"What about the grass? Are we going to be shredded by vegetation when we cross over?"
Nash rubbed my upper arms through my jacket as I shivered. "I doubt it. There's too much activity here for razor wheat to get a foothold on the land. It takes a while for that shit to establish strong roots, which it can't do with Netherworlders stomping through it all the time. Right?" He glanced at Tod for confirmation, and the reaper nodded. Then Nash lifted my chin until my gaze met his. "And by the way, if you ever have to do that again—which I would not recommend—wear waders. Waist high, at least. Mom says that's the only way to get out of razor wheat without getting sliced to bits."
I nodded and bit my lip to keep from telling him about the whole sideways-step procedure, because that would make it sound like I'd mastered the razor wheat and intended to maintain my skill. Which I did not.
Unless I had to.
Still, waders sounded like a good idea….
"So, if the Netherworld parallel to my house is a field of razor wheat, that means no one's been there in a while, right?"
"It means there hasn't been enough activity there to keep it from growing or to stomp it down," Nash said as Tod headed across the lot toward the stadium, with us trailing him. "That's probably why your dad picked that section of the neighborhood."
His guess felt right. I could easily see my father trying to protect me by isolating us from centers of Netherworld activity.
A pang of guilt rang through me at that thought, for the way I'd yelled at him. Yes, he was being a real pain, but only because I wouldn't tell him what I was doing. It wasn't his fault. When this whole mess was over and I was done lying, I'd make him a pan of brownies.
Chocolate says "I'm sorry" so much better than words.
"The fact that there probably won't be razor wheat doesn't mean the plant life will be safe." Nash sounded grim and almost angry as he stepped over a concrete wheel stop. He didn't want to cross over, and honestly, neither did I. "Don't touch anything, just in case."
"So, all the plants are dangerous?"
Tod cleared his throat and pivoted to walk backward, facing us as he spoke, walking right through steel barricades and light posts. "The sun in the Netherworld doesn't shine as purely as it does here. It's kind of…filtered. Anemic. So the plants have adapted. They supplement their diet with blood, from wherever they can find it. Mostly rodents, and lizards, and other scuttlers. But they'll try for your blood, too, if you flaunt it."
Lovely… A dark chill washed over me, and I rubbed my arms for warmth. I hated the Netherworld already, and I'd spent only minutes there. "It sounds like Little Shop of Horrors."
Tod gave a harsh huff and turned smoothly to face forward. "That was only one plant."
I stepped onto the raised sidewalk in front of the stadium, walking confidently to hide the fear pumping through my veins, chilling me from the inside out. "So, don't touch anything and stay away from the plant life."
"Right." Tod nodded, apparently satisfied. "Let's go. It's not getting any earlier, on either plane."
Keening was even easier that time than the time before, and to my surprise—and concern—I was able to do it without consciously remembering anyone's death. Instead I forced myself to endure the nightmare unfolding in my mind, like a bloom dripping blood.
Nash's death.
It wasn't a premonition. I knew that at the first touch of the terror-soaked, thorny vine creeping up the base of my skull. I wasn't predicting Nash's death. I was imagining it in horrifying, soul-wrenching detail. My biggest anti-wish. It played out behind my closed eyes, drawing from me a wail so strong the first thin tendrils of sound scorched my throat like I'd choked on living flames.
I wanted to spit those flames back up. Needed to purge them from my body for my own sanity. But I made myself swallow them, all but a ribbon of sound vibrating from my vocal chords, bypassing my sealed lips. My insides smoldered, ethereal smoke making the back of my throat itch.
I opened my eyes, and the world had gone gray.
The stadium was still there, rising in front of me like a domed, steel-and-concrete mushroom. But now an otherworldly fog shrouded the exposed beams and the underside of the massive stands.
Nash stared at me, his eyes churning colorlessly in fear for me. Fear for us all.
