The footsteps approached the corner and a shadow stretched out across the grass, an inky shape in the greater darkness. I squeezed my eyes shut as logic and fear came to a stalemate inside me and I froze, hating myself a little for my own indecision. Was this the best I had? Close my eyes and hide in the shadows, wishing for the big bad to pick another target?
I wanted the courage to face whatever was coming to kill me, but who was I kidding? I didn’t even have the guts to defend Laura—my own best friend—when Peyton started ragging on her, so what good would I be against an actual monster?
The footsteps came closer. My jaw clenched. I would look. This time, I would be strong. I would open my eyes in three…two…
Something touched my arm and I sucked in a deep breath to scream. But then lips pressed against mine, soft and warm, and the breath I’d taken froze in my throat. I kissed back for a second without thinking, caught up in the eager touch, the pleasure where I’d expected pain.
Then my senses came roaring back and my eyes flew open, but the face was too close, the world too dark. I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing or feeling, and I couldn’t pull away, because of the wall at my back. So I wedged my hands between me and a solid, cotton-covered chest and shoved.
Luca came into focus as he stumbled backward, recovering from surprise with a grin I ached to indulge even though I wanted to smack it off his face. “What was that for?” he asked, staring into my eyes in the dark.
“Why’d you kiss me?” I asked, instead of answering his question.
He shrugged. “You were about to scream, and that would have attracted attention.” He frowned and glanced around in the dark, obviously just now hearing the sounds that had been following me all along. “Though it sounds like you’ve already done that.”
“So, what? You couldn’t just say ‘Shh’?”
“I could have.” His grin widened, his eyes sparkling in the red-tinted moonlight. “But this was more fun.”
I knew better than to admit that I agreed. “I was coming to rescue you. How’d you get out?”
Another shrug. “Netherworld fun fact—monster flesh crisps up nicely with direct exposure to an open flame.”
“Open flame?”
“Turns out the gas stoves in the kitchen actually work. Also turns out that vegetable oil functions nicely as an accelerant.”
My eyes widened. “Impressive.”
“Thanks. You?” he asked, as I let him lead me away from the building.
“Good old-fashioned bloodletting.” I showed him the gash on my palm, crusted over with dried blood, and he raised one dark brow.
“Gruesome, but obviously effective. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“You have no idea what’s in me,” I said, and then I realized that that statement applied to us both. I wasn’t sure what I had in me either.
“I intend to find out, if we ever get out of here.”
I hoped he couldn’t see my stupid grin in the dark, because I couldn’t banish it—until I noticed how many dark shapes lingered on the edge of my vision, lumbering slowly toward us. We’d be surrounded soon. We needed to get out of the open.
Luca squinted at something to my left, then pointed. “There.”
I followed his aim to a shed used by some of the athletic teams for overflow equipment. In our world, it was kept padlocked, but here…there was no telling.
“Walk fast, but don’t run,” Luca said, taking my hand, and I nodded. The creatures were getting closer. I could hear a few of them breathing now, rasping, chuffing sounds.
“Is closing ourselves in a good idea?” I whispered, as we race-walked across the grass.
“Probably not. But neither is being eaten.”
When we got to the shed, I was relieved to see that there was no lock. Luca pulled open the door and I shone my cell phone screen inside to make sure the tiny building was empty. It was, except for what few pieces of equipment had bled through from our world with the building. He followed me inside, then slammed the door shut, and I set my phone on the ground so it would illuminate as much as possible while we wedged the door in place with several old baseball bats planted in the dirt.
Less than a minute after we’d closed the door, the first fist pounded on it. Not that I could tell it was a fist. For all I knew, it could be a hoof, or a tentacle, or a horn. I jumped at the sound, and Luca’s hand wrapped around mine in the dark—by then I’d pocketed my phone to save the battery.
“Can they get in?” I asked, as something scratched the door from the outside, and something else started banging on the wall at our backs.
Luca sighed. “Probably. Eventually.”
“So we’re trapped.” My throat felt tight and my hands were starting to tingle. This couldn’t be it. This wasn’t how I was supposed to die. This wasn’t when I was supposed to die. I was barely sixteen years old!
But at least I wasn’t alone. Though I couldn’t understand that either…
“That hellion was going to send you home, right?”
Luca nodded, and I let him pull me closer, until my back was pressed against his chest, my legs crossed in front of me. He wrapped his arms and legs around me like a cloak, though he felt more like a shield. Like he was putting himself between me and whatever was trying to break into the shed, and I couldn’t believe the kind of courage that must have taken. To put yourself between someone you just met and the monsters willing to rip you both limb from limb.
How could I be so scared, yet so relieved, both at once?
“So why didn’t you go home?” I whispered, as another long, grating scratch trailed down the door.
“Like I was gonna leave you here.” Luca’s breath brushed my ear and stirred my hair. He laid his hands over mine, and they fit like they were meant to go there.
“Maybe you should have.” I flinched when the next loud bang shook the whole shed. “I met this girl. She was crazy, but she kind of made sense. She told me how to get out of my cage, only I didn’t understand what she was telling me at the time. She also said I could go home, all on my own.”
