Blue Noon (27 page)

A half hour later Jonathan tapped her on the back.

“Come on.” He offered his hand. “We should leave soon if I’m going to get back here in time.”

“Thought you said it would be funny if I just disappeared.”

“Sorry.” He touched her hand softly, midnight gravity shivering through her body for a moment. “You could have stayed there. Dess and I could have done this on our own.”

“Glad to help.” She shrugged. “Slumber parties aren’t much fun when your host is a stiff.” Jessica looked into his eyes. “Plus I hate midnights when I don’t get to fly.”

He held out his hand, smiling. “Let’s fly, then.”

“Okay.” She took it, feeling the connection take hold, her body light as the air. “See you tomorrow, Dess.”

Dess looked up from the open front door, where she was piling the stolen merchandise. “Sure, Jess. And Flyboy? If you don’t get back before midnight, I’m leaving all this stuff in your car with a big note to the sheriff.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”

They flew toward Constanza’s, shooting down an empty stretch of highway to the colony of large houses on a circular road. Jonathan jumped with Jessica up to the roof, just outside the open window of the second-floor bathroom.

Jessica glanced at her watch; Jonathan still had plenty of time to make it back to the store before midnight ended. “Thanks for the lift.”

“Listen, I know you needed to see Constanza tonight.” He stood. “Seeing as how she’s your only normal friend and everything.”

Jessica looked up at him, wondering if he was being sarcastic.

“I mean it, Jess. It’s okay to need somebody who’s not a midnighter.” He swallowed, looking uncomfortable. “And I’m sorry I never made friends with her.”

“Thanks.” Jessica sighed. “After what’s coming, she won’t be back, will she?”

“Yeah, I guess. But at least she’ll be safe in Los Angeles.”

“Sure.” She sighed again. “I just hate goodbyes.” Before she’d moved to Bixby, the last three months in Chicago had been nothing but farewells. And now she seemed to be losing everything again.

“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” Jonathan said. “You can count on that.”

Inside, Jessica changed back into her pajamas, waiting for midnight to end. When the blue light faded, the house shuddering to life around her, she flushed the toilet and stepped out into the upstairs hallway.

“So,
as
I was saying,” Constanza began as Jessica opened her door. “This shirt can be retired, right?”

Jessica looked at the black pullover with red shoulder pads. “Yeah. Way too eighties.”

“Eww.” Constanza threw the shirt into the discard pile, then turned to the three giant suitcases that lay open on the floor. They were packed crushingly full of dresses, shirts, skirts, and what seemed like dozens of shoes.

“Won’t your parents be suspicious? I mean, you’re supposedly only going for a week.”

Constanza snorted. “I always pack this much for a week. You wouldn’t believe all the great stuff I’m leaving behind. But I think that’s it.”

“So… we’re done?” Jessica said hopefully. They’d been packing pretty much all day.

“Done for tonight.” Constanza stood up, surveying the wreckage of her room. “Thanks so much for helping me, Jess. I
hate
packing.” She looked longingly into her huge closets. “All these clothes crying out to me. So many left behind.”

Jessica felt herself smiling. The whole last week had been spent preparing for a battle that seemed unwinnable. It felt good to have accomplished something concrete, even as minor as packing Constanza’s bags. And it was a relief to make a few choices that nobody’s life depended on.

“Glad I could help you. It was fun, if exhausting.”

“Ernesto
said
he was going to help, but he’s long gone.”

Jessica frowned. “None of your cousins are still around, are they?”

“No. And even if they were, Grandpa’s being extra insane about anybody setting foot in Bixby before the move.”

Jessica nodded. This close to Samhain, only Constanza’s unlucky parents would still be here. Their house was on the opposite side of Bixby from Jenks but still in the path of the rip. If the darklings broke through, her folks would be in serious danger.

“Isn’t it going to be weird?” she said. “Not seeing your parents… as much?”

Constanza shrugged. “I’m almost seventeen. I figure I’d be out of their house soon anyway. At least this way they’ll be able to see me on TV.”

Jessica had to smile.

“But you know, leaving them behind doesn’t really make me sad,” Constanza continued. “They’ll always be around, one way or another. It’s more my friends I’m going to miss. You especially.”

