My Way to Hell

by Dakota Cassidy

  “You’re not the typical woman, Marcella—”

  “So I’ve been told,” she retorted with a wily smile and a pouty lower lip.

  “That’s not what I mean. What I mean is you’re as strong as I am, demon that you are. I’ll take you down before I’ll let you leave.”

  “You’d hit a woman?”

  “Nah. I won’t hit you, but I will restrain you.”

  Heh. “I didn’t take you for the kind of man who dug hand-cuffs, but I will give you this—it’s always the science teachers who get off on the kink.”

  His nostrils flared. “I’m done playing.”

  Bummer. He was hot when he played. “Yeah. Me, too. Now move.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “You know what I think, Kellen?”

  “You think?”

  “Not often, but when I do, it’s all bright and shiny. So, know what I think?”

  “What do you think, Marcella?”

  She winked one green eye at him, smoldering. “I think you just want to cop a feel.”

  His cheeks sucked inward.

  “You’re losing your patience with me, right?”

  “I think that’s fair.”

  “Then move and impatience will be a thing of the past.”

  “The hell.”

  Arching her back, Marcella let her body align with his, allowing him to have the full impact of her prowess. She hadn’t been out of the game so long she didn’t remember the kind of sexual vibe she threw out into the universe in sensual waves. It was one trick that, demon or ghost, she’d always be able to use. Walking her fingers along Kellen’s chest, she stopped just under his arms. Lovely, strong, capable arms. “Don’t throw the word ‘hell’ around in vain. It hurts my demonic feelings.” She let her lower lip fall open again, this time with an extra-enticing pout.

  Kellen ran his index finger over it, making her flesh sing corny Air Supply songs. “You need ChapStick. Wherever you skulked off to, it must’ve been dry, because it hasn’t been kind to your big mouth.”

  That was it. Like applying a fresh coat of lip gloss, the need to best him came with ease. Marcella snatched at his finger with her teeth, chomping down on it and catching him by surprise. When Kellen yelped his pain, she tickled him under his arms, making him lurch forward. As he fell away from the doorway, she skipped out of it as fast as she could in her tattered sandals and floated directly through a stray chair that might have kept her from getting to the front door had it not been for her ghostly skills.

  Like the hounds of Hell were nipping at her heels, she made a beeline for the front of Delaney’s East Village store and, without so much as a twitch of fear, hurled herself headfirst through the glass, spilling out the other side without a mark on her.

  Booyah for ghostie powers.

  Ducking, Marcella headed for the alleyway, zigzagging to avoid hitting people strolling along the sidewalk. Though she found, via the portly man in overalls, she had no need to take care that she didn’t bump into anyone. Not when she could walk right through them.

  Wheeling into the alley, she pressed her spine up against the brick structure and almost fell into it. Like literally. While she righted herself, a little boy with an older woman Marcella was sure she recognized sauntered past her. Their hands were entwined, swinging between their bodies.

  The child looked up at her, all big, green eyes and gangly limbs, and smiled, raising his free hand to wave at her with a coy glance. Yet the old lady looked right through her. “Come, Carlos. You must hurry. You are always daydreaming,” she chastised, though the reprimand was tempered with a warm, indulgent smile.

  Heavy footsteps thudded against the pavement, forcing her to set aside her curiosity in order to make a quick getaway. Without even realizing how, Marcella floated down the alleyway and through the building at the end of it to pop out on the other side.

  One block away from Delaney’s store.

  While it was a crazy-cool ability to possess, it still didn’t beat disappearing and reappearing at Pier 1. When she’d been a demon, she could still shop.

  So now what?

  Fuck-all. She should have at least peeked at that snob Irvin Epstein’s test when they’d had a pop quiz on how to give your afterlife direction.

  Asking for directions back to Chez Dreary wouldn’t make her feel like less of a man at all right now.

  “You saw her?” Delaney’s face was fraught with myriad emotions. Her eyes filled with worry as she poured herbal tea into mugs for the three of them. The tinkle of her bracelets jingling together soothed Kellen, who made a point of hiding his reaction to Marcella with a cool glance at his sister.

