Page 1 of Crazy as Hell

Chapter One

Naomi Locke was trapped in hell.

That wasn’t a figure of speech or an embellishment born from a ploy for sympathy. It was the undeniable, depressing truth. Her literal reality was hell, and there was no escape. No rescue. No hope waiting for her just beyond the horizon.

She was stuck in a nightmare with no end.

It all began on her first official day as a student at Trifecta University. Before that, Naomi’s life had been painfully ordinary. Or at least as ordinary as life could be in a world where magic existed. Her mother had been a witch, beautiful and kind, until cancer stole her away while Naomi was still a child. Her father had never been part of the picture, so he wasn’t any help.

That left her alone in the world.

With no family to claim her, she had spent the rest of her childhood bouncing around the foster system. Eventually, she was lucky enough to land in a group home for magical kids who had nowhere else to go. It wasn’t a horrible place, but it never felt like a real home. Privacy was a privilege there was far too little of, and she counted down the days until she turned eighteen and could live on her own.

When that day finally came, she rented a small studio apartment within walking distance of Trifecta University and the pizza parlor where she worked to pay the bills. The apartment was cramped, and the walls were thin enough for her to know what her neighbors were watching on TV, but she was proud of it.

For the first time in her life, Naomi felt like things were finally working out for her. She had a job she liked, a place to call her own, and she had scraped together enough to buy a second-hand car to get her where she needed to go. She’d also worked her ass off in school and had gotten accepted into one of the best universities in the country.

On her first day at Trifecta University, she’d been nervous, excited, and a little afraid as all students were when the future finally stopped being a dream and became real. Wide-eyed and idealistic, her only worries had been about going through magical testing, figuring out what classes she would be taking, and meeting a campus full of supernatural and human students.

As soon as she arrived on campus, the heavens turned against her. A surprise summer storm rolled in, blanketing the entire city in a deluge of rain. What should have been the beginning of the most exciting chapter of her life turned out to be the opposite when a bolt of lightning ripped through the sky, and the world exploded.

One blinding flash of light.

One instant of unbearable heat and white-hot pain…then nothing.

That was the first time she died.

The next time Naomi opened her eyes, she was back in bed inside her small apartment. At first, she’d had no idea what had happened. Writing off the entire experience as nothing more than a nightmare induced by nerves, she had gotten up and hurried to get ready to make it to the university for her first day of testing. The feeling of déjà vu was unsettling, but she had stubbornly ignored it. But the moment the storm rolled in, she realized she’d made a terrible mistake not trusting her instincts.

That was the second time she died.

When she woke up and found herself back in her own bed again, she barely dared to breathe or move. Waking up alive and well should have been comforting. Instead, it left her feeling terrified and thoroughly confused. Panic crashed through her as memories of the lightning, pain, and dying came rushing back.

She hadn’t imagined any of it.

It hadn’t been a nightmare caused by stress or anxiety.

She really died…twice.

Initially, Naomi assumed she’d won some sort of bizarre cosmic lottery. Maybe the universe had made a mistake, or perhaps fate simply decided to show her mercy. Either way, she had somehow earned a second chance at life. What she didn’t know back then was it wasn’t a miracle that had brought her back.

It was a fucking curse.

Death became a pattern for her. A grueling, unending cycle she couldn’t escape from, no matter how hard she tried. Every time she was reborn with the faintest glimmer of hope that she might finally break the cycle, fate found a new, brutal way to extinguish it.

Looking back, it was embarrassing to admit how many attempts it had taken just to survive that first day. Going to school always led to her death. It took several painful tries to realize that avoiding the campus altogether that first day was her only chance at staying alive. But surviving that first day was only her first of many challenges since evading one death always triggered another.

If the storm didn’t claim her, something else always did. A car accident. A collapsing building. A magical creature she never saw coming. A betrayal she hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes she lasted months. Sometimes it was merely a few days. A few times, she’d even made it two whole years.

But it inevitably ended the same way…with her dying.

Some deaths were random. Others felt carefully orchestrated, as though the universe itself refused to let her stray too far from some designated path it had chosen. No matter what decisions she made, no matter how cautiously she lived or how carefully she planned, death always found her. It didn’t matter if she kept her head down, avoided people, stayed locked in her apartment, or fled the city altogether.

Every path eventually led to another unavoidable end.

After enough deaths, it began to feel less like bad luck and more like a cruel game designed solely for her suffering. The whole fucked up scenario reminded her of one of those campy horror movies where the protagonist was trapped reliving the same day over and over, forced to outsmart an unseen killer before they could finally end their torment and escape the loop.

Except horror movies always gave the audience something to work with. A masked murderer. A malevolent ghost. A monster lurking in the shadows. There was a villain to identify, clues to follow, and weaknesses to exploit.