“Thanks, except I was hoping we’d see it from the inside.”

“Come on,” Rex said for the tenth time. “The cops were all over the place tonight. We’re lucky we made it to your house at all.”

“So how are we supposed to get over there?” she asked.

The blue arc over the snake pit shone brightly across the desert. With his midnight vision Rex could see every slender finger of the cold lightning that leapt from the ring of steel Dess had created. He could see the slithers swirling overhead, drawn to the snake pit and its ancient stones, barely smart enough to avoid the deadly forces they attracted from the clean metal. He could also see darklings overhead, hovering wary and patient, waiting for something to happen.

Everything was in readiness.

Unfortunately, it was all happening hundreds of yards away, across open, defenseless desert.

“I have no idea,” he admitted.

“They know we’re here,” Melissa said. “But they don’t care about us. Just her.”

Rex nodded. He could see two forms inside the barrier of lightning, looking back at him across the plain. Jessica had made it here, had risked her life to meet them.

“So maybe we can just walk across.”

Dess looked at him as if he were nuts.

“After you,” Melissa suggested.

Dess had created a small protective perimeter around them, clean steel stakes borrowed from her dad’s camping tent, carefully arranged and linked with wire to make a thirteen-pointed star. The wires glistened in the moonlight like a spiderweb around them. It was easy to keep away darklings if you could set up defenses, but moving across open terrain was another matter.

“We can’t just sit here.” He looked up at the moon. “We’ve only got another forty minutes or so.”

“Less than that,” Dess said. “The arc is weakening.”

Rex stared at her. “What?” he cried. “You said it would last all midnight.”

She shook her head. “I know, but you saw those fireworks a minute ago. Something big must have hit it. Like maybe a darkling threw itself against the barrier. I didn’t think even a psychokitty would be that stupid.”

Rex blinked. He wouldn’t have imagined it either. Darklings were very old, and those left alive were, by simple process of elimination, only the very cautious ones. Self-sacrifice was not in their nature. “Then we can’t stand around. We’ve got to help them.”

Melissa raised her head and sniffed the wind. “I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon.”

“No,” Rex agreed. “But we have to try. We could run that distance in a couple of minutes.”

“And get ourselves killed in thirty seconds,” Dess said.

He turned to Melissa. “You said they don’t care about us.”

“They’ll care about us pretty quick if we get any closer to her.”