Page 12 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“I did. Wipe the counter, please.”

He made a desultory attempt, mostly smearing the blood around, but that wasn’t ultimately Hazel’s problem. “How? What were those words?”

Hazel spritzed the back of her phone, applying a DNA-mutating amount of cleanser. “Ancient Sumerian, by way of Bangor. You shouldn’t have any more trouble.”

“Are you sure?” Steve asked, getting more of a handle on the counter.

“Nobody’s going to be surer, but you can call me if you do have trouble,” she added reluctantly, and wrote her number on a folded-over scrap of paper towel. “I’d like my car now.”

* * *

Both curiosity and procedure took a back seat to Steve’s very evident fear that Hazel would turn him into a frog. He handed over the replacement keys promptly and told her that her car was in the fifth row, obviously praying that he wouldn’t have to show her in person.

Hazel didn’t bother asking him to keep the incident to himself. She knew a lost cause when she saw one.

Her headache was progressing nicely by the time she closed the car door, but she was prepared for that much. The impound lot hadn’t taken the ibuprofen out of her glove compartment or the bottles of water out of the back seat.

Actually, other than taking her phone, nobody had moved a thing. The seat and the mirrors were precisely the way Hazel had left them, the radio was still set to auxiliary mode, and even her half-full bottle of lime-flavored Diet Coke had kept its position in the cupholder. A quick check of the trunk before she’d gotten in had showed Hazel that its contents were the same too: spare tire and jack, first aid kit, and a duffel bag with a spare set of clothing, some travel-size toiletries, and a cheap spy novel in case she had to stay the night in a place too haunted to use her phone reliably.

The familiarity was weirder, in a way, than if Steve or his boss had thrown out her Coke or set the radio to FM. Each point of recognition made her feel like an archaeologist on a dig, finding the soda bottles and the seat settings of the Time Before.They must not have liked the local stations, Professor. A cultural taboo, maybe.

It didn’t matter that the Time Before had been no more than two days ago. A gulf had opened in Hazel’s mind, one she knew from other times and places. That internal division stayed no matter how smoothly the rest of the world kept turning. She could—would—bridge the gap as she went on, as she drove the car again, as she resumed her place in her audiobook, as she parked in her own space, unlocked her apartment door, braved the contents of her refrigerator, but those would be bridges. The chasm would stick around.

Hazel watched herself in the rearview mirror as she washed down the painkillers, noticing the lines around her mouth, the deep circles under her eyes, and the general impression that she’d been dead for a week.

She hadn’t planned on entering any beauty pageants in the next few days, and her last date had been two months back, but her reflection still concerned her. Willpower, anger, and fear could beat back exhaustion for a time, but her appearance showed what she couldn’t let herself feel.

What she needed was a month on a beach in Santa Monica, with a margarita and a bunch of coconut shrimp at her side and no ghosts for miles. What she was going to get was a three-hour drive and a tough conversation.

The hospital hauntingcouldhave been a coincidence. It might even have been half of one—some lingering presence of the ethereal fight could have triggered an incipient haunting, the way strain could make a hairline fracture snap. Hazel’s cell phone was a different story, and the two incidents in such quick succession…

She considered pounding her head against the steering wheel, decided that it would just make her headache worse, and drove out of the impound lot to find a drive-through coffee shop. A cinnamon bun and a latte helped, but her real motive was the chance to linger in a parking lot without witnesses who’d just seen her banish a minor manifestation. She didn’t talk on the phone while driving as a rule. This wasn’t the moment to start.

Hazel pulled out her perfectly normal cell phone and took a slow sip of her water. The hauntings hadn’t hurt anybody yet, she told herself as she brought up her contacts list. Her situation wasn’t an emergency. She took another sip of water, hit the number she wanted, and prepared to listen hard before she said a word. If Summer sounded like he was in pain, if he even sounded tired—

“Hazelnut.” Summer’s voice, with its hint of a Southern drawl, sounded relaxed and cheerful. Mellow, really. “Always a nice surprise.”

“I’m afraid it might not be so nice this time. Nothing urgent, though.” She tried to sound sure about the latter part.

Summer’smm-hmmhad a very skeptical sound to it. “Well, I’m peeling carrots right now, and there’s nothing good on TV. You go ahead and tell me everything.”

That was all the invitation Hazel needed. She began with Chapman’s call and sketched out the last few days from there, not going into too much detail but being far more specific than she’d gotten with Stephanie. She stared out the window while she talked, only half seeing the chain-link fence in front of her and the hedges beyond it, hearing her own clipped, controlled voice from far away.

When she got to the part about waking up in the hospital, Summer clicked his tongue. “You could’vecalledme. Had them call me.”

“Why? You don’t do healing when modern medicine works.”

“That’s—this is different.”

“And what could you have done from down there?”

“Come up.”

“That’s nice of you, but I wasn’t in any danger by that time, and they wouldn’t have let me out of the hospital even if you had healed me. You’d have made the whole drive and it would have just caused a scene.”

“You are the most ridiculous person I know sometimes. Go on.”

Hazel did. After she described the screaming, she heard Summer suck air through his teeth. “That it?”