To your right, fast. They need you.

Melissa. The mindcaster’s taste washed across Jessica’s tongue—a strange sensation, given that she’d never thought of Melissa as having a taste before. But there it was, bitter and caustic, like chewing some pill you were supposed to swallow.

Jessica began to run, veering right until a high-pitched scream reached her through the trees. She barreled toward the sound, ignoring the branches whipping at her face and clothes. The rip had cleared the suspended raindrops from the air, but the trees were still heavy with water—dumping gallons on her as she crashed through them.

Another scream came from dead ahead. Close.

She burst out into the familiar clearing, saw the finger of stone thrusting into the air, then stumbled to a halt, eyes wide. A thing was wrapped around the cave entrance, like a great jellyfish attached to its prey, its tendrils sinking into the rock itself. It had no head that Jessica could see, just a tangled knot of stringy appendages, all matted together like hair caught in a bathtub drain.

A small human figure stood just inside the mouth of the cave, pale and shaking, the creature’s tendrils wound around her arms and legs.

Jessica ran toward it, playing Foolhardiness’s white light across the creature.

But its tendrils didn’t burst into flame; instead they sizzled angrily with blue fire, coiling tighter.

Rex had warned them that they might see new things tonight, things born well before midnight had been created, so old that mere white light wouldn’t be enough to slay them.

In which case, he had said, there was always fire.

Jessica pulled a highway flare from her pocket and, in a move she’d practiced all week, flicked its top off, banging the two pieces against each other in a glancing blow.

“Ventriloquism,” she said, and the flare burst to life, its radiance white-hot and blinding.

In its radiance she saw one of the thing’s legs reaching for her, snaking across the ground. She knelt, thrusting the flare at it. The tendril sizzled, a low flame racing across it, bringing up a gagging smell of burned hair and dust.

It retreated, slithering away from her, but another reached through the air.

“Haven’t had enough?” Jessica said, fending it off. The arm darted around her, just outside the reach of the hissing flame. In the corner of her eye she saw another arm stretching its way from the creature.

She swallowed. Since she’d become the flame-bringer, the darklings had been so afraid of her. But apparently these old ones didn’t cut and run.

This was their night, after all.

Jessica lunged forward, swinging the flare into the closest tendril. A gout of flame exploded, bringing a low, mournful scream and another rush of the burned-hair smell.

She looked around for the other arm….

At that moment something wrapped itself around her leg, soft and feathery but bitter cold. The chill climbed through her, shooting up her spine, bringing with it a tidal wave of emotion: old fears and nightmares rose in her, forgotten terrors dredged up to the surface of her mind.