in that creepy new way they did, somehow catching the dark moon’s light even in normal time.
His lips curled away from his teeth, and for a horrible moment Melissa thought she’d gone too far. He would turn into a beast once and for all and devour her right there, leaving Madeleine’s staircase littered with her bones.
But then the expression on his face turned into a wry smile.
“What’s the matter, Cowgirl?” he said. “Jealous?”
“Just wait a minute, Rex. Please?”
He looked down at his captive boot and raised one eyebrow.
Melissa turned his ankle loose, realizing that she was half kneeling on the stairs, like some drunk trying to crawl up to bed. She took a deep breath to calm herself and turned away from Rex, sitting down on the steps. Then she pointed one black fingernail at the spot next to her.
After an infuriating pause, as if his oldest friend in the world was so hard to deal with, the staircase began to creak and shift under his weight as he descended. He sat down beside her.
“I’m not jealous of Madeleine,” she said. “But you used to be, remember?”
“Vividly.”
Melissa snorted. “Glad to hear that. I’d hate it if you gave up jealousy. It’s probably the only thing in the world everyone’s good at. Everyone besides me, of course.”
“Of course.”
“This isn’t about me, though. It’s about us.” Melissa winced at her own words and glanced up at him. His eyes had gone back to normal, at least. She had the foul feeling in her stomach that she’d tasted so many times in Bixby High girls, that sour paranoia that their boyfriends’ interest in them was evaporating. Melissa had always written them off as dorky and contemptible; she’d never realized that rejection was so painful.
Of course, things were bound to be awkward when your boyfriend was changing into a different species.
She took his hand, and his taste filled her. She focused on the surface of his mind—the steady, calming thought patterns of Rex Greene. Even during all those years she’d been unable to touch him, his surety and seer’s focus had always been something Melissa could cling to. The old Rex was still in there.
Of course, that familiarity only made the other part of him more disturbing. How could something so comforting and reassuring be wrapped around such darkness?
“Let me try again.”
“We already tried. It’s useless.” He shrugged. “And who knows? Maybe Madeleine can’t get inside me either. But it’s been a week; I don’t want what I got from the darklings to fade before she has a chance to look for it.”
“Believe me, Rex. It isn’t fading.” The blackness at his core was as solid as tar.
“Well, it isn’t any clearer either, Cowgirl, no matter how many times we’ve done this. We need Madeleine’s help. Samhain is only sixteen days away.”
Instead of answering, Melissa pushed herself farther into him, letting her thoughts flow across the human surface of his mind.
This time she didn’t try to crack the darkness at his center. Rex was probably right: whatever the darklings had left behind was too inhuman for her to reach. Melissa instead offered her own store of implanted memories, the accumulated legacy passed from hand to hand across the generations.
Before he went up to the attic, Rex had to know what mindcasters were capable of.
Melissa took Rex to a place in the core of those memories, an event that mindcasters had shared since the old days. A long time ago, back even before the earliest Spanish settlers had come to Oklahoma, long before the Anglos and the eastern tribes, there had been a gathering. Mindcasters from several tribes had met before a large fire to exchange images of far-off places they’d seen—east to the still waters of the Gulf of Mexico, north to where the Rockies reared up; one had traveled as far as the Grand Canyon. Since that first meeting the memory had been added to, layered with more images as it had been passed from generation to generation. It was as if the gathering had grown to a thousand mindcasters, all of those who had ever come to Bixby and discovered their power, until finally it had made its way to Melissa.
“Wow,” he said after a moment of marveling at it all.
“And not a hint of guilt,” Melissa said softly.
“What do you mean?”
“None of them thought that mindcasting was a bad thing, Rex. Of those hundreds of minds, not one thought it came with any cost.”
Rex pulled his hand away, shaking his head to clear it. “So you’re saying Angie’s wrong? That the Grayfoots fooled her somehow?”
“No.” Melissa glanced over her shoulder toward the top of the stairs, reassuring herself that Madeleine wasn’t within listening range. “Since Angie gave us her little lecture, I’ve been sifting through the memories for the kind of thing she was talking about—destroying people, altering minds for profit, mass manipulation. But I haven’t found them.” She drummed her fingers on her knees. “For some reason, though, I still think she’s telling the truth. Does that make any sense?”