“Me?
Especially?”

“Of course, silly. I mean, sometimes I feel like I’ve hardly gotten a chance to know you. It’s only been what? Two months since school started?”

“I suppose so,” Jessica said quietly. It felt like years sometimes, but she’d only arrived in Bixby in late August. She sat next to one of the suitcases, staring at the profusion of clothes and shoes inside. “Two months can seem like a long time, I guess.”

“That’s
so
true.” Constanza leaned closer. “In fact, my theory is that two months in friendship time is actually longer than a year, you know?”

“Um… not exactly.”

Constanza bent and picked up a stack of shirts that hadn’t made the cut. She took them to one of the room’s huge, now half-empty closets. “Listen, Jess, I
know
you’re all sad about me leaving. You’ve been moping around ever since I told you about LA. But sometimes these short friendships are totally the best.”

Jessica raised an eyebrow. “They are?”

Constanza slid the shirts back onto hangers thoughtfully, one by one. “Sure! Didn’t you ever have a best friend at summer camp or something? You make friends quick, and you know you’re only together until the end of summer, so it’s
super
intense?”

Jessica nodded. “Yeah, I guess I know what you mean.”

Constanza reached over to brush a lock of Jessica’s hair out of her face. “But those are always the people you remember for the rest of your life. At least I do. Even though I usually forget to write to them or whatever.”

Jessica swallowed, a lump rising in her throat. She couldn’t believe that tears had sneaked up on her and knew she’d feel like a total dork if she cried. She tried to focus her mind on Jonathan’s words: Constanza was one of the lucky ones. She wouldn’t be here for Bixby’s big Halloween surprise.

Constanza sighed. “Maybe it’s because when friendships end like this, instead of growing apart, you get ripped apart. So you never get to the phase where you don’t like each other anymore.”

Jessica blinked, and one tear traveled down her cheek.

Constanza reached out with an elegant finger and softly brushed it away.

“Come on, Jess. That’s enough of being sad.” She laughed. “I’ll be back in Bixby whenever my shooting schedule allows. Still have to see the parentals, you know.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Constanza turned her smile up to its full wattage. “But now that we’re all packed, we’ve got to have some fun so I can remember you happy.”

Jessica nodded, letting Constanza’s mood lift her out of the sadness that had haunted her all week. Dess kept saying that her plan should work, that maybe they could save everyone in Bixby, or almost everyone. And after twenty-five hours of midnight, the blue time would retreat again.

Maybe once the darklings realized they had a fight on their hands, they wouldn’t keep coming back every Halloween.

Jessica decided that tonight, at least, she would have a good time.

“Okay, this is me being happy.” She forced a smile.

“That’s the spirit,” Constanza said. “We can still talk on the telephone, after all. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.

“Looks like Halloween might be canceled,” Don Day said from the other end of the couch.

Jessica looked up from the book she’d been trying, and failing, to read. As usual the Weather Channel was on. A man in a bow tie was coaxing a swirling mass of white out of the Gulf of Mexico and onto the Texas plains.

It was headed straight for Oklahoma.

“Is that rain?” she said. “For
tonight?”

“It was a hurricane, but by now it’s just a tropical depression,” her father said in his Weather-Channel-lecture voice. He leaned forward to peer out the back window. “By the time it gets here, it’ll only be a thunderstorm.”

“Only a thunderstorm…” Jessica watched in horror as the satellite image repeated its course across the TV again and again, stopping at the border of Oklahoma every time. “Um, when’s it supposed to get here?”

“Sometime tonight. It might rain out all the fun.” He gave her a puzzled look. “You’re not going trick-or-treating, are you?”

“Duh. Of course not.” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “I’m probably doing trig homework all night. But thunderstorms are kind of scary, you know, especially on Halloween.”

Especially at midnight, and particularly when you were trying to keep two hundred pounds of fireworks dry because you were fighting off an invasion of monsters. In the last two weeks of planning, no one had brought up the possibility that it might
rain.

“So, Dad,” she said a minute later, trying not to sound
too
interested. “Are they saying the storm should be here by, like, midnight?”

