He sat down next to her, twisting the top from the thermos.

“Where is Melissa?” she croaked.

“She’s leaving.” The two simple words sent a spur of pain through him. But of course it was the only way.

“Where?”

He shrugged. “Eat.”

She took the thermos in trembling hands, held it to her lips, and drank. Rex watched her wrinkled throat move with each greedy swallow. Apparently rebuilding her damaged mind was hungry work. He looked down at the spear points, reading the lore symbols in Angie’s cramped handwriting. It was easier on his brain than modern letters. Melissa found it maddening how much he enjoyed the letters from his new pen pal.

Finally Madeleine rested the thermos in her lap, catching her breath. “You’re a fool to hate me, Rex.”

“I don’t hate you. I pity you when I bother to think about it.”

“I did it all for you, Rex. Don’t you see?” Her eyes gleamed, and he could see what remained of her colossal egotism. “I wanted to make Bixby as it was in the old days.”

He shook his head. “That Bixby was a nightmare. It’s our day now.”

She snorted. “What would you know about it? A half-darkling, half-midnighter and so concerned with daylighters. It’s perverse.”

Rex smiled, glad to hear her diagnosis. She could see that the beast inside him was under control, subservient to his human side. Maybe she wasn’t the only one repairing herself.

“Did you say Melissa was leaving?”

He nodded.

“But why? I cowered in this house for fifty years rather than leave the contortion. She’ll be blind and deaf out there, without a hint of taste. A daylighter, Rex—a nothing.”

“No, she won’t be.”

He swallowed, fear moving through him again at the thought of her leaving. It wasn’t Melissa he was worried about, of course. It was Rex Greene. Would he still be able to hold himself together once his oldest friend was gone? Maybe he should join the others, leaving Dess all alone in Bixby, leaving his father and the old woman to die. They deserved whatever they got, and without Melissa’s calmness of mind, without her touch…

Rex shook his head, steeling himself. He took the thermos from Madeleine’s hand and wiped stray soup from her chin. Perhaps Melissa was right, and it was tending to his father and an old woman that had kept him sane all along. His cares kept him human.

Madeleine hadn’t heard him; she was still mewling. “Why, Rex? Why would she leave? This is Bixby, after all.”

He drew himself up and gave her a predatory smile, knowing that the news would silence her.

“Because Bixby isn’t special anymore.”

They reached Jenks without any trouble, and Jonathan drew to a halt in the same field that Rex had raged across in his mother’s pink Cadillac. As the four of them made their silent way toward the rip, he stared down the railroad tracks, which still bore the scars of Halloween—a few cross-ties were blackened from burning oil and rocket exhaust, and the soggy relics of firecracker-red paper clung to bits of gravel everywhere.