After an infuriating pause, as if his oldest friend in the world was so hard to deal with, the staircase began to creak and shift under his weight as he descended. He sat down beside her.

“I’m not jealous of Madeleine,” she said. “But you used to be, remember?”

“Vividly.”

Melissa snorted. “Glad to hear that. I’d hate it if you gave up jealousy. It’s probably the only thing in the world everyone’s good at. Everyone besides me, of course.”

“Of course.”

“This isn’t about me, though. It’s about us.” Melissa winced at her own words and glanced up at him. His eyes had gone back to normal, at least. She had the foul feeling in her stomach that she’d tasted so many times in Bixby High girls, that sour paranoia that their boyfriends’ interest in them was evaporating. Melissa had always written them off as dorky and contemptible; she’d never realized that rejection was so painful.

Of course, things were bound to be awkward when your boyfriend was changing into a different species.

She took his hand, and his taste filled her. She focused on the surface of his mind—the steady, calming thought patterns of Rex Greene. Even during all those years she’d been unable to touch him, his surety and seer’s focus had always been something Melissa could cling to. The old Rex was still in there.

Of course, that familiarity only made the other part of him more disturbing. How could something so comforting and reassuring be wrapped around such darkness?

“Let me try again.”

“We already tried. It’s useless.” He shrugged. “And who knows? Maybe Madeleine can’t get inside me either. But it’s been a week; I don’t want what I got from the darklings to fade before she has a chance to look for it.”

“Believe me, Rex. It isn’t fading.” The blackness at his core was as solid as tar.

“Well, it isn’t any clearer either, Cowgirl, no matter how many times we’ve done this. We need Madeleine’s help. Samhain is only sixteen days away.”

Instead of answering, Melissa pushed herself farther into him, letting her thoughts flow across the human surface of his mind.

This time she didn’t try to crack the darkness at his center. Rex was probably right: whatever the darklings had left behind was too inhuman for her to reach. Melissa instead offered her own store of implanted memories, the accumulated legacy passed from hand to hand across the generations.

Before he went up to the attic, Rex had to know what mindcasters were capable of.

Melissa took Rex to a place in the core of those memories, an event that mindcasters had shared since the old days. A long time ago, back even before the earliest Spanish settlers had come to Oklahoma, long before the Anglos and the eastern tribes, there had been a gathering. Mindcasters from several tribes had met before a large fire to exchange images of far-off places they’d seen—east to the still waters of the Gulf of Mexico, north to where the Rockies reared up; one had traveled as far as the Grand Canyon. Since that first meeting the memory had been added to, layered with more images as it had been passed from generation to generation. It was as if the gathering had grown to a thousand mindcasters, all of those who had ever come to Bixby and discovered their power, until finally it had made its way to Melissa.