She shook her head, a sad look crossing her face, then silenced him with another kiss.

22

6:29 A.M.

FIREWORKS

“If Rex doesn’t show up on time, I’ll kill him.”

Jonathan looked tiredly at Dess, then at his watch. “He’s got another minute.”

“One minute to live, you mean.”

“Not really,” Jonathan said. “Either Rex gets here in one minute, in which case he’s on time and you don’t kill him. Or he’s late, which means he won’t be here, so you can’t kill him. Either way he has more than one minute to live.”

Dess cast a cold glance at Flyboy. He was making logical sense, which was totally unfair at this time on a Saturday morning.

“Jess,” she said. “Tell Jonathan to stop making sense.”

Jessica, her head leaning sleepily on Flyboy’s shoulder, started to answer, but a yawn consumed her words. She wound up waving her hand noncommittally.

“Wait a second,” Jonathan said. “Is that them?”

Jessica sat bolt upright. “What? In that thing?”

Dess felt her jaw dropping. “No way!”

A pink Cadillac was rumbling toward them through the field, its vast frame bobbing across the furrows.

“Rex said he had a new ride,” Dess said with quiet awe. “But I didn’t think he meant his mom’s car.” She felt a smile break across her face. Teasing him about this was going to be so much more fun than killing him.

Rex’s mother worked selling Mary Kay cosmetics door to door, and in recognition of her millionth facial or whatever, she had received a pink Cadillac. But Dess had never actually seen the fabled machine before; Rex refused to ride to school in it, and she’d never imagined him actually driving it.

Yet there he was, cruising through Jenks at daybreak like he owned the whole town.

It rolled to a stop next to Jonathan’s car, and Flyboy barked out a short laugh as the front window came down. “Wow, Rex. Ding-dong!”

“That’s Avon, actually,” Melissa said as she stepped out of the Cadillac’s passenger side. “You’re not even trying.”

“Oh, right,” Jonathan said. “Well, it’s not like I have to try that hard. I mean…” He spread his arms to indicate the car. “It’s so pink.”

Flyboy’s voice trailed off as Rex stepped out, looked down at the car, and said, “Hey, yeah, it is. I hadn’t noticed.”

Then he turned back to them and cracked a smile.

Dess breathed a sigh of relief; that was the first joke he’d made in days. His messed-up morning hair made him look more human than he usually did. Maybe the effects of Maddy unleashing the darklings in his brain had worn off a little.

“How did you get your mom to lend it to you?” she asked. Since his father’s accident, Rex’s mother hardly ever showed her face in Bixby. Dess couldn’t imagine her handing over the keys for an early morning joyride.

“She dropped by for a visit night before last,” Rex said. “And I got the idea of pulling her starter cable out.”