Page 25 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“Every family is dramatic in its own way. Happy or not,” said Jess, who had propped themself on their elbows and leaned forward to more fully involve themself in the conversation.

Kathy rolled her eyes affectionately. “I can’t say much more than Tolstoy here,” she admitted. “I babysat for them a few times when I was a girl, but that was back in the sixties, and it’s not as though people really confide in the sitter. They seemed nice. Their second son died in Vietnam, and of course that was awful, but it wasn’t really rare back then either. And they never had very much, but that wasn’t rare either. Still isn’t, sadly.”

“No,” said Hazel, thinking of the houses she’d driven past. For every solid-looking farmhouse or neat little prefab, she’d seen a wreck almost as bad as the one she’d bought, with peeling walls or a sagging roof or both. Most had cars parked out front, a few in the yard. “It’s not a big deal, really. I was just curious.”

“There’s a lot of history around here,” said Kathy, “but none of it’s the kind they make movies about. Thank goodness.”

Interlude 3

Being neither fish nor fowl had its advantages, among them that Ligat could enter the physical world much more readily than true demons like Perthrux. He could stay near it as well, observing from the edges, but eventually he had to refresh himself in the deeper parts of the ethereal and a slumber that he remembered much less than mortals recalled their dreams.

He knew he’d dreamed of the medium.

Coherent details evaded him, but he remembered the silky feeling of her hair beneath his fingers and the warmth of her breast under his palm. He knew that she’d been helpless, and that she hadn’t been afraid, and he woke with the most demanding erection he’d experienced since his now-alien adolescence.

While ethereal beings could be as carnal as those on other planes, Ligat’s service had generally not been conductive to lust. He’d observed other attractive mortals, sometimes even reacted to them, but none of them had stuck in his head and certainly none had surfaced in his dreams. Wrapping a hand around his cock, he considered this new development.

Objectively, it was unfortunate. He didn’t need the distraction. Attachment would be futile at best and dangerous at worst. If he’d been giving advice, Ligat would have told himself to try to put Hazel Lewis out of his head.

Even as he thought, he was sliding his hand up his rigid shaft, picturing the medium’s face as he thrust up into his own grip.

After all, he’d probably have to keep standing watch. It was only fair that he find a way to enjoy the task. If that meant closing his eyes and hearing her ragged breathing again as his climax built, that surely wasn’t unreasonable.

Repression only increased desire. The forbidden had a much greater lure than the permitted.

So Ligat called Hazel to mind while he stroked himself, imagining that slight, quick frame beneath him and her eyes widening again as he slid inside her, this time in pleasure rather than fear. That image brought him to the peak, a series of hard spasms that blotted out coherent thought and forced a shout from his lips as he spilled across his stomach.

For the first time since he’d been a mortal, Ligat wasn’t entirely sure what he’d gotten himself into. He found that he rather liked the idea.

Chapter 13

“Ms. Lewis,” said a voice on the other end of the phone line, a quick-talking tenor. “You’re a medium, right?”

“Sometimes,” said Hazel. She sat on the porch, swatting at mosquitoes with the hand that didn’t hold her phone and staring off at the forest. Near twilight, with the living trees green in the late sunshine, it had its pretty moments. “I’m not taking clients in person right now, but—”

“You did a séance for Clarence Chapman?”

Hazel grimaced. “I’d like to know who this is,” she said, “and why you’re calling me.”

Clients started out shy sometimes:I’m being haunted; here’s my name and informationdidn’t come easily to most people in the modern world. Hazel had learned patience for the sake of both their welfare and her bank account. Sadly, that meant lowering her defenses, and that in turn left an opening for people who took a very different sort of interest in her affairs.

Her caller, for instance, who sighed like Hazel had just demanded a comprehensive employment history and a blood test. “Scott Edwards. I work for ThousandFootView.com, and—”

“No comment,” said Hazel, and hung up.

Scott had been the third reporter that day. One of them had sounded almost respectable. Hazel hadn’t bothered to ask any ofthem how they’d gotten her number—even assuming Steve and his boss had stayed professional, it was pretty easy to unearth records like that—and had only considered changing it for an hour or two. It wouldn’t help much, not unless she wanted to abandon her clients completely.

If her situation had been less complicated, she might have agreed to a story. The worst a reporter could normally do was paint her as a flake; she’d lived through that before and even gotten a few jobs out of it, the sort where she mostly provided a shoulder to cry on rather than spiritual intervention. Publicity now would probably attract police attention, though, and both of those would introduce new factors that Hazel really didn’t need.

She was dealing with quite enough people already, and she didn’t even know who one of them was—or if itwasa person.

If the face from her first night had been real, its owner had gotten more subtle, or adjusting to her new life had tired Hazel out enough to blunt her senses. She hadn’t even seen the flicker of its red eyes in the evenings since, much less caught a glimpse of its outline.

She still couldn’t believe it had just left.

And shehad, maybe, caught less blatant signs: motion out of the corner of her eye, gone as soon as she looked directly, that wasn’t fluttery enough for moths or bats. Normal nighttime creatures were making themselves familiar, which made the abnormal stand out.

More often, she hadn’t seen anything at all. She’d simply felt a presence, a sense of being watched, that she couldn’t track down even when she risked attuning her senses to the ethereal. Once or twice she’d called “Hello?” to the empty room, getting no answer and feeling alternately stupid and creeped out—that was generally the moment in movies where a guy with a chainsaw and a hockey mask emerged from the closet.