“You totally disappeared there, Jess. Kind of freaked me out.” He took a few steps closer. “Hey, what happened to your—”

He never saw it coming; Jessica hardly saw it herself. In one fluid motion Constanza released her, took a step forward, and punched Steve in the face.

He stumbled backward, tripped on his own feet, and landed on his butt on the hard ground.

“Hey!” Constanza took Jessica’s arm and resumed their march toward the cars, continuing where she had left off.

“We’ll get together with some decent Bixby boys and have a party out on the salt flats.”

Jessica blinked and felt a laugh gurgling up inside her. “Uh, yeah, that’d be fun.”

Steve’s protests faded behind them.

“Nothing like a desert bonfire to keep warm,” Constanza proclaimed.

Jessica smiled and pulled her friend a bit closer for warmth.

“Great idea,” she said. “I’ll bring the matches.”

31

12:00 A.M.

NIGHT WATCH

“They’re still out there, in the distance.”

“Cowering, you mean.” Rex leaned back on the hood of Melissa’s car, propping his head on his hands.

She tasted the air. “No, something else.”

It was two midnights after the flame-bringer had come to Rustle’s Bottom, and the blue-lit desert looked as if nothing had ever walked on its hard earth. The vast emptiness of the place covered Melissa’s tongue with a dry, lonely taste like powdered chalk and sand. But she could still sense the darklings and their allies hidden among the low mountains on the other side of the Bottom.

“Waiting,” she said.

“For what?”

Melissa shrugged. It was a taste, nothing more specific.

“For the next thing to happen, I guess.”

“They must still be in shock,” Rex said. “I know I am.”

She shook her head again. “No, they were expecting her.”

“Are you kidding?”

Melissa opened her eyes and turned to her old friend.

“You’ve never tasted the darklings, Rex. Maybe you have to be a mindcaster to understand them, but they aren’t like us.”

She lay back next to him, looking up at the moon.

“They’re so old, so frightened.”

“Until last week they never struck me as the frightened type,” Rex said. “More in the frightening category, actually.”

Melissa smiled. She had felt Rex’s fear of the spiders two nights before, a terror as deep and mindless as any kid’s nightmare.

“They’ve been chased to the edge of the world, Rex, squeezed into one hour of the day. Pursued by the daylight, by fire and math, by an age of new technologies. Scared into hiding by a species they used to eat for breakfast. Literally.”

“I guess so.”