Of course, Cassie couldn’t have actually gotten that far in twenty minutes unless the darklings had swooped down and carried her off. And if that had happened, she probably wasn’t alive and certainly wouldn’t survive the long minutes it would take Jonathan and Jessica to reach her.

Rex sniffed the trail before him. An electric trickle of fear still lingered in the human scent, mixed with excitement and wonder. It made something within him grow hungry. This was the smell of those young, adventurous humans who tended to stray too far from their villages—the call of easy meat.

Part of Rex knew that he should do the sensible thing. He should head back to safety and get everyone organized: keep Dess and Melissa from fighting with each other, tell Jonathan and Jessica what to do when they arrived, maybe fly along with them to the rescue. No one but he could be the leader that the group needed.

But the smell of the lone girl drew him forward, calling his entire body down the narrow path. Cassie Flinders felt so close. His hands tingled with how near she was, and a raw imperative filled him…

Reach her before the others do. She’s yours.

Rex took an unsteady step forward. He had to get there first.

“Fifteen!” Dess’s distant cry reached him. “Where the hell are you, Rex? Ten. You’re-an-idiot-nine, get-back-here-eight, you-dimwit-seven….”

Rex plunged deeper into the undergrowth.

Seconds later the earth shuddered under his feet. Blue light swept through the brush and across the sky, dulling the stars and bringing every branch and blade of grass into sharp relief, his vision suddenly seer-perfect.

He breathed in the hungry essence of the blue time, the mental clarity of midnight.

Ahead of him in the distance Rex’s sharp ears caught a small cry of surprise and fear…Cassie waking up in the blue time.

It made him hungrier.

Only a minute after midnight’s fall, things were beginning to stir in every direction. Slithers were worming their way up out of the deep burrows that protected them from the sun, signaling one another with their strange, chirping calls. It was like first light on some weird spring morning, the birds waking up and making a ruckus.

There were lots of slithers out here. Suddenly the steel hoops around his boots didn’t feel like enough protection. He swept his eyes back and forth nervously across the dense brush, searching for the sharp Focus of their burrows, imagining the icy sting of a slither strike catching him on the leg. Rex had once worked on his grandfather’s farm in Texas during harvest season; every step through these burrows reminded him of the anxious moment of lifting a hay bale and not knowing if an angry rattler lay underneath.

Another cry reached his ears, and Rex tore his eyes from the forest floor. Through the trees he saw a wedge of stone jutting up from the earth, cut in two by a narrow fissure. It was a tight fit even for a little kid but enough cover to hide Cassie from the sun.