Soul Screamers, Volume 1

“Oh, I won’t. Not now that I know what I am. And it’s not like I’m ever going to use any of this, right?” I shrugged, but inside I flinched from her hurt look. “I mean, I already know how to hold back my wail, and that’s all I really need, right?” I hated feigning disinterest in what she had to show me, when I was really very curious. And I hated it even worse that I sounded ungrateful for her help. But Addy’s and Regan’s souls depended on making Harmony want to teach me something my father wouldn’t approve of. Something she’d normally never show me.

“You never know, Kaylee.” She drank from her glass again, probably to hide her disappointment, which had virtually erased the deep dimples from her cheeks. “Emergencies happen, and you might need to know how to go to the Netherworld someday, instead of just peeking into it.”

I frowned, showcasing my hesitance as I chewed my last bite of cookie. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

She shrugged and pushed up the sleeves of her snug lilac sweater. “Unsupervised, yes. But the risk would be pretty minimal if we cross over from here.”

“Because human houses don’t exist in the Netherworld?” I was thinking of what she’d told me on Sunday.

“That’s true, but Netherworlders do have homes of their own, and if you cross over without knowing where you’ll come out, you could wind up somewhere you don’t want to be.”

I was betting that was a pretty big understatement.

“Can’t we just peek in and see what’s here on the Netherworld plane?”

“Kind of.” Harmony sat straighter; she was perking up now that I was openly curious. “When you peek into the Netherworld from here, or vice versa, you’re seeing the two realities layered, one over the other. That can be really confusing if you aren’t used to mentally sorting out what you’re seeing. You could easily overlook something important. Or dangerous.”

“So, how do you know it’s safe to cross over from your house?” I asked, then let my brows rise in eagerness. “You’ve done it, haven’t you? Where would we wind up?”

Harmony set her glass on the end table, then met my gaze frankly. “Yes, I’ve done it. I had to cross over when we first moved here, to make sure it was safe in case of an emergency. I still do it periodically, to make sure nothing’s changed.”

“What could change?”

She shrugged. “The landscape there evolves, just like ours does, based on the needs of the populace.”

“So, is it safe?”

She smiled, obviously enjoying my interest. “Yes, it’s safe. Comparatively speaking, anyway. This spot in the Netherworld—” she spread her arms to take in her entire house “—is…unoccupied. But, Kaylee, things are different there. It’s like a warped reflection of our world. Everything is skewed, like the world kind of shifted after everything was built.”

I knew exactly what she meant, though I’d never actually been to the Netherworld, because I’d seen the things that lived there. They were skewed, too. Disproportionate, like images stretched or squished in carnival mirrors. I could only imagine what their surroundings must look like.

And I only wanted to imagine. But my imagination wouldn’t get the Page sisters back their souls. Or get me out of my house if my father didn’t go to bed at a decent hour…

“Have you ever crossed over from my house?” My heart thumped painfully as I said the words. She’d see through my question. She’d know what I was up to. She’d tell my dad, and it would all be over. Addy would die soulless, and Regan would follow her sister, whenever her time came.

But Harmony only cocked her head to one side, frowning at me as the unpleasant possibilities occurred to her. “Only once. Why?”

I thought quickly, and went with a half truth. “It creeps me out to think that someone else—some weird Netherworld family—could be living in an alternate version of my house. What if I have one of those emergencies and have to cross over? I’d rather know what I was getting into before I actually get there. To make sure it’s safe.” I quoted her own words back to her, and Harmony’s bright blue eyes darkened for a moment, before clearing like the sky after a summer storm.

I admired her control. Her perseverance. Harmony had picked herself up and pieced her life together twice, after the deaths of both her husband and her oldest son, and she still found enough of herself to share with people who needed her. To protect both me and Nash, and by extension, Emma, Addy, and Regan.

“You don’t have to worry about that.” She handed me the cookie she had yet to taste, as if a little sugar really could make everything all better. “The Netherworld is much more sparsely populated than our world,” she continued as I bit into the cookie. “So it’s not like every house here represents a house there. If you crossed over from home, you’d find overgrown fields, with buildings in the distance, in the direction of our downtown district. Very similar to what you’d see if you crossed over from here.”

Good. I kept chewing to disguise my exhalation of relief.