Page 16 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“We can put on a show and save the orphanage,” said Hazel. She was trying to joke, but it came out weary.

“I’ve never lied to you.” Magnified by his glasses, Summer’s eyes made Hazel think of a winter sky at dawn: pale, clear, and completely steady. “I won’t start now and tell you I’m sure we can heal you. I’ve never seen somebody become a conduit before. But that goes the other way too.”

“Huh?” she asked. It wasn’t her finest moment, but dinner and beer on top of stress and the drive had begun to kick in.

Summer smiled. “I don’t know any reason wecan’tset this right. And if you or I don’t know the answer, somebody else might—whether they’re alive to tell us or wrote a book about it. Only way we lose for sure is giving up.”

“We?”

“We,” he said firmly, and Hazel felt the word like a hug.

* * *

She left Summer’s house the next morning after nine dark and dreamless hours, two cups of coffee, and a raft of pancakes. She took a Tupperware container of leftover barbecue, a charm made of green and white knotted ribbons and a stone with a hole in it, and a case of beer. None of them solved her problems, but the combination let her face the tasks ahead of her without wanting to scream.

Hazel barely flinched when she walked into her apartment and the hallway light exploded.

Yes, the pop and then the crash were loud, the smell of ozone hit her nose unpleasantly, and green and pink blobs danced in front of her eyes for a minute. Yes, she’d be picking bits of glass out of her carpet for the next week—a week which she suspected would be busy as it was. She knew the situation now, and she didn’t have the time or the energy to panic.

“I get your point,” she said, folding her arms over her chest and addressing the unseen force as she waited for her vision to clear. “I don’t think much of it, but I get it.”

Then she went to drop her bags in her room and start making phone calls.

“Jesus H. Christ,”Tiffany said, “youbetterwork remotely. Go full Amish and send your reports in by FedEx if you need to.”

“I don’t think it’ll get that bad,” said Hazel.

“Great. I’m still not risking our electronics. The printer breaks enough as it is without ghosts, and God forbid the coffee machine gets haunted. ThenI’llneed an exorcism.”

“I’m not sure that’s how it works,” said Hazel, suppressing a chuckle. Tiffany hadn’t wanted to know details back before Hazel had become one of her junior accountants, when she’d helped getrid of an annoying dead aunt, and she almost defensively got them wrong now. “I have time off coming if the tech here starts breaking down or I’m dragged off to the other side, but barring that—”

“Okay, whoa, no, not happening.”

“—I should be able to make most of my deadlines.”

“Fuck your deadlines. You picked a slow season.”

“Just for you.”

“We’ll be fine. We’ll make it work. Are you okay? Do you actuallyneeda priest? I haven’t been in St. Stephen’s for ten years, but I could probably talk to people. Not that they’d believe me.”

“No, I think—” The shadows in the corner seemed to flicker, as though a shape passed by against a light Hazel couldn’t see. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ll be fine. A priest probably couldn’t help even if they believed. I could use a hand with a normal problem, though.”

“Normal problems are great—tell me all your normal problems.”

“We don’t have time, and you’re not a therapist,” said Hazel. She opened her eyes again and ignored the sense of another presence in the room. Her apartment wasn’t as strongly defended as Summer’s house, but it would have taken ethereal beingslotsof power to cause any major physical damage, and she refused to let party tricks get to her. “I might need you to put in a good word for me at a bank, though.”

Houses filled the laptop screen in front of her, short descriptions below thumbnails that almost no normal home buyers would find even a little bit appealing. Hazel, who’d stopped trying to be normal long ago, clicked on the first and began to write down details as she talked to Tiffany.

Anybody else in the apartment would just have to entertain themselves.

Interlude

The medium was small. A joke, that. He remembered as much.

But this onewassmall: short, thin, with a little triangle of a face and close-bobbed black hair. Her eyes, comparatively large, were very dark blue. Ligat had only seen her up close for a moment, but he remembered her fearful, determined gaze more clearly than half of the ethereal landscapes he traveled.

The lady moved fast—in every meaning of the phrase. Fueled by terror, she’d dodged and struck like a serpent in Chapman’s room. She’d acted swiftly and decisively in the hospital and with the car clerk, she’d flashed down to her friend’s farm and back, and once she’d learned that she needed to move, she’d selected a new place, paid, and packed within half a week.