Read Online Touching Darkness by Scott Westerfeld - Free Book Online

minutes. It’s what’s coming after midnight that worries me.”
     
    They shoved the darkling dominoes back into the closet and crept to one of the smaller bedrooms. Hopefully the man wouldn’t poke around the empty house with so little time remaining before midnight. Rex pointed to a wide, shallow wardrobe with sliding doors.
    The sound of the front door opening carried up the stairs just as they made it into the darkness of the wardrobe. Melissa felt Rex breathing hard next to her, off balance as he tried to avoid touching her accidentally. She slipped her other glove back on and steadied him with that hand, whispering, “Relax. Let me concentrate.”
    Rex’s mind calmed, and she could feel now that there were two of them downstairs, the man and… Angie. The woman radiated only calm; no wonder she’d been invisible to Melissa before now.
    “You’re lucky we made it,” came the man’s muffled voice, his footsteps audible on the stairs.
    Melissa controlled her breathing. The way sound echoed through the empty house, one bump against the wardrobe door and they’d be discovered.
    “I didn’t ask to break down. Next time I won’t bother to call you.” Her voice was low and controlled, not out of breath like his. Her mind held none of his fear of being late. Melissa felt the woman check her watch—a burst of satisfaction as she confirmed that everything was on schedule. Now that they were inside the house, Melissa could taste them clearly.
    “Promises, promises,” the guy shouted from the master bathroom. A rush of release filled his brain just as the trickling sound of piss reached Melissa’s ears. She shuddered at the intimacy.
    “Like you could handle this on your own,” the woman said in a voice so soft that it mostly reached Melissa as thought. She had a lock on Angie’s mind now: it was saturated with a sickly sweet contempt for the man. Angie didn’t need him here in the first place—he could barely interpret lore symbols, couldn’t see the big picture, was always lugging around his stupid camera, which of course never captured the spooks anyway. If he wasn’t related to the patriarch…
    The woman’s mind grew closer, her slow footsteps carrying her through the upstairs hall. She came to a halt just outside the room they’d hidden in.
    “Did we really need this big a house?”
    Rex’s shoulder muscles tightened under Melissa’s grip, his mind clouding hers with a wave of fear. Relax, she willed him.
    “Location, location, location,” the man said. “That’s all the spooks care about. Anyway, if this field is as big as they say, we should make about a hundred times what this cracker box cost.”
    The woman took one more step into the room and flicked on a light. A blinding wedge of illumination forced its way through the crack between the wardrobe’s double doors. Melissa squinted, feeling as if the light was slicing her in half from top to bottom. Rex had stopped breathing.
    Melissa closed her eyes, trying to tease from the woman’s mind what she was thinking, why she was staring at the closet door. But Rex’s terror drowned out those smooth, collected thoughts.
    “Come on, Angie! Thirty seconds.”
    The woman didn’t move. Melissa made a fist with her free hand. One solid punch to the gut would put anyone down for half a minute. Long enough.
    “Angie!”
    Finally the footsteps retreated, quick and determined now. Melissa heard the clatter of dominoes being spilled in the other room, felt anticipation growing in the two intruders as relief flooded through Rex.
    And then, seconds later, always glorious…
    Silence.

12:00 a.m.
HALFLING
 
    “Come on! We’ve got to run!”
    Melissa shook her head and tore away from him. Her eyes shone with the terrible clarity they always had in the blue time; freed from the tumultuous mind noise of humanity, she could be fearless, imperiously bold.
    Rex sighed. She could also be a pain in the ass.
    “I am so going to rip this woman,” she said,