Page 65 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Maybe it was Maxwell, suggested the worst part of her brain.Maybe he was watching owls in the forest.

Maybe he came over to explain.

“No,” she whimpered, wanting to curl up and close her eyes. “He never came over at night before. He wouldn’t show up after dark, it’d be too weird.”

Heisweird, remember?said her brain, the asshole.

Hazel was tempted to cling to his strangeness; if Maxwell wasn’ta normal human, which she was pretty sure about, then maybe he’d be all right even if he did run into the monster. She knew he was corporeal, though.

And the sound from the porch had been very organic.

The crashing grew nearer, louder. Hazel shifted her grip on the gun. She muttered a prayer, unsure that it would help but grateful that the words at least distracted her from the images in her head, where Maxwell’s shyly handsome face turned into red pulp. A tree fell over nearby, and the monster bellowed again. It was at the side of her house now.

Her subconscious, of course, chose that minute to throw up bits of a poem from her middle school classes.

Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence!Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!

Nearer he came and nearer. Her face was like a light.

Hazel doubted the last line most of all. Her face was grimy from the floor and streaked with the tears that were oozing out of her eyes, even though she was too scared and tired to cry properly.

A cold softness touched the back of her neck, and when she turned, she got Casper’s spectral tongue on her cheek. The dog whined, still rigid with fear, but licked her face again. “Good boy,” she said again. “I owe you.” She reached out to pet his ears.

The monster’s head crashed through the window.

* * *

The shape scattered glass and wood in front of it without flinching, even though shards and splinters stuck into the elongated gray-white oval that Hazel could only assume was a face. It didn’t have a mouth or a nose, but a honeycomb of pink eyes stared out of the doughy flesh, darting this way and that as the thing wriggled farther intothe room. The sides of its head blackened and peeled away when it barged through Hazel’s wards. It pulled back and shook itself in pain, flicking off the dead flesh, then lunged again.

Hazel fired. The sound unlocked her throat, and she screamed, a raw cry of despair, disgust, and anger. She’d only tried to help people, and where had it gotten her? Cursed, probably about to die, and having to look at a thing from the far side of an ergot hallucination before she did, that was where. She leaped up from the floor and shot the intruder again, feeling tears course down her cheeks and hearing Casper growl from behind her.

The first shell went high, but the monster made a huge target, and the shot blasted bits of the pallid flesh off the top of its head. Hazel’s second try hit the creature squarely in the middle of its cluster of eyes, bursting many of them. Pink fluid ran down its face like a grotesque mirror of her tears. It reared up and back.

Shotguns were easier than other firearms, but they only held two rounds. Hazel could see the thing’s head growing back already. That was fine. It was awful, but it was fine. She jammed one hand into her pocket, grabbed the bundle of herbs and salt, and shrieked three words in degraded Sumerian as she hurled it at the outsider. The packet flared with green light when it struck, throwing up a cloud of colored smoke that gave Hazel a few seconds of reprieve from having to look at the thing.

She tried to reload in that interval, got one shell into the gun before the outsider charged back into the room, and saw one of its flabby, multijointed limbs move just in time to duck a blow that would have taken her head off. An acrid, burning scent filled her sinuses, making her eyes water as she jammed the other shell into the barrel.

Then the return swing caught her in the side.

Hazel went flying into the wall, just managing to duck her head and take the impact on her shoulder. Her vision still went black whenshe hit, pain shooting through the left side of her body to accompany the force of the blow she’d taken on her right, and she couldn’t get her legs under her or make her vision focus for a second.

Her first coherent thought was that it should have hit harder.

She couldn’t havetakena harder hit. She had no delusions about that—but the outsider was huge, it had effortlessly rendered somebodywho please God wasn’t Maxwellinto clumps of meat, and a blow from that should have shattered her arm or her ribs. Breaking her in half wouldn’t have been out of the question. Instead, she was pushing herself off the ground, through the pain, and leveling the shotgun at the invader again.

When she managed to focus her eyes, she saw that the thing was…thinner.

It still took up the window, and as much flesh covered its distorted frame as ever, but it looked less solid, almost transparent. As Hazel fired again, she saw the grotesque lines of its face blur. The shells hitting its face and the upper part of its body sounded much quieter than they had before.

De-manifestation, said what remained of her intellect, and then produced another line of inappropriate poetry:Nothing gold can stay.

Hazel backed up in a hurry as the outsider took another swing at her and watched its arm flail through the air. It reallywastransparent now. De-manifestation went fast once it started. It was a mark of the thing’s strength that it hadn’t just vanished in a cloud of sulfur when its time was up. She stayed back, though, and loaded the shotgun one more time. Being confident generally got people in trouble when it came to the ethereal.

The monster stuck its head a little farther into the room, swiveling it back and forth on a boneless neck, and let loose another roar. Then it pulled back. Through the wreckage of the window, Hazel saw it stretch up to the sky, outline wavering as though an unseen force was pulling it apart. It shimmered, rippled…and disappeared.

In its absence, the green-yellow tint faded from the night sky.Hazel watched it go and never loosened her grip on the gun while it did. When she could look out the window and see only darkness, stars, and the occasional blink of a satellite, she set the shotgun carefully down on the floor, sat down just as gingerly on the edge of her bed, and dropped her face into her hands to cry.

Chapter 35