Page 35 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Hazel snorted. “With all the wrong people. Except the dog.” She thought suddenly of Max Redfern, her cheerful, self-deprecating rescuer with the pretty eyes, but it didn’t count as popular if a guy was just interested in her chickadees.

“Has that reporter been sniffing around again?”

“Not that I can tell. He made a really indignant video about the whole incident, though. I came off like I should be sitting on a rocking chair with a shotgun.”

“Maybe you should. Fill it with salt, and it might help with the demons. Or trespassers.”

“I’d have to get a license.”

“Hazelnut, you’re in Pennsylvania. You don’t need a license for anything short of a tank. Maybe not even that if the sheriff’s in a good mood.”

“It feels really wrong to be glad about that.”

“I know what you mean,” said Summer. “But…”

“Stopped clock?”

“I was gonna say mushrooms grow in bullshit. Same difference, really.” He hesitated while Hazel drank more of her coffee. “How are you feeling after all of that? It sure sounds like a hell of a time.”

“It was, and—I don’t know. It depends on the minute, I guess. Scared a lot, especially when I think of the hand or those wallpaper flowers. Angry. And now…motivated, maybe? Not that I wasn’t before, but…”

Summer waited, patient and silent as one of his trees.

“Let’s say that Ligat’s right and Iamdoomed. I know my condition’s getting worse. I’ve put up defenses where I can, and they kind of work, but they’re not foolproof. When I really start breaking down, they’ll be worse.” She swallowed. It was the first time she’d summed up her situation out loud, and every word felt like a kick in the chest.

“We might be able to stop that,” Summer said, “but okay, thought experiment, we’ll say nothing we know about works. What are you thinking?”

Hazel looked out of the windshield again, but didn’t really see the parking lot this time. “I don’t have a lot to lose.”

* * *

“I want someanswers,” said Chapman, “and I want themnow.”

He’d mastered certain aspects of ethereal travel with unfortunate speed, it seemed, and so he stood in front of Ligat’s quarters with his arms akimbo. In death, he’d clothed himself in a version of the uniform he’d worn as a policeman, a spotless iteration with sharply pressed seams and a huge badge. He hadn’t put the same amount of care into his own body. His hands were a piebald mixture of bone and rotting flesh, and the face under the uniform hat had no skin.

All things being equal, Ligat had enjoyed the demand for information more when he’d been tied up with blackberry vines and threatened with a silver knife.

“I’m not sure how that’s my concern,” he said. “And you’d do well to move aside.”

Chapman, of course, didn’t. “Don’t you give me that back talk. I know who you answer to. He and I have a bargain, you know that, and Ididmy part.”

“I’m aware.” Ligat eyed the door to his quarters, the only vivid object in a blue-tinged watercolor of a city. Chapman stood directly in his way. It would probably be the better part of diplomacy not to push past him, and yet the idea was a tempting one. “Your point?”

“Mypointis that it’s been weeks. Weeks!” Chapman leaned forward, his skinless head jutting out. “And that voodoo-working little bitch is still strutting around—”

Ligat grabbed the other ghost by the collar of his ridiculous uniform and pulled him close, relishing his yell of surprise and alarm. “Itseems I need to make myself clear,” he hissed, staring directly into Chapman’s eyes and knowing his own were flaring up. “I don’t answer to you. I’m not afraid of you. Whatever piddling authority you once held”—he glanced down at the badge and curled his lip—“doesn’t impress me at all.”

“I—” Chapman tried to pull free, but Ligat tightened his grip.

“I take my orders directly from Perthrux. In its absence? I’ve been here much longer than you, and I haven’t been idle in all that time. You will keep a civil tongue in your head or find out that there are much slower ways to extract one than you ever practiced. Understand?” He shook Chapman for emphasis.

The old killer was stubborn enough to hold out—not for very long, but long enough that Ligat started to wonder if he should explain at more length—before lowering his head. “I understand,” he muttered, sullen.

“Good.” Ligat released him, shoving him to the side. “Now get yourself out of my doorway. Go make demands of Perthrux, if you’re so impatient.”

From Chapman’s stillness, Ligat suspected that the suggestion didn’t have much appeal. The ghost stiffened his shoulders, adjusted his uniform, and glared. “No need to lose your temper about it,” he said before stalking off into the barely formed pathways of the ethereal.

Ligat’s eyes might have changed greatly from his mortal days, but he could still roll them. He’d never thought very much of the police in life, he remembered faintly, and Chapman wasn’t improving his opinion of the profession at all. It was a pity that their paths did run together for a while yet—but then, the whole matter was foul from start to finish. His irritation was perhaps the least of it.