Free Touching Darkness by Scott Westerfeld

resource Dess had never thought of (not that she needed help finding tridecalogisms).
    “Acceptability.” Think.
    The piece of paper was the second-to-last page of a Scrabble dictionary, the only kind of lexicon Rex had ever found that listed words by length.
    “Accidentalism.” Whatever that was. Thunk. The door would be rock solid once he got to thirteen…
    The knives ran out at twelve.
    Rex squeezed his eyes shut tight. Why hadn’t he counted before starting? Nine would have been good enough. And anything would have been better than twelve.
    He whirled around and grabbed a butter knife from the silverware drawer, turned back, and propelled it against the door with all his strength. The blunt tip skated off, taking his wrist a few inches from the serrated edge of a beautiful Japanese carving knife.
    “Damn,” he said. Still twelve knives. He’d turned the door into a darkling magnet! How could he have been so—?
    Thunk.
    Rex blinked, staring at the knife trembling in the wood beside his head. Its blade was etched with snakes and frogs, its hilt cast like two scaly lizard tails, and its pommel, a tiny metal skull with glass eyes, seemed to be smiling at Rex. He’d never seen the knife before and found himself realizing that he wasn’t the only midnighter who had a few weapons put aside for a rainy day.
    “Magnificently Instantaneous Gratification,” Melissa said.
    He turned to face her. She was still on the other side of the room—she’d thrown it past Rex’s head.
    Melissa had wiped the tears away, and her expression had returned to its usual midnight sneer. “I’m okay now.”
    He let out his breath and started to nod, but movement out the window caught his eye. He crossed the room.
    “Don’t look, Rex. You don’t want to—” But he’d already seen it.
     
    The thing came down on undulating wings, two leathery sails that billowed from long, multijointed arms. Its hands, long-taloned and grasping the air with compulsive little twitches, must have been thirty feet apart. Its spiked tail whipped through the wind with every beat of the wings, as if to counterbalance the beast’s grotesque cargo.
    Its body was thin, the darkling part of it anyway, ribs showing through its leathery flesh. The thing’s spindly hind legs stumbled, trembling feebly as it landed on the rooftop across the street, and its wings took one steadying stroke as it gained its footing.
    Melissa, still facing away from the window, made a choking noise.
    It had no head. Not a darkling head, anyway. A human torso seemed to be submerged into the creature’s flesh, and a half-visible human face stared glassily from its emaciated chest. Two secondary arms thrust from the sunken torso, ending in the hands and fingers of a person—a child, Rex now saw—which were clenched as if in pain.
    “It thinks…” Melissa rasped, “…like us.”
    Something burst through the window, an explosion of broken glass, fluttering wings, and ratlike squeaks. Needles of ice shot through Rex’s chest as the winged slither struck, and a sudden tangle of black filaments seemed to clutch his heart.
    Blue sparks blinded him, the metal chains swinging from Melissa’s fist knocking the slither to the ground. Rex gasped for breath through frozen lungs, watching as she casually tipped the silverware drawer over onto the still-fluttering beast. The metal spat more sparks as the thing sizzled underneath the pile.
    “You do the window,” she ordered, kicking the glowing forks, spoons, and knives around on the floor to prevent any crawling slithers from sneaking up on them.
    Rex nodded and reached into the duffel bag. He tossed two handfuls of Dess’s nails and screws out the window, bringing screams and blue fire from the things that hovered or slithered just outside. A swing with Arachnophobia, the ball-peen hammer, dislodged something large that had taken hold of the sill.
    “Help me with this,” he shouted, ice from the slither strike still grating in his