Blue Noon (2 page)

“And a new ’do?” Timmy shook his head sadly. “You trying to look tough? Like everyone doesn’t remember what a little pussy you are?”

Rex found himself staring at Timmy’s throat, where the blood pulsed close to the surface. One shallow rip through the frail skin and life would spill out, warm and nourishing.

“Think your little extreme makeover makes you Mr. Cool, don’t you?”

Rex found himself smiling at the words. What had happened to him was so much more extreme than anything Timmy could imagine.

“What’s so funny?”

“Your weakness.” Rex blinked. The words had just popped out of his mouth.

Timmy took half a step back, blank-faced with shock for a moment. He looked one way down the empty hall, then the other, as if checking the reaction of some invisible audience.

“My
what
?” he finally spat.

Rex nodded slowly. He could
smell
it now, he realized, and the scent of weakness had triggered something inside him, something that threatened to spin out of control.

His mind grasped for some way to master himself. He tried to think of the lore symbols, but they had all flown out of his brain. All he had left were words. Maybe if he could keep talking…

“You’re the kind we cut from the herd.”

Timmy’s eyebrows went up. “Say what, retard?”

“You’re weak and afraid.”

“You think I’m afraid, Rex?” The boy tried to put on an amused smile, but only half his face obeyed. The left side seemed frozen, taut and wide-eyed, his fear leaking out into his expression. “Of
you?”

Rex saw that Timmy’s pulse was quickening, his hands shaking.

Weakness.

“I can smell it on you….” The words faded as Rex finally lost control. He watched the rest of what happened like a passenger in his own body. He took a step forward until his face was as close as Timmy had dared come a moment before.

The fear in Rex’s stomach had changed into something else, something hot and cruel that surged through his chest and up into his jaw. His teeth parted, lips pulling back so far that he felt them split, baring his teeth and half an inch of gums. His whole body grew as taut as one long trembling muscle, swaying for balance like a snake ready to strike, arms out and fingers locked in rigid claws.

He made a noise then, right in Timmy’s face, a horrific sound that Rex had never heard before, much less produced himself. His mouth still open wide, the back of his throat cinched tightly closed, a breath forcing its way out with a long and shuddering
hisssss
—a mix of fingernails on a chalkboard, the shriek of a hawk, and the last rattle of a punctured lung. The noise seemed to coil in the air for a moment, wrapping around Timmy’s shuddering frame, squeezing the breath from him.

The hiss lingered in the empty hallway like the echoes of a shout, disappearing into the buzzing of the fluorescent lights.

Timmy didn’t move. The twisted half smile stayed on his face, muscles frozen, as if some careless surgeon had snipped a nerve and he was stuck with the half-formed expression for the rest of his life.

“Weakness,” Rex said softly, the hiss still ringing in his voice.

His body softened then, whatever demon had slipped into him departing as swiftly as it had come. His jaw relaxed, and Rex’s muscles lost their inhuman rigidity—but Timmy still didn’t move. He looked thoroughly frozen, like a rat that had just lost a staring contest with a python.

He didn’t make another sound as Rex walked away.

Halfway to the gym, Rex’s heart was still pounding with the weirdness of what had just happened. He felt elated, confident, and powerful, finally cleansed of the fear that had stalked him through the halls of Bixby High School every day for the last two years.

But he was also afraid. He’d tried to fend off the darkling part of him, but it had taken control nonetheless.

Still, the experience had left him feeling so
good
—purposeful and somehow more complete. And he hadn’t really lost it, had he? The predator had drawn its claws, but it hadn’t used them. He hadn’t struck for the pulse in Timmy’s throat, the easy kill of the straggler.

Maybe the darkling side of him maintained a balance with his human half. Perhaps Rex Greene was still sane.

For now.

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.