Blue Noon (16 page)

“But midnighters aren’t about controlling people’s minds.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Well, they only did it to keep the secret hour hidden, to keep the town safe.”

Angie barked out a single-syllable laugh. “Sometime, Rex, you should read some
real
history. Everyone who abuses power says exactly the same thing: ‘We only do nasty, secret things to keep everyone safe. Without us in charge, you’re all doomed.’ ”

“What are…?” He growled, unable to organize his thoughts. “You
kidnapped
me!”

She looked away, letting out a slow breath, and Rex thought for a moment that he had finally quieted her madness. But after a moment she turned back and said, “It was the only way to stay in contact with the darklings. Without them we couldn’t keep you from re-creating the old Bixby.” She shrugged, the thick leather coat creaking. “Besides, do you know how many hundreds of children the old midnighters kidnapped over the years?”

“What?” Rex cried. But then he remembered the ancient tales: when mindcasters detected newly born midnighters nearby, war parties had been dispatched to steal them. More recently, offers of jobs and money had been sent to their parents. Rex found himself wondering, though—if those inducements hadn’t worked, had the old midnighters resorted to stronger tactics? There wasn’t anything like that in the lore, but what if they had just pretended it hadn’t happened?

“Well,” he said, “maybe a long time ago they did some things that seem weird now, sort of like… George Washington having slaves or whatever.” Rex shook his head firmly. “But
we’re
not like that!”

“I’ve seen your father, Rex,” she said calmly. “Did a stroke leave him that way?”

“That was…” His voice broke. “We were just kids.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Born monsters, like I said.”

They were silent for a moment, Rex’s head spinning from everything Angie had said. When he’d seen her name in lore symbols at the bottom of the note, there had been a moment of curiosity; even if she wasn’t a seer, here was someone else who could read the lore, who knew the signs of midnight. But after just a few minutes of talking to her, he felt his oldest sureties in danger of crumbling.

Was she making all this up? Could there really be a secret history
behind
the secret history?

He took a deep breath, checking his watch. The only way to find out was to stick to the plan; Melissa could get to the bottom of this.

“In any case,” Angie said. “I didn’t come here to debate midnighter ethics. Just don’t sit there pretending like I’m some kind of demon, all right?”

“Fine.” Rex forced himself to calm down. This was nuts, sitting here questioning what was what. It was probably the new predator part of his mind, willing to believe anything said against the humans who had dared to challenge the darkling kind.

He just had to let the plan unfold. Keep stalling and make sure that Angie stayed nervous.

“Just one quick question,” he said. “Your employers? The nice people who ‘freed’ Bixby. What would they do if they knew you were here talking to me?”

She let out a short, dry laugh. “Probably cut me into small pieces. Maybe you too.”

Rex allowed a grim smile to show on his face. He’d been hoping she would say something like that. “Talk about monsters.”

“I never said they were perfect. Far from it.” She crossed her arms. “All right, since it’s a school night and everything, shall we move on from the mutual recriminations? I told you some of what I know in my note. Maybe I’ll have more to tell you later. But you go first.”

“Okay.” Rex glanced at his watch. He still had fifteen minutes to kill. “There have been signs of change in the blue time.”

“Blue time?”

“You know, the secret hour.” Rex blinked. He’d forgotten that “blue time” had originally been Dess’s term—not part of the lore. “Everything turns kind of blue when time freezes.”

Angie just looked at him.

“What?” he said. “You didn’t know that?”

“Yeah, I’ve read the accounts. But I never got used to the idea of you midnighters,” she said. “It’s one thing that spooks live in the secret hour, but
human beings
walking around while the rest of us are frozen?” She shivered. “It’s so creepy.”

He snorted a laugh. “Trust me. They’re the creepy ones, not us. Whatever you’ve read about the darklings, I’ve
seen
them.”

“But you haven’t read their words,” she said. “And I have.”

Rex was silent for a moment. It was true—Grandpa Grayfoot had managed to do something that no seer had ever done before. He’d communicated with the enemy.

But now Rex had gone one better—he’d actually communicated with a darkling face-to-face. He thought again about heading out to the desert, meeting with the old minds there, hearing what
their
perspective was about all this history.

