“Haven’t seen a psychokitty in ages.” Dess commented to an awestruck Connor and Tech.
“Dess, quit scaring the kids,” Rex warned, the kind of thing he’d never have said a year ago. A year alone with Dess and his darkling senses in Bixby had changed him, a little. Dess rolled her eyes. She hadn’t changed much.
“Connor. Tech. Everyone,” Melissa introduced, just to be sure.
“What talents we got?” Dess asked, interested.
“Seer,” Melissa said, pointing. “Polymath.”
Dess smiled like it was Supernumerary Mathematician Christmas again.
“Polymath. Fawesome,” Dess answered. The others looked blankly. She rolled her eyes agin, grinning. Losers.
“Come on. I want you to read some lore for me,” Rex said, gesturing Connor and the others inside.
The room was crappy as ever. Dust, junk, and boxes, all frozen in the blue time. In front of the TV, Rex’s dad sat, stiff, his mouth and eyes open and glassy. Connor and Tech watched it all like kids rushed through a carnival house of horrors. Dess just averted her eyes.
Rex’s room had gona from messy crashing-place to full size museum in the last year. Bookshelves, constructed and salvaged, rimmed the walls, covered in artifacts and lore and books and tridecagrams and metal.
“Alright. Read this for me,” Rex started, and Dess got bored already, wandering the edges of the room. Connor and Tech stayed huddled in the middle. Melissa fell back on the bed, running her hands through her short hair. It’d grown out of the buzz, a little, so now it was more fashionable crop than inmate shave.
There are few things on earth more boring than being a polymath sitting around watching two seers look at lore and scribble down symbols.
For Dess, this was usually the sort of thing she considered Hell.
Unless, say, you had another plymath to talk to. Even if he was, admittedly, looking a little shell-shocked and clinging to his brother.
“Never seen a psychokitty before, have you?” Dess asked the other polymath, this Tech. He was looking around, wide-eyed, shoulders hunched in his dark blue pullover sweatshirt. He shook his head.
“Don’t you guys have any weapons?”
Tech shook his head. Dess was outraged.
“No weapons at all? No clean steel? No tridecalogisms?”
He shook his head.
“What’s a tridecalogism?” Dess just about exploded as Tech asked that question. What had Melissa, Jess and Jonathan told these kids? Then she smiled, getting the glint in her eyes that scared people who knew her well enough. This was going to be fun.
“Tridecalogism…” she started pulling off both of her named steel thumb rings (Zombification and Electrocution, her two favorite means of death), “is a thirteen-letter word that means thirteen-letter word.”
The next day around noon, Rex Greene led Connor into the Clovis Museum, passing dusty cases full of lore-inscribed arrowheads. The open excavation wall loomed on one side, and directly in front of them was Rex’s Rosetta Stone, a giant slab of rock covered in lore symbols. If Connor really could see some other, secret lore, this was the place to test it.
Last midnight, he’d consistently come up with slightly different versions of the lore than Rex. They told the same stories, it seemed, but in different words, different points of view, different accounts, maybe like the books of the Bible.
Rex wanted to see what he could do at Lore 101. Already he was plotting taking the other seer down to the Snake Pit.
Rex surveyed the museum happily. After Jonathan and Melissa had left, he’d gotten a part-time job at the museum, and thrown himself into excavations, labeling, dusting and organizing. Without the curator’s knowledge, he’d slowly turned the place into Midnighter Lore 101.
Connor looked around disinterestedly.
“God, this place is lame,” he said. Rex glared. “Seriously.” Connor still wasn’t getting the hint. “About as pathetic and small-town as everything in Bixby.”
Rex might agree. That didn’t mean Connor could say it. Connor who’d been running around with Jonathan and Melissa while Rex took finals, who’d only been a seer for less than a year, who hadn’t studied the lore all his life, hadn’t gotten captured by darklings, didn’t know how hard it was to be a halfling.
Rex shoved Connor up against a wall, his hand to Connor’s throat.
“Think you’re big-time, don’t you, little seer? Pathetic. Little. Human.” He spat.
“I’m not afraid of you.” Connor choked. Bad move. Rex reached for him with the darkling senses he’d learned to control over the last year.
“But you’re afraid of Midnight. You’re afraid of all those little slithers and darklings and psychokitties coming to get you every night. You’re afraid they’re going to come in the blue time and snatch away your poor, innocent little brother.”
