Hell and Back

by Patricia Blackmoor

  He squeezed my hand tighter. “One, two, three!”

  Together we raced across the road. The monster with tentacles paused and turned, his eyes growing wide as he saw us. He let out a roar and began stomping toward us.

  “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Parker shouted as we ran as fast as we could. They were looming on us, and we were only a few feet from their grasp as we burst into the transit center.

  “Here,” Parker said. I didn’t even have time to blink before he had pulled me onto one of the trains. Seconds later it pulled out of the station and into the tunnel, leaving the demons behind.

  Chapter Twenty–One

  Exhausted, both Parker and I sank down onto an empty set of seats as the train whooshed through the tunnel.

  “Any idea where we’re going?” I asked, trying to catch my breath.

  “No idea,” he said. “North?”

  I leaned my head back against the seat. “That’s helpful.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t have time to check the destination as we were running away from the giant creatures.”

  I thought he might be annoyed, but when I glanced at him he flashed me one of his brilliant smiles. I had to grin back. Energy still surging through me, I pulled his face toward mine and met him in a deep kiss.

  “Sorry,” I said, still breathless.

  He gave me another, softer kiss. “What on earth are you apologizing for?”

  I reached down and took his hand, one of the only tangible things I had to hold onto. Touching him made me feel like I was back in high school, like I couldn’t keep my hands off of him and I didn’t want to try. Yet even though no one could see us, it still didn’t feel appropriate to be making out on the train. Maybe, if we could avoid the monsters and demons, we’d have a little time for that later.

  Screw it, we might not. Thoughts about being dragged back to hell had been plaguing me since the demons made their first appearance, and those thoughts were tethered to a feeling of dread that came from knowing that when we returned to hell, I might never see him again.

  I pulled him in close to me, our lips lingering on each other’s before they crashed down. My body melded into his, his hand sliding around my waist and pressing against my lower back, pulling me in closer.

  Our mouths explored each other, foreheads pressed together in heated breaths. It was uncomfortable, twisting in the plastic seats, but I could deal with a little bit of discomfort if it meant I could be in Parker’s arms. His hands slipped underneath my shirt, grasping at my skin. With both hands he held me around the ribs and pulled me onto his lap so I straddled him, pressing against the hardness that strained against his pants.

  His lips drifted from my lips down my neck, and I arched my back into his touch. My hand behind his neck, I pulled him in, savoring the warmth from his mouth as he teased my collarbones with kisses. I closed my eyes as he kissed down my chest, just underneath the collar of my shirt, just enough to tease me to the edge and drive me wild. I dug my nails into his back, begging him for more.

  While I had been alive, I would never have gone for anything remotely like this; I had never been a fan of public displays of affection. Despite this, I had never felt more alive in the whole time I had been living, adrenaline and raw sexual energy flooding my system, overriding my brain. I had just opened my eyes so I could meet his lips again when I froze.

  “Parker. Parker, wait.”

  His head flew up from my chest. “What’s wrong?”

  “I know where we are.” I climbed from his lap and sat up on my knees as we looked out the window.

  “Okay,” he said, shifting in his seat to look at me. “Where?”

  “We’re by my parents’ house.” There was no mistaking this little neighborhood on the outskirts of town, technically still in Minneapolis but nothing like the rest of the city with the bright green lawns and sprawling houses that all somehow managed to look almost exactly the same.

  “Should we get off here?”

  “I mean, I don’t see why not,” I told him. We waited until the train pulled into the next stop and we hopped off with the rest of the passengers.

  “Do you want to go to your parents’ house?” he asked me as we stepped away from the platform.

  “Um, no. Hell no.”

  He gave me a curious look. “Why not? We’re here.”

  “First off, we don’t really have time for that, do we? And second, I told you my history with my family. I don’t want to see them, alive or dead.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Sometimes I forget that other people’s families aren’t as tightly knit as mine was.”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes I forget that not everyone had the same privileges I did. And to be honest, I’d rather have the close family than the privilege.”

  “Where to now, then?” he asked.

  “We should get back to my house.” As fun as it would be to just be able to wander around the city with Parker, we were on a very tight time frame and had hell-spawned demons after us.

  Parker and I went over to the nearby transit map.

  “Looks like if we just get here,” he said, pointing to a stop where several colored lines collided, “we can take a straight shot to your neighborhood.”

  “Perfect,” I said, swallowing heavily as I looked at the map. “Let’s go.”

  He linked arms with mine, and I choked back the worry that we’d be permanently separated once we were delivered back to hell in the arms of the demons. Together we strolled down the sidewalk, almost like a normal couple, something the two of us would never, could never be. Without the demons lumbering right behind us, it was almost peaceful here, the sun beginning to set, birds still chirping in the trees, a warm breeze blowing in off of one of the lakes.

  I’d miss this.

  I hadn’t realized exactly where we were until we rounded a corner and I froze.

  “Everything all right?”

  I looked up at the big brick house at the end of the cul-de-sac just down the street. “It’s my parents’ house.”