Tod watched us both carefully, and I read doubt in every line on his face. He wasn't sure I could cross over. Or at least that I could take Nash with me.
The reaper's skepticism fueled my determination, pushing me past the pain in my throat and the awful bloated feeling in my core, as if my insides would soon rupture from holding back my own wail. I thought of the Netherworld, and my intense need to be there. To find the hellion who'd sucked the Page sisters' souls. To get those souls back.
At first nothing happened. Then, just when frustration threatened to rip the full cry from throat, I realized the problem. I was still thinking about the razor wheat, and my desire never to step into it again. And those thoughts interfered with my intent to actually cross over.
Growling a bit, in sharp, dissonant harmony with my keening, I forced thoughts of the glasslike stalks from my mind and concentrated on Nash's assurance that it couldn't grow in such a populated area.
Suddenly the stadium began to fade into that featureless haze, and for one long moment I saw nothing but gray. Felt nothing but gray. I'd had my eyes closed the first time I'd crossed over, so I'd missed this claustrophobic emptiness, as if the world had swallowed me whole and wrapped me in fog.
My hands flailed in front of me, reaching desperately, blindly for Nash, before it was too late to take him with me. I did not want to have to cross over again.
His hands closed over mine with a familiar, soothing warmth. My finger brushed the pencil callous on the middle finger of his right hand, and the long, raised scar on his left palm, where he'd sliced it open working on his bike when he was twelve. I squeezed his hands, and an instant later the world whooshed back into focus around me.
Only it wasn't our world. It was the Netherworld. Again.
My previous crossover had prepared me for this trip no more than a trip to the farm would prepare an alien visitor for an evening in New York City.
My biggest surprise was that the Netherworld had sidewalks—a sign of civilization and advanced order I had not expected. I'd known the stadium would exist on both levels. As a center of high-volume human activity, it was one of the anchors pinning the human plane to the Netherworld like a dress pattern over a bolt of cloth. Where the pin pierced both, the layers remained flat and even, and time and space were relatively constant. But between the pins, the bottom layer—the Netherworld—could bunch, and shift, and wrinkle. And that's where things were likely to get the weirdest.
Not that they were exactly normal even at one of the anchors….
"How did the Netherworld get sidewalks?" I whispered, letting go of Nash's hands to wipe nervous sweat on the front of my jeans. My pulse pounded in my ears so fast I was actually a little dizzy. "And parking lots? Is there some kind of creepy concrete company around here?" I didn't even want to know what the Netherworld mafia might bury in building foundations….
"No." Tod sounded amused again, in his own bleak way. "All of this is drawn through from our world, along with enormous amounts of human energy. The stronger the anchor, the more closely the Netherworld mirrors our world."
"So, the Netherworld equivalents of places like L.A. and New York must look—"
"Just about the same," Nash finished for me, smiling in spite of the circumstances. "Except for the people walking down the sidewalks."
I propped both hands on my hips, below the hem of my jacket, and took a long look around. "The stadium doesn't look much different—" though, the few vehicles sprinkled around the lot and the area surrounding the huge complex on the human plane were gone "—so where's the disposal facility?"
"Um…" Tod gestured toward the stadium. "I think that's it." He shrugged. "It's not like they actually play footbal
l here, right?"
I studied the stadium more carefully, looking for some sign of activity. Surely if this place was a repository for dangerous substances, there would be Security, or warning signs, or something. "Where is everyone? What about those fiends? Shouldn't they be around here somewhere?" Not that I was eager to find them. Unless, of course, finding them helped us avoid them.
"I don't—" Tod started.
But then Nash grabbed my arm, whispering fiercely. "Did you see that?"
I followed his gaze to the main entrance and the thick bank of shadows cast over it by the strange red crescent moon. On its own, such a feeble moon shouldn't have been able to produce much light, but again I noticed that the Netherworld night sky was not as dark as the one I'd grown up beneath, and the odd purple expanse cast a weak glow of its own.
