Page 11 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“What does it look like?” Denied gossip, Steve became a stickler for procedure.

“Yellow iPhone 14, dark blue plastic case. There’s a pride sticker on the back.”

“Hold on.” Steve ducked behind the counter, rummaged, andcame up holding the first familiar object Hazel had seen in days. She reached for it without thinking, and he stepped backward. “Unlock it first.”

She couldn’t actually blame him for that. Letting somebody take an iPhone that didn’t belong to them would probably have gotten Steve fired and the lot sued. “Sorry.”

Steve laid the phone flat on the counter, keeping his fingers on the top. “Go ahead.”

As Hazel leaned forward to tap the screen, pain shot outward from the bite on her leg. She was only annoyed at first—her doctor had told her that might happen for a few days more, especially when she wasn’t taking the good painkillers—but then she touched the first number of her passcode and her finger sank into the phone.

Icy slime coated her skin up to the first knuckle. Hazel yelled in revolted surprise as she yanked her finger back, sure that Steve thought she’d gone crazy herself but not caring enough to look up at him and check. She was too busy wiping her finger on her sweatshirt, staring at her phone, where eyes had suddenly replaced all the numbers on her keypad, and trying not to scream again.

“Jesus,” said Steve, with unexpected revulsion inhisvoice. Hazel thought he might have seen the eyes too. “Is thatblood?”

A dark red puddle was slowly seeping from underneath the phone.

Steve, who had forgotten security, dropped his hand to his side and scrambled backward, cursing in a progressively more breathless voice. Beneath his blond beard and the constellation of red zits, his face was grayish-white.

As though Hazel had finished entering her passcode, the input screen disappeared. A picture of her screaming face replaced it. Hazel’s normal clutter of apps had vanished, leaving nothing to obscure how her mouth was open far beyond what biology should have allowed. A strange gray light from behind it illuminated the bleeding stump where her tongue had been.

She felt a cold stab of anger, equal parts irritation and violation,that overwhelmed all other emotions. Later she would consider what the haunting meant and worry. Just then, her only coherent thought wasYou havegotto be kidding me with this.

“Pen,” she ordered the hapless Steve.

He turned his stunned face to her. “Huh?”

Hazel didn’t wait to explain, just leaned over the counter and plucked the ballpoint from off a clipboard. She left it capped—no point damaging her phone if she didn’t have to—licked the end of it thoroughly, and then sketched a circle on her cell phone screen with the quick, controlled movement of an experienced short-order cook chopping vegetables.

The screen hissed at the contact. Steve yelped. In the picture, Hazel’s mutilated mouth worked, almost forming words. “Sophomore films won’t stop me,” she told it, and drew the next concentric circle, the second part of a pattern she’d learned from an old woman in Maine. She kept the pressure as light as possible. The rot-soft glass threatened to give way under the pen, and Hazel was pretty sure that’d break the charm.

During the third circle, the screen started hardening again, and relief poured through Hazel. The last part of the charm would’ve been tough if she could still poke through the glass, sure, and the change was a sign that the spell was taking effect, but mostly she was just glad she didn’t have to feel that unstable squishiness dragging beneath the pen.

Promising herself that she’d wash her hands with Lysol and hot water later, Hazel lifted the pen. The image of her face was faint and unmoving behind solid glass. She couldn’t see the stump of her tongue any longer, but her jaw still gaped open.

“Kainim ma!” she snapped, and brought the end of the pen down into her photograph’s mouth, right at the center of the circles she’d drawn.

A buzz went through the room. It was too low and too textured to sound quite like electricity, although a light bulb popped overhead.The phone screen went white, then, after a second when Hazel did her best not to have a heart attack, returned to the normal keypad and instructions to enter her passcode.

“Oh my God. What was that? What’d you do? What did you say? Is it over?”

She’d almost forgotten about Steve until he started babbling. When she looked up at him, he was staring at both her and the phone, not daring to either step forward or take his eyes off them—in a metaphorical sense, fortunately.

“Get me a paper towel and some Windex, please,” she said, gesturing to the puddle of blood. Apparently, itwasn’tthe kind of manifestation that completely faded.

Drat.

“But—”

“It’s going to stain your counter if we wait much longer.”

The ethereal world evidently held no terror compared to the wrath of Steve’s boss. He scurried to a back room while Hazel rubbed the center of her forehead, where a headache was rapidly starting. Improvising banishment never left her feeling fantastic.

He barely waited to come back and hand her a roll of paper towels before repeating himself. “Whathappened?”

“You wouldn’t believe a bug in the latest software update, would you?” Hazel wiped the blood off the back of her phone, grimacing as it seeped through the towel. When Steve didn’t answer, she went with the truth. “A haunting. I’m not sure exactly what.”

“And you got rid of it.”