Luca squinted at something to my left, then pointed. “There.”

I followed his aim to a shed used by some of the athletic teams for overflow equipment. In our world, it was kept padlocked, but here…there was no telling.

“Walk fast, but don’t run,” Luca said, taking my hand, and I nodded. The creatures were getting closer. I could hear a few of them breathing now, rasping, chuffing sounds.

“Is closing ourselves in a good idea?” I whispered, as we race-walked across the grass.

“Probably not. But neither is being eaten.”

When we got to the shed, I was relieved to see that there was no lock. Luca pulled open the door and I shone my cell phone screen inside to make sure the tiny building was empty. It was, except for what few pieces of equipment had bled through from our world with the building. He followed me inside, then slammed the door shut, and I set my phone on the ground so it would illuminate as much as possible while we wedged the door in place with several old baseball bats planted in the dirt.

Less than a minute after we’d closed the door, the first fist pounded on it. Not that I could tell it was a fist. For all I knew, it could be a hoof, or a tentacle, or a horn. I jumped at the sound, and Luca’s hand wrapped around mine in the dark—by then I’d pocketed my phone to save the battery.

“Can they get in?” I asked, as something scratched the door from the outside, and something else started banging on the wall at our backs.

Luca sighed. “Probably. Eventually.”

“So we’re trapped.” My throat felt tight and my hands were starting to tingle. This couldn’t be it. This wasn’t how I was supposed to die. This wasn’t when I was supposed to die. I was barely sixteen years old!

But at least I wasn’t alone. Though I couldn’t understand that either…

“That hellion was going to send you home, right?”

Luca nodded, and I let him pull me closer, until my back was pressed against his chest, my legs crossed in front of me. He wrapped his arms and legs around me like a cloak, though he felt more like a shield. Like he was putting himself between me and whatever was trying to break into the shed, and I couldn’t believe the kind of courage that must have taken. To put yourself between someone you just met and the monsters willing to rip you both limb from limb.

How could I be so scared, yet so relieved, both at once?

“So why didn’t you go home?” I whispered, as another long, grating scratch trailed down the door.

“Like I was gonna leave you here.” Luca’s breath brushed my ear and stirred my hair. He laid his hands over mine, and they fit like they were meant to go there.

“Maybe you should have.” I flinched when the next loud bang shook the whole shed. “I met this girl. She was crazy, butshe kind of made sense. She told me how to get out of my cage, only I didn’t understand what she was telling me at the time. She also said I could go home, all on my own.”

“I’m not sure I followed that,” Luca said.

“I’m not sure I did either. And I don’t know if she was telling the truth. Even if she was, I don’t know what she meant.”

“What did she say?” He let go of me long enough to reseat a bat knocked loose by the latest blow to the door.

“She said to go back the way I came. Which might be helpful if I knew how I got here.” Or maybe not. I couldn’t think with all the banging, knowing we were minutes from being eaten alive.

“Well, clearly she wants you to wait until another soulless reaper appears in front of you.” He sat next to me this time and I twisted to face him. “I don’t suppose you know when that’s scheduled to happen again, do you?”

“He was soulless?” Were reapers supposed to have souls? I should have been impossible to surprise, after everything I’d seen since getting sucked into an alternate dimension, but the weirdness just kept piling up, and I was so buried in it now I wasn’t sure I could ever dig my way out. “How do you know?”

“His eyes. You know how they say the eyes are the windows to the soul?” Luca said, and I nodded, though I’d never really given the phrase much thought before. “Well, his eyes were empty. Because he has no soul.”

Everything else I wanted to ask was stuck in my throat, stalled by skepticism that would have been outright disbelief a few hours earlier. But I no longer felt qualified to say what was possible and what wasn’t. So…did that mean that Addison Page really was dead? And what about me?

“Am I dead?” I asked softly, trying to block out the scratches and thumps, and the slivers of moonlight that were starting to shine in around the widening gaps in the door frame. “You said you thought you felt something earlier.” When he’d pulled me off the ground, in the hall. “Was that because you’re a necromancer, and I’m dead?”

Luca laughed, and I felt like an idiot for asking such a stupid question. But I had to know. “You’re very much alive, and obviously determined to stay that way. But I do think you’re connected to death, somehow. Touched by it.”

“Because my mom died?” Even after spending who knew how many hours in this bizarre hell world, my mother’s death still ranked as my single worst memory ever. Or, my worst not-a-memory. I’d been unconscious in the moment of her death, and I’d missed her every moment since. My mom had known me like my father never could, and everything I truly understood about myself had come from her.