Page 80 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Hazel glanced up at him, tilting her chin back a little to get a better view. “How does that work? If you don’t mind me asking, of course. And if you can say.”

“I can, I don’t, and it’s a grim business, which I can’t imagine is news to you. I tracked down the person who cursed my family, read far too many notes in Middle English”—he shuddered theatrically—“and then used an intermediary to approach my current master. Bargains are more direct, though even they have a few steps.”

A light came into her eyes then, the expression of a hunter finding a trail. “What sort of steps, exactly? Were you around for Chapman’s?”

Maxwell nodded. “Enough of it. The first sacrifice is a general one, an offering for any demon that has interest. Another seals the bargain. Chapman’s all had to be specifically dedicated after that, so I suspect that’s the general way of things.”

“Dedicated,” said Hazel, tracing circles over Maxwell’s breastbone with one fingertip. He didn’t think she even realized she was doing so. “He’d have to use its name, then?”

“Yes.” Maxwell said the word carefully, quietly, waiting for his bindings to activate or Perthrux’s wrath to reveal itself. Even in Hazel’s warded bedroom, he wasn’t completely safe, and the line of questioning was potentially a treacherous one.

Her face went blank. “Interesting,” she said, and then all at once sat up. “But it’s about time we had that breakfast I mentioned an hour or so back. My stomach just growled loud enough to bring animal control back out here.”

“That would be hard to explain. In the interest of averting a crisis, I can follow simple directions and boil water, if that would help.”

Maxwell sat up as well. It took an effort, and her absence made him colder, but he didn’t object to the sudden change, nor was he inclined to ask questions. He thought he understood Hazel’s general motives, or at least could see the shape of them through the fog. If she didn’t want him getting a clearer look, he suspected he also understood why.

Chapter 42

The outsider had done a number on the yard as well as the house, even aside from throwing bits of Albert all over it, and had crashed into the edge of the woods at a few points. While the trees had held up better than either the underbrush or the beginnings of Hazel’s plants, it would have probably taken redwoods or mighty oaks to bear up under the creature’s clumsy weight. One look told her that many of the broken branches were too big for her to move alone, especially when she was still recovering, so she spent her afternoon making a pile of midsize sticks and kneeling with a pair of clippers to perform plant-based triage.

Breakfast with Maxwell had been startlingly easy, even when ideas she couldn’t mention out loud took up half her attention. He might have sensed that; he made jokes about meals at the schools he’d gone to, which had led to an offhand discussion of college. When Casper showed up, he’d petted the ghost dog and told Hazel about a phantom Pekingese he’d once encountered, so she’d responded with her story of settling a cat’s ghost. (“It kept knocking things off the shelves. I guess some habits die hard, as it were.”) All the conversation had stayed very light.

“You can stick around in here, if you’d like,” she’d offered afterward, but he’d shaken his head.

“Too suspicious, I fear, and my master will start recoveringhimself before long. Besides, Iwastold to keep watch—and you could use a sentry.”

Hazel hadn’t been able to disagree, so Maxwell patrolled the border of the yard while she went about trying to fix it up, keeping watch for trouble that might sneak up from another side of her. It was worryingly nice having him as a partner. She had no attachment to working alone on principle, but she didn’t want to start relying on the man. The demon could call him away at any time—or make him into a danger himself.

In a vague effort to keep herself from getting too soft, she glanced around every so often to make sure that she could spot potential threats on her own and that Maxwell hadn’t suddenly vanished. When she turned back after one of those checks, she saw a mass of blackberry vines in front of her, many of them crushed and bleeding sap. Bramble lowered its “head” toward her, and Hazel saw that half its “eyes” were pulp.

“Oh, no,” she said softly, reaching out one hand on instinct even though she knew her touch would mean little to the dryad. “I’m so sorry. I never meant that you should try and contain… I was just thinking about Maxwell, about spies, not direct attacks. I should’ve been more specific.”

Slowly, with great care, the dryad held out one of its badly crushed vines. The lower part had come halfway off, showing green wetness that struck Hazel for the first time as a real wound. Another limb came up and gestured to her clippers.

“Oh,” she said again. “Absolutely. No problem.”

It wasn’t, really—she hadn’t been new to gardening even before she’d moved, and pruning blackberries wasn’t exactly rocket science—but the procedure was way more nerve-racking than usual. Hazel glanced at the dryad for confirmation every time she positioned the shears and held her breath a little on each cut. Bramble didn’t show any pain, or not in a way she could understand, just holding still until each job was done and it could hold up the next damaged part.

It kept standing there when she was finished, a little lopsided butmuch less mangled than it had been. “I’ll fix up the yard too,” Hazel told it. “You’ve done a lot. Go and heal—I know who was spying on me anyhow, right? I’ll be fine for a week or two.”

Although she could never be sure, she thought it watched her for a moment before shuffling off into the forest.

* * *

“I don’t have much to report,” Maxwell said into the mirror. “She’s repairing her property—it takes up a fair amount of her time and effort. I wouldn’t swear that she has no time for research, but I’d guess that she hasn’t been able to do as much as she used to.”

Technically, he spoke the truth. He left out the fact that he’d been stealing moments to read Hazel’s books and take notes, or that he’d been clarifying her previous research as much as his own experience let him. Perthrux hadn’t asked.

The demon didn’t reply. It hadn’t even made an appearance; the mirror showed one of the near-mindless minions that served it as an answering service, an eyeless blue-gray face. Perthrux itself hadn’t spoken to Maxwell since the night its attack had failed. He wasn’t sure whether the demon was recovering its power, planning its next move, or—

—well, his mother would have called itsulkingin a human.

All of the three gave him some degree of freedom. The first possibility was inevitable, the second concerning, but Maxwell told himself that he and Hazel were doing all they could against both. He mostly believed that.

Chapman hadn’t put in an appearance either, which made Maxwell wonder whether Perthrux had finally decided the man was too much of a liability. He didn’t dare hope too hard for that much of a silver lining.

“The authorities poked around a little more,” he went on, “but most of them don’t seem inclined to look into the incident verydeeply. None of them would be able to act if they did. The reporter’s audience may get ideas, but I’ve seen no signs yet.”