Which was a bad idea. There were young darklings not too far away, probing the edges of the rip, wondering if they could take a few quick prey before their elders arrived in force. Melissa just hoped that the scent of the flame-bringer would keep any midnight creatures away from Cassie and Beth.

She turned her focus back toward the city, where Rex’s mind still tugged at her. He was growing more anxious as the rip built up speed, heading toward him down the Bixby-bound railroad line. It was moving at running speed now.

Then it became a little clearer: he needed help to get there before the rip arrived.

Don’t worry, Loverboy, she called. Jonathan’s coming.

Opening her eyes, Melissa looked down at the trailer houses along the railroad right-of-way. Someone had wandered out of the house next to Cassie’s, an old man wearing only a T-shirt and undershorts. He was looking around wide-eyed at the blue-red world, tasting of fear and wonderment.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” she murmured.

Then she twitched, a taste reaching her from the deep desert again.

They were coming…daring to issue from the mountains now. They flew slower than their offspring, their muscles creaking with age, with millennia of disuse. But their ancient hunger drew them toward Bixby, with its hated spires of metal and glass.

Finally we hunt again.

Melissa shivered, then something reached her from in the middle distance—a human mind awakening in the desert, at the farthest end of the rip from Bixby. Someone was camping out there, she realized with horror, out with the spiders and the rattlesnakes. And tonight with much worse things…

They were already waiting for him, a trio of young darklings.

Melissa felt it all, the tastes surging into her mouth like stomach acid. They tore into his tent the moment the rip arrived, only seconds after the earth’s shudder had pulled him out of his slumber. He fought back against them, swinging a flashlight whose stainless steel case brought a howl of pain from the youngest darkling. But it wouldn’t light, and it had no thirteen-letter name, and soon their claws had cut across his face, then his chest, then finally found his throat.

And then the darklings were eating, slaking their thirst with the man’s still-warm juices, reveling in his last gasps, fighting over scraps…

Melissa felt bile rising in her throat, and her brain spun with the darklings’ killing frenzy. She struck her own head with her hands, trying to drive the images out, and stumbled half blind across the tracks, dizzy and close to vomiting, her mind caught in the whirlwind of hunger and death.

Then pain shot through her outstretched hand, a sharp sensation of burning, and she heard glass breaking.

She wrenched her eyes open, tried to tear her mind back into her own body.

Fire was everywhere, its white light blinding in the secret hour. She’d overturned the hurricane lamp, and it had shattered, spilling its oil across the fireworks. Through the dazzling flames Melissa saw fuses beginning to sparkle.