“Well, you know how darklings take our nightmares and use them against us?”

“Of course I do, Rex.” Every night Melissa tasted the old minds out across the desert. And she had personally witnessed their shape-shifting into all creatures vile and hideous—worms, spiders, slugs. “That’s why they always pull the tarantula trip on you.”

“Yeah, tarantulas.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, Timmy Hudson was bugging me. And he’s afraid of snakes, it turns out. Ever since he was little, when his dad killed a rattler in the backyard and then brought Timmy out to take a look at the results. So I sort of got…snaky.”

He glanced at her, his tongue darting out for a split second. Then he smiled.

Melissa noticed that Rex’s chapped lower lip was split, his chin a little reddened with wiped-off blood. She reached up and touched it, felt the fading tension in his jaw muscle. “Okay, Loverboy. But how did you know that? About Timmy? You and he were never exactly friends.”

Rex shook his head. “I just knew.”

“But how, Rex? I’m the mindcaster here, remember? How did you get into someone’s nightmares?”

He turned away again, staring at the pep festivities without seeing them. His mind radiated a quiet confidence, an intensity Melissa had never felt from him before, not during daylight hours. His strength was flavored, though, with tremors of uncertainty, bitter as the dregs of Madeleine’s tea. Rex felt a lot like a young trucker Melissa had once tasted on the highway, driving an eighteen-wheeler for the first time with no one else in the cab—heady with an overdose of power, but nervous that the rig was about to hurtle off the road.

Finally he answered. “That’s what darklings do.”

The pep rally dragged on for ages. Announcements were made about bake sales and car washes and school plays. Team banners were raised. The members of last year’s district-winning chess club got a few seconds of applause—a token suggestion that being smart might actually be a good thing. And gradually the rally began to lose its pep. Even the cheerleaders started to look bored, pom-poms wilting in their hands.

Then came the part when everyone chanted together.

“Beat North Tulsa. Beat North Tulsa,” the gnome–like principal began. He stepped back from the microphone, raising his tiny fist in rhythm with the words. Gradually the chant built, louder and louder, until the gymnasium thundered with the sound.

This ritual was supposed to channel the whole school’s “spirit” into the football team, transforming them from a bunch of seventeen-year-old boys into the champions of Bixby High.

The funny thing was, the concept wasn’t total nonsense. You could see it on the team’s faces as they listened: it did affect them, as if a gathered mass of humans really could lend its strength to a few zit-faced boys. Melissa often wondered if the daylighter who had invented pep rallies actually knew something about how mindcasting worked.

This part of pep rallies had always terrified Melissa in the past—the assembled minds uniting their energy in the chant, every strand of individual thought swamped by the animal imperatives of the pack: Stay with the herd. Safety in numbers. Kill the enemy. Beat North Tulsa.