  “I did. Just like I’m seeing you,” Kellen offered. “She said to tell you she was fine.” He’d relayed almost word for word his conversation with Marcella, while Delaney listened intently.

  Dropping onto the sofa, his sister grabbed her husband Clyde’s hand, bringing it to her chest. “Did you hear that, honey? Kellen saw Marcella!”

  Clyde’s eyes met Kellen’s over the top of his new wife’s head. They passed an unspoken message between them, one that had a big question attached to it. Then he looked down at Delaney, warming his gaze when it fell upon her soft red hair, wild from the damp, cold rain they’d been having. “I did. So do you feel better? Knowing she’s okay?”

  She shook her head, falling back on the couch next to him and dragging an old afghan over her legs. “Uh, no. And what do you mean she’s fine? That’s all she had to say after disappearing and keeping me up every night worried sick? Why didn’t she tell you where she’s been? What the shit is that?”

  Kellen’s lips pursed. Because she’s the most difficult, disagreeable full-on pain in the ass I know. A pain with the sweetest ass he’d ever seen, but still a boil on his butt. “She was pretty reluctant to tell me anything, D. And shouldn’t she be? She’s been off screwing around for all this time and never once came to tell you she was all right. I’m pretty sure she was just too embarrassed to tell me where she’s really been.” That Marcella had been off having a good time while his sister had worried herself sick over her tripped his trigger. Not even her smokin’ hot bod could make him forget that.

  “Nope. Sorry. I know you’d like nothing more than to believe Marcella’s been off on some tour of Neiman Marcuses around the globe—”

  “Pier 1. I thought she liked Pier 1,” Kellen interrupted without realizing he’d given away the details he knew about Marcella. Details he’d heard in conversations she’d had with Delaney over the years while he’d try to focus on anything other than her seductive presence in the room. In fact, he knew more about Marcella Acosta than he did almost any other woman outside of his sister.

  Clyde reached over and slapped him on the back with a grin that Delaney had once said melted her heart. “For someone who once told me he’d rather be flayed alive at high noon and have vinegar poured on his open, bleeding wounds than to ever have to see Marcella Acosta again, you sure know her deets, don’t you?”

  Delaney snickered when Kellen grumbled, “She was always talking about it. I’m just pointing out how much she loved to shop.” Niiice cover, Markham. Caught red-handed, dumb-ass.

  Delaney shook her head of long, golden-red curls again. “Nope. You’d love to believe Marcella was a selfish, superficial demon, but I knew her. She was the only friend I had for ten damn years, Kellen. She fought with the devil himself to help me save Clyde. The hell I’ll believe she cared so little about me that she blew me off all this time. If you remember, I didn’t want her involved in the mess with Clyde in the first place. She just wouldn’t take no for an answer because she was looking out for me. She was the one who helped us figure out the whole reason why Clyde ended up in Hell. After that night in Nebraska, you can’t convince me she’d take off without a word even if I saw her skipping through the aisles of Pier 1 in her party dress with my own damned eyes. So, brother, if you’re going to Marcella bash—blow. I’ll find some other way to find her.” His si
ster’s eyes flashed at him, hot with anger.

  Yeah. There was that. As much as he disliked Marcella, Kellen had to admit she’d taken one for the team. Her reluctance to tell him where she’d been had even had him wondering what the frig was going on. Kellen gave his sister a contrite glance. “Okay. I apologize. She did go to bat for you, but that doesn’t explain why she hasn’t come to see you, yet she did come to see me.”

  Delaney’s slight gasp had all seven of her dogs, sprawled in various parts of their living room, and Clyde at attention. “You don’t think Lucifer threatened her, do you? Like maybe told her she had to stay away from me? Uriel promised me she’d be safe. He didn’t promise that safety would come without strings attached.”