Still, the shadows were virtually impenetrable, and at first I could see nothing in their depths.
Then something moved. The long, dark expanse seemed to writhe. To wriggle, as if the shadows cloaked some huge nest full of bodies crawling all over one another, vying for what little light reflected from the oddly colored sky.
"What is that?" I'd wandered several steps closer before I even realized I'd moved. Nash came with me, but Tod put a hand on my shoulder to hold me back.
"I think those are the fiends."
Great. "Okay, maybe there's a back door." 'Cause we were not fighting our way through a mass of wriggling fiends. Whatever those were. "Let's walk around," I suggested. And since neither of the guys had a better idea, we walked.
I couldn't get over how normal things looked—so long as I stared at the ground. The parking lot was virtually identical to the one in front of our own Texas Stadium, potholes and all. There were faded, chipped lines of yellow and white paint on the asphalt, and even several dark streaks of burned rubber, which had crossed over with the entire lot.
The closer we got to the building, however, the more the small differences began to jump out at me. The first was the flags. On the human plane, the stadium was ringed with a series of blue-and-white flags showing a football player in his helmet, and the Texas Lone Star. But in the Netherworld, those flags were stained, streaked banners of gray, torn by some otherworldly wind. Several had been reduced to ribbons of colorless cloth, virtually shredded by time and neglect.
The murals, too, were gray and largely featureless, showing just a hint of a humanlike outline. Several of them seemed to have extra limbs. And I could swear one had two heads.
"This is weeeeird," I sang beneath my breath, curling my fingers around Nash's when his warm hand found mine. "Let's just find a way in and ask the first person we see. Maybe Libby will be here…."
"She won't help." Tod veered slightly to the right, away from the main entrance, where those writhing figures were slowly coming into focus. "She's already told us everything she can, and I doubt any other reaper will do more. We'll have to ask someone else."
"What are those?" I asked, again squinting into the shadows beneath the awning. I could discern individual bodies now, and was surprised to realize that they were not serpentine in the least, in spite of the mental image their writhing had called up in my head.
They had heads—one apiece, fortunately—and the proper number of arms and legs. But that's where the similarity to my species ended. These creatures were small—though I couldn't judge how small from such a distance—and naked. Their skin was darker than mine and lighter than Libby's, but I couldn't tell how much of their coloring was due to the thick shadows they crawled through.
Oh, and they had tails. Long, thin hairless tails that coiled and uncoiled around legs and other appendages with such fluidity that they couldn't possibly have contained rigid bones.
And their tails weren't the only hairless parts. These little creatures were completely bald, and some part of me wondered if they wallowed all over one another just to stay warm. Some sort of group defense against the cold?
"Those are the fiends," Tod said softly, and for the first time, I realized he was acting weird. Speaking softly. Walking with us, rather than blinking to the other side of the stadium to scan for other entrances. Did his reaper abilities not function in the Netherworld?
"They can't be fiends," I said, deciding to hold my question for later. "They're too small." They didn't even come up to my waist, and the way Libby described fiends, I was expecting huge, burly monsters, pounding on the doors of the facility, literally fiending for another hit of Demon's Breath.
"Size isn't everything," Tod said, and my jaws clenched in irritation over his wise-man tone. "Those are the fiends. Look how they're crawling all over one another to get to the door. Not that that'll help. It's probably bolted from the inside."
Oh. They weren't trying to stay warm. They were trying to break in. I kicked a loose chip of concrete, thinking. "If it's bolted from the inside, how do the reapers get in?"
"They probably cross over from inside the stadium." An easy feat for a reaper, who could blink himself right onto the football field on the human plane, even after hours.
"So how are we going to get in?"
"Don't know yet." Tod frowned, still watching the fiends.
"Can't you just blink yourself inside from here?"
He shook his head slowly and feigned interest in a crack in the sidewalk.
Nash huffed, sounding almost smug. "Most reaper skills don't work here," he said, confirming my earlier hunch.
