Soul Screamers, Volume 1

“Why not?” I frowned and glanced again at the pile of fiends trying to scale the exposed beams and smooth, glass doors. Okay, yes, they looked pretty fierce. But they were also pint-size. If one attacked, surely we could just…step on him.

“Because they’re poisonous,” Tod answered, coming to an abrupt stop. “And they bite.”

“They eat people?” I took several slow, careful steps backward, squinting harder at the fiends. They weren’t big enough to eat more than my hand in a single sitting.

Maybe they share....

Though, judging from the competitive nature of their desperate climb, I highly doubted it.

“No, they don’t eat people. Not humans or bean sidhes, anyway. There aren’t many of us around here. But they bite anything that gets in their way, and their saliva is toxic to creatures native to the human world.”

“Lovely.” I took another step backward, but it was too late. We’d caught their attention. Or rather, I had.

The fiend in the middle crossed the lot toward me, almost bouncing with each step, and two more came on his heels, twitching noticeably every few seconds.

“Snacks?” the second fiend asked, his voice high-pitched and eager, like a child high on sugar. And when he opened his mouth, I glimpsed double rows of sharply pointed, metallic-looking, needlelike teeth, both top and bottom.

They glinted like blood in the red moonlight.

The fiends grew closer, fingers twitching eagerly. Saliva gathered in the corners of their thin gray lips.

My heart lurched into my throat, and to my own humiliation, I yelped and grabbed Nash’s arm. I tried to take another step back, but my foot caught on something, and I would have gone down on my face if not for my grip on Nash’s jacket sleeve.

One glance down revealed the problem, and pumped more scalding fear through my bloodstream, fast enough to make my head swim. A thin, bright weed grew from a crack in the concrete, red as Japanese maple leaves in the fall. The damn thing had wound around my right ankle, clinging to my jeans with thorns as sharp as the teeth of a tiny saw.

I jerked on my foot, my gaze glued to the fiends still approaching slowly, but that only pulled the vine tight. The thorns pierced denim and speared my flesh in a dozen tiny points of pain. “Ow!” I cried, then immediately slapped my hand over my mouth. The last thing I needed was to draw more attention our way.

Nash glanced down, and in a flash he’d dropped to one knee, a pocketknife drawn and ready. He couldn’t fit it between the vine and my leg without cutting me, so he simply sliced the weed out of the ground, and pulled me back before the surviving, grasping tendrils could grip me again.

The severed weed dripped several drops of dark red on the concrete. Or maybe that was my blood. A sick feeling wound around my stomach, tightening like the vine around my leg.

What am I doing here? My ankle burned where the thorns had pricked me, my pulse raced in my ears, so loud I could hardly hear the scrambling of the fiends against the glass anymore.

Was there time to cross back into the human world before the approaching fiends pounced? Because I was suddenly certain that’s what they were planning.

“They smell yummy,” the third said, followed by a peal of high, maniacal laughter. “Do they kiss hellions?” His teeth clanged like hollow metal when he closed his mouth, and my pulse lurched again. “Do they breathe Demon’s Breath?”

“No,” the first one said, as Nash, Tod, and I slowly backed farther from the small monsters now clearly stalking us. I wasn’t sure if they could hurt Tod, but he obviously wasn’t taking any chances. “They are clean.”

“Pity…” the second high-pitched voice sang. Then the two fiends in back turned on their small, bare heels and twitch-bounced back to the group scaling the walls of the stadium.

My pulse slowed just a bit, with the threat decreased by two-thirds. But the first fiend still eyed us. Eyed me. He sniffed, tiny, flat nostrils flaring. “Foreign.” His left arm twitched violently, as if it were trying to fight free from the rest of his body. Then his right foot jiggled, like he was trying to wake it up. Only, I was sure he hadn’t done it on purpose. He was in desperate need of a hit, and his body wouldn’t work properly until he got it.

“You don’t belong here, humans.” He stepped forward as one corner of his mouth began to jump. The fiend eyed me boldly, assessing me, and I realized that though he was clearly in the grip of some sort of withdrawal, he was still thinking and speaking somewhat coherently. At least, more so than his friends. “Stay, and something bigger will surely eat you....”

“We’re not—” I started, but Nash squeezed my hand ruthlessly, stopping me from denying our humanity. “We’re looking for a hellion,” I said instead, and Nash groaned audibly. Evidently that wasn’t a good conversation-starter in the Netherworld.

Who knew?