Midnighters 4, The Next Generation

Dess whooped a loud war howl and swung the steel chain around and around above her. Its name was Hyphenated-13. It was kind of cheating, but it worked great.

Clang! ZAP! Steel collided with darkling flesh. Red, angry sparks flew everywhere.

Melissa charged up with a long steel pole in her hands. She used it like a lance, stabbing and spearing every dark creature in sight.

Jonathan and Jess were hanging back, every once in a while taking a swipe at a stray spider or jaguar.

Let me explain this.

Darklings are old spirits that only live one hour a day. This hour is between 11:59PM and 12:00AM, so they call it the midnight hour. It's invisible to normal humans, but to those who were born exactly at that moment in time, it is a whole extra hour every day.

Still with me?

They call themselves midnighters. They are free to roam the frozen, blue, midnight world, with their interesting capabilities. For example, Jonathan is an acrobat. In the midnight hour, gravity means basically nothing to him, and anyone he's touching.

Jess is a flame-bringer. Usually, electric things don't work in the midnight hour, such as cars and flashlights. But Jess can bring them to life and use them as weapons against darklings, which hate white light.

The darklings sometimes attack, and new steel with 13 letter names, or Jess' light, can hurt or even kill them.

Now, let me tell you about their midnighter history.

Humans, long ago, shoved darklings into one hour of the day, and isolated them. Darklings are dangerous beasts. It was that everyone knew, once. But now, only the midnighters know the truth.

This group came from Bixby, a town that sat perfectly on 36, 42; both numbers being divisible by 12, a darkling number. So it stands to reason that it is one of the places in the world where 'blue time' happens.

Because, as soon as you leave Bixby, you enter the real world again.

Let me tell you one more thing. Jess, due to an explosion and lightning, is stuck in the midnighter hour as well as the darklings. She's been following the group across the country as well as she can, but it's been a major setback.

See, after Dess discovered that there were coordinates to this sort of thing, the group decided to go look for other midnighters. There were too many memories in Bixby. Rex, a part of the group known as a 'Seer', stayed behind.

And here they go; to discover a secret much bigger than any they had ever known before.