  “Oh.” He looked at me as I looked at the house. “Do you want to go in?”

  I shook my head. “I told you already, no.”

  “Just wanted to make sure,” he said. “I don’t mean to pressure you.”

  “You’re not. It’s just...bad memories.”

  I’d grown up in that house. I’d had meltdowns in my bedroom on the second floor, been yelled at in the kitchen, hidden bad report cards in the fireplace. There had been happiness but mostly stress and sorrow. If I never saw that home again, I’d be happy.

  “Let’s keep going,” I said, motioning down the street. We kept going through the neighborhood toward the bus stop. We passed down another street and I paused near a fenced-off block.

  “A cemetery?” Parker asked.

  “Yeah. Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “Just a thought.”

  He grew quiet. “Do you want to go look?”

  “We don’t have time for that.”

  He looked out over the cemetery for a moment. “You know what? They have no idea where we are. I think we have a little bit of time.”

  I lingered, my hand on the iron fence. I was hesitant, for obvious reasons. But at the same time, when would I ever have the chance again? When would anyone have the chance?

  “Okay,” I said, my voice soft and scratchy.

  Parker took my hand as we entered the cemetery. It was massive, sprawling hills full of marble gravestones and American flags. The graves looked endless.

  “How on earth will we find it?”

  “Look for one of the fresher ones, I guess.”

  I nodded and we started off down the path, trying to find the more recent burials first. After winding our way down the pathways and around the duck pond, we found a spot where more of the graves were new. My back was beginning to hurt from leaning forward and looking at the names on the stones when Parker called my name.

  “Meg, I think I found you.”

  My heart
racing, I crossed to where he stood, next to a square of dirt with a fresh stone and red, white, and blue gerbera daisies placed across the grave. Those were still pristine, unwilted. They had been placed there today.

  I swallowed.

  “Loving daughter, sister, and friend,” I read, feeling the urge to cry even if I couldn’t. “Funny. I never felt like any one of those things.”

  Parker put his arm around me. “You clearly were to them.”

  I shook my head. “All the epitaphs are kind and positive. Even Nietzsche’s probably says something like ‘Brilliant philosopher, loving brother.’”

  Parker rolled his eyes. “Why are you so down on yourself all the time?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  He put a hand to my cheek. “You really can’t see how amazing you are.”

  “Still ended up in hell, though.”

  “You made some mistakes. Everyone does that.”

  “You’re too nice to me,” I sighed.

  “You don’t think you deserve for people to be nice to you. You’re wrong.”

  I smiled up at him. Years of therapy had confirmed that I felt I didn’t deserve love, but Parker seemed to be the only one who really understood that. It killed me that soon, I’d have to let him go.

  “What if we ran away together?” I asked him.

  “What do you mean?”

  I put my hand on his chest, looking up into his hazel eyes. “I mean, what if we hopped on a plane, flew away across the world. Go to Disneyland or the Seychelles or Paris.”

  “They’ll still find us.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Meg, they would. No maybe about it.”

  “They haven’t found us yet and we’ve only gone across town. How long do you think it would take them to find us if we went across the world? A few days, at least. We could travel the world, see things we never got to see when we were alive. We could travel the planet. We could go to Antarctica and not worry about freezing to death. We could go to a volcano in Hawaii.”

  “Do all your plans involve danger and peril?”

  “Not all of them. We could relax on the beach in the Bahamas or go see the Eiffel Tower. But if we can’t die, imagine all the things we could experience that we would never ever get the chance to ever again.”

  He pinched his lips together as he thought. “It’s an idea.”

  “A brilliant idea. We could even fly first class, no one would ever know. Or take a train across the country, like Harry Potter!”

  He paused. “What’s really bothering you?”

  I took his hand, pulling it up to my face. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  He nodded. “I don’t want to lose you, either.” He pulled me in for a hug and I blinked away tears that never came. If I could stay here forever being held by Parker, I would. But if we had any hope that our dreams of fugitive travel could come to fruition, we needed to fulfill our first mission, and that was to get Parker’s sister the money so that his family could survive while we were exploring the globe.

  “We should probably get out of here,” I said, still snuggled in his arms.

  “Yeah,” he murmured into my hair.

  My hands were still wrapped around his waist, his arms around my shoulders. I didn’t want to let him go. I didn’t know when I’d get the chance to hold him like this again. I wasn’t a particularly petite person. I was a little short but average weight, but I felt small now. In Parker’s arms, curled against his broad shoulders, I felt safe and protected. I’d been helpless and hopeless for so long, but Parker was giving me the strength and the urgency to do the right thing.

  I didn’t want to leave, but we had to. We had to get that money to his sister. I couldn’t go back to hell or jet-set around the world without knowing that Parker’s family had all the things they needed to survive. We couldn’t do anything until we got them that money.

  I gave a deep sigh. “All right,” I said. “No more stalling. Let’s go get that money to your sister.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  I nodded. “More sure than I ever have about anything. Your family needs that money.”

