Page 6 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“No, thanks.” She drank more ginger ale to clear her throat. “I guess I’ll call the impound lot, see if I can at least get my phone back. Or do I need to go through the police?”

“The guy at the lot can tell you more, I bet. But…” Anita never hesitated as she jotted down numbers and unwrapped the cuff, training taking over in a way that Hazel could appreciate. She was frowning, though. “A couple policemendowant to talk to you. They’ve been in the waiting room for an hour, hour and a half.”

“Oh.”

She should have expected that. A guy was dead, his house had collapsed, and Hazel had been one of two surviving people at the scene. She was pretty sure Agatha Christie characters would call thosesuspicious circumstances. Just to add a cherry to the sundae, Clarence had been a cop himself about twenty years back. She groaned.

“I think they just want to know what happened,” said Anita. “But—”

“Please tell them that I don’t talk to police without a lawyer present.”

“Do you have a lawyer?”

Hazel shook her head. “So they can either arrest me and get me a public defender or they can wait for the…I don’t know, the official reports.” Were there crime scene reports if nobody had committed an actual crime? “Either way, there’s no point in us wasting each other’s time.”

When Anita left, worry flooded in, starting withoh,good, law enforcement’s involvedand spreading little tendrils out in all directions. She could start at the cost of her hospital stay, shift a little and fret over what shape her car might be in, then move on to whether the impound lot would accept knowing her PIN as ID and how she wasgoing to get a driver’s license. Maybe she would need to call Mark or Tiffany after all.

The police had taken an interest. She had a demon bite on her thigh, and while shehopedAnita would have mentioned it if she’d been missing enough flesh to give her trouble when she walked, she couldn’t be sure. She was in a hospital, one kind of place most likely to be haunted.

Also, she’d nearly died, and she suspecteddiedwouldn’t have begun to cover what would’ve happened if the demon had gotten its hands on her. Even with the merciful fuzziness of drugs, time, and blood loss, Hazel knew she’d gotten out of Chapman’s house by the skin of her teeth.

Hazel lay back against her pillows, heart thudding in her throat. Her mind filled up with Clarence’s dusty laughter and the wet squelching sounds the maggots had made when they moved. She didn’t even need to shut her eyes to see the demon shamble toward her or the hands trying to push their way out of the wallpaper.

A fan turned serenely overhead. The edges of its blades blurred as Hazel watched them, losing their shapes, then went back to normal when she blinked.

She had just enough control not to turn over and curl into a ball, and that was only because she knew it would disconnect the IV and a couple important sensors. Hazel stayed flat on the bed instead, hands twisting in the sheets, and a moan forced its way up her throat even though she kept her mouth closed.

None of the objects in the room changed their outlines, but they all took on a new and sinister depth as Hazel’s chest tightened, as though the IV stand and the lamp were themselves alien, malicious presences that had just passed unnoticed until that moment. Shadows grew darker.

The chairs’ gray fabric suddenly looked fungal and slimy.

Nope.

Strong emotion didn’t generally summon ghosts or demons, but itcouldslide a medium closer to the ethereal world. That would be bad even in a non-haunted hospital. Death and birth charged the whole place, and the bad spiritual resonance would be hideous.

I’m here, Hazel told herself sternly,I made it. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. If I have to call people, I will. If I have to dip into my savings, I’ll do that. It’s not the end of the world. I’m alive.

Internal monologues never dented the knot of panic as much as she always hoped they would, but it gave her a place to hold on, so the feeling didn’t overwhelm her. She could work from there.

Counting slowly backward from twenty, with a long inhale and exhale on each number, brought the chairs and the shadows back to normal. Hazel carried on talking to herself, a habit she’d picked up as an odd child and found too useful to entirely discard.This is overdue fear. This is your body dumping adrenaline, your mind processing what you went through. It will pass.

The talk let her loosen her grip on the sheets. She took a long sip of ginger ale, centering herself on the taste, the can’s bright green color, and the feel of cool metal in her grip. Food and drink made the parasympathetic nervous system kick in, which was useful as long as she didn’t throw up from stress. Hazel took another slow drink.

After she swallowed, she hit the call button.

Processing was good. But processing became obsessing far too easily to keep going unchecked, especially when she was stuck in a hospital and far from at her best physically or spiritually—or mentally, probably, between the trauma and the morphine.

“Having a panic attack, I think,” she said when Anita opened the door. A lifetime of rigid control and the sight of a human face let her get the words out without gasping. “I know combining drugs is risky, but is there something…”

The nurse clicked her tongue sympathetically. “Oh, honey, of course. Just sit tight, okay?”

Hazel nodded. She turned on the TV when Anita left, and while the memory of Clarence’s set made her flinch, the program that came on was a sitcom she’d seen a hundred times before. She let the canned laughter wash over her and concentrated on her breathing again.

I’m here, she kept reminding herself.I made it. The worst is over.

Chapter 4

At 3:18 in the morning, the screaming woke Hazel up.