A/N: Many, many thanks to those of you who liked this story enough to subscribe. Really, seeing those little alerts in my inbox always makes my day, and encourages me to write more. Also, special shiny thanks to The Capslock Savior and Kiyosaisei Ichimaru for reviewing. Really. If subs are like getting free candy, then reviews are like getting sent free mocha icecream cake to your door by a stranger. Either way, they're yummy. 3

So, new chapter. Enjoy!

"So let me get this straight: there was a slither walking around the school hallway?"

Jonathan nodded.

"In the afternoon, when there's sun, which slithers burst into flame in? And the school hallway, by the way, is lined with steel lockers and high-tech insulation. I can see it getting over the ceramic tile without getting burned, but only if the lights were off, which they weren't."

"I know what I saw, Dess," he said, "It had purple eyes. Not to mention, you know, it ran away when I started spouting tridecalogisms."

Dess sighed.

"Maybe it was a leftover from Samhain. That still doesn't explain how it got in the building," she closed her eyes for a moment, "but maybe that's not what we should be worried about right now."

"What'd you mean?"

"Why would it want to get in the school in the first place? Say it got left behind when the rip sealed, you'd think it would go back to the desert to wait for a chance to get back in the blue time. But it didn't. It went into a school building full of all sorts of new things, after hours, when not many kids where left there, and came up to you and Smith on purpose. It was looking for one of you."

Jonathan leaned back and thought for a little bit. "It completely ignored me, but it acted kind of like it wanted Smith to follow it. He thought it was just a normal cat, though; he kept trying to pet it, and it wouldn't let him touch it."

Dess stared at the floor, counting tiles. She already knew that there were 507, because the room was 13' by 39' and every tile was a foot square, but the numbers tumbling through her head helped her think. It sounded a bit like what Jessica had said happened the second time she was in the blue time (and like Cassie, she had to remind herself) , but this whole mess took place in broad daylight, which meant that even if it had been a psychokitty, there was no where for it to lure Smith to. It made absolutely no sense.

God, she was thinking in italics. That had to mean things were bad.

"So maybe Smith's a midnighter?" That hadn't come from her, but from Flyboy. She shoved her ever-present sunglasses further up her nose.

"Yeah, maybe. Either that or you've gone completely off your rocker, which I kind of doubt because it's Madeleine's turn." Jonathan gave her a look, so she explained. "Not sure if you've noticed, but we're just barely short of enough sanity to go around in our little group. When Melissa finally got the voices she didn't want out of her head, Rex went nutty, and now that he's getting better, Madeleine's a vegetable."

There was a short pause, and Jonathan sighed. "Think Rex would be willing to check him out? I think he dropped; I haven't seen him at school since Samhain. It would be kinda awkward if I went to his house."

Of course. They'd been through the freaking end of the world together, and they still couldn't get along.

She sighed. "I'll see what I can do."

They found Smith in the museum's front room, staring at the darkling skeleton that the curators had mistaken for an ancient cat. He had glasses, and Dess wondered briefly if he was a seer. He didn't seem to notice them, but it was and odd coincidence that he was here.

Unless it wasn't a coincidence.

Dess shook the thought out of her head before it could take root. There was no logical way he could be here because of them, unless he was some weird kind of super spy that could trace their phone calls.

She hung back in the stairwell down to the basement room they had been talking in and flipped her phone out. Jonathan kept going, but looked back once he realized she was still there.

"Go," she said, "I'll take care of things here. And don't talk to Smith; he's out there looking at the psychokitty bones. I'm gonna call Rex and get him down here." Jonathan nodded and went on his way, and Smith didn't so much as look up.

Rex hadn't come back to school after Samhain, and had officially dropped out after about a week. Dess guessed he spent all his time nursing his adopted vegetables: his dad and Madeleine. He and Melissa were still an item, but Dess didn't really care enough to keep track of them. They had all kind of drifted apart after the long midnight, the crises that had kept shoving them together suddenly absent.

Dess sighed, punched the call button, and held the phone to her ear.

Rex didn't come to the museum much anymore. It felt so wrong, those artifacts in all their sweet oldness trapped behind bulletproof glass, held together with tricky little wires, treated with who knew what to keep them from decay. Bixby's Natural History Museum (and all museums, really) violated the very thing it was trying so hard to preserve.

At least now he was to the point where he could walk into the place unassisted. He didn't like it any more than he had school, but he was at least learning how to shove the darkness inside him to a manageable portion of his brain. He wore sunglasses to help him with fluorescent light now that he didn't need his prescription lenses, his hair was finally growing out a bit, and he had learned how to look less predatory. He still wore gloves, because they were the only way he could touch new things without being burned.

He wasn't sure if "healing" was the right word, but he was getting better. He hoped.

Rex pushed open the big steel-framed glass doors to the museum's front room, squinting at the sunlight that streamed through the windows despite his dark glasses. He spotted the teacher Dess had called him about immediately. The man was burning.

