My Life From Hell (18 page)

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.

Cerberus stepped in front of the grate, blocking out pretty much all the light. He reminded me of one of the Wild Things. Roaring his terrible roar and gnashing his terrible teeth.

“Nice boy,” I said, soothingly.

Rumbling growls became ear-splitting barks. This was, however, a step up from the first time that I’d met Cerberus in my Sophie form. Back then he’d tried to snap me in two. I felt about as cuddly toward him.

I flapped one hand at him from the safety of my side of the barrier. “Quiet,” I hissed.

He stepped closer to me and sniffed with two of his three heads. Then, amazingly, he shut up. He turned six black-as-pitch eyes on me and waited, heads bobbing expectantly.

Awwww
. He was kind of cute in a stinky, knobby, death beast way.

I wasn’t sure what he wanted. But I did know he was my best shot at help right now. Did I dare trust him to leave me intact? I had very limited options. I could either try and crawl my way back up and out of the Underworld with no guarantee that there
was
a way out on the other end or I could risk trying to get Cerberus’ help and hope that he didn’t tear me apart like a chew toy this time.

Desperate times. “Help me get out of here, dog.” Seeing as he was a primal killer and not a reasonably intelligent orangutan, he sat there.

I stuck my fingers through the grate and waggled them at him, indicating he should come closer. I also called my light with a palmy glow, in case he turned on me.

His fur felt rough and matted as he nudged my hand. His muscles made lumpy ridges under his skin, which rippled as he opened one of his massive mouths and let out a stream of the foulest stench I’d ever smelled. Rotting eggs were minty mouthwash in comparison. It was like a thousand years of compressed decay.

I tried not to gag, failed, plugged my nose, and tugged him close until two of his snouts touched the grate. “Arrr. Arrr.” I mimed biting the metal bars of the grate and tugging backward.

He got the picture pretty quickly, i.e. not at all. Ten minutes later, I was slumped in a dejected ball. “Come on, you dumb mutt.”

More waiting on his part.

Okay, he was a dog. A scary one, but still. What did dogs respond to? I had no treats. Hand motions had done nothing. Maybe he just needed a simple command? I sat up and channelled every once of commanding that I could muster. “Cerberus, move grate.”

The magic words. Go figure.

I hurried to cover my nose and mouth as his jaws opened again, which helped somewhat with the smell, but still made my eyes water. Cerberus bit down on the bars, and with an effortless flick of his heads, flung the grate out of the way.

I crawled into the Underworld and collapsed. The last time I’d been here, it had been night. I thought it would always be night, but now that I had my Persephone memories, I knew that Hades enjoyed sunlit days during which to strut his god’s doucheyness, as much as he liked moonlit nights.

Worked for me, since the sunshine recharged my power. I looked up, a hand automatically shielding my eyes. Then I realized it wasn’t that bright. Weird. Even though the sun was yellow and the sky was blue, there was no vibrancy or richness to them. More the faintest suggestion of color than the actual thing.

Color or not, this sun recharged me just fine. After a few minutes, I felt good to go. All I wanted was to find Kai and Theo—if they were here—locate the way to Demeter’s temple, and get on with stopping Zeus and Hades.

But where might be the most likely place to find my boys? I looked to Cerberus who settled his heads on his paws, his eyes lowering sleepily. Nope. I wasn’t finished with the mutt just yet. “Cerberus, play game.”

He didn’t exactly thump his tail in joy. Instead, he let two of his heads go to sleep.

I stood up and wiped some salty soil from my eyes. The dress, which had originally been a very nice shade of deep blue, was now streaked with muck. Well, Felicia shouldn’t have stuck me in a dirt tunnel if she expected it to stay clean.

I approached Cerberus cautiously. I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to make eye contact or not.

Hannah would have known.

No. Not going there.

With a beast this size, and this dangerous, it probably didn’t matter. He wasn’t worried about dominance. He
was
the top of the food chain.

I stopped in front of him, feeling his hot breath against my hand. Cerberus was massive but not quite as enormous as I remembered him. In
my
memory of fleeing Hades with my sapphire pendent, I must have built this puppy up to nightmare proportions.

I squatted down. “No rest for the wicked yet, buddy. I need you to find Kai. And Theo, but I’m betting you know Kai’s scent better.” I shoved at him. “Up and at ‘em.”

Cerberus dropped his middle head on the ground. His deep, ancient eyes looked back at me with a profound stare. It was a stare that said, “I have lived an eternal life and you are the biggest idiot I’ve seen.”

“Seriously. Get up.” I nestled against him, my nose wrinkled at his musky smell. I turned around with my back to his body, dug in my heels for leverage, and pushed. Complete with straining face and grunting.

That’s when I heard Kai say, “There you are, kardia mou. I’ve been looking for you.”

Kardia mou?
“My heart” in Greek?

I looked up with a laugh, happy to hear Kai tease me with such sappy affection. But my laughter cut short at his perplexed expression. He hadn’t been teasing—clearly Kai had no clue what I was doing, and he wasn’t dressed like I’d last seen him. Now he wore a dark linen short-sleeved shirt over similarly colored linen pants. He was barefoot. And looking at me all kinds of weirdly.

I stepped away from the dog, stood up, and brushed myself off as best I could. “I know I look bad, but come on. That tunnel was a bitch.”

He placed a finger over my lips. “Such language mars the perfect beauty of your mouth.”

Was he kidding me? I eyed him, worried that maybe he’d suffered some kind of concussion on his way here. Maybe Felicia had done a number on all of us. “Enough, Kai.”

Kyrillos.
Persephone’s voice rose up unbidden inside me. “Kyrillos,” I found myself amending.

Kai gave me one of his cat-going-to-eat-the-canary-that-was-me grins. It put me at ease and had me on delicious, anticipating edge as he held out a hand. “I’ve blown off my father for the afternoon.”

He took a step closer. “We can be alone, Persephone.”

Persephone?!

Say what?!
“Say what?”

Everything fell into place with a sickening lurch. Why Cerberus hadn’t tried to kill me, why he didn’t seem as large. Why Kai was acting off.

I glanced down at myself, praying this horrible impossibility was not, in fact possible. I saw that the ground was now much farther away than it should have been, and that the body I now rocked was definitely not mine.

Somehow, I had become Persephone.

I heard in her my head, full of spiteful glee.
I’m back.

Oh. No.

Eleven

I bolted. As if I could somehow outrun this body I was stuck in. Molt it away with speed, leaving it in a dusty heap on the ground and my Sophie self all happy in the sunshine.