Jessica nodded, letting Constanza’s mood lift her out of the sadness that had haunted her all week. Dess kept saying that her plan should work, that maybe they could save everyone in Bixby, or almost everyone. And after twenty-five hours of midnight, the blue time would retreat again.

Maybe once the darklings realized they had a fight on their hands, they wouldn’t keep coming back every Halloween.

Jessica decided that tonight, at least, she would have a good time.

“Okay, this is me being happy.” She forced a smile.

“That’s the spirit,” Constanza said. “We can still talk on the telephone, after all. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.

24

5:33 P.M.

TRICK OR TREAT

“Looks like Halloween might be canceled,” Don Day said from the other end of the couch.

Jessica looked up from the book she’d been trying, and failing, to read. As usual the Weather Channel was on. A man in a bow tie was coaxing a swirling mass of white out of the Gulf of Mexico and onto the Texas plains.

It was headed straight for Oklahoma.

“Is that rain?” she said. “For tonight?”

“It was a hurricane, but by now it’s just a tropical depression,” her father said in his Weather-Channel-lecture voice. He leaned forward to peer out the back window. “By the time it gets here, it’ll only be a thunderstorm.”

“Only a thunderstorm…” Jessica watched in horror as the satellite image repeated its course across the TV again and again, stopping at the border of Oklahoma every time. “Um, when’s it supposed to get here?”

“Sometime tonight. It might rain out all the fun.” He gave her a puzzled look. “You’re not going trick-or-treating, are you?”

“Duh. Of course not.” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “I’m probably doing trig homework all night. But thunderstorms are kind of scary, you know, especially on Halloween.”

Especially at midnight, and particularly when you were trying to keep two hundred pounds of fireworks dry because you were fighting off an invasion of monsters. In the last two weeks of planning, no one had brought up the possibility that it might rain.

“So, Dad,” she said a minute later, trying not to sound too interested. “Are they saying the storm should be here by, like, midnight?”

He shrugged. “It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen once a hurricane, or even a tropical depression, hits land. Could take until tomorrow morning. Might break up into nothing. Or it could keep going strong and get here by nine or ten.”

“Whatever!” Beth announced from the doorway. “I’m going trick-or-treating even if it’s raining golf-ball-sized hail. Or even golf balls.”

Jess looked up at her little sister and had to suppress a snort of laughter. Eight coat hangers stuck out from Beth’s shoulders at all angles, covered with black paper and bobbing wildly. Her face was mostly blackened with makeup, exaggerating the whites of her eyes, and she was wearing plastic vampire fangs.