My Soul to Steal (24 page)

No problem
. The last time I’d been in the Netherworld version of my high school—less than a month before—it had been completely unpopulated. Surely I could just jog down the hall and around the corner, into the nearest supply closet,
then scream my way back into my own world, completely unnoticed by the Nether-freaks.

Taking deep, slow breaths to control my racing pulse, I stood and walked silently to the classroom door, only feet from Mrs. Brown’s unoccupied desk. Fingers crossed against surprises, I twisted the knob, pulled open the door—wincing at the creak—then stepped into the doorway.

And froze in terror.

The walls were red. And they were moving.

It took one long, terrifying moment for me to understand what I was seeing, but understanding only made it worse. The walls themselves weren’t red. I couldn’t tell what color they were because they were covered—completely
obscured
—with thick red vines, pulsing, coiling, constantly twisting in one huge tangle.

My hands clenched around the door frame and three of my fingernails snapped off at the quick. Panic tightened my chest, constricting my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I could only stare in horror so profound it swallowed the rest of me whole.

Some sections of the vine were as thin as a pencil, others as thick as my bicep. The larger sections were striated with every possible shade from dried-blood red to a softer, watercolor cherry, like thinned paint. The ends of the vines, very fine and limber, sported needle-thin thorns and sharply variegated leaves, greenish in the center, bleeding to maroon on the edges.

I gasped, then clasped one hand over my mouth. I knew those leaves.

Crimson Creeper.

The entire hallway was
crawling
with it. A few months before, I’d been pricked by several thorns from an infant vine
growing through cracked concrete, and that had been enough to nearly kill me. What clung to walls and lockers now was probably enough to take out half of Dallas.

As I stood frozen, staring, trying to overcome fear too thick to breathe through, something brushed my right index finger. I jerked my hand away from the door frame and turned to see a thin cord of vine slowly slithering down the metal jamb, leaves the size of half-dollars reaching for me like petals toward the sun.

I swallowed a startled shout and stumbled away from the door—and into the hall. Too late, I realized my mistake, but when I turned back toward the classroom, I found that one curious vine stretching across the opening at waist height, blocking my entrance. Deliberately.

Sparing one moment for a string of silent curses—most aimed at Sabine—I stepped carefully into the center of the hallway. There was no turning back now.

I walked slowly, eyes peeled for reaching vines, while soft, dry slithering sounds accompanied my whispered footsteps. A thicker vine slid toward my right foot. Skin crawling, I backed out of the way—only to step on a small tangle of leaves and thorns.

Several steps later, I noticed a break in the ever-shifting plant life—an open classroom door. A metallic scraping sound screeched from the opening, and I jumped, my heart pounding fiercely. I swallowed the new lump of panic and went still, willing myself to go unseen, hoping that whatever was in that room hadn’t heard me. Eyes closed, I sucked in a deep breath through my nose—and nearly gagged on it.

And that’s when I realized something warm and wet was soaking into the back of my shirt.

Barely suppressing a squeal of disgust, I darted forward and
glanced up to find something foul and goopy and vaguely orange in color, dripping from the ceiling. From a large, tightly wrapped coil of vines, almost directly overhead. The creeper had caught something, and it was being slowly digested by tiny pores in the plant—but for the bit of Nether-slime that had leaked down my shirt.

Revulsion shuddered through me and it took every bit of self-control I had not to pull my shirt over my head and drop it where I stood, as fears of Netherworld poison and weird biological contamination threw my logic circuits into overload.

Another harsh, heavy scraping sound echoed from the classroom ahead, and I edged forward a little more. Then stopped again when a deep, rough voice slid over me, like sandpaper against bare skin.

The words sounded familiar, but the speech pattern was so foreign I couldn’t decipher any meaning from sounds and syllables I felt like I should know. When no one came thundering into the hall to grab me, I silently released the breath I’d been holding and crept forward again until I stood inches from the open door.

