Then he recalled the bathroom window.
Rex had often retreated to the bathroom when his father started to get a head of steam up. It was the only room in the house with a lock on the door, and the window was just the right size for a kid to crawl through. But that was four years ago. Rex wondered if he could still fit.
Would his attackers have stationed someone in the narrow side yard? There was no side door, and no other windows faced that way.
He stood, fighting memories of childhood fears. It was his only chance. And Rex was too old to still be spooked by his father’s lies: he knew damn well that under the house was not where spiders came from.
Rex’s steps were no longer quiet. His boots clumped down the hall to the bathroom and set the boards to creaking. When he’d reached the silence of the tile floor, he paused to listen again. The knocking had stopped.
Then the sound of rattling metal reached his ears from the living room. The doorknob was being jimmied or picked. The sound set his teeth on edge, and Rex almost wished they would simply burst through the door instead of taking their time.
Of course, they had surrounded him, cut him off from any help. Why should they rush?
He unlocked the bathroom window and slowly pushed it open, straining to keep it silent. Shrunken by the autumn cold, the wood slid easily. With one foot on the toilet, Rex pushed himself up and stuck his head out.
The narrow stretch of side yard was empty. The darkling groupies had covered the front and back, not expecting Rex to go under the house. Rex heard the panting of the Guddersons’ dog next door, and smiled. Of course the trespassers would give the mean old rottweiler a wide berth. The animal was always listening for any reason to start up a righteous barking.
He pushed himself farther out and found that his shoulders passed through the window diagonally. If they fit, surely the rest of him would make it? The image of being stuck halfway filled his mind, but Rex shook it out of his head.
He pulled himself in and lifted the backpack through, dropping it softly to the grass. Then, with both feet up on the toilet and his hands on the windowsill, Rex paused…
The dominoes, the lore signs he’d stolen from Darkling Manor—he hadn’t thought of any reason to bring them tonight, so they were sitting on his desk, ready for the taking. Even if he got away, the darkling groupies would recover them. They’d have the symbol for the flame-bringer again, and they’d be able to go after Jessica. She’d always been their real target, after all.
He stood there for another few seconds, trying to hear past the mutterings of the TV. Were they inside yet? Was there time to go back and get the dominoes? The bathroom was next to his room; it wouldn’t take thirty seconds.
Rex sighed. He couldn’t endanger Jessica to save himself. He lowered one foot and then the other softly to the floor.
Out in the dark hall again, he saw nothing. But his father made a soft sound, one he knew from years of interpreting the old man’s grunts and moans: confusion over an unfamiliar face. They were inside.
Rex took the few steps to his room, wincing at the soft thud of his boots against the floor. He scooped up the darkling dominoes from his desk, then paused again. Lying on the desk was Spontaneously Machiavellian Deceitfulness, a letter opener that Melissa had given to him a month ago. As a daylight weapon, it was useless. But if he was captured tonight, it might serve to carry a message…
He grasped the opener and pressed the cool against his forehead, focusing all his terror and anxiety into it. He imagined himself stripped and mutilated, his flesh melded with a darkling’s, his mind enslaved to help is enemies.
Then he placed the blade’s point against the soft wood of the desk and pushed as hard as he could until it stuck upright, quivering like a shot arrow when he pulled his hand away.
A noise came from the living room, a muffled protest from his father. Rex swallowed. They wouldn’t do anything to the old man, would they? Of course, they didn’t know how drugged up he was, how unlikely to raise any sort of alarm.
Rex closed his mind to any thought of his father. If restraining the old bastard was keeping them busy for a few extra moments, so be it.
He slipped out of his room and took two steps down the hall. One stride from the bathroom, his boot connected with a soft and plaintive shape.
“Brrrrp?”
Rex halted at the bathroom door. “Dag, shhh,” he whispered.
A footstep sounded behind him, from the far end of the dark hall. Rex didn’t turn. With the window open to moonlight, he knew he was silhouetted against the bathroom door.
“Rex Greene?” a voice called.
The time for silence was over.
He stepped inside and slammed the bathroom door, locked it, then jumped up onto the toilet and threw himself into the window’s maw.
Halfway through Rex reached a sickening point of equilibrium, his front and back halves balanced, the windowsill digging into his belly, blood rushing to his head as he teetered forward. The moment stretched out, unresolved by gravity… His hips were caught.
Then Rex realized: his shoulders had barely fit through diagonally, but now his body was square across the window. He tried to twist himself, to rotate the forty-five degrees he’d need to squeeze on through, but his struggles dislodged the loose window sash, which fell closed, wedging him in even tighter.
A muffled crash reached his ears—the bathroom door bursting in. His attackers had also dispensed with silence.
Rex felt a firm hand grasp his ankle and flailed with his feet while his fingers clawed for purchase at the house’s aluminum siding. One boot connected solidly, and a hideous grunt spilled out through the window. The collision pushed him a critical few inches forward, and his hips were free.
The ground was rushing up at him…
“Uhnn.” His shoulder exploded with pain, his head clouding as the world turned over itself. After a moment of disorientation Rex found himself on his back, the breath knocked out of him. He raised himself painfully on one elbow to look around. No dark figures, no sound save the jingle of the metal tags on the growling beast next door.
Then a voice cried from the window, “He’s in the side yard! This way!”
They couldn’t fit through the window, but they could see him. They would watch him crawl under the house. But maybe it would take too long to drag him out, especially if the whole neighborhood had woken up…
He lashed out with his boots at the fence between his house and the Guddersons’, beating the wood like a drum only inches from the rottweiler’s head. Vicious barking started instantly, as if the animal had been waiting all night for an excuse to start howling.
Rex scrambled the other way, pulling himself through the narrow gap between aluminum siding and earth, his head and upper body plunging into the cold, damp world beneath the house. This had been his father’s constant threat, exiling young Rex into this shadow place where old, sick Magnetosphere had crawled away to die, this place where tarantulas bred and multiplied in the darkness.
He felt naked, as if he were about to grasp a biting, hairy spider with every desperate handful of dirt. Even his midnighter’s vision was useless in the utter blackness. Brittle dead things scratched his face, leaves and branches that had blown here to rot. He was almost all the way under the house. They wouldn’t waste time following him down here with the dog next door going crazy… would they?
Then he felt strong hands take his ankles.
Rex lashed out, trying to connect again. But more hands took hold, two on each foot, pulling him back out so fast that his coat and shirt rode up, his bare stomach sliding across the dirt. His fingernails skittered across the hard earth uselessly. Twisting half around, he reached up to grasp the floor beams of the house, but they were covered in a damp mold, as slick as algae-coated rocks in a stream.