“I’m not sure I followed that,” Luca said.
“I’m not sure I did either. And I don’t know if she was telling the truth. Even if she was, I don’t know what she meant.”
“What did she say?” He let go of me long enough to reseat a bat knocked loose by the latest blow to the door.
“She said to go back the way I came. Which might be helpful if I knew how I got here.” Or maybe not. I couldn’t think with all the banging, knowing we were minutes from being eaten alive.
“Well, clearly she wants you to wait until another soulless reaper appears in front of you.” He sat next to me this time and I twisted to face him. “I don’t suppose you know when that’s scheduled to happen again, do you?”
“He was soulless?” Were reapers supposed to have souls? I should have been impossible to surprise, after everything I’d seen since getting sucked into an alternate dimension, but the weirdness just kept piling up, and I was so buried in it now I wasn’t sure I could ever dig my way out. “How do you know?”
“His eyes. You know how they say the eyes are the windows to the soul?” Luca said, and I nodded, though I’d never really given the phrase much thought before. “Well, his eyes were empty. Because he has no soul.”
Everything else I wanted to ask was stuck in my throat, stalled by skepticism that would have been outright disbelief a few hours earlier. But I no longer felt qualified to say what was possible and what wasn’t. So…did that mean that Addison Page really was dead? And what about me?
“Am I dead?” I asked softly, trying to block out the scratches and thumps, and the slivers of moonlight that were starting to shine in around the widening gaps in the door frame. “You said you thought you felt something earlier.” When he’d pulled me off the ground, in the hall. “Was that because you’re a necromancer, and I’m dead?”
Luca laughed, and I felt like an idiot for asking such a stu
pid question. But I had to know. “You’re very much alive, and obviously determined to stay that way. But I do think you’re connected to death, somehow. Touched by it.”
“Because my mom died?” Even after spending who knew how many hours in this bizarre hell world, my mother’s death still ranked as my single worst memory ever. Or, my worst not-a-memory. I’d been unconscious in the moment of her death, and I’d missed her every moment since. My mom had known me like my father never could, and everything I truly understood about myself had come from her.
But Luca shook his head slowly. “I don’t think that’s it. Unless…were you hurt when she died, like, in the same accident or something? Is it possible you died too, even for just a minute?”
“No.” I frowned. “I don’t think so.” But the truth was that I had no idea. No one who was there that night would tell me what happened. Nash and his mom were off the hook, but my dad and Kaylee—they were family. They owed me the truth.
But Luca misunderstood my confusion. “That happens more than you’d think. People die, and doctors resuscitate, but once death’s touched you, you’ll always bear its mark, even if I’m the only one who can feel it.”
Another thud shook the shed, and I jumped, my next question forgotten.
Luca lifted my chin and kissed me again, and this time instead of pulling away, I pulled him closer. His hand slid around my neck, his fingers curling in my hair.
“What was that one for?” I asked, when he finally let me go.
“Just for fun. Because I’m not sure I’ll get another chance.” He lifted my cut palm, and I stared at it, wondering if all that cutting and bleeding and running had been for nothing. What was the point, if I was just going to die anyway? If we both were?
“That’s unacceptable.” I pulled my phone from my pocket to check the time, but the lit screen was blank, like cell signals weren’t the only things missing in the Netherworld. Like maybe time had no meaning here either. “We’re not going to die here, or anywhere else in this nightmare of an alternate dimension. Addison said I could go home, and I believe her.”
“And Addison would be…?”
“The dead pop star,” I said, and that time Luca looked skeptical, but I hardly noticed, because I was going over everything Addison had said. Again. “She said I could go home, but I had to want it, more than anything else. She said to go back the way I came. But what does that mean?”
“It sounds like she thinks you brought yourself—and maybe me—here,” Luca suggested, reseating another loosened bat.
“But I didn’t do anything. That dead guy just appeared there, and his eyes were empty. I started screaming and closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew, we were here, and nothing made any sense.”
“There has to be something else,” Luca said. “You must have done something we’re not remembering.”
Something heavy slammed against the door, and I shrieked when the top hinge ripped free from the wall. And just for a second, everything changed. The floor of the shed was suddenly filled with thick, rolling gray fog, and through it, I could see the ghosts of things—mostly sports equipment—that didn’t exist in the Netherworld. But they existed in our world, in this very shed.
In an instant, that flash of impossible things was gone, and Luca hadn’t seen it. He jumped to his feet and stepped over two bats to hold the door closed with his body. His eyes focused on me, shining in the glare from my phone screen, and I could see fear in every line of his face. And as I watched him, clutching my cell in my good hand, swimming in my own fear, some crazy bit of understanding slid into place in my head.
I’d listened, not just to Addison, but to myself. I’d seen what she wanted me to see. And I could do what she’d said I could do. I could take us home. And I didn’t need any help.
“Sophie.” Luca’s voice pulled me out of my own head and back to the reality where each blow to the door jarred his entire body. “Kiss me. This really is our last chance.”
