I KEPT MY EYES squeezed shut, afraid to look. The desktop was cold beneath my folded arms, and I could feel the crack in the seat of my chair that pinched my leg when I wore shorts. Both of those facts should have meant everything was fine. That I was still in my darkened classroom, with twenty-nine other students feigning interest in the history of French architecture.

But silence doesn’t lie.

There was no tapping of Courtney Webber’s feet as she listened to her iPod instead of watching the film. No scratching of Gary Yates’s pencil against paper as he scrambled to finish his history essay before last period. And certainly no criminally dull narrator droning on about angles and perspective and rebellion against classical architecture.

My heart thudded against my sternum. I sat up, gripping the sides of my desk with my eyes still squeezed shut. I didn’t want to look. But not looking would be stupid. Not looking could get me killed. So I opened my eyes and took in the differences—the things that hadn’t bled through the barrier into this warped, twisted version of my own world.

An empty classroom. The thirty-two empty desks, devoid of scratches and names scribbled in permanent marker, gave the room an abandoned feel—the high school version of a ghost town. A barren metal teacher’s desk sat up front, by the door. There was no whiteboard. No posters of le Louvre, la tour Eiffel, or le Centre Pompidou. There was no ancient television on a cart, playing an outdated, staticky video cassette.

The Netherworld. If I’d had any doubt, it disappeared with my first glance at the educational void surrounding me. I’d crossed over. In my sleep.

No! It takes intent to cross into the Netherworld, and I had no intent. I had the opposite of intent. Yet there I was, of someone else’s volition.

Sabine.

She was mad at me. She was pissed, and I couldn’t blame her. And she alone had the ability to mess with my dreams. Well, she and Avari, but this felt like Sabine. It was cruel on a personal level—making me dream that my wail wanted me to cross over—and she knew my fears. She knew there was little in either world that scared me more than winding up in the Netherworld.

Focus, Kaylee. I had to get back to my own world, but I couldn’t just cross over again in the middle of class. It was entirely possible that no one had seen me disappear from French, thanks to the darkened classroom and bored or sleeping students. Assuming I hadn’t actually screamed my head off, in life as in my dream. But the chances of thirty people also missing my reentry were slim to none, and I wasn’t exactly swimming in good luck.

I’d have to find someplace unpopulated in both worlds before I could cross over. And I’d have to find that place without being eaten, captured, or ritualistically dismembered by any of the Netherworld natives.

No problem. The last time I’d been in the Netherworld version of my high school—less than a monthbefore—it had been completely unpopulated. Surely I could just jog down the hall and around the corner, into the nearest supply closet, then scream my way back into my own world, completely unnoticed by the Nether-freaks.

Taking deep, slow breaths to control my racing pulse, I stood and walked silently to the classroom door, only feet from Mrs. Brown’s unoccupied desk. Fingers crossed against surprises, I twisted the knob, pulled open the door—wincing at the creak—then stepped into the doorway.

And froze in terror.

The walls were red. And they were moving.

It took one long, terrifying moment for me to understand what I was seeing, but understanding only made it worse. The walls themselves weren’t red. I couldn’t tell what color they were because they were covered—completely obscured—with thick red vines, pulsing, coiling, constantly twisting in one huge tangle.

My hands clenched around the door frame and three of my fingernails snapped off at the quick. Panic tightened my chest, constricting my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I could only stare in horror so profound it swallowed the rest of me whole.

Some sections of the vine were as thin as a pencil, others as thick as my bicep. The larger sections were striated with every possible shade from dried-blood red to a softer, watercolor cherry, like thinned paint. The ends of the vines, very fine and limber, sported needle-thin thorns and sharply variegated leaves, greenish in the center, bleeding to maroon on the edges.

I gasped, then clasped one hand over my mouth. I knew those leaves.

Crimson Creeper.

The entire hallway was crawling with it. A few months before, I’d been pricked by several thorns from an infant vine growing through cracked concrete, and that had been enough to nearly kill me. What clung to walls and lockers now was probably enough to take out half of Dallas.

As I stood frozen, staring, trying to overcome fear too thick to breathe through, something brushed my right index finger. I jerked my hand away from the door frame and turned to see a thin cord of vine slowly slithering down the metal jamb, leaves the size of half-dollars reaching for me like petals toward the sun.

I swallowed a startled shout and stumbled away from the door—and into the hall. Too late, I realized my mistake, but when I turned back toward the classroom, I found that one curious vine stretching across the opening at waist height, blocking my entrance. Deliberately.

Sparing one moment for a string of silent curses—most aimed at Sabine—I stepped carefully into the center of the hallway. There was no turning back now.

I walked slowly, eyes peeled for reaching vines, while soft, dry slithering sounds accompanied my whispered footsteps. A thicker vine slid toward my right foot. Skin crawling, I backed out of the way—only to step on a small tangle of leaves and thorns.