Now, that would be a brain bender… if they didn’t kill him first.

As Rex stared out the window, he saw a car flash past at the end of the alley. He swallowed, glancing at his watch again. They were early.

Angie hadn’t seen it, though.

“Well, whatever,” he said. “When time freezes, it’s blue. But this last week something really strange happened. Something that’s not in any lore I’ve ever read.”

“A timequake.”

He looked at her. “A what?”

“A spontaneous fluctuation of the prime contortion. Releasing the energies built up over the centuries.”

“Um, yeah.” He drummed his fingers on the seat.
Prime contortion?
Maybe Angie really had read a few things that Rex hadn’t. “We’ve been calling it an eclipse. But it might be more like a tremor, a warning of bigger things to come.”

“And that’s why the Grayfoots’ houses all sprouted For Sale signs last week?”

He nodded. “We think that the blue time is going to expand, suddenly and without much warning, getting big enough to swallow Broken Arrow.”

She stared at him for a moment, then said, “Jesus. No wonder they’re running. When?”

He shook his head and smiled. “I think I’ll save that piece of information until you tell me more. Such as, when are the Grayfoots leaving Broken Arrow?”

“Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure,” she said. “But there is something they’ve all been talking about for a while.”

“What is it?”

Suddenly lights swept through the interior of the car.

“What the…?” Angie said, turning to look back.

Rex winced as he glanced in the mirror. A pair of headlights loomed at the other end of the alley.
Jonathan and Dess, you morons,
he thought.
Can’t you read a clock?

They’d come way too soon.

But there was only one thing to do: stick with the plan. He started the engine.

“What the hell are you doing?” Angie shouted.

“They’re coming for us,” he said. The headlights were closing fast. “They must have followed you!” He put the car in gear and rolled down the alley.

“Oh, Christ! Let me out!” She started to open her door.

Rex accelerated, and the door crushed a trash can with a sickening sound, swinging closed with a thunk.
Sorry, Melissa,
he thought.

“You’ll never make it to your car!” he shouted. “Just hang on. I’ll get us out of here.”

He accelerated down the alley and out onto the first street on Dess’s route map. As he turned right, the Ford’s freshly filled tires screeched across the asphalt.

The headlights swept out of the alley behind them, clinging to his tail.

Very convincing, Flyboy.

“I don’t know if I can outrun them,” he said. “This car’s pretty old.”

“Oh, great! You know,
my
car goes plenty fast!”

“I didn’t know you were going to bring company!” he shouted. “I’ll head for the highway.”

He hit Highway 75 and turned west, bringing the Ford up to eighty miles per hour. This was the diciest part of the plan. Going over the speed limit was bad enough, given that it was curfew time back in Bixby, but if another eclipse—or timequake, or fluctuation of the prime contortion—suddenly struck, Rex would plow through the windshield like a bullet.

“Hey! You’re headed to Bixby!” The knife flashed in the corner of Rex’s eye—he smelled steel inches from his face.

“Oh, crap.” He swallowed, finding it easy to sound scared. “Just headed home by reflex. Sorry.”

He heard a growl rise in her throat, but no burning blade of steel pierced his ribs just yet.

“Listen,” he said. “There aren’t any exits before Bixby except the access road. We can follow it through Saddleback.”

“Don’t try to mess with me, Rex. That’s inside the contortion!”

“Yeah, but we can go straight through to the other side of the county. You’ll be in and out of the blue time inside ten minutes.”

“Dammit, Rex…” She looked at her watch.

“Maybe the Grayfoots will be afraid to follow us in!”

Angie’s voice suddenly grew very calm. “Okay, keep driving. It’s before eleven-thirty, so you can get me out by midnight. But if you stop
anywhere
in this county, Rex, I swear I’ll kill you.”

“Hey, don’t threaten the driver. I won’t stop, okay?”

Unless of course, I happen to run out of gas.

There was movement in his peripheral vision, and the glimmer of the knife disappeared. “All right, then,” she said.

Rex breathed a sigh of relief. Things were going more or less according to plan. Jonathan and Dess might have shown up a bit too early, but at least Angie hadn’t stabbed him yet.