He shrugged. “It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen once a hurricane, or even a tropical depression, hits land. Could take until tomorrow morning. Might break up into nothing. Or it could keep going strong and get here by nine or ten.”

“Whatever!” Beth announced from the doorway. “I’m going trick-or-treating even if it’s raining golf-ball-sized hail. Or even golf balls.”

Jess looked up at her little sister and had to suppress a snort of laughter. Eight coat hangers stuck out from Beth’s shoulders at all angles, covered with black paper and bobbing wildly Her face was mostly blackened with makeup, exaggerating the whites of her eyes, and she was wearing plastic vampire fangs.

“What are
you
supposed to be?”

“I’m a tarantula, stupid.” Beth took a step closer to the couch, angling one of the legs so that it menaced her father.

“Ow,” he said as it struck his head, eyes still trained on the Weather Channel.

“You’re calling
me
stupid. Look in a mirror.” Then Jessica frowned. “Where’d you get that idea?”

“From Cassie. We’re both going as tarantulas. She has this thing about spiders.”

A chill ran down Jessica’s spine. “She’s coming over here tonight?”

“What? Don’t you like Cassie, Jess?” Beth said sweetly.

“Yeah, she’s wonderful.” Jessica lowered her eyes to stare at her book. Cassie had been over a few times since that first awful Spaghetti Night. The two of them had left Jessica alone so far, but tonight she had a feeling they were going to show up at exactly eleven-thirty, when she had to slip out of her room.

At least in one way it was a good thing: it would be a lot safer for Cassie here than in Jenks. Once midnight fell, the rip was going to start expanding, zooming down the 36th parallel. Hopefully it wouldn’t grow wide enough to swallow houses on the north side of Bixby. But even if it did, the darklings might not make it this far.

That’s what Jessica had been telling herself all week, anyway.

“Well, you won’t have to put up with us in any case.” Beth swiveled her hips so that one of the tarantula legs banged against Jessica’s head. “I’m going over to her house.”

“What,in>n/b?”

Beth looked at Jessica with surprise, and even her father’s eyes lurched away from the Weather Channel.

“Um, yes, Jess. Because that’s where Cassie, like,
lives.”

“When are you getting home?”

“Jess, you’re being weird. Dad, tell Jess she’s being weird.”

“Jessica?” her father said.

“Well, trick-or-treating in a strange part of town and everything.”

They both looked at her in puzzlement a little bit longer, and then a knowing smile broke out slowly across Beth’s face.

Their father turned back to the TV, which was filled with images of the storm roiling the Texas coast. “Lighten up, Jessica. It’s Halloween. Cassie’s grandmother promised they’d be in bed by eleven and that they wouldn’t eat too much candy.”

That last word seemed to remind him of the open bag of candy corn on the coffee table, and he leaned forward to grab a handful.

“Mom said not to eat that,” Beth said.

“Mom’s not home yet,” he answered.

“But it’s dangerous!” Jessica cried.

“What?” her father said. “Candy corn?”

“No. Being out there in the country. With a possible storm coming and… everything.”

Beth was still smiling. “You don’t want me in Jenks tonight, do you?”

Jessica ignored the words, staring at her book, trying not to chew at her lip. Her little sister was headed right into the path of the darkling invasion, but she couldn’t think of a single way to stop it. Beth had that smug look on her face—this time she really was ready to spill everything she knew if Jessica got in her way.

And this was
not
the night to get grounded.

“Come on, Dad, let’s get moving,” Beth said. “The Weather Channel will still be here when you get back. Like it ever changes.”

“The weather changes all the time, smarty-pants,” he said, scooping his keys and another handful of candy corn from the coffee table and rising to his feet.

Jessica found herself wishing that she’d become all predatory, like Rex, so that she could slip outside right now and pull the starter cable out of her father’s car. But she didn’t actually know what starter cables looked like and wasn’t a hundred percent sure she could even get the hood open.

What else could she do? Explain that the food chain was about to turn upside down? That Bixby was about to be invaded? They’d only think she was kidding or crazy.

She would have to deal with this at midnight. Along with everything else tonight, Jessica was going to have to make sure her little sister was okay.