How was I going to face her this morning after what it happened last night?
Caroline’s best friend, who is going through her own shit. She was dealing with the loss of her best friend and the betrayal of the man she was dating.
I was supposed to be there to comfort her, but instead I had made unwanted physical advances towards her.
I rolled over on my back, slapping my hands against my forehead and squeezing my eyes shut.
I had really screwed up. My stomach was in knots
I needed Laney.
As. A. Friend.
I didn’t deserve, but I needed, her support.
For some reason I had been confused on that, but I wasn’t anymore. The kiss last night had changed all that.
I had felt absolutely nothing.
Except that it was wrong.
It had been bland and inappropriate. It had felt like a big mistake even as it had been happening.
I guess it was exactly what I had needed to shake me out of this forlorn slump I was in since Caroline had died. I stood up from the bed, glaring at the sunrise.
I might have been making mistakes, but I wasn’t going to do that anymore. My head was clear and focused.
I needed to find Caroline.
PART TWO
Chapter 15
CAROLINE
The room was dark and quiet, as I stirred fitfully with slightly open eyes. My head was throbbing and feeling completely overwhelmed with pain I couldn’t hide. My hands cramped, turning over and over again, balling into fists and then opening. The motion seemed to create a rhythm that I began to blink to.
My whole body was burnt, with small, stinging sensations on every nerve ending.
The last thing I remembered was falling into the lava pit and feeling the lava burn me alive. It was something I had never imagined I would feel. The truth was, it was painful as all fuck. Now it felt like I had tiny cuts all over my skin, giving me a tingling, searing sensation. It touched my skin and sent waves of pain moving through my body. When I blinked, my eyelids hurt.
I wanted to see what had happened to my body. Was my skin black and charred? I didn’t even feel like I should be alive right now. I felt sunken and hollow, blackened and in deep pain.
The sound near me made my body shudder and a ripple of pain moved through me from the top of my head down to the tip of my toes.
The sound came again, as if something was scraping along the floor. I drew in a rasping breath and slowly twisted my head to the left to see who or what was near me. The place was so quiet it was clear the only sound was this thing. I blinked my eyes into the darkness, seeing two glowing, yellow eyes blinking back at me.
It took me a moment more for my eyes to become accustomed to the darkness but as I did, I could just make out the outline of a creature who stood in the dark near me.
“Don’t move, your body is still pretty badly burned,” the thing in the corner said. Right now, it was just a dark shadow with two yellow glowing eyes. As my eyes grew used to the dark, I saw it was actually a man. Well, sort of a man, a man with flames in his eyes and horns on his head, and something dark and ominous behind him, but in general, it was still a man.
It all came flooding back to me how Ryder was a monster and Ratchet was a demon, and then I suddenly realized those eyes were the demon eyes I had seen before in Ratchet. This was no man standing next to me. It was a demon.
“Where am I?” I croaked. My voice was cracked and tired.
“You’re in Undirheim,” the demon said. “I am Thrain, Lord of the Underworld.”
“The Lord of the Underworld,” I murmured. “What have I done to deserve such attention?”
