Soul Screamers, Volume 1

The closer we got to the building, however, the more the small differences began to jump out at me. The first was the flags. On the human plane, the stadium was ringed with a series of blue-and-white flags showing a football player in his helmet, and the Texas Lone Star. But in the Netherworld, those flags were stained, streaked banners of gray, torn by some otherworldly wind. Several had been reduced to ribbons of colorless cloth, virtually shredded by time and neglect.

The murals, too, were gray and largely featureless, showing just a hint of a humanlike outline. Several of them seemed to have extra limbs. And I could swear one had two heads.

“This is weeeeird,” I sang beneath my breath, curling my fingers around Nash’s when his warm hand found mine. “Let’s just find a way in and ask the first person we see. Maybe Libby will be here....”

“She won’t help.” Tod veered slightly to the right, away from the main entrance, where those writhing figures were slowly coming into focus. “She’s already told us everything she can, and I doubt any other reaper will do more. We’ll have to ask someone else.”

“What are those?” I asked, again squinting into the shadows beneath the awning. I could discern individual bodies now, and was surprised to realize that they were not serpentine in the least, in spite of the mental image their writhing had called up in my head.

They had heads—one apiece, fortunately—and the proper number of arms and legs. But that’s where the similarity to my species ended. These creatures were small—though I couldn’t judge how small from such a distance—and naked. Their skin was darker than mine and lighter than Libby’s, but I couldn’t tell how much of their coloring was due to the thick shadows they crawled through.

Oh, and they had tails. Long, thin hairless tails that coiled and uncoiled around legs and other appendages with such fluidity that they couldn’t possibly have contained rigid bones.

And their tails weren’t the only hairless parts. These little creatures were completely bald, and some part of me wondered if they wallowed all over one another just to stay warm. Some sort of group defense against the cold?

“Those are the fiends,” Tod said softly, and for the first time, I realized he was acting weird. Speaking softly. Walking with us, rather than blinking to the other side of the stadium to scan for other entrances. Did his reaper abilities not function in the Netherworld?

“They can’t be fiends,” I said, deciding to hold my question for later. “They’re too small.” They didn’t even come up to my waist, and the way Libby described fiends, I was expecting huge, burly monsters, pounding on the doors of the facility, literally fiending for another hit of Demon’s Breath.

“Size isn’t everything,” Tod said, and my jaws clenched in irritation over his wise-man tone. “Those are the fiends. Look how they’re crawling all over one another to get to the door. Not that that’ll help. It’s probably bolted from the inside.”

Oh. They weren’t trying to stay warm. They were trying to break in. I kicked a loose chip of concrete, thinking. “If it’s bolted from the inside, how do the reapers get in?”

“They probably cross over from inside the stadium.” An easy feat for a reaper, who could blink himself right onto the football field on the human plane, even after hours.

“So how are we going to get in?”

“Don’t know yet.” Tod frowned, still watching the fiends.

“Can’t you just blink yourself inside from here?”

He shook his head slowly and feigned interest in a crack in the sidewalk.

Nash huffed, sounding almost smug. “Most reaper skills don’t work here,” he said, confirming my earlier hunch.

Tod sighed and met my gaze, his forehead lined deeply in frustration. “I could have done it from the human plane, but I doubt whoever works in there would be eager to help one rookie reaper who pops in without permission, bearing no Demon’s Breath.”

“So you’re just like us down here?” I couldn’t tear my gaze from the small bodies climbing all over one another in a bid for the door. As I watched, one creature’s tail encircled another’s neck and wrenched him forcefully from the top of the pile, only to drop him several feet from the ground. The displaced fiend bumped and rolled down the mountain of squirming bodies until he hit the concrete, where he scraped the side of his face and came up bleeding.

Wow. It was like watching a panicked crowd fight its way out of a burning building, only they were trying to get in.

And that’s when I noticed that several fiends stood at the edge of the crowd, watching their spastic brethren jostle for position. Other than the occasional manic, full-body twitch, they looked pretty normal. For little naked guys with tails.

“Maybe we should ask one of them,” I whispered, pointing out the fiends on the fringe. “They look like they come here pretty often.”

“Kaylee, you can’t just walk up to a fiend and start a conversation,” Nash whispered, pulling me close with one arm around my waist. But this time, the motion felt less like it was intended to comfort me than to protect me. To draw me away from the minimonsters.