Chapter 2

8:31 A.M.

PEP RALLY

She watched the pep rally with awestruck fascination.

Melissa had been forced to attend dozens of these things before, of course, but she'd never really seen one. Battered by the mind noise, huddled in the back with eyes closed and fists clenched, the old Melissa had understood pep rallies about as well as a bird sucked through a jet engine comprehended aircraft design.

But the crowd no longer terrorized her, the horde of other minds no longer threatened to erase her own. Using the memories Madeleine had given her, the generations of technique passed on among mindcasters, she could rise above the tempest, ride its swells like a buoy in a storm.

Finally she could taste it all....

The football team strutting in Lycra before the crowd, their testosterone and bluster mixed with a bitter backwash flavor - the growing realization that once again, they were going to lose every game this year. The clique of pretty girls clustered together a few rows down, surrounded by a force field of disdain for all the nobodies around them - unaware of how much the nobodies hated them right back. The bored minds of teachers stationed around the edges of the gym, jonesing for cigarettes and more coffee, quietly relieved that first period had been superseded. The group of freshman boys camped on the first row of bleachers, watching the cheerleaders' skirts fly up, their horny thoughts as sharp as sweat licked off an upper lip.

Melissa found it all hysterically funny. Why hadn't she ever understood this simple fact before? Why hadn't anyone told her? High school wasn't a trial by fire or some ordeal that had to be survived.

It was all a big joke. You just had to provide the laugh track.

Through the crowd noise the minds of the other midnighters reached her, their various flavors coming through loud and clear. The three of them sat together - about as far away from Melissa as they could. In particular, she tasted every cold glance from Dess, who was glowering behind dark glasses, her mind still full of acid hatred for what had happened ten days ago.

Melissa did feel bad about that - no one knew better than she how vile it was having your mind wrenched open against your will. But there hadn't been any choice. If she hadn't gone in and dredged up Dess's secrets, Rex would be a full-fledged darkling now instead of...

Well, instead of whatever he had become.

Jonathan and Jessica sat close to each other, their fingers intertwined, separated from everyone around them by their coupleness. Of course, they would turn and talk to Dess every once in a while, throwing her a bone. Jessica had witnessed what Melissa had done to Dess and felt almost as bad as if she'd done it herself. Her thoughts were often layered with a sickly survivor's guilt: If only I had stopped Melissa, blah, blah, blah...

Of course, Jessica's indignation wasn't nearly as bad as what lurked in Jonathan's mind. Ever since he'd touched Melissa and felt what it was like to be her, a rancid pity polluted him from head to toe.

Of course, the joke was on him. Because being Melissa didn't feel like that anymore.

It felt sweet.

"Sucker," she whispered, and let herself be buoyed again by the chanting crowd.

Loverboy made his way in about fifteen minutes late, slipping easily past the teacher monitoring the door.

Melissa tasted his mind through the chaotic energies of the pep rally. Despite all the confusion he carried now, Rex's thoughts still reached her on their own special channel, even clearer than those of the other midnighters'. She knew instantly that something unexpected had happened to him in the empty hallways of the school. His mind was bright and buzzing, like just after they'd kissed.

But whatever had happened had also unnerved him. Melissa felt him scan the crowd anxiously, relaxing only when he spotted her atop the closest bleachers to the door. He made his way up with soft, effortless steps, as fluid as a cat across a rooftop.

Melissa smiled. Watching Rex show off his new feline grace was one of her great pleasures.

"Get what you wanted?" she asked as he settled beside her.

"Oh, my English book." He shook his head. "Forgot all about it, actually. Had some trouble on the way."

"Yeah, I figured that." She could taste it more clearly now: Underneath his excitement Rex was bubbling with the darkling flavor he sometimes had now - the sour lemon of a young hunter's mind jazzed by the smell of prey. "Hmm. Didn't eat anybody, did you?"

"Not quite. But it was a pretty close thing." He held out his hand, palm up. "Want to see?" His eyes flashed.

"Of course, Loverboy." She smiled and placed her hand over his.

The darkling taste redoubled, shuddering through her acid and electric, like kissing an old car battery that still carried some juice. The surging taste of it blotted out the insipid flavors of the pep rally.

She felt Rex's new predatory confidence, his worries about losing control, the fading buzz of his wild transformation. Someone had threatened him, she realized, had actually dared to get into his face. Sucker.

