“That even though you’re not grounded anymore, I’ve still got my eye on you.”

Jessica sighed again. “Beth, quit being weird. Dad, tell Beth to quit being weird.”

Don Day was silent for a moment. Finally he said, “Well, Jessica, I kind of know what she means. After all, I’ve got my eye on you too.”

5

3:27 P.M.

DREGS

“Milk, no sugar, correct?”

“Yes, please.” Dess smiled politely, but the bitter taste of Madeleine’s tea was already trickling through her imagination, the acid flavor of betrayal on her tongue.

By rights, this secret place should have been her playground. Dess was the one who had found Madeleine, after all. She’d struggled through sleepless nights to decode the weird dreams the old mindcaster had sent her; she was the one who’d done the math.

But it had all been in the service of Melissa and Rex. They were the ones really enjoying themselves here in Madeleine’s crepuscular contortion, her little secret hide-away. Rex finally had all the lore he could possibly want. Years of reading awaited him in this house, every document the surviving midnighters of the last generation had managed to salvage when they’d been forced into hiding.

And Melissa…she had totally scored.

Dess noticed that as Melissa took her cup and saucer from Madeleine’s hand, the two mindcasters’ fingers brushed for a moment. Then they both smirked at some shared, silent joke.

The sight made her flesh crawl. The two of them communicated mostly by mindcasting, rarely uttering a word to each other. Dess wondered what they were saying to each other right now.

On the other side of the big dining table, Rex was also watching them. Besides Rex, Madeleine was the only person whom Melissa allowed to touch her—not that anyone else would want to—but he didn’t seem jealous of little moments like this one. It was those long sessions, when the two mindcasters sat for hours at a stretch with eyes closed and fingers interlocked, that made Rex start to get all territorial.

Of course, Melissa did have some catching up to do. Growing up as a lone mindcaster, she’d never learned the old tricks that should have been taught to her by the previous generation. A trove had awaited her inside Madeleine’s brain—the thousands of years of memories, techniques, and gossip accumulated since the first mindcasters had learned how to pass knowledge from hand to hand.

Dess wondered how that math worked. If every generation of mindcasters took all their memories and forwarded them onto the next bunch, who then passed theirs onto the next, who added their memories, and so on…wouldn’t the pile get too big at some point? Wouldn’t all that knowledge become less and less stable, like building blocks stacked higher and higher, until the whole thing collapsed at once?

Maybe the memories got fuzzier as you went back in time, a blurry aggregate of thoughts and feelings, like the symbols that meteorologists used to represent weather. Dess imagined a big H hovering over Madeleine’s house, warning of a high-pressure center of bitchiness.