The Secret Hour

“Thanks,” she said.

Jonathan realized that they’d actually made it back to the snake pit. “You’re welcome.”

Melissa turned to Dess. “And you.”

Dess lowered her gaze, shrugged.

Melissa turned away from them all. “Thanks, I mean, Dess.”

Jonathan looked at Jessica, who frowned. Rex put his hand on Melissa’s shoulder, but she pulled away.

Rex sighed and tenderly pulled off his rings. The fingers looked burned underneath. He glanced up at the moon, almost at its peak.

“We’d better get started,” Rex said. “Ready, Jessica?”

Jessica shivered in her jacket. “I guess.”

Jonathan took her hand. He felt the muscles relax as midnight gravity flowed through her.

“Jonathan, you help Dess,” Rex said.

He bristled for a moment, remembering how Rex always assumed he was in command. But he took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Help Dess what?”

Dess cleared her throat. “Help me fix the defenses to keep the snake pit from being overrun by darklings and about a million slithers.”

“I thought you said—”

“The defenses are weakening,” she explained. “Something big must have been caught in the lightning arc.”

“Like a darkling?” Jessica asked.

“Yeah.”

Jonathan and Jess looked at each other.

“I did that,” Jessica said.

A few yards away Melissa snorted, completely back to her old self.

Dess frowned. “Wow. That’s a trick you’ll have to show me.”

“Just an accident. Like everything I do.”

“Later,” Rex said. “Buy us some time, Dess.” He turned to Jessica. “Jess, are you…?”

“Yes?”

Rex paused. “Are you wearing makeup?”

She rolled her eyes. “Come on. It’s Friday night!”

“No, you look great. Really. Let’s go do this.”

Jessica squeezed Jonathan’s hand, then turned away. Rex and Melissa led her down toward the dark center of the pit.

Jonathan took another deep breath, pulling his eyes away from Jessica.

“Okay, Dess, what do we do?”

“First, we need the clean metal I brought, which is…” Dess groaned, slapping a hand to her forehead. “In my duffel bag.”

Jonathan looked around. “Where?”

Dess pointed out of the snake pit and across the sand, to where spiders still poured from the darkling she had speared, spreading over the desert to form a black, seething sea of legs and teeth.

“Not a chance,” Jonathan said.

Dess sighed. “Then I guess we’ll have to improvise.”

28

12:00 A.M.

CEREMONY

Jessica followed Rex down into the center of the snake pit.

The ground was damp down here. This morning in the library Dess had explained to her how sinkholes formed. Somewhere below them was an underground pocket of water trapped between layers of stone, which had collected back when the Bottom had been a lake. The crust of sand beneath her feet was thi

Jessica walked carefully, wondering if the snake pit was pla

At the center, the lowest and dampest part of the pit, a shaft of stone thrust up from the ground. Dess had said it had been buried for a long time, maybe thousands of years, before the formation of the sinkhole had exposed it to the sun again. The stone had been important to the people who’d fought the darklings in the old days, before the creatures had retreated to the secret hour.

It was about as tall as Rex, with a flat shelf jutting out from it about halfway up. A little pile of rocks sat on the shelf. Rex swept them away.

“Kids,” he said.

“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?”

“Absolutely. Nothing inhuman has ever—”

“Not that kind of clean,” Jessica interrupted, trying not to roll her eyes. “Disinfected clean.”

Rex smiled. “Smell it.”

Jessica sniffed the knife and caught a whiff of rubbing alcohol.

“Just go easy, okay?” Rex said. “We only need a few drops.”

“No problem.” She looked at her hand and curled it into a fist except for the ring finger. The knife glistened in the dark moonlight, and she could read the tiny words stainless steel on its shaft.

“Okay,” she said, preparing herself.

“Do you want me to do it for—”

“No!” Jessica interrupted him.

She swallowed, gritted her teeth, and pulled the edge across her fingertip. Pain shot up her arm.

As she watched, blood welled up along the cut. Even in the blue light of midnight it was a fresh, bright red.

“Don’t waste it,” Melissa said.

“Plenty to go around,” Jessica muttered. She held her hand over the shelf of rock and watched as a drop gradually formed on the fingertip, wobbled tenuously for a moment, then fell into the little bowl of stone.

A hissing sound came from deep inside the rock. Jessica jerked her hand away.

“More,” Rex said.

She reached out carefully, letting another drop fall into the bowl. The hissing grew louder as the blood ran. She felt a tremor build under her feet.