Soul Screamers, Volume 1

I couldn’t answer him—not while I was holding back my wail. So I shrugged, and squinted into the distance, turning slowly in my seat. At first there was nothing but the usual gray fog, paler toward the sky, and the eerie impression of movement just outside my field of vision.

As Harmony had explained, human private residences didn’t exist in the Netherworld, so when I peeked into it, Addy’s neighborhood was suddenly overlaid with a second, similar series of gravel streets and walkways, which ended in nothing. And some darkly intuitive part of my mind insisted that the gravel was really crushed bone. Though, from what sort of creature I couldn’t begin to imagine....

I wondered what I’d see if I were actually in the Netherworld. What would the homes look like? Could I go in one? Would I want to?

“Well?” The urgency in Nash’s voice reminded me of the ticking clock. I squinted into the fog again and this time made out a series of darker-than-normal shapes in the ever-present gray spliced into our world. Shapes that weren’t moving. Or at least, weren’t moving away.

I pointed to my right, and was surprised when my hand smashed into the glass of my own window. Though I still sat bodily in the human world, my senses were so intensely focused on that other world that I’d become oblivious to my physical surroundings. The car didn’t exist in the Netherworld, where I seemed to float over the road alone, in an invisible chair.

Weird.

Nash turned the wheel in the direction I’d pointed, and vertigo washed over me as I moved along with a vehicle I could only see and feel on one plane. In one reality.

Double weird. Evidently I get carsick in the Nether-reality.

As we drew closer, the shapes became a little more distinct. Two tall forms, and one small. Small, like a little girl. A young teenager, maybe.

Crap. Regan had already crossed over.

A little more of my wail slipped out, and I was surprised all over again when the echo of my voice bounced around in the car, rather than rolling out to points unknown. Nash followed my finger, and I had to slap a hand over my mouth to keep from vomiting when the car tilted up suddenly, and he slammed my gearshift into Park. We were in a sharply sloping driveway, only feet from those three dark figures now.

The driver’s side door opened, and cold air swirled around me. A moment later, my door opened, and Nash helped me out of the car by one arm. Icy mist settled on me, rendering me instantly damp and cold, and distantly I wished I’d worn a jacket.

Nash’s lips brushed my ear. “Let it go…” His words slid over me like warm satin gliding over my skin. I felt myself relax, even as the largest of those gray figures turned to walk away. “We’re here now, so just let it go.”

I let the wail fade, and the grayness melted from my vision, leaving me with a scratchy throat and haunting images lingering behind my eyes. And a crystal-clear view of a large brick house with a stone facade around a bright red front door, illuminated by a series of floodlights.

Parked on the street in front of the house was a plain black limousine—if a limo can ever be considered plain—with the engine still running, the driver half asleep behind the wheel. That would have been a remarkable sight on my street, but in Addy’s neighborhood, it was probably commonplace.

Nash dashed toward the house, and I sprinted after him, without taking time to truly reorient myself in the human world. I tripped over the front step, but he caught me with one hand, already twisting the knob with the other.

It opened easily. Dekker and the reaper obviously weren’t expecting company. Fortunately, Addison was.

We rushed through the tiled foyer into a large, plush living room, where John Dekker held Addison Page by her upper arm, his other hand gripping an expanding file folder closed with a built-in rubber band.

Was that Regan’s contract? Excitement surged through me like an electrical charge. Could the hellion’s name really be so close?

An instant later, two female figures appeared in the center of the floor, holding hands.

The taller form I assumed to be the rogue reaper. The other was Regan Page. I recognized her from the ads for her new tween drama. Except that on TV, she had crystalline blue eyes only a couple of shades darker than her sister’s.

Now her eyes were solid white orbs, shot through with tiny red veins, as if the whites had absorbed her pupils and irises.

Despair crashed through me, heavy and almost too thick to breathe through. My hand tightened around Nash’s. We were too late. She’d sold her soul, and the brief, dark-’n’-blurry glimpse I’d gotten of the hellion who took it wasn’t enough to let me identify him, much less find him.

I’d failed—again—and another girl had lost her soul.





Chapter 11





“Regan…” Addison moaned, staring into her sister’s featureless eyes, slowly shaking her head. Her own eerie, fake-blue eyes filled with tears and her hands began to tremble.