Rex bared his teeth. Connor shivered and choked, and Rex Greene the halfling let him down. Connor gasped as his Converse slid back on to the dusty linoleum floor.
“Trust me.” Rex said. “You should be afraid of me.”
And he kept walking, strolling over to the case that contained the flat slab of the giant lore stone. Reluctantly, slowly, warily, Connor followed.
“Top right corner, what do you see?” Rex asked after a minute.
“Flame-bringer symbol.” Connor answered quickly. Last midnight Rex had taught him some of the more basic symbols; the ones for most of the talents and a few others.
It went on like this for a while, Connor sketching symbols he didn’t know the names of into a notebook Rex’d brought.
At four o’clock, museum closing time, they looked over the pages, examining them fully for the first real time. Reading their meaning.
“We have to tell Jonathan.” Rex said, possibly the first time he’d ever thought or said such a thing.
As it happened, Jessica Day and Jonathan Martinez reached Bixby Oklahoma about halfway through the secret hour that night. they’d flown all through the blue time the previous night, covering a decent amount of ground, not stopping to sightsee, flying the entire hour, almost falling down as midnight ended.
The secret hour came again, and they flew less quickly, Jess full of reluctance about coming back to Bixby, knowing her family were just miles away but she’d never see them. The rip was completely closed up by now.
They flew over the Bixby junkyard on the way into town. In the blue hour, it was a city of metal, shining skeletons of buildings and machinery, the steel glinting in the light of the dark moon. A winged shape caught her eye.
“Look!” she said, gesturing with her and Jonathan’s intertwined hands. He panicked a little, from being knocked off balance, and suspecting darklings.
“Where?” he asked, whipping around and pulling them down to the ground so much as he could.
“Pegasus.” She said simply, and Jonathan looked down, the pair of them gently floating to the ground in the junkyard, separating.
The once-magnificent horse that had crowned the top of the Mobil Building during Jessica’s sophomore year was rusty and burned, blackened by the strike of lightning.
Blue-tinged rust turned red and flaked off under Jessica’s fingertips as she brushed them against the familiar curve of the wings. Her eyes filled with tears.
A lightness filled her. Jonathan had come up beside her, holding her hand securely with his.
“It’s going to be okay. We’ll find a way.” He reassured, and she tried to believe him, looking up into the eyes of her boyfriend, who was now two years older than her, not just one.
“I’m serious. This thing with Connor, it’ll be the breakthrough.” Jessica Day turned her head away, focusing blurry eyes on the metal wings of the Pegasus sign.
They made it to Dess’ house, the meeting place arranged when Jonathan had called from the small, no-name town he’d stayed in for the day, just before the secret hour ended. Melissa must have felt them coming, because she, Rex, Dess, Connor and Tech were waiting together on the lawn.
“We found something.” Rex said even before Jonathan and Jess landed. “In the lore.”
“What?” Jonathan asked just as the secret hour ended, color flooding Bixby, Oklahoma. He spun around to Jess just as her hands dissolved under his, and she was gone with a sweet smile.
“It’s about how the darklings first made the secret hour. They had to fold things into the blue time, one by one, the elders jumping in and out and bringing the others with them.”
“But if darklings could go in and out of the secret hour whenever they wanted, why all the stuff about the rips? Why wouldn’t they just come out and hunt whenever they wanted?”
“They used to. But even then they could only come out through places where the secret hour existed. And there were usually midnighters to fight them off. And somehow, eventually, there weren’t enough elders, and they lost the power, and got too cautious.”
“What’s your point, Rex?” Jonathan interjected into the rambling history lecture.
“His point,” Connor took over, “is that wehave the power. And that the darklings could go back and forth. They could bring stuff into midnight, but they could also bring it out.”
It felt like the secret hour again, except only Jonathan’s organs knew it, and they’d jumped up at midnight gravity without the approval of the rest of his body. Heart in his throat, stomach in his lungs.
“But…” Jonathan objected a second later. “We don’t have a darkling.”
“No.” Rex Greene answered. “But we have a halfling.”
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how freakishly fawesome is that?
-Co-Prez OUT! 😀
January 15, 2008
Categories: Chapters, CHASING MIDNIGHT WEREWOLVES, Serafina-la . . Author: Lizzy-wa . Comments: 50 Comments