A second voice spoke, higher in pitch, but his meaning was no easier to grasp. I could hear them moving around inside the room—a second-floor math class, in the human world—and my muscles were so tense I was starting to ache all over.

If I ever made it back to the human world, I was going to
kill
Sabine.

After a pause in the bizarre conversation, the scraping sounds resumed, and I gathered my battered courage around me like the remains of badly beaten armor. Then, using the scrapes to disguise the sound of my movement, I lurched across the open doorway and deeper into the vine-tangled hall, my heart racing erratically.

As I passed, I got a fleeting look at the backs of two tall, hairless creatures with skin so wrinkled and voluminous they looked like overgrown shar-peis. They had smooth, shiny skulls—the only unwrinkled parts of their bodies—and long, black claws tipping too many fingers to count. But even weirder than the creatures themselves was the huge stack of school desks they were both studying, puzzled, like chess players searching for their next moves.

From there, I walked on softly, concentrating on silence and speed, trying to ignore the cooling patch of fetid wetness on my back as I dodged grasping creeper vines. The next few doors I passed were closed, the classrooms quiet and presumably empty.

I was about fifteen feet from the T-shaped hallway junction when a mad scrabbling sound sent chills skittering up my spine. It sounded like a hundred cat claws scrambling for purchase on a slick floor, the whole thing accompanied by a high-pitched, foreign-sounding voice.

My arms prickled with chills, I tiptoed toward the door, which stood open about four inches. The closer I got, the louder the sounds became, and when I was less than a foot away, a chorus of younger, sharper voices joined the first in a frenzy of eager inhuman cries.

Sweat broke out over my forehead. I took a deep, silent breath and peeked around the vine-choked doorjamb and into the classroom. My throat tightened around a gasp as waves of terror and revulsion washed over me, freezing me in place for several eternal moments.

At first, I couldn’t understand what I saw. There were too many limbs, gray like death, but short and dimpled like toddlers. Too many round, smooth heads, covered in soft, translucent peach-fuzz hair. Too many tiny violet eyes. Too many
gaping mouths full of needle-teeth, snapping and whining eagerly.

And in the midst of what could only be a nest of pint-size Netherworld monster children stood a single adult, darker and smoother in color, but no less terrifying. As I watched, my pulse rushing in my ears, she held up an ordinary cardboard box, extended over the crowd around her. The children stilled, staring at the box in reverent silence.

The adult paused, and her smile chilled the blood in my veins. Then she overturned the box, and half a dozen round, fleshy things fell from it.

The children pounced. The air crackled with their hisses and snarls, and with the scratching of their clawed feet on tile. They fought for the bloodied treats, snatching quick, gory bites before another set of clawed hands ripped the prize away. Crimson sprays arced through the air. Teeth gleamed red beneath black gums.

It was a preschool free-for-all—a child-size slaughter—and the one adult watched, a proud, gruesome smile warping the bottom half of her round face.

Shuddering, I stepped past the door and only released the breath I’d been holding when nothing burst from the room to devour me.

Breathing hard now, I took a second to get myself back together, then I started walking again. The storage closet was right around the corner from the bathroom. Surely I could make it that far.

But I’d only taken a couple of steps when a commanding, glacier-cold voice sent chills the length of my body. I froze.

Avari
. He was right around the corner.

Damndamndamn!
What were they all doing here? The school had been empty just weeks before! Sabine’s life expectancy had
just shrunk to a matter of minutes from the time I got back to the human world. Assuming that actually happened.

Riding a fresh wave of fear, I raced down the hall—
toward
the sound of his voice—and ducked into a bathroom niche, thick with shadows. The walls were blessedly free of vines, but covered with a thick, smelly, slowly oozing fluid.

I pressed as close to the wall as I could get without actually touching it, and stared out at the empty hall from the shadows hopefully hiding me.

