The multitude swallowed us whole, and I let it, breathing deeply through my mouth as we walked, trying to calm my racing pulse in case any of the predators could hear it. Sophie’s skirt swished around my ankles, brushing other pieces of clothing made of rich, iridescent materials I didn’t recognize, several of which seemed to move independently of their wearers.
A tail brushed my hand and I shivered. A soft, warm breeze caressed my face and exposed cleavage, and as it passed, I both heard and felt the words it whispered into my ears, though I couldn’t understand a bit of what was said.
I clung to Tod’s hand as we crossed the crowded street, grateful for how very there he felt in the Netherworld, though no doubt his physical vulnerability made him feel exposed and defenseless. And finally, when we stepped past the edge of the crowd onto the sidewalk in front of the school, I exhaled. We were still alive, and we were almost there.
“Ready?” Addison appeared at Tod’s side and took his hand, just as Alec emerged on my right.
We both nodded. Then the double front doors of the school opened, and my gaze was drawn toward the literally dazzling figure that emerged.
“Who’s that?” I stared at the girl, who looked completely human except that she glowed with a beautiful, intense inner light. As if she were lit from within, like a human candle, shining so brightly it hurt my eyes to look at her.
Her eyes were dark pinpoints in a face so brilliant I couldn’t make out her actual features, and though her short, fitted dress was a pristine white, it was dull in comparison to flesh that gleamed and glittered like sunlight on the ocean. In one glowing hand, she carried a slim, dark cylinder I couldn’t identify from that distance.
“That’s Lana. She’s one of the lampades,” Alec whispered as the girl sank onto the top step, like a school kid waiting for a ride. “She’s one of Avari’s favorite pets in decades. This whole celebration is for the lampades. About them. And Avari has two of them for the first time in living memory. Lana, and her sister, Luci. They just got here yesterday.”
“What are they?” I asked, unable to drag my focus from the girl glowing like a living jack-o’-lantern, even though the light hurt my eyes.
“Lampades are the only creatures I know of that exist in both worlds at once, in the exact same time and place.” Alec headed slowly away from the crowd and we followed him, the cold Netherworld wind seeming to push us along. “If you were to cross over, you’d see her sitting there in your world just like she is here. Lampades are walking liminalities. You see how Lana’s glowing like someone shoved a lightbulb up her butt?” Alec asked, and I nodded, amused by the visual in spite of the circumstances. “That’s liminal light, and it runs through her like blood runs through us. A concentration of that light can temporarily merge corresponding sections of the Netherworld and your world if she shines it at a liminal space, like a window, or a threshold.”
Sudden brutal understanding uncoiled like a whip inside me, snapping tight around my brain. “Can someone go through that…merged space? Like a doorway?” I whispered, dreading the answer even as I asked the question.
“Maybe…” Alec began, and I recognized comprehension as it swept over Tod, and the reaper met my gaze. “But he’d have to move fast. Shining her light is like bleeding for a lampade, and she’ll bleed to death if she’s not careful.”
“But you said there are two of them, right?” I asked, and the proxy nodded, dark curls almost blending with the shadow of the building. “So if they worked together…”
“…they’d only have to bleed half as much,” Alec finished, and the deep furrows in his forehead said he was starting to understand.
“That’s how he got them,” Tod said, and I nodded. “These lampades took Nash and your dad.”
My eyes closed in sudden cruel certainty. “And I could have stopped them.”
“How?” Addison asked, stepping from the sidewalk onto the umber-colored grass on one side of the school’s front lawn.
I gestured toward the steps, where Lana now sat with her hands clasped over her knees. “I think I met both of them last night. They came to Doug Fuller’s party with Everett. Nash ran them off, but they must have come back after Em and I left. After Doug died.”
“What?” Tod’s eyes flashed in anger, and I knew exactly how he felt.
“These lampades? I’d bet my life they were the arm candy hovering over Everett last night at the party. Only they didn’t glow then.”
Alec rubbed one hand over his forehead, like he was fending off a headache. “They only glow here. In your world, they’d look like normal people.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, except they’re identical, and flawlessly gorgeous.” More than enough to give a regular girl an inferiority complex, without adding evil to the mix. “I’m going to cross over and make sure I’m right.”
“Want me to come with you?” Tod asked, but I shook my head.
“Stay here with them.” I knew he didn’t want to leave Addy, and I needed him to keep an eye on Alec, whom I had no intention of bringing with me until we found Nash and my father. “I’ll be right back.”
I rounded the corner of the building quickly to cross over without being seen in either world, and my silent scream came fairly easily that time, which scared me almost as much as the necessity of using it. I faded into my own world near the back corner of the parking lot, then hugged the wall of the building all the way to the front of the school, to keep from being seen. Sophie’s satin gown whispered against the rough bricks, and twice I had to tug the material free when it snagged. My cousin was going to kill me.
Assuming I survived long enough to be murdered.
At the edge of the building, I peeked around the corner to see Lana—definitely one of the girls I’d seen with Everett—sitting on the front step, exactly where she’d been in the Netherworld. Only now she held an ornately decorated metal flashlight. It was unlit—for the moment.
I crossed back over and rejoined the group without bothering to lift the hem of Sophie’s skirt when I walked. “It’s her,” I said, shivering from the cold. “The lampades are the girls from the party.”
“What are they doing here?” Addison asked as the front door of the school opened and Luci joined her sister on the top step, holding an identical unlit flashlight. “Waiting to be celebrated?”
“They’re obviously waiting for something,” I said, and no sooner had the last word fallen from my lips than the girls twisted in unison to glance at the sky to the east of the school, where the sun was just starting to sink below the horizon, a mirror image to the sunset in the human world, but for the bruised green-and-purple of the Netherworld sky.
“Uh-oh…” A heavy new dread anchored my sneakered feet to the sidewalk.
“What?” Tod asked, but my gaze found Alec—the man with the answers.
“What effect would other liminalities have on this doorway a lampade can create? Big liminalities. Like, once-a-year events.” Such as the winter solstice.
Alec’s eyes closed in alarm as the reaper tensed visibly. “They would amplify the power of the liminal light.”
“And would that make this doorway any bigger? Or hold it open any longer?”
The proxy nodded, because words were no longer necessary. We finally understood the purpose of Avari’s Liminal Celebration. “He’s using the solstice to bridge the gap, when the veil between the two worlds is thinnest,” I whispered, terror rendering my voice a hoarse echo of itself.
Even as I spoke, the lampade sisters stood and took up positions on either side of the double front doors, facing each other. And that’s when the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Crap!” I whispered fiercely, grabbing Addison’s scarred hand without thinking. “They’re about to start.”