At least, that's what it looked like. The focus that clung to him was like nothing he'd ever seen. It wasn't like midnighters, or the tracks of human innovation he'd been able to see since the change. He was practically glowing with it, radiating sheer wrongness and power and clever ideas that could kill if he got too close.

Rex bristled. The teacher, Smith, felt so…wrong. It made his heart hammer; and the darkling part of his brain screamed at the sight of the man. He closed his eyes and turned back to the door, got the hell away so he could calm down and try to figure out what that meant.

He rushed to his car, put his head between his legs, and tried to breathe. That man – if that's what he was; Rex almost doubted that that could have come from someone human – seemed to be made of, to be seeping everything darklings detested. If Dess' little theory was right, if the daytime-slither had been seeking out Smith, it had been to kill him. He was also pretty sure that for any slither to make it that close to the man, it would have to be able to walk through daylight, at the very least. Anything from midnight resilient enough to stand the sight of him would be resilient enough to survive the inside of a modern building, no problem. Compared to Smith, school was a cakewalk.

"What the hell are you?" he whispered to himself, knuckles turning white on the steering wheel above his head. "What's going on?"

"So," Dess asked when she picked up the phone, "Is he a midnighter?"

Rex gulped, not entirely sure how to answer. "I don't know," he said.

"What do you mean, you don't know? You saw him, didn't you?"

"Yeah, but…" Rex didn't know how to say this. It sounded so stupid in his head: "Yeah, Dess, I saw him. He was burning. He might not be entirely human, either, just so you know."

Yeah, right.

Dess was waiting.

"I'll explain it to you at midnight, okay? Meet me downtown, by the park."

He didn't give her time to say no before he hung up.

The Doctor had seen them. All three of them, in the museum. He was very good at acting like he didn't see things, of course, because it often came in handy. Like today, for instance. Jonathan and that other girl had been in the museum, and when Jonathan left, he walked right past the Doctor without so much as a glance. Judging by the direction he had come from, though, there was no way he couldn't have seen him, which probably meant he was intentionally ignoring his teacher. (Rather rude, that.)

Afterwards, the other girl – Dess, he was pretty sure he had heard Jonathan call her – had whipped out her phone and called up a friend, who he assumed, (correctly, he could only hope) was the kid with the dark glasses who had walked in, stared at him, and bristled, like a cat that had accidentally run into a pit bull, before walking back out. The Doctor had virtually no idea how those kids were wrapped up with what had happened that Halloween, but he would bet one of his hearts that they had been.

He had actually meant to land before Halloween, but the TARDIS, silly old girl that she was, wouldn't let him. Instead, she'd tossed him to January of the next year, leaving him unable to do anything but piece together what had happened. And he would piece it together, even if doing so was completely futile now. He'd come to Bixby with the intention of saving lives, only to find that when he actually got there, he was three months too late to do anything. The TARDIS, of course, was unrepentant. She was so sure that she had done the right thing by not letting him intervene…

In any case, it turned out his little trip to the museum hadn't been entirely fruitless. He was pretty sure the skeleton of the prehistoric big cat wasn't exactly that. There were some little deviations from real ancient cats, especially in the skull and the proportions of the thing. And although the label said it was a saber-tooth, it had normal, average, kitty-cat teeth, albeit bigger than most cats'. It had supposedly been dug up just outside of Bixby.

So perhaps this hadn't been a normal cat. And if that was the case, maybe the one he ran into earlier wasn't, either.

When no-one was looking, long after the three kids had all left, he shaved a bit of bone off the skeleton's tail. He could tell it wasn't a plaster mold, this, despite the fact that the plaque said it was. After all, the plaque also called the beastie a saber-tooth tiger.

He whistled as he made his way back to the TARDIS to analyze his new find.

Dess was already on her bike when midnight struck. She was taking Geostationary out to where she found the police box to see if there was anything funky going on with the math. Of course, Geostationary wouldn't work during the blue time, except maybe to chase away slithers. If there had been any slithers, that is. They were all out of town now, except for the stray that Martinez had run into.

Martinez had gotten in touch with Melissa after the museum. She was probably scanning the midnight brainwaves right now for any sign of Smith. Dess wasn't sure she would find him, after all, the chances of another midnighter coming to town were so close to nothing that she didn't even bother calculating. He would have had to been natural-born, too, like Rex, because he was too old to be one of Madeleine's pets. She also seriously doubted he wouldn't know about midnight with what happened at Samhain, even if he was new in town.

She, on the other hand, was supposed to be headed to meet Rex. And she was, kind of, except with a slight detour. She had timed it wrong, though: her calculations were all correct, of course, but her parents had stayed up later than she expected, so she got out of the house about ten minutes late. She had gone as fast as she could, but sometimes good plans failed because of stupid, small things. Like parents. She went to the alley anyway, hoping to get another chance to try to pry open the police box's doors. She could have tried to pick the lock, if she had remembered to bring her lock picks.

She turned the corner to the alley, and what she found made her heart flutter a bit. Another variable had just been discovered. It was a binomial now, this little conundrum.

The police box was gone.