“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,” Isuggested. 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.

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?