Never to Sleep (3 page)

“Little what?”

“Little Shop…”
He stopped and shook his head when he found no comprehension in my eyes. “Never mind. My dad likes musical horror. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve sat through
Rocky Horror Picture Show
and
Sweeney Todd.
Watch where you step.”

“Ugh. Why are these things growing
inside
the building?” I said, when one of the thick green vines curled up at its end, like a creepy finger giving me a “come here” gesture. “I don’t even like regular plants. Except for corsages and long-stemmed roses.” And those only hurt you when they
don’t
show up.

Luca laughed, like it didn’t bother him that we were suddenly someplace where killer plants grew on interior walls, even though we hadn’t actually
gone
anywhere. But his laugh sounded kind of forced, like maybe it was for my benefit. “Haven’t you ever been camping?” he said, and I had to glance at him again to see if he was serious.

“Only if you count my thirteenth birthday sleepover, when ten of us camped out on air mattresses in the living room, watching a marathon of
America’s Next Top Model.
You know, in high definition, on a fifty-inch screen, you can see every single pore on a person’s face. Close-ups are
way
overutilized.”

“Um, no. That doesn’t count. You’re not camping unless you’re communing with nature.”

“I’d rather ‘commune’ with my air conditioner, my electric lights, and my LCD screen.” Bugs, poison oak, and bottom-dwelling pond fish were not on my list of spring must-have accessories. “Where are we, Luca? Have you been here before?”

“Here specifically? No.” He frowned and took another careful step. “But…that’s kind of a complicated question.”

“This is a nightmare, right?” I whispered, tiptoeing through the tangle of vines slithering slowly toward us on the floor, inhaling and exhaling with deliberation. “Please tell me I’m asleep?” Because none of this made any sense.

“This is definitely a nightmare, but you’re not asleep. Crimson creeper only thrives where there’s a steady food supply, which means we’re not alone. We have to get out of here. Where’s the nearest exit?”

“How the hell should I know?” I backed carefully away from another vine, and my gaze snagged on something caught in a tangle of green on the wall to my left. Something small and furry. Something dead, dripping yellowish gunk through an open wound on its leg.

Ew!
Disgust overwhelmed my fear for the first time in the three minutes since I’d opened my eyes in hell, and I clutched Luca’s hand tighter.

“Sophie, look at me,” he said softly, and I did. He was the only thing in this whole nightmare worth looking at anyway. He was the only part I wanted to still see when I woke up. “This is your school. You know where we are. How do we get out?”

I shook my head. “This isn’t my school. I’ve never been here before.” Not even in my very worst fears. Not even in my nightmares.

“Yes, you have. Look.” He pointed at the floor. “The same tile.” I looked down to find dingy whitish floor tiles, identical to the ones we’d been standing on before the world of bizarre opened its mouth and swallowed me whole. Only this tile was crawling with creepy green eat-you-alive vines. “We never left the school. We just kind of…fell through the layer we live in and landed in the one beneath that. Like the layers of a cake—if you stick your fork through one and into the next, you’re still touching cake. And we’re still in your school. Down there’s the water fountain. See?”

I had to look extrahard to see the fountain, because the stainless steel box was almost entirely covered by yet more vines. But it was there. He was right. Somehow, this was my school, and that was the fountain outside Mrs. Foley’s biology class, in the science hall. Which meant that the nearest exit was…

“Teacher’s lounge. Around the corner on the right. It opens into the quad.”

“Let’s go.” He took my hand again, and we picked our way carefully through the vines slowly twisting on the floor, grasping toward our feet with every step.

“How is this possible—these layers? This is my school, but…it
isn’t.
It’s like a Halloween maze with the same blueprint as my school. But that doesn’t make any sense. How can a school have layers?”

I never thought I’d miss the ugly floors and painted-white cinder-block walls. And the lockers! I could hardly tell they were there, beneath the mass of vines tangled in and all around them now. Tiny vines even grew from the locker vents to trail to the floor.

“This is…well, the easiest way to explain it is…this is an alternate dimension.”

