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!”