My Life From Hell (The Blooming Goddess #3)

And Here I Thought It Couldn't Get Worse (Part 1)

I didn't feel any pain but it did get exceedingly dark. Heavy, all-encompassing, like light was an alien concept here. Dark. Did Felicia make Kiki blind me? I tried to touch my face and realized I couldn't move. I lay on my back, my hands pinned to my sides and my legs clamped together.

I. Freaked.

Light blasted out of my eyes and palms in my panic, and I felt something fall away from me. But between the blinding flash of my powers, and the return to Situation Normal blackness, I couldn't actually see what it was.

Free from my bindings, I groped around until I found them. Cool, thin cloth had wrapped me like a mummy. Not strips of bandage though, one solid strip. That twigged something. I lay there, trying to grab hold of the elusive fact dancing just out of memory.

A shroud. That was it! But my satisfaction at remembering quickly turned to dread as the implications of that thought hit me. Shrouds were used for one thing. Burial.

My hand flew up and hit a heavy earth barrier above my head. I started to pant. Had Felicia buried me alive? Awkwardly, I contorted myself so I was on all fours, since there wasn't enough room to sit up straight. My legs got tangled in the flowing long dress that I now wore. Trust Felicia to ensure a wardrobe change.

Face tilted upward, I scrabbled furiously at the dirt, my blood icy with fear as I felt my oxygen draining away. My palms sweated, my breath managed to both hitch and hyperventilate. Loamy earth clogged my fingernails as I clawed at the earth to get out. But it was hopeless. I was trapped.

From my position on all fours, I collapsed face down, acking out the taste of soil. I inhaled a nose full of musty air, with an undertone of deep rot. That smell, more than anything, hammered home the finality of my predicament. This was it. Just like in my vision, buried alive. I felt hollow. The futility of it all, the stupidity and surreality of coming so close only to lose overwhelmed me in spikes of equal measures: fear and despair.

I lay there, a boneless heap, listening to my racing heart and every precious remaining breath. I thought about how I'd left things with Hannah. About how I'd been cheated out of what little time I'd have with Theo. And Kai ...

Maybe it was better if I didn't think anymore.

I didn't want to lie there until I starved, or suffocated, or whatever. If I was buried alive, maybe there was a rock or something to knock myself unconscious with. In this situation, patience wouldn't be a virtue. Just scary.

My arms were bent up against my sides, my elbows hovering around my ears. I stretched out one arm, fully expecting to encounter more dirt. There was nothing but empty air. I stretched my arm out a little further, my fingertips exploring the absolute blackness. More air.

I pulled myself back up onto all fours and carefully examined my space. My back fit snug against the dirt ceiling. The sides were close in on me. I couldn't turn around to check behind me, because I was Alice-in-Wonderland huge here. I crawled forward then backward for a bit. Nothing stopped me. Not buried alive then. In a tunnel.

Just as I started to wonder where I was, and why I was there, I felt something skitter over my foot. Wonder later, get out now. I began my world record speed crawl to freedom.

"Kai? Theo?" Were they nearby? It was so dark, they could have been right in front of me and I'd never have known. But no one answered me. Which begged the question of where they were. Back at Felicia's?

It was crampy joint-stiffening work inching along like this. The tunnel was uncomfortably hot and stuffy. Every few minutes, I had to wipe the salty sweat from my eyes and stretch my neck as best I could, so as not to solidify into pretzel form. I felt like I'd been crawling for hours, the tunnel spiraling downward in long loops all the while. All this quality time alone in my head allowed me to progress through the five stages of dealing with my mother.

Stage one: Denial. The panic, the utter cluelessness about where I was—it couldn't be because Felicia had sent me tunneling to the Underworld, could it? Felicia had said we needed to cross through it to get to her exit. And a lot of the myths talked about how people descended to Hades. Was she really sending me there on my own?

That led to stage two: Disbelief. Seriously? Again? She'd screwed me over again? Showed not disinterest, but active desire to do harm. The more I thought about it, the more I felt certain that Hades was precisely where she was sending me. If the Underworld was like Manhattan, I was a single occupant driver in the Holland tunnel from Jersey.

Hopefully, there wouldn't be a toll booth. Because I'd paid enough.

Stage three: Rage. Lots of name calling. Lots of threats.

Finally, I swear it felt like I could have graduated and gone to college by this point, I saw a pinprick of light up ahead. I blinked to be sure that it wasn't some weird trick. Like my brain trying to fool me into seeing it. Wishful thinking made manifest.

But no. The light grew brighter and brighter until I could see a grate. And grateful I was as I made my way to it. Daylight filtered in from up ahead, which meant that I was reaching the end of this stupid non-scenic route.

I shoved my weight against the grate. Nada. It wouldn't budge. Waa waa waa waaaa.

Stage four: Laughter. Perhaps a tad unhinged. Because of course Felicia wasn't going to make any of it easy on me. Foolish girl for thinking otherwise.

The grate was made of crisscrossing metal bars, which were too narrow for me to get through, with the bars themselves unbreakable. And unshootable. My light did nothing except slip off of them.

I mentally shook myself and progressed into stage five: Determination. All right, I had to get through a grate. Could be worse.

The ground rumbled with low, deep menace.

And hello, worse.