She looked down across the fists rising and falling in rhythm, felt the beat of stomping feet resonating through the bleachers. The clique of pretty girls had lost the force field around them, dissolving into the crowd. The freshman boys in the first row were taking it seriously, no longer ogling the cheerleaders. Even Jessica Day and Flyboy had joined in, trying to act halfhearted but overtaken by the power of the mob.

Melissa nervously took a few deep breaths. This pep rally was a joke, she reminded herself. The crowd didn’t know what they were doing, and not one of the minds in this gymnasium matched hers for sheer power. Just because they’d found a meaningless football game to channel themselves into didn’t make them stronger than her.

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.