“…very close now…” Avari said from around the corner, as I sucked in a silent breath tasting of fear and smelling of my own sweat. “When you have yours, and I have mine, this affiliation is over. You will slink back to your own corner of oblivion, and we shall see each other no more. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said a second voice, smooth and seductive, like the first sweet taste of a chocolate-dipped pepper, before the fire inside it roasts you alive. “I shall have the lovely Nightmare child, and you shall have your little
bean sidhe,
and we shall feast on their souls for all of eternity….”

A
S THEY ROUNDED
the corner, I breathed shallowly through my mouth to keep from smelling whatever oozed down the wall behind me. Wishing with every single cell in my body that I was anywhere in the world but where I stood in that moment.

Avari stepped into sight, and I willed my heart to stop beating for a few seconds, afraid that even that small noise—plus the stench of my terror—would give me away. But he never even glanced at the restroom alcove. Evidently the flood of human emotion from the blitz in progress disguised my individual fear. And he was obviously too irritated at the creature who walked on his other side to bother checking the shadows for humans accidentally stranded in the Nether.

Lucky me.

The woman with him was shorter than Avari, and very thin, her hands a tangle of swollen joints and skeletal fingers beneath the tattered sleeves of a black velvet dress. Her cheeks were sharply pronounced, the hollows beneath them dark and deep. Her black orb eyes reflected a faint green glow in the
little available light, and since she had no obvious pupils or irises, I couldn’t tell whether or not she was even looking in my direction.

But her most prominent feature by far was her hair—an ever-dripping flow of noxious liquid, streaming over her head and down her back in distinct currents and waves. The flow was thick and black, except where the light overhead gave it a dark green tint. As I watched, she brushed a streaming strand back from her hawkish face and several drops splattered on the floor at her back, sizzling in green-tinted fizz on the grimy tiles.

I’d never seen anything like her river of hair, and I had no doubt that if it splashed me, the drops would eat the flesh right off my bones.

I shivered in my shadows, fighting to keep my teeth from chattering, but the two hellions just walked on slowly, talking, and I strained to hear every word.

“My beautiful Nightmare is ripe for the plucking—so full of luscious envy,” the woman said, her words sliding over me like the seductive warmth of a fireplace. Suddenly I wanted her voice for myself, to replace the screeching abomination my own throat spewed into the world. Why should a monster like that get such a beautiful voice, when I got a shriek that could drive grown men home to their mommies? “And I would pluck her
now,
” she continued, oblivious to how badly I wanted to rip her voice box from her emaciated throat and stomp it into the ground, to deny her what I couldn’t have for myself.

The thought that I might be capable of such a violent act should have shocked and scared me, but it didn’t. It felt…justified. Why should someone else—
anyone
else—have something I couldn’t have?

“Your impatience is tiresome, Invidia,” Avari said, drawing my thoughts from the wrong I ached to right. “I’ve readied both hosts, but pushing them into slumber in the same moment is rather an exact science, and one rash act could bring this whole tower tumbling down on top of us.”

“Nonsense.” Invidia tossed her hair again as she passed out of my sight, and several vines shrank away from the drops sizzling on the tiles. “You exhausted them for just this purpose, and this flow of youthful energy will not last forever. We should strike now, while the iron is hot, lest our hosts have time to cool their heels.”

“Soon, Invidia. I give my word, it will be soon….”

I didn’t release my breath until I was sure they’d turned the next corner and passed out of both sight and hearing range. Their conversation played over in my head as I tried to make sense of antiquated phrasing, using what little I knew of the Netherworld and the continuing catastrophe my school had become.

The “flow of youthful energy” seemed the most obvious: the increased bleed-through of human life force the blitz provided. But as for the rest…I needed a second, more enlightened opinion. All I knew for sure was that Avari and this Invidia—clearly a fellow hellion—were planning to somehow claim me and Sabine, body and soul, with the help of a couple of preselected “hosts.” And we didn’t have much time to defend against whatever they were about to throw at us.

Considering the seemingly steady flow of traffic in the Netherworld version of my school hall, I decided to risk crossing over in the bathroom instead of pressing on to the storage closet, which may or may not be locked from the outside in the human world.