And there was something else... an unexpected cluster of memories carried on top of Rex's spinning thoughts.

Not a darkling flavor, but something fearful and human.

Melissa pulled her hand away, staring into the whorls of her palm to puzzle over the strange images: a rattler cut in two by someone's dad in a backyard, its fangs snapping together in its death throes. The two snake halves squirming for thirty minutes on either side of the shovel that had bisected them, as if trying to rejoin each other and wreak revenge.

Melissa blinked. "Someone's afraid of snakes?"

"Timmy Hudson is." Rex smiled, showing too many teeth. "Very."

She shook her head. "What the hell?"

Rex stared down at the cheerleaders, who were piling themselves into a shaky pyramid. His glassy eyes gazed straight through them, into some new mix of midnighter lore and implanted ancient memories.

"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 heir, 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 gnomelike 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.

She looked down across the fists rising and falling in rhythm, felt the beat of stomping feet resonating through the bleachers. The clique of pretty girls had lost the force field around them, dissolving into the crowd. The freshman boys in the first row were taking it seriously, no longer ogling the cheerleaders. Even Jessica Day and Flyboy had joined in, trying to act halfhearted but overtaken by the power of the mob.

Melissa nervously took a few deep breaths. This pep rally was a joke, she reminded herself. The crowd didn't know what they were doing, and not one of the minds in this gymnasium matched hers for sheer power. Just because they'd found a meaningless football game to channel themselves into didn't make them stronger than her.

She steadily gained control again.

Then Melissa noticed Rex sniffing the air, eyes twitching as his nostrils flared.

The chant was making him anxious as well.

"It's like a hunt," he hissed. "This is how they got themselves ready in the old days."

Melissa touched Rex's hand and for an awful moment felt the crowd as he did. Little humans, weak and frail - but so many of them. It had been rituals like this one that had helped them conquer their fear of the darklings. And one day they had begun to hunt their own predators, packs of humans armed with fire and their sharp, clever stones.

Finally a band of them had gotten lucky, taking down a young darkling that had thought itself invulnerable. And some of the dread that the master species had always depended on was lost forever. The oldest minds still remembered that moment, when the balance had begun to shift. Humans had slowly become more confident, scratching pictures of their kills onto rocks and into mud, the first hated symbols of their mastery.

Melissa pulled her hand away, burned by the memory.

Maybe this pep rally wasn't such a joke. After all, high school was all about the oldest human bonds - the tribe, the pack, the hunting party.

Rex's hands twitched. He was struggling with the part of him that wanted to flee.

"You need to leave?" she whispered.

He shook his head grimly. "No. This is important. Have to learn to keep control."

Melissa sighed. Rex could be a moron sometimes.

She often remembered a line she'd read once on a bathroom wall: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. As Melissa watched the sweat building on Rex's upper lip, she knew that he was making the same mistake as the bathroom wall guy.

Not everything made you stronger. It was possible to survive, yet still be crippled for your trouble. Sometimes it was okay to run away, to skip the test, to chicken out. Or at least to get some help.

She firmly took his hand, not letting him pull away, and reached inside herself for a place that Madeleine had shown her, an old mindcaster trick for chilling out. Melissa closed her eyes and entered Rex, gently pushing the crowd's chant out of his mind.

She felt him relax, his fear of the crowd - and of the beast inside him - slipping away.

"Whoa," he said softly. "Thanks, Cowgirl."

"Any time, Loverboy."

"Okay. How about tonight?"

She opened her eyes. "Hmm?"

"Maybe later we can - " Rex's voice choked off, his grip suddenly tightening. "Something's coming."

"What do you - ?" she started, but then she felt it too and slammed her eyes shut again.

A taste was thundering toward them across the desert, vast and ancient and bitter, tumbling over itself in a rushing wave. It grew stronger as it advanced, like an avalanche pulling down more snow from the mountainside, burying everything in its wake.

Then it struck, washing through the gymnasium, sweeping away the puny energies of the pep rally, obliterating the surrounding mind noise of Bixby leaking in through the walls. It consumed everything. Only Melissa's connection with Rex remained, his shock and alarm reverberating through her like the echoes of a gunshot.

She opened her eyes and saw what had happened. The blue light, the frozen bodies, a leaping cheerleader hovering suspended in the air. The whole world struck by...

Silence.

Melissa looked at her watch in amazement. It was just after 9 a.m.

But the blue time was here.