Never to Sleep (4 page)

Maybe I wasn’t thirsty after all.

We were nearly to the corner when I realized we’d passed several classrooms, but with the doors closed and covered by vines, this creepy distortion of a hallway felt more like a tunnel, especially where the lights overhead were dimmed by the thick growth of plant life.

“Where is everyone else from school?” I asked, then flinched when I stepped on a vine and it squished beneath my shoe, hemorrhaging that horrible yellow fluid.

“They’re gone. Well, actually
we’re
gone. They’re all still in our layer of the cake,” he whispered, peeking carefully around the corner of the vine-covered wall. “Shh…” He looked both ways, then stood very still and closed his eyes, like he was listening. So I listened too, but at first, I couldn’t hear anything except the rush of my own pulse in my ears. Then there was something else. A sharp metallic scraping sound anyone who’s ever been in a classroom would recognize as desks sliding across the floor.

My eyes flew open and I let go of his hand. “Someone’s in the math hall.” I glanced at the ground then stepped carefully to the left, avoiding a twist of vine, but Luca pulled me back. “Whatever’s down there isn’t human. Come on.”

“Not human, like you’re not human?” But he meant something else. I could tell that with one glance at his frown. “What does that mean? Animals?” I glanced to the left once, then he tugged me around the corner in the opposite direction. “Like, bunnies and squirrels?” I could see the teacher’s lounge ahead on the left. At least, I
thought
that was the teacher’s lounge, but it was hard to identify specific doors and rooms when I couldn’t even recognize my own school beneath the layer of bloodthirsty plant life.

“Who knows?” Luca whispered, his voice floating back to me on a soft breath. “But if there are bunnies here, you can bet they’ve got teeth like needles and an appetite for human flesh.”

“Is that a joke? Please tell me you’re joking.”

“I never joke about carnivorous bunnies.” Luca stopped in the middle of the hall, and studied a closed door on our right. The vines were sparser here, but several crisscrossed the closed doorway, slithering slowly from one facing to the other, and a smaller vine encircled the doorknob completely. “That’s the teacher’s lounge?” he said, one brow raised at me in question. I nodded. “Figures.”

We couldn’t get the door open without removing the vines. Which would probably require touching them.

“We can go that way,” I pointed down the hall in the opposite direction. “The parking lot is through those double doors at the end of the math hall.” The Kaylee drama was blessedly absent from whatever horrifying alternate universe we’d somehow stumbled into—though we’d obviously exchanged one brand of crazy for another. “But we’d have to sneak past the killer bunnies.”

“And another hundred feet of crimson creeper…” Luca let go of my hand and rubbed his forehead. “We need scissors, or a knife.” He started back the way we’d come without me, then stopped to stare down the hall, like he was just then noticing that all the other rooms were blocked by even more crimson creeper.

“There might be something in the custodian’s closet,” I suggested, and he turned back to me with the possibility shining in his beautiful brown eyes.

“Where’s that?”

I half turned and pointed several feet farther down the hall, where a single vine stretched across an open doorway.

“Perfect.” He practically leaped over the vines on the floor between us, then squatted to peer into the dark closet. “You duck in there and look for something sharp, and I’ll work on protective gear.”

“In there?” I glanced at the closet, which was too dark to see into. “You want me to walk into a dark hole in the wall, where some horrible Netherworld creature is probably waiting to eat me alive. Obviously you’ve mistaken me for Lara Croft.”

Luca’s brows rose, and I couldn’t tell whether he was irritated or amused. “Apologies, Your Highness, I meant to mistake you for someone who wants to
survive.
” When I only crossed my arms over my chest and waited for him to come to his senses, Luca exhaled in frustration. “Look, if anything in there wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.”

Yet somehow, that thought didn’t comfort me as I stared into the dark closet, on the lookout for glowing eyes and menacing fangs. “Then why don’t
you
crawl into the cave of untold horrors and let me take care of the protective gear?” Whatever that meant.

“Sure.” Luca said, and I turned to find him naked from the waist up. Holding his T-shirt in both hands. Baring a smooth, well-defined chest to the whole world. The Netherworld, anyway. “I just didn’t think you’d want to strip for the cause.”