I eased the door open slowly, and when I saw no sign of
any Netherworldly occupants, I slipped inside and let the door close behind me. The row of sinks looked just like the sinks in my world, except that the one in the middle was steadily dripping a viscous-looking yellow fluid in place of water.

Swallowing my disgust, I knelt to peek beneath the doors of the two closed stalls, glad most of them stood open. On the human side of the crossing, the second to last stall was out of order. The toilet had been broken since we got back from the winter break, and a sign hung on the outside of the locked door.

That stall held my best chance of crossing over without being seen.

The door on this side of the barrier was open, so I went in and closed it, then stepped up onto the slimy-looking toilet seat to keep a set of feet from suddenly appearing in the human world version of the stall when I crossed over. I braced my hands on either side of the stall, careful not to slip. I did
not
want to land in the goopy yellow liquid putrefying in the bowl beneath me.

Then I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, concentrating on the memory of death to summon my
bean sidhe
wail and my intent to cross back over.

I thought about Doug dropping the clip from Nash’s bright red balloon, the night of his own party. He’d inhaled as I raced toward him, but I was too late; that one hit was all it took. Doug’s eyes had rolled back into his head and he’d collapsed to the ground. The balloon had fallen with him, and I’d nearly choked on the scream trying to rip free from my body.

And with that memory, the wail came again, as real and as painful as it had been the first time. My throat burned like I’d swallowed fire. The scream bounced around in my skull and in my heart, demanding to be set free. Pain echoed
everywhere the trapped wail slammed into me, but I clenched my jaw shut, letting only the thinnest thread of sound out, desperately hoping it would be enough.

I closed my eyes and clung to the sides of the stall when the fog began to roll in, roiling around the base of the filthy toilet and over my ankles, though I couldn’t feel it. I ignored the intense need to open my mouth, to scream for that remembered soul—one I hadn’t been able to help, in real life.

And now, in memory, Doug and his soul would help me. They would send me back so I could save myself and Sabine from eternal torture, and the rest of the school from the energy blitz that would soon be its ruin.

When I heard water running—the first sound not produced by my tortured throat—I glanced down to find the toilet beneath me clean and white, the water in its bowl clear and odorless. Only then did I let that thread of sound recede within me, like winding up an unrolled ball of twine. A very thorny, scalding ball of twine.

“What was that?” a girl’s voice asked from outside the stall, and I nearly groaned out loud. The broken stall was empty, which I’d been counting on, but the bathroom itself was not. Either someone was skipping class, or I’d crossed over between bells.

“What was what?” another voice asked.

I considered hiding out until they left, but I had to find Sabine and Nash before they made it to sixth period, or I might not get another chance until it was too late.

Bracing myself for embarrassment, I hopped down from the toilet and unlocked the stall. When I stepped out, all four girls in front of the mirror turned to stare at me.

“Can’t you read the sign?”

“Gross. That one’s
out of order
.”

“That’s Sophie Cavanaugh’s sister.”

“Cousin,” I corrected on my way into the hall, and before the door closed behind me, the fourth girl made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat. “Ew! She didn’t even wash her hands!”

“Or flush!”

I speed-walked through the hall, sidestepping students and teachers alike, scanning dozens of familiar faces for the two I needed. I couldn’t stop Avari and Invidia on my own. I needed Nash and Sabine.

But what I found was Tod. Where I least expected him.

After glancing into Sabine’s sixth period classroom with no luck, I ducked into the first-floor girls’ restroom in search of her. I’d checked three of the four stalls and found them all empty when Tod suddenly appeared in front of the door to the fourth.

I shrieked a shrill profanity and jumped back so hard my elbow slammed into the third stall. “You can’t be in here!”

Tod stuck his head through the last stall door, then backed up and shrugged. “It’s all clear.”

“Well, it might not be for long. What are you doing here?”

“Nash called me.”

He had? Emma must have told him I’d disappeared from fifth period.