“An alternate dimension? Like that fantasy role-playing gamer crap, with swords and magic elves?” Great. I’d been sucked into
nerd
hell. Shouldn’t there be a different one for people who’d never banished an evil magician or LOL’d in an RPG chatroom?

“Um… Less
Lord of the Rings
and more
Alice in Wonderland.
Only scary,” Luca said. “This world is a reflection of our world, only everything’s…different. Warped. Discolored. Disproportionate.”

“I’d say that sounds crazy, except that it actually
looks
even crazier than it sounds.” I pulled Luca to a stop to ask the question twisting my stomach into knots. There was only one real explanation for all this, and it had nothing to do with cake layers and fantasy role playing. “Am I insane?”

He must have heard the very real fear in my voice because he turned to look at me, in spite of the vines still snaking toward us like they were drawn to our scent or our sound, or maybe just the air we disturbed with every step.

“This is real, Sophie. And based on the fact that you haven’t freaked out yet, I’d say you’re astonishingly stable.”

“Or maybe I’m in shock.”

He shrugged. “Always a possibility.”

“So, how did we get to this dimension?” I asked, stepping over and around vines again.

“It’s called the Netherworld. Around here, anyway. They may call it something else in other regions of the world. Nether means—”

“Under. Beneath. I know. Like nether regions. If you’re telling me this place is the crotch of the world, I’m not gonna argue,” I said, and Luca laughed softly. “But how did we get here? Does this have something to do with that guy with no eyes? Is he from here? Did we get traded for him, like some kind of exchange program? One freaky eyeless Netherworld guy in exchange for two normal, tragically beautiful people from our world?”

Luca glanced back at me in surprise, and I rolled my eyes. “We’re about to be devoured by man-eating plants. Shouldn’t we at least acknowledge how attractive our respective bodies are before they’re digested from the inside out?”

“Is that your way of fishing for a compliment?”

“No.” I already knew I was pretty. Not that I would have hated hearing him say it. “My point is that this isn’t a fair trade no matter how the U.S. dollar stacks up against whatever the Netherworld currency is.”

Luca exhaled softly, and his hand tightened around mine. “Sophie, we
are
the Netherworld currency.”

My heart did a somersault in my chest. “What does that mean?”

“That means that we aren’t safe. I don’t know what you are, but I can’t actually
control
the dead, no matter what people think about necromancers, so we—”

“Whoa.” I pulled him to a stop again, frowning up at him. Maybe
I
wasn’t the crazy one at all. “I only understood part of that sentence, but it sounded like you said you don’t know what I
am
.”

Luca stared at me through narrowed eyes, like he was studying me. Just like he had when he’d pulled me off the floor at school. At my
real
school. “You don’t know either, do you?”

“I don’t know anything right now,
except
what I am. I’m a sophomore, and a dancer, and a student council member, and a dance committee member, and—”

Luca laughed. “Sophie, you’re much more than all of that.”

“Um, thanks.”
I guess
. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“I don’t know.” He frowned. “I’d hate to guess without more information, but I can tell from touching you that you’re not human.” He held up our joined hands. “Not entirely, anyway.”

I pulled my hand from his grip. “Okay, being hot will only get you so far, and you should know that telling a girl she’s not entirely human is
not
considered a compliment. At least, not in my world.” Though I was seriously starting to doubt he was a native of my world. Or even planet earth.

“Sophie, look around. Pay special attention to the man-eating vines and the fact that we’re no longer in
your world.
Think back to the man with no eyes. With all that in mind, does it really seem so crazy to think that you may not be entirely human?” He shrugged, and though his eyes sparkled, his grin looked almost shy. “I’m not.”

“You’re not…human?”

“Well, I
am
human. But I’m more.”

More?
“What are you?” I wasn’t convinced that “more” was even possible, but the evidence slithering across the floor toward us was pretty damn convincing of…something. Maybe we were both crazy. Maybe we were really sharing a delusion in some real-world psych ward. Maybe my ex-boyfriend was in the room next door.

Maybe Kaylee was actually the sanest person I knew.