“They’re catching up,” she announced.

He looked in the rearview.
Idiots.
They weren’t supposed to overtake them or force Rex to drive over seventy-five, which would draw cops like flies.

Couldn’t Jonathan and Dess do
anything
right?

“Like I said, the Grayfoots probably won’t follow us into Bixby. Right?”

“If they know I’m meeting with one of you midnighters, they might make an exception.”

“But maybe not.” Rex pushed the accelerator a bit farther down, trying to make it look convincing. The old Ford’s engine began to make a grinding sound, and Rex hoped he wasn’t screwing up Dess’s calculations too much.

Of course, the most worrying question was whether Angie would go crazy when his car ran out of gas right smack in the center of the emptiest, least traveled part of the county.

Rex swore under his breath. It would have been better if Dess and Jonathan had shown up ten minutes later. As it was, Angie would have too much time before midnight to wonder if this had all been arranged. Or she might get lucky and have a passing car pick her up.

Still looking backward, she swore. “There’s two of them now.”

“Huh?Twoofmto?”

“Two cars following us, you pinhead.”

“How could there… ? Oh, crap!” he shouted. It had to be the police. “Does one of them have a flashing light on top?”

“No, they’re both black Mercedes. Standard Grayfoot issue.”

“Mercedes…?”

A few seconds later Rex let out a strangled little laugh of pure amazement. On the other side of the highway, headed into Broken Arrow right on schedule, was Jonathan’s father’s car, complete with him and Dess in the front seat, their expressions of surprise briefly visible as they flashed by.

“Oops,” Rex said softly.

“What?”

“You actually let the Grayfoots
follow you
!”

“I thought we already covered that,” Angie said. “They’re closing in! Doesn’t this thing go any faster?”

“I guess it does,” said Rex, and pushed the pedal to the floor.

He looked down at the gas gauge, which hovered just above
E.

But not for much longer.

“So, Flyboy—clue me in here. Was that
Rex
we just saw speeding down the other lane?”

Jonathan’s eyes swept the highway frantically. Now that the shock was wearing off, he’d realized they needed to turn around. Fast. “Yep.”

“And that was Angie sitting next to him?”

“I don’t think it was his mom.”

“And—now this was the confusing part—there was this big black car chasing them, right? Like we were supposed to be doing? I mean, this isn’t one of those time travel things where we just saw ourselves in the future, is it?”

“Not unless ten minutes in the future we’ve got a pair of Mercedes between us.”

“There were
two
of them?”

“That’s what I saw.” Although at this point Jonathan wasn’t completely sure what he’d seen.

Then he spotted a familiar exit, a mile up. He could pull off here and head back west without getting completely tangled in downtown Broken Arrow’s web of warehouses and alleys.

Dess tapped her fingers on her window for a few seconds. “So that means Rex’s plan isn’t going very well, is it?”

“Nope. Hold on.” Without slowing at all, Jonathan brought the car off the highway. Dess crushed against his shoulder as she leaned into the turn.

“Seat belt?” he suggested. He heard the slithering sound of vinyl as Dess scrambled to secure herself, then the click of a metal clasp.

He found himself glad that Melissa and Jess were still back in Bixby. Rex hadn’t wanted them all inside Broken Arrow together in case this whole thing was some kind of Grayfoot trap.

Frankly, Jonathan had never thought much of the plan. It was pretty complicated, which always meant there were lots of things that could go wrong. Being involved in Rex’s schemes had taught Jonathan that someone was always late (usually Jessica) or didn’t pass along the message (usually Beth) or simply didn’t do what they were supposed to do because they didn’t feel like it (typically Melissa). And even if all the midnighters decided to play their parts, there were always cops, or parents, or teachers to screw things up.

Of course, even with all his doubts, Jonathan hadn’t actually thought of this particular possibility.

“So wait,” Dess said as they zoomed through the dark underbelly of a cluster of overpasses, huge concrete columns flashing past on either side. “The Grayfoots really
did
know that Angie was meeting with Rex?”

“Yeah. They must have been following her or something.”