Blue Noon

“Just give me that countdown,” he called back.

“Rex!” Dess wailed.

He noticed that she and Melissa were standing as far apart as they could inside the tridecagram, like two rival cats locked in a small room together.

Whatever. They’d live.

Rex pushed his way deeper into the underbrush, fighting the bare, brittle branches of mesquite. He could see in the dark better than ever now, and the spaces between leafless trees and scrub seemed to open up before him. He soon realized that his prey’s slender marks of Focus followed a narrow path, probably an old animal trail.

As Cassie’s footsteps went deeper into the brush, they began to grow more sure and purposeful, as if after the first few minutes of confusion in the blue time, she’d headed for someplace where she felt safe.

A branch caught Rex, bending taut, then whipping backward, leaving a long rip in his shirt. The girl must have grown up around here to move so easily through this overgrowth. He could tell she was much shorter than him—from her footprints, she had walked almost upright underneath branches that he was forced to crouch beneath.

Her footsteps grew farther apart; moving more swiftly now, as if coaxed forward by some goal. Rex swore—he wasn’t going to find the girl before midnight fell. She’d had twenty-one minutes to get wherever she’d disappeared to, and he had only…

“Thirty seconds, Rex!” Dess’s voice called through the trees.

He paused. To make it back to safety, he should turn around now and start ru

Of course, Cassie couldn’t have actually gotten that far in twenty minutes unless the darklings had swooped down and carried her off. And if that had happened, she probably wasn’t alive and certainly wouldn’t survive the long minutes it would take Jonathan and Jessica to reach her.

Rex sniffed the trail before him. An electric trickle of fear still lingered in the human scent, mixed with excitement and wonder. It made something within him grow hungry. This was the smell of those young, adventurous humans who tended to stray too far from their villages—the call of easy meat.

Part of Rex knew that he should do the sensible thing. He should head back to safety and get everyone organized: keep Dess and Melissa from fighting with each other, tell Jonathan and Jessica what to do when they arrived, maybe fly along with them to the rescue. No one but he could be the leader that the group needed.

But the smell of the lone girl drew him forward, calling his entire body down the narrow path. Cassie Flinders felt so close. His hands tingled with how near she was, and a raw imperative filled him…

Reach her before the others do. She’s yours.

Rex took an unsteady step forward. He had to get there first.

“Fifteen!” Dess’s distant cry reached him. “Where the hell are you, Rex? Ten. You’re-an-idiot-nine, get-back-here-eight, you-dimwit-seven….”

Rex plunged deeper into the undergrowth.

Seconds later the earth shuddered under his feet. Blue light swept through the brush and across the sky, dulling the stars and bringing every branch and blade of grass into sharp relief, his vision suddenly seer-perfect.

He breathed in the hungry essence of the blue time, the mental clarity of midnight.

Ahead of him in the distance Rex’s sharp ears caught a small cry of surprise and fear… Cassie waking up in the blue time.

It made him hungrier.

Only a minute after midnight’s fall, things were begi

There were lots of slithers out here. Suddenly the steel hoops around his boots didn’t feel like enough protection. He swept his eyes back and forth nervously across the dense brush, searching for the sharp Focus of their burrows, imagining the icy sting of a slither strike catching him on the leg. Rex had once worked on his grandfather’s farm in Texas during harvest season; every step through these burrows reminded him of the anxious moment of lifting a hay bale and not knowing if an angry rattler lay underneath.

Another cry reached his ears, and Rex tore his eyes from the forest floor. Through the trees he saw a wedge of stone jutting up from the earth, cut in two by a narrow fissure. It was a tight fit even for a little kid but enough cover to hide Cassie from the sun.

Why had she gone in there? It seemed like incredibly bad luck to have wandered into a cave hidden from the sun’s rays.

Unless she had somehow been coaxed into coming here…

Rex pulled his gloves on. These days the touch of stainless steel made his bare flesh itch during the secret hour, but leather gloves allowed him a solid grip on his new weapon. Dess had decorated the hunting knife’s blade with a superfine guitar string wound in patterns that made his eyes burn and water. The knife had the clever human smell of a finely tooled bicycle part—all modern alloys and precise proportions—buzzing with a thousand ingenious angles.

It make his head hurt to look at it, even to think its name, which meant that the weapon could fend off any darkling, at least for the short time it would take for Jessica and Jonathan to get here. The secret hour had begun almost three minutes ago—they had to be on their way.

From just outside the mouth of the fissure, he stared into the gloom. A blue glow emanated from the rocks, revealing layers of slither Focus in the cave, plus one slender trail of human footsteps. The crevice went deeper than he’d thought, the Oklahoma shale crumpled into zigzags by some ancient earthquake.

He paused to listen. The short, raspy breaths of a panicking thirteen-year-old reached his ears.

“Cassie?” he called.

The breathing caught, then a voice answered softly, “Help me.”

The girl sounded much younger than thirteen; probably she was frightened out of her wits. “Are you okay?”

“My grandma froze.”

“She’s better now, Cassie,” he said calmly. “But she’s worried about you. Are you all right?”

“It hurts.”

“What hurts, Cassie?”

“My foot. Where the kitty bit me.”

A cat. Rex remembered the slither that Jessica had followed on the first night the darklings had tried to kill her. It had disguised itself as a black cat and scratched on her window, then led her out onto Bixby’s empty streets to where a darkling awaited. They must have used the same trick on Cassie Flinders. With the whole world transformed into a frozen, empty place around her, she had i

“It’s okay, Cassie. My name’s Rex. I’m here to take you home.”

She didn’t answer.

“Cassie, you have to tell me: is there anything else in there? Anything besides the kitty?”

“It went away.”

“That’s good.” The slither must have struck as the eclipse had ended, just before heading back to its burrow. It had hobbled Cassie to make sure she didn’t wander out of the cave, out to where the sunlight would free her from the blue time. Cassie had been frozen for the fifteen hours since the eclipse—to her the cat had only run off a few minutes ago.

“But there are snakes in here, Rex,” Cassie said. “They’re looking at me.”

He tried to ignore the fear in her voice, the way it made him react. He could tell from her breathing that she was sick and remembered from the news that she’d been home from school with a head cold. Easy prey.

It was going to be tricky coaxing her out of the cave. In his darkling dreams Rex had seen humans paralyzed by their own fear when cornered.