I kept my eyes open, and was amazed to see the Netherworld simply fade around me, going first gray, then insubstantial. The sharp stalks blurred, then finally disappeared, and I found myself standing in short, dead grass, a mere six inches or so from the brick wall of the house and my bedroom window.
Oops, cut that one kind of close.
Though, I’d gone two extra steps, just to be sure. Were distances skewed in the Netherworld?
My brain danced around the possible implications of that thought, but then I shook it off. I had to get to Nash’s.
I spared a moment to pluck the obvious shards of Netherworld grass from my jeans, vaguely frightened that they hadn’t simply faded from existence with the rest of the Nether. Then I zipped up my jacket and took off toward Nash’s house at a jog, hoping the remaining slivers would shake free with the movement.
Any other night, I would have been nervous to be out alone, but after several minutes in the Netherworld, edging my way through a field of deadly grass to get away from something slithering through the stalks after me, nighttime in the human-world seemed downright welcoming.
I was breathing hard by the time I got to Nash’s house, where he, Tod, and Emma were piling into her car. “Leaving without me?” I panted, leaning with my hands on my knees to catch my breath.
“Kaylee, jeez, you scared me!” Emma cried, loud enough that if any of the neighbors had been awake, they’d have heard her.
“We weren’t leaving without you.” Nash greeted me with a tame kiss on the tip of my nose, a greeting that spoke of relief, rather than heat. “We were coming to find you.”
I wrapped my arm around his waist, pressing into him to share his warmth. “I’m only a couple of minutes…” My voice trailed off as I glanced at my watch. It was twelve thirty-five. I’d left my room around eleven fifty-five, and it had taken me no more than ten minutes to jog from my house to Nash’s. And I’d spent less than five minutes in the Netherworld. I was sure of it.
Which meant I was missing twenty-five minutes….
Fear washed over me like a cold ocean wave, and both Hudson boys saw it on my face.
“How did you get out of your house, Kaylee?” Tod asked, his voice deep with suspicion, and when all heads turned his way, I knew Emma could both see and hear him.
I squeezed Nash and stared at my feet. “My dad fell asleep in the living room. I didn’t have any other choice.”
“So you crossed over?” Nash’s voice was lower and more dangerous than I’d ever heard it, and his words held no hint of calm. He held me at arms’ length, both hands on my shoulders. “Don’t ever do that again. Do you understand?”
I shrugged out of his grip, my temper flaring to a hot, sharp edge. “It’ll be pretty hard to get Addy’s soul back without crossing over,” I snapped.
“Crossing over?” Emma’s brows sank in confusion. “To where?”
“I mean alone,” Nash clarified, ignoring her question. “You can’t go there alone, Kaylee. You have no idea what…stuff is out there.”
“What stuff is where?” Emma demanded, propping both hands on her hips.
“Well, I know a little better now.” Turning from Nash, I slid
into the passenger seat, then I caught Emma’s eye and tossed my head toward the driver’s side, urging her silently to get in.
The guys followed our lead reluctantly.
“What happened?” Nash demanded softly, as he clicked his seat belt home in the backseat. “Did you see something?”
I twisted around and smiled to relax him. I didn’t like the bossy side of him, but knew it stemmed from concern for me. “Just a field full of weird grass with something slithering through it.”
“Lizards,” Tod said, and I knew based on Emma’s reaction—or lack thereof—that he hadn’t let her hear him that time. Which meant we weren’t talking about ordinary lizards.
I glanced at Nash with my brows raised in question, but he only shook his head. We’d talk about it later, after we’d dropped Emma at her house. Or rather, after she’d dropped herself off.
Em was still irritated by our refusal to explain what was going on, but she hugged me when she got out of the car and told me to be careful doing…whatever we were doing.
I hugged her back and thanked her sincerely. Then I hugged her again, hoping it wouldn’t be the last time I’d see her. I really didn’t want to die in the Netherworld. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Not yet, anyway.
I slid into the driver’s seat and Nash climbed over the center console to sit next to me. Then I twisted to look out the rear windshield as I backed slowly out of Emma’s driveway, while she let herself into her house. “So, time moves slower in the Netherworld? That would have been nice to know.”
“If we’d known you were going, we would have told you,”
Tod said matter-of-factly. “Along with the fact that most species of Netherworld lizards are poisonous to humans.”
“And to
bean sidhes
,” Nash clarified, in case I didn’t get it.
“Yeah, thanks. And the plant life isn’t exactly amber waves of grain.”
Tod grinned, and I knew that he, at least, had forgiven me. “It won’t be like that closer to the city. The Netherworld is like a reflection of our world, anchored at certain, highly populated spots. Like public buildings. But the farther you go from those meccas, the less the Netherworld resembles our own. Including plant and animal life. And space and time.”
So I really
had
gone farther in the Netherworld than I had on the human plane.
“Space and time?” I took the next corner too fast, distracted by the new information.
“Yeah.” Tod shifted onto the center of the back bench seat so I could see him better in the mirror. “The human world is the constant, and time in the Netherworld will never go faster than it does here. And you’ll never move farther here than you would have there. But time will move slower in the parts of the Netherworld that are least firmly anchored to the human plane, and it’s very easy to think you’ve traveled far enough, yet when you cross back over, you haven’t gone as far here as you thought you had.”
Which was exactly what had happened to me.
“So, how are we supposed to get around in the Netherworld, if we never know where or when we’ll be when we cross back over?” I shot a worried glance at Nash.
“Very carefully,” he said, his voice grim and dark again. But this time he let a thread of calm snake through it to wrap
around me, and I settled into that calm, inhaling it just for the taste of Nash. “Because most mistakes made in the Netherworld can’t be fixed.”
W
E TOOK
I-30
to Highway 12, in Irving, where the Dallas Cowboys were finishing their last season in the old stadium. I drove and Nash navigated. Fortunately, he’d been to Texas Stadium a bunch of times, and except for one missed exit—I hate it when highway signs aren’t marked well in advance—we had no problems getting there. Though, I was a little creeped out by the late-night, nearly deserted feel of the area.
We parked in a lot south of the stadium, and the sound of my car door closing echoed across the expanse of bare concrete. The air outside was warmer and more humid than in the car, but goose bumps popped up all over my arms, as if my skin knew better than my head that I ought to be afraid.
The dark chill of anticipation could probably be attributed to my imagination. Or to the fear that I would cross over from the human plane into another field of glass spears, or something even worse.
“You ready?” Tod asked from the other side of Emma’s car, one hand on the roof between us. Nash stood next to him, watching me carefully, as if I might melt into a puddle of fear and raw nerves any minute. Or maybe burst into tears.
Did he really think I was that fragile?
No, I was not ready. But neither was I going to delay our mission. Addy’s time was running out.
“This is a public place with a very large concentration of human life force most of the time, so this section of the Netherworld should be pretty well anchored to ours,” Tod began, stuffing his hands into his jacket pockets. “Which means that, for the most part, you can trust that time and space are running along pretty normal lines.”
“But there hasn’t been a game here in a couple of weeks, right?” I glanced from one brother to the other. “Shouldn’t that lack of human activity cause the anchor to slip a little?”
Nash rounded the hood of the car to take my hand, and his brother shrugged. “It might slip a bit during the off-season, but there’s been so much human energy built up here over the years that two weeks isn’t enough to make much of a difference.” The reaper ran one hand through his blond curls and joined us at the front of the car. “There might be a slight time and space discrepancy because it’s the middle of the night and no one’s around right now, but it’ll be very small. Definitely much less than what you felt at home.”
“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 football 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.