Page 8 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

They whirled around, eyes wide, and froze before they realized that Hazel was a human patient rather than the next strange threat of the evening.

“Do you have candles?” Hazel yelled.

“What?” Dan, he/him, gave her a completely baffled look.

“Candles.” The word strained Hazel’s throat. She tried to get her point across with gestures, realized she looked like she was requesting either upward motion or a sex toy, and gave up.

Dan had heard her, though. “Why? You shouldn’t be out here!” The veins in his neck stood out with the effort of making himself heard.

“I—”

The voices blended together, becoming a long, tormented shriek. Hazel clapped her hands to her ears and noticed other onlookers doing the same, but it didn’t help much. The noise went on inside her head, louder and louder, as the gurney crashed itself against the wall with increasing speed.

Just when Hazel thought her eardrums might rupture, it stopped.

The gurney fell to the floor, one final crash in the sudden silence, and lay in a heap of battered metal and ruptured plastic cushions. Nobody spoke.

Hazel rubbed her head just below her ringing ears. Her bitten leg ached, so did the arm she’d used to pull the IV stand, and the linoleum was freezing even in the material world. She glared at the gurney.

“What was that?” Dan finally said, calling Hazel’s attention back to him. “And why did it stop?”

“Out of power,” said Hazel, choosing to answer just the last question. Most manifestations vanished on their own. They rarely went away permanently, and sometimes they escalated, but the blood dripping down walls generally evaporated, and the headless lady only swept down the hallway for a few minutes at midnight. “Do things like this happen a lot?”

“No. God, no!” he said, giving her another of those incredulous expressions. Then professionalism seemed to intrude. “You—you should be back in bed. I’ll give you a hand.”

Hazel let him, leaning on him like she was a little old lady and he was a Boy Scout helping her across the street. Trying to be self-reliant too soon would only damage her further in the long term—and she had the feeling she didn’t have much time for a slow recovery.

Chapter 5

The next morning, as Anita was checking her vital signs, Hazel got a little more information. Administration was blaming “the incident” on hackers getting into the PA system as some sort of juvenile prank, and was livid. Dan and the other people on the scene didn’t find that explanation particularly convincing, especially when the official line on the gurney did in fact turn out to be magnets, and at least a few of the staff had “already started spreading rumors. Foolishness.”

“You think it was hackers?” Hazel asked.

Anita shrugged. “I don’t know what it is, but I know it’snotghosts.”

“Is that the rumor?”

“One of them.” She peeled another sensor off Hazel’s torso and set it aside. “Even if I believed in that nonsense, and I don’t, I’ve worked here for ten years and I’ve never seen a ghost. Never even heard of a room that was supposed to be haunted.”

Hazel grinned and wiggled her eyebrows, making a joke of her question the way she’d learned to do. “No mysteeeeeerious deaths lately?”

“Not a lot of deaths in a hospital are mysterious, hon. We haven’t even had any reallydramaticones in the last couple months—except to the people, of course, and their loved ones.” Anita shook her head. “But, God forgive me for saying so, if every old person who died of heart failure started haunting the place, we’d be knee-deep inectoplasm.”

“It’s a weird prank, though. Who’d go to that much trouble?”

“Some people have too much time on their hands,” Anita said severely. “And some people carry grudges. If it’s a, whatsit, disgruntled employee behind last night, I’ll just be glad if that’s the worst they do.”

That made Hazel wince, no otherworldly element required. “Ooof. Yeah.”

“I don’t plan to worry about it. Neither should you.”

“Oh, I was just curious,” Hazel said, but Anita’s gaze was sharp, and Hazel wasn’t sure how convincing she’d been.

There hadn’t been any pranksters. The force behind the previous night had been distinctly ethereal and very serious about its business. Maybe it hadn’t been related to Hazel’s presence—plenty of people died “peacefully” with unresolved business, from inheritance to abuse—but if Orange River hadn’t been haunted before, the manifestation would be a hell of a coincidence.

Hazel didn’t have any plans to worry about the incident either. She’d started already.

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