Page 13 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“Sadly, no.” She told him about the phone. There was barely half a minute of silence when she’d finished.

“Get down here,” Summer said, not sounding relaxed any longer. “Fast as you can.”

Chapter 7

After three and a half hours on the road and a gas station bathroom that she’d have held up against the worst of the ethereal realm, Hazel turned off a bumpy Pennsylvania back road and parked in front of a long, one-story brown house. Clover spread across a wide field to its left, a row of maples bordered the road to its right, and in front was a long, smoothly paved driveway with marigolds growing thickly on either side. The door of the house opened as Hazel got out of the car, and a man in a wheelchair rolled out to meet her.

Summer looked almost exactly like she remembered him too—braided red hair streaked with gray, broad shoulders, pale blue eyes behind wire-framed glasses—but he didn’t give Hazel the alien feeling that so many other familiar things had. Maybe it was because she didn’t see him every day, or because any situation where they met was almost inevitably strange.

Mostly, she just couldn’t imagine feeling odd around Summer. He’d been solid ground ever since she’d come to him fifteen years earlier, looking for information about a haunted lake. Unlike previous mentors she’d managed to find, he was also only a few years older than her, and one of the only other people she knew who had the energy to actively address the ethereal.

The chair gave her second thoughts, though. If his leg was bothering him too much for just a cane—

“I can tell what you’re thinking,” he said, coming up to her, “and you should stop being a damn fool. I know my limits better than you.”

“Well, yes,” she said, flushing, “but I didn’t mean to impose.”

“I’ll ‘impose’ you if you keep on talking like that.”

“What does that even mean?”

“You don’t want to find out.” Summer grinned, fox-like. “Give me a hug, Hazelnut, and come get a beer. I think we’re both gonna need one.”

Human touch was embarrassingly comforting. She leaned her head on Summer’s shoulder longer than she ever would have done before Chapman’s house, breathing in the mint shampoo he used and the scent that clung to his shirt. The nurses had been kind, but professionally so, and the odor of disinfectant that had come with them had only been a reminder of that distance.

Embarrassment started to outweigh comfort before too long, and she pulled away. “Sorry.”

“Hush.” Summer punched her lightly in the shoulder before she stood up, then wheeled himself around and into the house.

Hazel followed, noting the little changes in the year or so since she’d last visited: pink rather than red geraniums in the pots on the porch, window and door frames painted blue, and a hex sign with orange tulips above the door rather than the blue five-pointed star she remembered.

The kitchen, with its wide cabinets and small fridge, was pretty much the same. So was the beer, which they took back out onto the porch. Hazel sat in a hand-carved rocking chair to drink hers, stretching out her legs with a sigh, and accompanied it with a handful of potato chips. “This is my second meal in three days that isn’t nutritionally balanced. I’ve missed it.”

“Aw, now, don’t insult my beer,” Summer said. “It’s chock-full of vitamins and minerals. You could live on it for weeks.”

He was probably right. Summer didn’t make his own beer, he’d said, but the cloudy brown bottles had no labels, and he’d neverrevealed his source. It tasted different each time Hazel visited—a hint of maple this time, vaguely citrusy on her last trip.

It was also strong, a trait that Hazel would have avoided in almost any other company, especially with disgusting supernatural phenomena popping up right and left, but Summer had heard about her situation and still made the offer. She rarely questioned his judgment in magical matters, and never when it came to alcohol.

“The clerk at the impound lot probably had his story on TikTok fifteen minutes after I left,” she said, gazing out past the marigolds to where the hills rose up against the purpling sky. “I’ll try and make sure nobody connects you to me, but…”

Summer shrugged. “If it happens, it happens. I’m not too worried about reporters or tourists.” His tone suggested he had ways of dealing with both, and Hazel believed it.

“But you’re worried.”

“There’s such a thing as small talk, you know,” said Summer, with more affection than real criticism.

“We talked about the beer.” Hazel looked into her bottle, tilting it to see the liquid inside slosh. “And I’d rather get business out of the way first. Otherwise, it just feels like we’re trying to ignore the obvious.”

“All right, fair enough. Let me hear the whole story, then. Even what you don’t think is important.”

“‘Omit no detail, however slight,’” Hazel quoted back at him. She took a long drink of beer before she began and had finished the bottle by the time she wound up telling him about the moments before her phone call.

Summer drank slowly as he listened. Once in a while he asked a question, holding up a hand first so he didn’t disrupt Hazel’s train of thought too badly, and she answered as well as she could. Yes, the house had seemed normal from the outside, plants included. Yes, all of the screaming in the hospital had sounded human, though shecouldn’t be a hundred percent sure. She didn’t remember any dreams, though that could easily have been the drugs.

“And you had a normal drive down here?” he finally asked, after Hazel had finished.

“As normal as Route 1 ever is.” Hazel set her beer bottle down on the small wooden table between them, not quite removing the temptation to fool with it as she talked but at least making it harder to indulge. “That’s all, except for whatever I completely missed.”