  Kellen’s nod was curt. Uriel, an archangel, had been a part of that night with Clyde. If not for him, no one would have ever known Clyde’s soul had been improperly damned to Hell in the first place. Due to a delay in Uriel’s soul collecting, he’d forgotten to catch Clyde’s soul as it left his body. Clyde had wrongfully ended up in Hell as a result. When Uriel stepped in to prevent Lucifer from claiming Clyde, he’d born witness to the lengths Marcella had already gone to keep Delaney from harm.

  As a favor to Delaney, Uriel had promised that he’d try to keep Marcella out of harm’s way. Because she was a demon, there wasn’t a lot he could do. He did play for the upstairs team, so his power would be limited. “I imagine that’s a possibility. I think we both know what Lucifer’s capable of.”

  “God damn it! If only I could still see the dead. Maybe I could put some feelers out. I don’t believe everything’s all rocking horses and rainbows. If that were the case, Marcella’d just rearrange her schedule so she could shop here with me in Long Island instead of the city. Something’s not right, Kellen.”

  That brought to mind her departure earlier. She hadn’t just snapped her fingers and disappeared like the old Marcella. She’d trampled through chairs and the front door to the store—floating. It had nagged the shit out of him during the entire drive to his sister’s. “I was wondering. Do you ever remember Marcella being able to walk through objects? Like doors? And float?”

  Delaney rocketed upward off the cushiony sofa she’d been sitting on with Clyde. “Walk through doors? Explain.”

  “When I told her she was coming with me to see you, she got angry. Typical Marcella, is what you’re thinking when it comes to anyone telling her what to do, right? I thought so, too, at first, but when she took off out of the store, she blew right through the door, Delaney. I know she had a power or two, but I don’t remember her walking through solid objects or floating, which she did during the course of our entire conversation.”

  Delaney jammed a hand into her flowing skirt and popped her lips. “You’re right. She could lob some fireballs. She was crazy talented at disappearing. She even managed to summon snakes, but she never walked through solid objects and rarely levitated. Maybe she acquired some new powers in the last few months.”

  “But that doesn’t explain her dress.” Kellen spoke the thought, unaware he’d said it out loud.

  “Her dress?” Clyde repeated from the couch.

  “Yeah. It was a hot mess, torn and wrinkled. So were her sandals. We all know Marcella never went anywhere unless her clothes were all but spray-painted on her, and her hair was never anything less than perfect.”

  “Said the man who hates the lady demon, but remembers details about what she was wearing,” Clyde taunted with a deep chuckle. “It’s the little things, pal.”

  Kellen ignored his brother-in-law’s poke at him. What he did know was that, at the beginning of his encounter with Marcella, her almost defeatist attitude was totally out of character. For whatever reason, it had taken her a few rounds to warm up. Couple that with her rumpled clothes and ripped shoes, and something didn’t add up. “Maybe Lucifer damned her to a life of off-the-rack clothes and thrift-store shoes. That’s like dying a thousand deaths every day for someone like Marcella.” Kellen volleyed the thought back at Clyde—even if he didn’t one hundred percent believe it.

  “Was anyone else with you when she showed up, Kellen? Like Mrs. Ramirez, maybe?” Mrs. Ramirez was the woman Delaney had hired to help at her herb store. She’d been with Delaney a long time, and she had a modicum of understanding when it came to his sister’s former gift of sight.

  “Nope. I was alone.”

  “I have a thought,” Delaney said, making her way through the pack of dogs at their feet and heading to her sprawling kitchen, where she did far more herb-oil making than she did cooking. She flung open the door of the pantry, which housed hundreds of herbal remedies and books on communicating with the dead.

  Carrying back a pile of books she almost couldn’t see over the top of, Delaney clunked them down on the distressed wood coffee table she and Clyde had just recently bought. “So tell me, little brother. How’s the ghost whispering going?” she asked with a sinisterly sweet smile.

  Kellen gave her a dubious look. “I did just take a sabbatical from teaching because of it, didn’t I? I’d say it’s going the way of the country’s economy as of late. To shit. I can’t get a handle on this the way you did, D. Maybe I’m not patient enough. But I gotta say you were much better at putting the pieces of some ghost’s story together than I’ll ever be. I spend more time ducking the shit they throw at me than I do understanding what they want. Remember the last guy who showed up and wanted me to pass on that message to a woman, only I didn’t know the woman was his wife?”

