Free Touching Darkness by Scott Westerfeld Page B

through the house, so it was probably a normal darkling, a brash young one to invade this modern place. Melissa didn’t say what she tasted, just stared at the door with blank-faced fatigue. The stairs creaked under its weight, and the thirteen knives began to glow again.
    Terror threatened to paralyze him, but then Rex’s mind went back to what she’d said: Tomorrow we’ll touch again. His head swam at the thought. Finally there was some promise of something more between him and Melissa. They were not going to die tonight.
    He pulled the hubcap from the duffel bag.
    “Come and get it,” he said softly.
    The knives shivered in the wood, lances of tremulous blue fire jumping between them. The scratching sound of claws traveled slowly down the door, and Rex could hear the harsh panting of a big cat. It had taken a hunting shape.
    A carving knife began to wobble, almost slipping from the door, but Rex thrust it back into the wood. Brief contact with the glowing metal scalded his palm.
    He brought the hubcap to his lips.
    “Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation.”
    The metal ignited, coursing with blue fire along its rim, the tiny pictures seeming to dance. The hubcap vibrated in his hand, giving off a buzzing heat that crawled up his arm and into his shoulder. Rex smiled grimly. He had seen what Dess’s really good work could do. So had the darklings.
    The panting outside stopped for a moment, a catch in the creature’s breath.
    A chuckle escaped Melissa’s lips. “Scaredy-cat.”
    A roar answered from outside, a huge howl of pain and anger that made the whole room shudder. But Rex knew from the defeated sound that the darkling had sensed the pulsing weapon in his hand and had decided not to throw away its cold, lingering life.
    The stairs creaked again as the darkling descended, the knives fading to a dull, spent gray, and the dread that had hung over the room slowly diminished.
     
    Before the hour ended, Rex took one last look through one of the rips in the clawed and battered pegboard. He saw the halfling leave, making its ungainly way from the balcony of the master bedroom to the roof, then taking to its overburdened wings.
    “Ready to run?” Melissa said.
    “What?” he asked.
    “They’re all leaving. The entourage too.” Melissa smiled. “We’ll have a couple of minutes, but I don’t think our motionless friends are going to like what we did to their house.”
    He looked around the room. “Could be you’re right.”
    “Damn kids with their senseless vandalism,” she said.
    Rex sighed, thinking of the broken window downstairs. “They might have an alarm system, come to think of it.”
    Melissa pulled Magnificently Instantaneous Gratification from the door.
    “It won’t work any—” he started, but her expression silenced him.
    “I also use it for the regular kind of protection, Rex. In case anyone tries to touch me.”
    “Oh.” He looked at his watch. Two minutes.
    They ran down the stairs. At the front door Melissa gathered herself for one last mindcast, then nodded. “All clear.”
    They reached the old Ford as the blue hour ended. Rex had never been so glad to see blackness sweeping across the sky. At the moment normal time reached them, carried on a cold Oklahoma wind, a high-pitched ringing filled the night.
    “Damn,” he said. “They did have an alarm.”
    Melissa jumped in and started the car, and they pulled away with a screech. Rex stayed quiet as she drove, letting her mindcast for police. A few minutes later she pulled over and turned off the Ford’s headlights, huddling down out of sight.
    Rex also slunk down in his seat, catching a glimpse of two private security cars as they zoomed past.
    Melissa took his hand, her wool glove warm against his skin. “Get some poison, Rex.”
    “Do what?”
    “Something that kills fast. Like one of those snakes that stops your heart in twenty seconds.”
    Had what she’d seen tonight finally pushed Melissa over the edge? “Melissa,