“The cause?” I heard the words—I even repeated them, like a brain-dead parrot—but I didn’t really understand them, because I was busy staring. Wishing he’d lower his hands a little, so I could get a better look at abs he certainly hadn’t sculpted by communing with either nature
or
the dead.

“I was gonna cut this up and wrap it around my hands, to keep from getting stuck by the thorns. But if you’d rather donate your shirt instead, by all means…hand it over.” His half grin and appreciative once-over glance lit little fires all through me, and I could feel my cheeks burn.

Good to know he was interested, but… “I am
not
sacrificing a brand-new blouse to a bunch of venom-leaking thorns.” Especially if taking my shirt off meant he would put his back on. “I’m going in. Will you at least watch my back?”

“Gladly,” he said, and I realized that unless the threat came at the exact height of my butt, he wasn’t likely to see it in time. “Give me your cell phone and I’ll shine some light for you.”

“What’s wrong with yours?” I asked.

“I don’t have one.”

“What kind of American teenager doesn’t have a cell phone?” I mumbled, digging my phone from my back pocket.

“The kind who wasn’t born with a silver stick up his—”

“Hey! That’s economic profiling,” I said, and he laughed as I set my cell in his palm. Luca pressed a button on my phone, and the screen glowed to life as he squatted in front of the dark closet again, using my cell screen as a flashlight.

“I have an app that’ll make that brighter,” I offered, and he handed the phone back to me so I could start the flashlight application. The app would drain my battery faster but provide much more light.

“Thanks,” he said, as I bent to duck below the vine. When I stood inside the dark closet, he shone the light inside, spotlighting cleaning equipment, a spare custodian’s uniform hanging from a nail, and shelves full of brown bathroom paper towels and huge rolls of cheap, scratchy toilet paper, which no female custodian would ever have ordered.

“A pair of hedge clippers would be awesome,” he said, but I didn’t see any landscaping equipment at all.

“They don’t keep anything that could kill someone inside the school building. The Eastlake student body tends to go psycho about once a month.” I turned, my gaze following the light as he swept it across the shelves in a careful back-and-forth pattern. “But maybe we could use this to pull the vines down,” I said, taking a mop out of an empty, wheeled bucket. I tilted the mop handle and handed it to Luca beneath the vines crossing the doorway.

While I scanned more shelves, he stepped on the mop head and unscrewed the handle from it with one hand, still lighting the closet for me with the other.

“Left,” I said, and he adjusted his aim. On one of the higher shelves, blocked from his view by a rusty pail, I found a pair of thick black rubber gloves. I stared at them for a second, while the angel and devil on my shoulders debated.

If I gave him the gloves, he’d put his shirt back on. If I didn’t, he might get pricked if a thorn went through the material.

In the end, my conscience won, but only because letting Luca die in the Netherworld would be an unacceptable waste of a perfectly good six-pack.

And because guilt was
not
a good look on me.

“Here.” I tossed the gloves into the hall at his feet, and when he bent to pick them up, the light from my phone glinted off something on the floor, beneath the far right shelf. A box cutter, like the kind my dad kept in the garage. “And the grand prize.” I slid the cutter into the hall with my foot, and Luca grinned like I’d just found water in the desert.

I ducked beneath the vines again and turned off the flashlight app while Luca slid his right hand into one of the gloves, then picked up the box cutter. “Ready?”

“As ready as I’ve ever been to cut through flesh-eating vines and escape from a scary alternate version of my own school into a world that may be even more terrifying and dangerous.” I shrugged and slid my phone into my pocket. “Let’s do it.”

Luca pressed the tip of the box cutter against the vine wrapped around the teacher’s lounge doorknob. “Stand back, just in case.”

I glanced behind me to make sure there were no vines within reach of my foot, then stepped back. Luca closed his eyes, and I was suddenly sure he was praying. Or wishing. Or maybe hearing some kind of countdown in his head. Either way, the buildup was so quiet and intense, I almost expected the vine to start shrieking in pain when he finally made the cut. The reality was kind of anticlimactic. The blade was dull, so the vine was squished before the cutter finally slid through it.