  Both Clyde and Delaney winced. “I do,” she said.

  “Do you suppose I deserved to be slugged because I found said wife with his old boss—in bed? I thought he just wanted to know she was happy. I told him she seemed pretty happy with the whole glow thing she had going on.”

  Delaney shook a finger at him as she settled back onto the couch. “I told you, you have to be careful what you relay to them. They’re crafty and some use their afterlife to gather information so they can exact revenge. You’re a conduit now, but you have to be a sensitive one. What I still don’t get is that they’re able to touch you . . . I never . . .”

  But Kellen wasn’t listening. It helped to rant about this gift, which had been thrust on him without warning, to someone who understood. “Oh, yeah. It’s a real perk. I had a black eye for two weeks from that bastard. That’s without even mentioning the craziness that ensued in my classroom.” Between dead sports heroes and singers showing up and the mayhem when an angry ghost had chucked the globe of the world at him, just missing a student by a hair, Kellen had had to make the choice to take a sabbatical so he could figure out this ghost thing. Delaney had offered to let him run the store with the help of Mrs. Ramirez.

  Business had picked up since Delaney’s showdown with Lucifer. So when she and Clyde had decided it was time to start a family and move to Long Island, they’d offered it to Kellen as a way for him to at least have some income while he got his gift of sight under control.

  Delaney hopped back off the couch again and paced. “Wait. Did you touch Marcella?”

  He shifted in the big, poofy chair he sat in by the couch. “Touch her?”

  “You know what I mean, Kel. Did you touch her? Did she touch you?”

  “I grabbed her arm.” Threatened to take her out. So, yeah. He’d touched her. And yes, she’d touched him. The fire she’d created with just her fingers had left a burning imprint.

  “Oh. My. God,” Delaney yelped. “I know why she wouldn’t tell you where she’s been, Kellen. And if I’m honest, I have to say, we have a shitload of work to do on your ghostie antennae. She’s a ghost, Kellen! Don’t you see? She walked through the store’s door. You touched her and I’d bet she touched you. I’d also bet my new AeroGarden only you can see her. Oh, shit. How the hell did this happen? We have to find her.”

  “How am I supposed to find her, Delaney? None of the ghosts you were once buddy-buddy with will give me the time of day, much less help me locate Marcella. I don’t even know how
she got to the store in the first place.”

  “That’s because you keep stomping all over them with your size elevens. You’re just a big Neanderthal when it comes to being a sympathetic ear. And she got to the store because I’d bet my last case of Saint-John’s-wort you were thinking about her.” When Kellen made an effort to dispute her claim, despite the fact that it was dead-on, she threw up a hand. “Don’t bother. You’re only kidding yourself if you think we don’t know you thought Marcella was hot. She needed a conduit to call her from the afterlife—which means you were doing some heavy breathing in the thinking department.” Her smile was smug.

  “But I’ve thought about her before,” he defended, only to realize he was just digging a bigger hole. He slumped down in his chair, clamping his mouth shut and shooting Clyde a dirty look for snickering.

  Delaney scrunched her lips up. “I’ll just bet my bippy you have, brother. But despite your crappy medium techniques, you’re getting stronger, and your will to see Marcella in person must’ve been strong.”

  Narrowing his eyes, he sank further into the chair and compressed his lips tighter.

  “Now,” Delaney said, “I know exactly what we need to do.”

  “You want me to get the chimes, honey?” Clyde rose, running a loving finger down Delaney’s nose.

  “Why do we need chimes?”

  “A séance, bruiser. We’re going to summon Marcella from the other side. So go hone your vibes, brother. Make sure they’re properly greased. We have a hot Latina ghost to catch.”

  three

  “Does this feel just a little ridiculous to either of you?” Kellen asked Clyde from across the kitchen table. The table they all held hands around. Chimes hung from the stained-glass ornamental light above, and candles scattered the room, their flames whispering soft orange and blue.