Dess hadn’t slain anything herself in ages now. Why had they all run away? Darklings were like tigers, she figured. You didn’t want them eating you, but you didn’t want them going extinct. The world was less interesting without them.

Of course, after a few thousand years in one crappy town, Halloween had probably looked like Christmas to the darklings who’d survived.

When Jessica had sealed the rip, the energies built up along Bixby’s fault line hadn’t disappeared—they’d spread across the globe.

Dess shook her head. After all her work on the geography of the secret hour, it seemed a shame to throw out all those maps. Still, she couldn’t wait for Jonathan and Jess to start exploring the 36th parallel, finding out how far midnight stretched in the aftermath of Samhain.

Did it extend along the whole 36th parallel? And the 12th, 24th, and 48th as well? Was it wrapped around the entire globe, or did it only pop up at the intersections of multiples of twelve?

Or was midnight simply everywhere now? Were lucky midnighters waking up in every city and town, amazed at the blue and frozen world?

Dess heard the crunch of gravel and turned. Flyboy was bouncing along behind her, looking unhappy, like he needed someone to talk to.

She sighed. “So when do you three leave?”

“Probably soon.” He pointed his chin back toward the girls. “Now that this is over and done with.”

“It’s going to be lonely, only seeing Jess an hour a day.”

“It’s already lonely.”

Dess shook her head, wondering if he’d bothered to do the math on that little conundrum. Jess lived only one hour to his twenty-five, which meant she’d be hitting her nineteenth birthday just about the same time Jonathan was dying of old age. And sometime way before that, things were going to get…icky.

“Oh, well.” Dess smiled wryly. “You’ve always got Melissa to talk to.”

He looked up from the tracks. “Why do you still hate her? She saved Jessica that night, you know. And Beth. Maybe everyone in the world.”

“I don’t hate her.” As the words left her mouth, Dess realized it was really true—her hatred of the mindcaster had quietly expired. “Still, she’s not exactly road trip material.”

“Maybe not.” He smiled. “But without her, we’ll never find all of them.”

“All of them? Flyboy, there’s lots more than you think.”

Jonathan looked at her, then shook his head. “Any idea how all this happened? I mean why it happened?”

Dess just snorted at that one. Let Rex bury himself in the lore, still trying to figure that stuff out, how the timequake and the lightning had chosen the same moment to strike. But Dess knew that was nuts. Not that she was against doing the math—explaining why and how things happened was the credo of the Discovery Channel, after all. But sometimes the numbers would never add up, no matter how hard you calculated.

After all, the chances of a bolt of lightning hitting the center of Bixby on the exact stroke of midnight on Halloween were…rather low. And if you thought for too long about why it had happened in exactly that way, you weren’t doing your brain any favors. In which case it was better to leave the math the hell alone.