“No way,” I said. “We’re getting out of here. Give me your hand.” I stepped over one of the fallen bats and reached for him, but he hesitated. It took all of his strength to keep the door closed, and giving me his hand would weaken that effort. “Trust me, Luca. Addison was right. I got us into this, and I can get us out of it.”
“How?” He had to raise his voice now, to be heard over the violent chuffing sound echoing through the door as some great beast dragged in air, then spit it out. “What did you do?”
“I screamed. That’s what brought us, and that’s what’ll take us home.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he insisted.
“Neither does this!” I waved a hand at the door to indicate every monster trying to break it down. He couldn’t hold them off forever. “Give me your damn hand!”
And finally he did. His fingers curled around mine and I opened my mouth. Then I screamed harder and louder than I’d ever screamed in my life.
Nothing happened. The scratching, clawing, and pounding never paused, and I didn’t see so much as a curl of fog on the ground.
“I don’t understand!” I had to shout to be heard above the ruckus by then. “Why didn’t it work?”
Before Luca could answer—assuming he had an answer—something hit the door hard enough to shove him forward. He lost his balance and went down on his knees on one of the bats, and I know it hurt, because I could hear the impact, even over the noise from outside. The next blow to the door ripped the middle hinge free, and Luca shoved himself to his feet. He planted his palms on the door and pushed, and the muscles stood out on his arms and his neck as he strained from the effort.
I put my hands next to his and pushed with all of my strength, but I had dancer’s legs, not football arms, so I wasn’t much help.
My arms ached, and fear felt like ice crawling up my spine. Each breath burned in my lungs, and sweat rolled into my eyes. And all of our effort was pointless. The next big blow to the door threw us both backward. I tripped over a bat and went down on my hip. Luca landed half on top of me, then scrambled away from the door, pulling me with him. He grabbed a bat on the way, and we didn’t stop until our backs hit the wall at the end of the shed.
One last blow knocked the door down and the end of it landed inches from my toes.
Luca grabbed my chin and turned me to face him. “Look at me,” he said, but I could hardly hear him over the race of my own pulse in my ears and the huffing, inhuman breathing from the beasts hovering in the open door. “Don’t look at them. Just look at me,” he insisted, and my heart beat so hard and fast my chest felt like it was going to burst.
I nodded, but that was easier said than done. The monsters smelled awful and sounded even worse. Claws scratched on the fallen door, and I started to turn for a glimpse of what would kill me.
Luca put one hand on the side of my face and kissed me again. This one was short, but intense, and for one amazing moment, nothing else mattered.
Then something swung on the edge of my vision and Luca pulled away from me, shouting in pain. He swung the bat, but it was wrenched from his grip. He grabbed my hand and I turned to see what was hauling him away from me, but they were backlit by red moonlight from the doorway, so I saw only a tangle of arms and legs—too many to make sense of—and eyes that glowed without any real light to reflect. There were teeth and claws and fur, and the shed was full of it all.
There was nowhere to go. There was nothing left to do. And Luca was being pulled away from me, in spite of the foot he’d jammed onto the end of the door to hold himself in place.
Then one of them reached for me—a humanoid hand with thick, curved black claws.
I screamed again, and the sound that ripped free from my throat was both terror and rage, mindless in its intensity. Merciless in its volume. I clung to Luca’s hand and kicked at the claws that raked my leg, but I was helpless against the scream scraping my throat raw with the power of pure sound.
Fog rolled around us, but the sound didn’t stop.
>
Then, suddenly, everything changed. The fog was gone, and with it the monsters. The shed was still there, but I now sat on a mesh bag full of soccer balls. Luca clung to my hand, his legs stretched out behind him, where the monsters had tried to haul him away, but the door here was intact, hanging from all three hinges, and the only signs of what we’d done and where we’d been were the scratches on my shin and the blood dripping from his ankle.
“Sophie?” Luca sat up and stared at me in the light leaking into the shed from around all four sides of the door. That light was too white to come from the Netherworld, and too bright to come from the moon. “Holy shit, you did it!”
“Yeah.” Yeah. I’d done it. “But what about the monsters? They were touching you when we…left.” Hell, they’d been trying to rip his leg off.
“Most things can’t cross out of the Netherworld. We’re safe.”
But I couldn’t think past the part he wasn’t saying. If “most” couldn’t cross, that meant “some” could. Like that soulless reaper.
Before I could question the miracle I’d accidentally delivered, Luca pushed himself to his feet, then pulled me up with him. He kissed me again, and tears rolled down my face, and I tasted them, but that kiss lasted forever and ever, and it was the best thing I’d ever felt in my life.
When he finally pulled away, he was laughing, and I knew how he felt, even though nothing was funny. Survival was joy, and joy was laughter, and I couldn’t think of a more appropriate reaction to having escaped an evil alternate dimension a single second before we both would have been literally devoured alive.
I was high on life. On still having mine. On still having his.
“What are you?” he whispered, staring down at me in the shadows as if I was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen. That was the second time he’d asked the question, and I had no better answer now than I’d had the first time.
I’m a sophomore. A dancer. An only child. A half orphan.
All of that was true, but none of it felt like the answer he was looking for. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but I hoped he’d found it, somewhere in me.