“Don’t rattle the cup when you stir, Jonathan!”

Speaking of which, Dess thought as Jonathan exchanged an eye roll with her. He kept stirring his tea, adopting a sarcastic little spoon twirl that Madeleine didn’t seem to notice.

At least they didn’t have to edit their thoughts here. Madeleine’s house was built on a whopping big crepuscular contortion, a wrinkle in the blue time that made it almost impossible to plunder anyone’s mind without physical contact. It was like living next to a power line that screwed up your TV reception.

This contortion was the only thing that had protected Madeleine for the last five decades. She was invisible to the darklings here, hidden along with her antiques and books, all the leftovers from the days when midnighters had ruled Bixby instead of skulking in the shadows.

Dess looked at the junk piled in the corners of the room, her mind automatically dissecting the angles of tridecagrams in rusted steel, all the patterns of thirteens and thirty-nines that had once guarded the town’s key citizens. Some of the junk was pretty interesting, engraved with old-timey tridecalogisms like accelerograph and paterfamilias. She had to admit: Rex and Melissa weren’t the only ones who’d found stuff to play with here.

Still, it bugged Dess that those two had gotten anything at all out of her discovery. Especially since the sweaty work of protecting Madeleine had been left to Dess, Jessica, and Jonathan. The three had spent hours making a big pile of the least-rusty darkling defenses. Then Dess had made sure every piece had its own brand-new thirteen-letter name and mounted them all around the house as a last line of protection should the darklings ever find Madeleine’s hiding place.

And what thanks had they gotten? Mostly getting yelled at for making too much noise.

“So, now that we all have tea,” Madeleine pronounced, “perhaps we should discuss the little incident this morning.”

“About time,” Dess muttered. Her fingers traced the deep scratches in the wood of the table. It had been completely covered by big, heavy iron tridecagrams before she’d cleared the room to make it habitable.

Madeleine arched an eyebrow. “Well, then, Desdemona. Since you’re feeling feisty, perhaps you’d like to start.”

“Me? What do I know about it? We were sort of hoping you could tell us something.”

“But surely you have something numerate to contribute?”

Dess sighed. “Well, we checked Rex’s fancy watch after the eclipse was over. He resets it every morning to the time on Geostationary, which is always perfect.” She felt the comforting weight of the GPS device in her pocket. “Turns out it had gained twenty-one minutes and thirty-six seconds—that was the total length of time the dark moon was up. That’s nine times 144 seconds, which is a very darkling number. Must mean something.”

“But you don’t know what?” Madeleine said.

“Not yet.” Dess sipped at her tea. Maybe the bitter taste of it would focus her mind on the problem.

“There’s nothing like this in the lore,” Rex piped up. “Not that I’ve read. You don’t have any old memories that would help, do you?”