“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 forLara 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.