Soul Screamers, Volume 1

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.