“But they wouldn’t have eaten me anyway. I carry their smell.” Rex gave the old mindcaster a cruel smile. He must know how much it offended her, Melissa thought, to have her little seer infected with the darkness.
Madeleine’s face twitched. “You taste more like them every day. But do you really think they would tell you something useful? Why should they?”
“The darklings didn’t tell me anything,” he said. “They share their thoughts naturally, like animals crying out when they’ve spotted a kill. You know that, Madeleine. You hear them thinking all the time.”
“If you can call it thinking.” She made a face, as if fifty years of her own bitter tea was finally hitting her taste buds. “Well, let’s see if your little experiment accomplished anything other than almost giving me a heart attack.”
She held out both her hands, palms up.
Melissa caught Rex’s eye, and they joined hands first with each other, waiting for a moment until their connection was complete. Her heart was pounding, and even though she was certain that the memory was all part of a big lie—propaganda, like Angie had said—Melissa recalled that long-ago mindcaster gathering, letting her wonder at those ancient images shared around the fire calm her.
As her mind stilled, she felt herself drawing strength from Rex’s dark confidence. Whatever the horde of old mindcasters inside Madeleine had in store for the two of them, at least they were facing it together.
“Come now. Don’t lollygag,” Madeleine snapped.
As one, they raised their other hands and let her grasp them, completing the circle.
As Madeleine stilled herself, she changed, becoming a congress of minds.
Melissa was always awestruck at the vastness of it: memories stretching back to shadowy recollections of the ice age, when glaciers could be reached in a month’s walk to the north. Ten thousand years of history, hundreds of generations, thousands of mindcasters.
She squeezed Rex’s hand. Facing that accumulated mass of minds, she was glad for his dark presence beside her.
“What have they done to you?” Madeleine murmured. She was probing the black sphere of Rex’s darkling half, searching its smooth surface for purchase. As the fingers of her mind settled in and began to pry, Rex’s hand flinched in Melissa’s.
“It’s for your own good,” the old woman muttered. Her concentration deepened, her raspy breathing slowing in Melissa’s ears.
After a long moment the darkness inside Rex began to swell, like something viscous and heavy coming slowly to a boil. The muscles in his fingers twitched again in her hand, a dry taste stirring among the patterns of his mind.
Eyes closed, Melissa watched the changes shifting through him and wondered if Madeleine really knew what she was doing. Melissa could taste arrogance in the mass of memories, their certainty that they could control anything and anyone. But they’d never faced something like Rex.
Then bitter metal filled her mouth, like old pennies on her tongue.
A seam had begun to open in Rex’s mind, his darkling inner core shivering, its surface cracking. Melissa tasted Madeleine’s satisfaction.
Rex made a pained sound.
Melissa sent calming thoughts toward him, but Madeleine pushed her back. You don’t know what you’re doing, girl. Stay clear.
The old mindcaster turned her attention back to Rex, pressing harder, and the darkness inside him began to split—a black and radiant shaft spilled across the mental landscape, bleeding color from it like the dark moon’s light. Images of an ancient Samhain flowed from his mind: masked humans piling up the bones of cattle and setting them alight, fires dotting the landscape for miles, raising up a slaughterhouse smell. Melissa felt a twitch of hunger at the scent and realized that the reaction was a darkling’s. Soon she was ravenous, feeling the call to hunt, to kill.
Abomination, whispered the mass of memories.
They meant Rex—seer and darkling mixed; he horrified them.
Madeleine grew bolder, her mind prizing into the cracks of Rex’s darkling half. He let out a short cry, and his fingernails dug into Melissa’s hand.
“Stop!” Melissa whispered hoarsely. “You’re hurting him.”
Abomination, a thousand voices hissed. The mindcasters’ memories had known nothing like him before; he had to be constrained, controlled.
But the darkness inside Rex only grew, swelling into a huge black storm cloud in Melissa’s mind, spilling more visions: Bixby as the old ones had seen it fifty years ago, a psychic spiderweb of midnight glittering across the desert. In the darklings’ eyes the town was an infected organism, the tendrils of a parasite extended into every fiber of its host—mindcasters quietly toiling, spreading obedience across the city, certain that it was only natural for them to rule.
Even the darklings knew what you were, Melissa thought.
Madeleine made a choking noise, the mass of memories inside her roiling as it beheld its own reflection in Rex’s mind. He was an abomination, and his thoughts were an insult to ten thousand years of history.
He had to be destroyed.
A shudder of horror passed through Madeleine at the thought, but she couldn’t pull her mind back. She couldn’t go against the mass.
“No,” Melissa whispered. Egotistical morons!
They ignored her. She tried to wrench her eyes open, to reach over and separate Madeleine’s hand from Rex’s, but her muscles were locked rigid.
Melissa felt hatred rising up in her, disgust at the conceited, clueless pride of her predecessors. She focused all of her loathing—everything Angie had said about the reign of the midnighters, their greed and child-stealing and brain-ripping—and hurled it at Madeleine as hard as she could.
The mass of memories reared at the insult and turned on her in a flood of contempt and arrogance. They had borne the secrets of midnight for thousands of years; Melissa was an upstart, an orphan, a nothing.
That which sticks up must be pounded down.
But before the mass could do any pounding, Melissa’s mouth filled again with the taste of darkling. She’d distracted them just long enough.
The thing in Rex was really boiling now….
Like a predatory cat, it sliced straight through the mass, down into Madeleine’s own memories, her deepest secrets. With a hunter’s instinct it found her fears… and ransacked them.
“No, Rex!” Madeleine gasped, but he was a wounded animal now, pitiless and rabid. Melissa watched aghast as fifty years of terror erupted from the depths of the old woman’s mind, every nervous minute of hiding since the Grayfoots’ revolution.
You gave them Anathea, he hissed, and decades of guilt surged up in Madeleine. The mass of memories spun in a tempest, unable to order themselves in her churning mind, like rats in a house on fire.
Melissa tried to focus her mind. Rex… that’s enough!
“We’re knocking at your door!” he said aloud, his voice inhuman. “We’ve found you at last. We’ve come for you!”
A single choked scream of terror came from Madeleine’s lips, darklings from a thousand nightmares shredding her mind; her hand jerked once, then slipped from Melissa’s.
Suddenly the mass of mindcasters was silenced, Madeleine’s mind gone; Melissa found herself alone with Rex in the blackness behind closed eyes. The darkling thoughts moved through him, still powerful, still hungry. Melissa watched in horror as her oldest friend transformed, the darkness consuming still more of his humanity.
She wondered if she was next.
Rex, she pleaded. Come back to me.
“Unconquerable,” he said softly, his voice dry.
The storm began to subside, and what remained of Rex’s humanity settled over the boiling darkness. She felt his sanity return.
With a snap her muscles were her own again. Melissa pulled her hand from his and opened her eyes.