Page 17 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Where the ethereal was concerned, those days were a peaceful reprieve. Perthrux had tested its power in the first two hauntings, then thrown it against the druid’s wards, and assaulted the Lewis woman’s defenses without managing more than a burst light bulb and a flickering face in the mirror at night.

So Perthrux had stalked or sulked off to its lair to recover its strength, Chapman had presumably found some tedious way of occupying himself, and Hazel Lewis had bought a decrepit house maybe fifty miles away from the druid. Her employer, who’d lent her the cash for it, came over to help put the contents of her apartment in boxes.

There were maybe ten at the end: books, clothes, occult supplies, and a small selection of mismatched kitchen implements. The medium sold her furniture to a series of strangers through the internet, fit all the other physical elements of her life neatly in the back of her small car, and drove down to her new old house on a thoroughly depressing, rainy day.

She was a woman without tethers, Ligat thought. He revised that opinion as she weeded out her belongings. She was a woman who selected each connection carefully and pruned them to the shape she wanted. It left her without many, and almost none of those that remained went very deep, though Summer might have been an exception. Watching her from the shadows of the ethereal, he spotted no family photographs or sentimental keepsakes. He saw no evidence that she had a lover, either, which he found annoyingly pleasant.

It certainly wouldn’t have been for lack of offers, unless the world was full of more fools than he remembered. Even the old clothes she wore to pack and move didn’t conceal the supple lines of her figure, which caught Ligat’s eye even as he stayed at a careful distance, or the decisive grace of her movements. He couldn’t imagine he was the first to notice them, and mortals would have acted.

He found himself speculating as the days went by, amusing himself by trying to guess the cause of her celibacy. Despite her contact with the ethereal, or perhaps because of it, the medium didn’t seem to follow the sort of religion that frowned on carnal pleasures. Of course, she might simply not have been inclined. She might have found the local talent lacking. Ligat, observing the people she dealt with, could certainly have understood that.

Over the decades, Ligat’s duties had exposed him more than occasionally to mortals. Most of the ones he’d actually met had been unpleasant. The rest had been unremarkable, blurring in time to become a mass of shifting fashions and politics. None had stood out, not until Chapman’s chosen sacrifice had tried to talk him down, then stabbed Ligat in the shoulder and actually managed to get away.

The shoulder still ached at times, the first lasting injury he could really remember, and the static had jarred his entire self when Hazel Lewis had struck the television. He’d almost welcomed both. He was sure that was for the novelty of them, not for any murkier reasons that he might almost recognize late at night.

He hadn’t expected Hazel. She continued to surprise him.

Ligat could almost find it in himself to regret her fate.

Chapter 9

Still alive,Hazel texted Summer, leaning back in a brown corduroy armchair. She’d gotten it off Facebook, but except for her bed and a folding table, it was still the only furniture in the house that she trusted.I’d knock wood, but the floor might fall apart.

The house’s siding had once been olive green but probably had never looked good, and the years had faded it to the color of dubious milk as well as making it sag and wrecking one of the gutters. Clumps of faded grass and bedraggled dandelions forced themselves up through the churned red dirt outside. Beyond that lay a tangle of briary undergrowth and assorted trees—some pine, some maple, many dead—and then, far enough east, a dirt road.

Conditions didn’t improve much inside. Hazel had cleaned out the bedroom, bathroom, and front hall that afternoon, applying a variety of chemicals she chose not to tell Summer about, and the effort had resulted in very bare but clean rooms with an eye-watering lemon and pine scent.

She’d picked the only bare-walled room in the house for her bedroom, even though it had faux-wood paneling that would probably give off hallucinogenic gas if she lit a match within fifty feet. The other rooms had wallpaper. Hazel didn’t feel up to confronting the wallpaper yet, or really even contemplating it.

knock it all down,the response text said,build a log cabin.

You can come do all that for me if you want.

Both of them knew it wouldn’t happen. Knee problem or not, Summer was tied to his land and the creatures living there. He could go to town once a week, and once in a while, generally in winter, he could manage a longer absence, but staying an hour away for as long as serious construction would take was not an option. Hazel had bought the house; she’d have to live with what wasn’t too bad for a while and make the changes she could manage. Bleach was just the start.

She finished her water, pushed herself back to her feet, and braved the possibly psychedelic walls by lighting the candle on the card table. Her hands shook a little as she struck the match, just as they’d done when she’d cast the runes, but the flame held steady and the wick caught without any trouble.

For the first time since Chapman’s house, Hazel slipped between the worlds on purpose.

The ethereal itself wasn’t quite as bad as she’d feared. After her morning of cleaning, she almost welcomed the sudden drop in temperature, and the house didn’t look anyworsein the blue-tinged light. Shadows gathered in the corners, dense and black and almost tangible, moving in the corner of Hazel’s eye when she looked away, which wasn’t great but wasn’t much of a surprise.

Her own body scared her the most.

Summer had said she’d become a conduit, that she was corroding the world, and Hazel had seen enough to believe him even if shehadn’tbeen inclined to trust his judgment. Once she realized what the faint, pallid glow around her left thigh was, she wasn’t surprised—but the initial sight jarred her into confusion, and figuring out the meaning just replaced it with a surge of dismay. The connection wasalready real enough to be visible. Hazel wasn’t sure how powerful that meant it was, but she’d hoped to get more time.

Faint lines radiated from the wound site like cracks in glass. They didn’t go very far, but their trajectory was obvious: down to her foot, across her pelvis at both the front and back, and up to her shoulder. Hazel suspected the wound would run up to her head eventually. She didn’t know what would happen when it did, but she thought it might be the sort of experience that made her choose death—if she still had the choice, that was.

Pulling on her flesh itself didn’t move the lines, and her fingers went right through the glow, meeting on very mundane-feeling denim.Idiot. Summer would have fixed you last week if that were possible, she told herself, but could only manage a half-hearted scolding. She’d known that when she reached for the wound, and she’d still had to try.

Time to do what she could then.

She didn’t need her knife or blessed water—though she’d set the latter out in its bowl—because she wasn’t going very far at all into the ethereal. If she was going to corrode the barrier between the worlds, the best protection would be a room or two where the physical dominated as much as she could make it.

First came salt, which she’d left out in the sunlight at noon and now scattered in a circle as close to the walls as she could manage. The shadows shriveled away from it, and the grains sank into the floorboards, small points of light against the dark, splintered wood. Most people in the physical world wouldn’t be able to see them, but all but the strongest creatures of the ethereal wouldn’t be able to pass through the circle as long as it lasted, and the world would stay normal inside it longer than in most other places.

A circle could never cover all of a square, so Hazel next picked up a handful of coffin nails—long, rough things with flat heads and almost blunt points. The bedroom window opened in the center of the eastern wall, so she started by sticking a nail into the top of itsframe and went from there, holding her breath as she steadied each of the nails and tried not to picture the hammer coming down on her thumb or her knuckle.

Hammering itself was pretty satisfying once she could let go, and even better once she moved from the window frame to the corner of the room. The angle was better there—Hazel didn’t worry about shattering any glass—and she could let herself revel in hitting something with a hard object. The energy might even lend strength to the spell.