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  Once more we took hands, this time less for romance and more for solidarity, to give each other confidence as we started off toward our last and final bus stop. The benches were taken, so we lingered underneath a wide-boughed tree, Parker behind me, hands around my waist. It was the little things like this that stabbed at my heart, the little snippets of normalcy that reminded me that we would never, ever be normal. I savored these moments for as long as I could, turning my head to kiss his cheek, resting my hands on top of his.

  The bus pulled up, brakes screeching softly as it stopped at the sign. We joined the others as they boarded. The bus was by no means full; not many were traveling by bus from the wealthy part of town to the middle-class area of town. I rested my head on his shoulder. My thoughts drifted, and part of me longed to be kissing him once more, but my stomach was full of butterflies and adrenaline flooded my veins. I couldn’t focus on making out right now if I tried. All I was thinking about was getting back to my old house, then escaping to somewhere far away from here.

  Neither of us spoke during the ride until we found ourselves in my neighborhood.

  “Here,” I said. “I think this is the closest stop.”

  We got up as the bus pulled up at the station and walked the few blocks. With a deep breath, we stopped in front of my house. I had never thought I’d be back here again.

  In the distance, one of the creatures shrieked.

  Chapter Twenty–Two

  I reached down and took Parker’s hand without looking, still staring up at the house as the sun set lower toward the horizon.

  “You ready?” Parker asked me.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I sighed.

  We looked at each other for a long moment before we walked together into the house.

  We stepped inside, and all was quiet. Once more we exchanged a look. I was surprised that both Mitchell and Courtney were out of the house. The banks were closed. On a normal night when I was alive, they would have been at home, relaxing in front of the TV.

  I put my finger to my lips, signaling for Parker to be quiet before realizing that he didn’t actually need to be quiet because if someone was in the house, they couldn’t hear us anyway. Still, Parker froze, and in the quiet I could hear the faint sounds of the television from deeper inside the house. I relaxed, hoping that meant that the two of them were zoned out in front of Netflix so I could find my laptop, open it, and send out the email without attracting attention. I nodded my head in that direction, praying that we’d find them there.

  The front of the house was dark, the lights in the kitchen and hallway turned off, but toward the back of the house, toward the living room, I could see a faint light. Everything was cast in the shadow of the setting sun. On the kitchen counter I could see the shadowy outlines of liquor bottles, and as we passed by the kitchen, the smell of alcohol was unmistakable. I swallowed and it burned my throat. Had they had visitors after we’d left the night before? They had never really been party people. Visitors would have surprised me.

  It all became clear when we stepped from the dark kitchen into the living room. Only one lamp was on, one of the ones next to the couch. The TV was on too, showing the menu of a DVD of Pulp Fiction. How fitting.

  Splayed on the couch were Courtney and Mitchell, each curled up in their own corner and passed out cold. Empty glasses and bottles covered the surface of the coffee table, and the smell of booze was even thicker in here. They’d been mixing liquor too: my wine coolers, beers, plus some vodka and tequila. That was bad; Courtney wasn’t allowed to have tequila after our friend’s twenty-first birthday had ended with her vomiting for almost two hours.

  “Looks like they’ve had some fun,” Parker commented.

  I wrinkled my nose. “Clearly.”

  “They do this a lot?”

&
nbsp; I shook my head. “Never. We were all casual drinkers; glass of wine or can of beer after a stressful day, mixed drinks if we felt like having fun, but we never drank much. I guess this is just another thing they were hiding from me.”

  “Or…”

  “Or?”

  “Well, it is your birthday.”

  “You think they were celebrating?”

  “Or trying to chase the guilt away.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “That would require them to feel remorse.”

  Parker chuckled.

  “Come on,” I said, motioning down the hall. “Let’s go find my laptop.”

  Parker and I crossed down the hallway to the bedroom I had once shared with Parker. In light of the recent revelations, it wasn’t the warm, comforting place it had once been. The walls felt too white, the bed too bare, the carpet too dingy. Now instead of lounging after a long day, I only wanted to get in and out. I didn’t want to linger in the room where my boyfriend constantly cheated on me.

  “Okay, I kept my laptop on my desk,” I said, climbing over a basket of laundry. I reached my desk, but of course, it wasn’t that easy. I checked the small cubby in the desk, too, but there was no sight of my thin silver laptop anywhere.

  “Are you kidding me?” I sighed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s not here.”

  “Okay. Where might it be?”

  “I don’t know. I always kept it at my desk or on my side of the bed. Or, what was my side of the bed, seeing as there’s a new girl sleeping in it.”

  “Well, maybe we should check there.”

  I crossed back over to the side of the bed closest to the door. To check under the bed I had to get on my hands and knees, the thin carpet pressing into my palms. Had it always felt this gross? Maybe I was only overreacting because I was angry.

  That anger could help, though. I didn’t see that laptop under the bed, so I had to check the drawer of the bedside table instead. With everything I had in me, I hooked my fingers into the drawer pull and yanked it open.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I sighed.

  “What is it?” Parker asked, coming up behind me.