“Oh. Well, thanks, but I’m more than capable of sneaking around the Netherworld on my own for a few minutes.” Even if I almost got devoured by man-eating plants and carnivorous kindergarteners… “So you can go polish your shining armor for someone else to admire.”

I
might
have been a little irritated at him for telling me to give up Nash.

Tod frowned and brushed a curl from his forehead. “You went to the Netherworld? Why the hell would you do that?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose!” I propped my hands on my hips, impatient to continue my search, but I wasn’t going to be seen talking to an invisible friend in the hall. Not so soon after the recent bathroom weirdness. “Sabine took her anger issues out on me when I fell asleep in French.”

“Hell hath no fury like a
mara
falsely accused.”

“Nash told you? What’d he do, call you at work?”

Todd shook his head and pulled a small, slim phone from his back pocket. “Mom put me on her cell plan, now that I can pay for the additional line. Got it a couple of days ago.”

“And you didn’t give me the number?” I swallowed a bitter, unexpected wash of disappointment.

The reaper grinned and leaned with one hip on the nearest sink. “I was waiting for you to ask.”

A flash of irritation burned in my cheeks. “That might have actually happened, if I’d known you had a phone.”

His brows arched in surprise. “I figured Nash would tell you.”

“Well, he didn’t,” I snapped.

Tod slid the phone back into his pocket. “So…you’re still mad about the other day?”

“Wouldn’t you be mad if I told you to give up on someone you care about? Just…hand her over to someone who doesn’t even deserve her?”

Tod gave me a strange, sad look I couldn’t interpret, and the blues in his irises shifted subtly for a moment before he got control of them. “Yeah. I guess I would.”

And obviously that was as much of an apology as I was going to get.

“Anyway, if you didn’t come to rescue me from the Netherworld, what are you doing here?”

Tod blinked, and I could almost see him refocusing on the crisis at hand. “Nash just called to tell me that Sabine sensed someone sleeping in the hall—you know
maras
can feel slumber, like we’d feel heat from a fire, right?”

I nodded, creeped out by the comparison. “So what?”

“So there was no one sleeping in the hall. Everyone was up and moving, on the way to class.”

“So maybe her spidey senses are all messed up.” I shrugged. “Karmic payback for sending me to the Netherworld in my sleep.”

“I doubt it’s that simple. Or that satisfying,” he said. So did I. “The only way I know of for a sleeping person to function like he’s awake is if he’s…”

“Possessed,” I finished for him, as the implication began to sink in and dread settled through me like lead, pinning me in place. Avari had taken control of his “host.” Or maybe Invidia had taken control of hers. “Did Sabine mention the lucky victim’s name?”

Tod shrugged. “She said the hall was too crowded and no one was snoring.”

“Great. She’s always
so
much help.” I closed my eyes, trying to gather my thoughts, then looked up at him. But before I could tell him what I’d overheard in the Netherworld, the sixth period bell rang, and I nearly jumped out of my shoes.

“You gonna be in trouble?” Tod asked, glancing at the ceiling like he could actually see the bell.

I reached for the door and gripped the handle. “Nowhere near as much trouble as we’ll all be in if Avari gets his way. He’s playing with a friend this time, and they’re up to something big.”

“You mean the blitz?”

“The blitz is just a means to an end. He and his partner are trying to drag me and Sabine into the Netherworld, and they’ve each picked out a body here in the human world to give them hands-on involvement in the process. We have to find out who they’ve possessed before they can make their move.”

There weren’t many possibilities to choose from. A person had to have some connection to the Netherworld to even qualify for hellion possession, and I couldn’t think of a single eligible party, other than me, Nash, and Emma.

And Sophie…

Shit!

Tod’s blue eyes went hard and angry on my behalf—and probably on Sabine’s. “What can I do?” He followed me into the hall, where I lowered my voice to avoid notice by the stragglers still making their way to class.

“Find Sophie and make her talk. If she doesn’t sound like herself, knock her out. Then meet me in the quad.”

Tod’s lips turned up in a grim smile. “You know I never pass up an opportunity to smack your cousin.”