“Lucky there’s no stiffs tonight,” Melissa said. She turned to Jessica. “Some nights you have to crawl over them to get anything done.”

“Yeah, I heard about people coming here at midnight.”

“They do,” Melissa said. “We like to give them a scare, just to keep them out of the way next time, you know?”

“I’m sure you do.”

Melissa smiled. “It’s for their own good.”

Rex was tracing his fingers across the stone, staring intently at it.

“This is one of the places where the lore changes,” he said to Jessica. “I try to come here pretty often.”

“Changes? You mean, the lore’s different on different nights?”

Jessica took a step closer, trying to see the signs that Rex was reading. All she saw was rock, divided into separate layers of different hues. In the blue light they were all shades of gray.

He nodded. “Yeah. Every time I read the signs here, there are new stories.” He thumped the rock with one knuckle. “There are a lot of tales stored in here, and only so many show up at once.”

“So it’s like the screen of a computer,” she said.

Melissa snorted, but Rex nodded again. “Sure. Except you can’t make it tell you what you need to know. It tells you what it wants.”

“Unless you ask it really nicely,” Melissa said.

She pulled a black velvet bag from her jacket and drew a knife from it.

Jessica swallowed. “How does this work, anyway?”

“The rock just needs a little taste of you,” Melissa said.

“A taste,” Jessica asked. “As in it’s going to lick my hand?”

Melissa smiled again. “More of a bite than a lick.”

Rex turned to Melissa and took the knife from her hand. “Stop it, Melissa. It’s not that big a deal.”

He turned toward Jessica.

“A few drops of blood will do.”

She drew a step away. “Nobody said anything about blood!”

“Just from your fingertip. It won’t hurt that much.”

Jessica clenched her fist.

“Come on, Jess,” Melissa said. “Haven’t you ever become a blood sister with someone? Or made a blood oath?”

“Uh, not really. More of a cross-my-heart kind of girl.”

Rex nodded. “Actually, the crossing of the heart was originally a blood oath. They used a knife in the old days.”

“The hope-to-die part was a lot more literal back then,” Melissa said.

“These are not the old days,” Jessica said. “And I don’t particularly hope to die.”

“What, are you too wimpy to cut your finger?” Melissa asked.

Jessica scowled. After everything she’d been through that night, no one was calling her a wimp. Certainly not Melissa, anyway.

“Okay. Give me the knife,” she said with a sigh.

“Let the blood collect right here,” Rex said. He pointed at a small depression in the shelf of rock, no bigger than a quarter.

Jessica inspected the knife. “Is this thing clean?”