Tod sighed and met my gaze, his forehead lined deeply in frustration. "I could have done it from the human plane, but I doubt whoever works in there would be eager to help one rookie reaper who pops in without permission, bearing no Demon's Breath."
"So you're just like us down here?" I couldn't tear my gaze from the small bodies climbing all over one another in a bid for the door. As I watched, one creature's tail encircled another's neck and wrenched him forcefully from the top of the pile, only to drop him several feet from the ground. The displaced fiend bumped and rolled down the mountain of squirming bodies until he hit the concrete, where he scraped the side of his face and came up bleeding.
Wow. It was like watching a panicked crowd fight its way out of a burning building, only they were trying to get in.
And that's when I noticed that several fiends stood at the edge of the crowd, watching their spastic brethren jostle for position. Other than the occasional manic, full-body twitch, they looked pretty normal. For little naked guys with tails.
"Maybe we should ask one of them," I whispered, pointing out the fiends on the fringe. "They look like they come here pretty often."
"Kaylee, you can't just walk up to a fiend and start a conversation," Nash whispered, pulling me close with one arm around my waist. But this time, the motion felt less like it was intended to comfort me than to protect me. To draw me away from the minimonsters.
"Why not?" I frowned and glanced again at the pile of fiends trying to scale the exposed beams and smooth, glass doors. Okay, yes, they looked pretty fierce. But they were also pint-size. If one attacked, surely we could just…step on him.
"Because they're poisonous," Tod answered, coming to an abrupt stop. "And they bite."
"They eat people?" I took several slow, careful steps backward, squinting harder at the fiends. They weren't big enough to eat more than my hand in a single sitting.
Maybe they share….
Though, judging from the competitive nature of their desperate climb, I highly doubted it.
"No, they don't eat people. Not humans or bean sidhes, anyway. There aren't many of us around here. But they bite anything that gets in their way, and their saliva is toxic to creatures native to the human world."
"Lovely." I took another step backward, but it was too late. We'd caught their attention. Or rather, I had.
The fiend in the middle crossed the lot toward me, almost bouncing with each step, and two more came on his heels, twitching noticeably every few seconds.
"Snacks?" the second fiend asked, his voice high-p
itched and eager, like a child high on sugar. And when he opened his mouth, I glimpsed double rows of sharply pointed, metallic-looking, needlelike teeth, both top and bottom.
They glinted like blood in the red moonlight.
The fiends grew closer, fingers twitching eagerly. Saliva gathered in the corners of their thin gray lips.
My heart lurched into my throat, and to my own humiliation, I yelped and grabbed Nash's arm. I tried to take another step back, but my foot caught on something, and I would have gone down on my face if not for my grip on Nash's jacket sleeve.
One glance down revealed the problem, and pumped more scalding fear through my bloodstream, fast enough to make my head swim. A thin, bright weed grew from a crack in the concrete, red as Japanese maple leaves in the fall. The damn thing had wound around my right ankle, clinging to my jeans with thorns as sharp as the teeth of a tiny saw.
I jerked on my foot, my gaze glued to the fiends still approaching slowly, but that only pulled the vine tight. The thorns pierced denim and speared my flesh in a dozen tiny points of pain. "Ow!" I cried, then immediately slapped my hand over my mouth. The last thing I needed was to draw more attention our way.
Nash glanced down, and in a flash he'd dropped to one knee, a pocketknife drawn and ready. He couldn't fit it between the vine and my leg without cutting me, so he simply sliced the weed out of the ground, and pulled me back before the surviving, grasping tendrils could grip me again.
The severed weed dripped several drops of dark red on the concrete. Or maybe that was my blood. A sick feeling wound around my stomach, tightening like the vine around my leg.
What am I doing here? My ankle burned where the thorns had pricked me, my pulse raced in my ears, so loud I could hardly hear the scrambling of the fiends against the glass anymore.