Undead and Unsure
Stranded = bad. Hell = bad. Stranded in Hell = very terribly awfully horribly dreadfully bad. Whew! That was a lot of adverbs. Wait... adjectives? Definitely should have paid more attention in Miss Wilson's English class. At least I wasn't trying to distract myself by pondering a past regret.
"Don't panic," I gasped aloud. Regardless of the damned who may or may not have been lurking just beyond the mist, I had to think out loud or go crazy. It wouldn't take much for me to lose my shit. So I embraced the urge to yak-yak-yak. "It's not as bad as it seems. It's not! It'll be fine. It will! You're a badass shoe shopper with an utter lack of conscience at sample sales. And also, you're a vampire. The queen of them, even. So take it easy. And you should probably stop talking out loud."
Okay. Good pep talk, good advice. Or at least not terrible life-ending advice. So I was marooned in the hellfog for who knew how long. Stay put or walk?
I know all the survivor show guys (they're always guys, for some reason) say if you're lost you should stay put so the rescue team can find you. Except I was the rescue team. Laura was the only one who could go back and forth from hellfog to earth to hellfog; her mother could, too, but (whoops!) I'd killed her.
And walk.
And walk.
This might not have been my best idea. I had the feeling I could walk for a long time and never find a Starbucks. Which would be, of course, the coffee shop... from hellfog!
Heck, if I was one of them, I'd be fine with the "head down until further notice" plan. I'd definitely be doing my best to avoid notice, though it went against most of my instincts. Ha! That made me think of my late stepmother, the Ant, someone who'd be unable to keep her head down. Even when she tried for subtle and unassuming, she put off obvious and overdone. Every damn time. So I needed to get back to counting my blessings.
There were worse things, I reminded myself, than being abandoned on a strange spiritual plane with piles of bad guys (they had to be bad; they were in Hell, right?) who were damned.
"Oh, hell."
Think of the devil, and her assistant appears.
I whirled to confront the most fiendish denizen of Hell in the history of humanity: my stepmother.