“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.

“Why not?” I frowned and glancedagain 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.