My Way to Hell Read Free

gaping black hole filled with miles of pink tongue. “I know, I know. That night was dreadful times a million. Old Lucifer whipped you like so much cream. That still doesn’t mean you just give up, Marcella. Other souls from this plane manage to make contact. You could, too. If you were willing to break a nail, that is.”
    “Don’t you think I’d send Delaney a message if I could, you antagonistic shit? I’ve tried everything. I just suck at this.” And she did. Suck at it, that is. She just couldn’t get a feel for the whole deal. No matter how many times she tried to connect with a medium, she ended up crapping out with a fizzle. She’d even gone so far as to attend this shitty plane’s therapy sessions and more self-help classes than she could count, like it was her new religion. Yet thus far, she’d tanked in “Medium + Ghost = Happily Ever After for Eternity,” and she couldn’t even begin to express her dismay over the “Limbo Doesn’t Have to Suck” class.
    The one last earthly thing she wanted to do was let her friend know that she was all right. That the choice she’d made that night in a hospital room in Nebraska was made with no regrets. Not one.
    What made being doomed here that much more doomish was the idea that knowing Delaney like she did, she knew guilt was chewing a hole in her gut. Delaney was the kind of friend who’d never have allowed her to give up what she’d given up that night. In fact, she’d have probably rather had a limb hacked off in lieu of. The least Marcella could do was let Delaney know she’d survived. Her friend would never have complete happiness if she didn’t have peace of mind about Marcella’s fate.
    “So?” Darwin prodded. “What are you going to do? Whine or take charge?”
    “Here’s the problem, mouth, and you know the rules as well as I do, Darwin. Because I was banished to this plane, I can’t leave unless someone summons my soul or unless I can find a medium to connect with and send signs to—which seems to be about as difficult as getting hold of the date for the second coming of Christ. Maybe some of the mediums on the approved list they gave me are just a bunch of shysters. Delaney always said there were more fakes than the real thing. And seriously, do you really think a place called the Spirit Shack—where, I might add, they offer five séances for five hundred bucks, get the sixth one free—is the real deal?”
    “The Spirit Shack just helped that Andre, didn’t they? He’d been here for eight years, Marcella. They can’t all be hack mediums if they helped a hard-core plane dweller like Andre. That’s just a convenient excuse for you not to get off your keister.”
    “Oh, bullshit,” she snorted, enraged that he was goading her. “Andre’s the perfect example for why I think I was banished to this plane instead of just dumped here. He crossed without the use of a real medium. It was just his time to go, I guess. I tried hitting up the Spirit Shack and got nothing out of it other than watching some lying piece of shit who called himself Jean-Franc perform a séance then pretend he could see some guy named Marlon from Hoboken who wasn’t even there. He couldn’t see me any more than Delaney can still see you. If that’s not enough proof for you, then I got nuthin’.”
    Darwin scratched his underside with a rapid thump of his paw. “While I’m certain some of the mediums who manage to make the approved list are just as you claim, full of shit, they aren’t all full of shit.”
    “Look, the only friggin’ medium I knew for sure was the real deal was Delaney, and she’s no longer a medium, remember? Or are you forgetting the reason she could see the dead in the first place? The contract with Lucifer. You know, that crazy contract her freaky half brother Vincent had with the horned one that gave him all that evil power he abused the shit out of while he was alive? The power that, upon his death, was passed to his next oldest