I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head—that was the scariest thought I’d ever had.

“I’m a necromancer,” Luca said, and I opened my eyes to look at him. “But that doesn’t mean what most people think it means.”

“Well, I’m not most people. I have no idea what that means.”

Luca chuckled, and we started picking our way down the hall again, carefully avoiding vines. “Thanks to movies and popular fiction, most people think necromancers can control the dead. Of course, most people also think necromancy is fiction.”

“But it’s not?” Control the dead? What did that even mean? How can you control something that isn’t even alive?

“Necromancy is as real as I am.”

I lifted one brow at him and stepped over a tangle of vines wrapped around something still squirming within the knot. “I’m kind of questioning my own sanity at the moment, so I’m not convinced you’re real right now either.”

Another laugh. “Necromancy is real. I’m real, you’re real, and all this is real.” He spread his arms to take in the deadly vines, their rank, leaking juices, and the building they seemed determined to take over from the inside out. “Normally, I’d try to acclimate you to this new reality slowly—well,
normally,
I wouldn’t have told you any of this—but since we’re here, obviously, I think we’re in a sort of deep immersion situation. Like when you move to a foreign country, to learn the language.”

“Okay, so what is a necromancer?” That word had triggered something in my memory. Something too disgusting to be academic, despite the educational sound of the word I couldn’t quite remember. “You, like,
like
the dead? Physically?”

Luca frowned in confusion. Then his eyes widened, and he laughed again, louder this time. “No. That’s a necro
philiac
. Same root word—
completely
different concept.”

“Oh. Good.” ’Cause…
ew.
“So, what’s a necromancer? What do you do?”

“That’s kind of complicated. The part that’s easy to explain is that I…recognize the dead.”

I burst into laughter, then slapped one hand over my mouth and glanced over my shoulder. The hall was still empty. I wasn’t sure what we were hiding from, but I really didn’t want to be found.

“So, you see dead people? Is that what you’re trying to say? Like, ghosts?”

“No. Not ghosts. People. Like that guy in the hall, with the white eyes. He was dead.”

I stopped walking again, and Luca tugged me forward to avoid a thin vine snaking toward me from the vent in a locker. “But he was moving. Dead people don’t move. That’s kind of a trademark characteristic of the deceased.”

Luca shrugged. “There are several different kinds of ‘dead.’ That guy was a reaper. They’re not supposed to kill at random, but they’re also not supposed to show up, fully corporeal, in the middle of a high school hallway either. Which is why we were going to run. But then we wound up here instead.”

“Wait, reaper, as in Grim Reaper? That was the Grim Reaper?”

“That was
a
reaper. One of many. But something’s wrong with him.”

I blinked, and he pulled me forward again when my feet stopped working. “Okay, time out. That’s all the crazy I can take for now. I want to go home. What do I have to do? Click my heels together?” My shoes weren’t ruby, nor were they slippers, but for what my dad paid for the designer label, they damn well ought to take me wherever I wanted to go.

“Um…I don’t think that’ll do it, Dorothy, so I suggest we find someplace safe to figure this out.”

Figure it out?
“Wait.” Irritation flared in my chest, like when I spent too much time with Peyton. “You know where we are, but not how to get back? How is that even possible?”

“Crossing dimensions is a little more complicated than crossing the street.”

“So, are we stuck here forever?”

“Nope. We’ll be devoured alive long before forever gets here.”

Great.
Man-eating plants, animated dead guys and one-way travel. “Anything else I should know?”

“Yeah. Don’t drink water from any local source.”

“Why not?” I hadn’t realized I was thirsty until that moment. Was that some kind of subliminal suggestion? Or whatever?

“The water here has chemical properties, and drinking it is like drugging yourself,” Luca said, and chill bumps popped up all over my arms.

“With what?”

“Sedatives. Amnesiacs. Stimulants. Something different from every source.”

“Amnesiacs?” I frowned, trying to wrap my mind around the concept. “Like, it makes you forget who you are?”

“It works differently on different people,” he said. “Some forget their names. Others forget where they are. Some lose memories from childhood.”