Both ends of the cut vine swung loose and spurted yellow fluid. Luca jumped back from the spray and I moved back with him. He pulled his shirt back on while we waited, and a few seconds later the end of the vine still connected to the wall curled around its end right in front of us, cutting off the leak of fluid.

“Did you see that?” I whispered, fascinated in spite of the steady current of fear still whooshing through my veins. “It’s like the vine made its own tourniquet.”

Luca nodded. “Survival is the name of the game.” He pocketed the box knife, then picked up the severed end of the vine between his gloved thumb and forefinger. The vine resisted as he tried to unwrap it from the door handle, but the severed section was dying, and its fight was short. Luca tossed the shriveling length of plant down the hall, and other vines moved in slowly to investigate, like curious, blind snakes.

I shivered in disgust and tried not to watch as I pulled the other glove onto my left hand.

Luca twisted the knob and the door swung into a teacher’s lounge that looked almost exactly like I remembered. Except that there were no tables or chairs here, and both of the old, grimy microwaves were gone, as were most of the cabinet doors.

“Why is this room empty?” I asked, as he lifted the vines so I could duck under them and into the lounge.

“Because there are fewer teachers than students, which means that this is one of the least populated rooms in the building. Things from our world bleed into this one all over, but the areas with the densest human population—thus the largest supply of human energy—bleed through the most thoroughly. So, a country back road there may show up here as a dirt or gravel path, but a busy interstate will look just like it does in our world, down to every broken yellow line and exit sign.”

I didn’t want to know what that said about the custodian’s closet full of supplies.

“It’s a popularity contest,” I said, glancing around at where the shelves should have been, and the vending machine. Even the wall-mounted telephone was missing, though the plug thing was in the wall, right next to the door. “Just like school.”

“Huh?” Luca ducked under the vines and into the room, then headed straight for the exterior door, gripping the mop handle like a bat now.

“You know, the most popular wins. Like the Snow Queen pageant. Only here, the popular highway gets paint and signs. The popular rooms get desks and chairs. It’s like this hell was tailor-made for me.”

“How so?” Luca pushed open the exterior door, but it only moved a couple of inches before snagging on vines draped over the outside.

I held the door in place for him with my gloved hand, so he could hack at the vines through the crack. “I always knew popularity was a survival skill in high school, but here, it’s really an issue of life and death.” And with that realization, I suddenly felt a little calmer. A little more in control. Yeah, this place still sucked, but it also made sense, in a weird kind of way.

Here, just like in my own world, popularity was power; survival required the occasional sacrifice of a damaged limb—or a damaged cousin—and alliances were crucial. At home, Laura and I needed each other to overthrow Peyton’s tyranny, a concept I’d recognized in her as soon as we heard about Alexander the Great in world history. Here, Luca and I needed each other to hack our way through the carnivorous landscape and dodge flesh-eating bunnies. Or whatever.

It wasn’t the game that had changed—it was just the venue. Fortunately for us both, as demonstrated by my social triumph in spite of overwhelming odds, I was damn good at the game.

“I guess.” Luca cut through the first vine and both halves of it fell away from the door. “But I doubt that being voted most likely to succeed will save you from a two-headed monster who wants to eat you alive from both ends at once.”

“You’re right.” He severed another vine, and I jumped out of the way of the yellowish spray without letting go of the door. “That sounds more like the homecoming court than the Who’s Who. Especially if you consider the Carter sisters to be a two-headed monster. Which, having been nearly eaten alive by them, I do.”

Luca laughed and glanced at me over his shoulder.

“Seriously. They’re creepy, even with their mouths closed, and that hair would shame Medusa.”

“Okay, I think this is the last one.” He reached overhead to slice through the only vine still visible, and it fell away with another spurt of yellow fluid. But instead of throwing the door open, he closed it and turned to me, his brown-eyed gaze steady and serious. “Sophie, I have no idea what’s on the other side of this door. It could be an empty courtyard, or a death trap full of monsters waiting to devour us slowly while we scream.”

“Like the judges’ panel at regionals. Got it.”