Page 15 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Hazel hadn’t heard the term before and didn’t think it was official—like she’d told Stephanie, magicians and mediums didn’t really have much in the way of technical vocabulary—but she had a decent idea what Summer meant. Her own mind had been circling around similar possibilities since the hospital. Now, hearing them solidify, she felt her stomach drop even though she’d never really allowed herself to hope for a better result.

“For the ethereal?” she asked and barely waited to see him nod before she sped to the next questions. “What does that mean? What’s going to happen to me?”

She heard her own voice rise, quick and breathless, and cut herself off before she could start actually wailing. Johnny or Willie raised its head and met her gaze, its eyes shining faintly.

“I don’t know for sure, Hazelnut,” Summer said, and took one of her hands in his.

Hazel tried to think around the tightness in her chest and the sound of her own heartbeat in her ears. “Okay, conduit, that means spirits can use me to manifest in the physical world?”

“Maybe. Folks on the other side are a bit more your department.You’re alittlebit like a tree with a dryad or a lake with a nymph, a tie between places, but much…vaguer. Less stable. And corrosive, sad to say.”

“Corrosive,” she repeated, and the word didn’t make any sense when she said it.

Summer nodded again sadly. “After a while, the other world will start bleeding into wherever you are. No effort required from anybody.”

She wasn’t going to cry, Hazel told herself, and she wasn’t going to throw up, not right now. “How much time do I have?” she asked, knowing what that sounded like and fighting tears back to get to the next question. “Should I leave now? Should I just…live on the road?”

Work would be hard, she thought, grasping at logistics to keep her head above water. If she could stay a few hours in one place, she could get remote assignments—her boss Tiffany was good about that—but that could get tricky unless she knew exactly when and where she’d be available. Hotel rooms were expensive too.

And Summer was shaking his head.

“You’re not leaving until tomorrow at the latest,” he told her, and she knew it was useless to argue. “As for the road…I wouldn’t recommend it. The border’s thicker in some places than others. If you run into a thin patch when you’re not expecting it…”

Hazel remembered the chaos in the hospital. That hadn’t even been a full breakdown of reality, just the upper end of an etheric manifestation, and it had happened when most people weren’t moving around. A greater breach, or one on a crowded highway, made her feel sick to imagine.

“I won’t do too much damage staying here, will I?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t have offered if you would. The border’s stronger around here than it is damn near anywhere else in the state, maybe the country.” Summer glanced up at her apologetically. “And if it was just me, I’d ask you to stay until we sort this whole thing out.”

He’d never told her exactly what his duties were—the word“druid” had come up once or twice, not entirely as a joke—but Hazel knew his property wasn’t just a sanctuary for him. “But even here I’ll start tearing holes eventually, won’t I?”

He nodded reluctantly. “Maybe worse for the delay. Forces build up.”

“Okay,” said Hazel, although it wasn’t, at all. She hadn’t even begun to think of Summer’s as a possible refuge, but knowing that it couldn’t be knocked the ground out from under her just that little bit more.

She’d think of something. She had to think of something. She could—

The backyard was chilly now that the sun had gone down, which made the warmth of Summer’s hands even more startling as he closed them around Hazel’s. “It’s getting late, and I’ve got barbecue that needs eating,” he said, squeezing her fingers. “Let’s go on in and give both of our minds a break.”

* * *

Hazel, who hadn’t been sure she’d be able to eat anything, mopped up the last bit of barbecue sauce with a slice of cornbread an hour later and curled up on Summer’s tattered couch. They’d avoided significant topics over dinner, talking about Hazel’s day job, Summer’s nomadic and ever-changing band of significant others, and a family of hedgehogs who’d moved into his front garden. At first, it had been hard to think of anything butI’m a conduitandthe link’s corrosive, but by the end of dinner they’d retreated to lurk at the back of her mind.

Stabilized with carbohydrates, she prodded the subject cautiously. “So I definitely shouldn’t stay in my apartment.”

“That’s always been true.”

“Thanks, Thoreau.”

“Hey now.” Summer raised a hand, one finger held up. “I do allmy own laundry.”

Hazel laughed, which would have felt completely alien an hour before. The news had collapsed her mind like the Chapman’s house; now she was gingerly lifting away debris, freeing stuff like humor and ideas a bit at a time. “Clearly I can go a couple hours at once before I run into trouble,” she said, sorting through what she’d found out in the last few days. “Do you think the…disruption…builds up and then vents, like a volcano, or is it more random?”

“Hard to say.” Summer peered at her. “Might depend, too, on whether anybody on the other side feels like messing with you.”

“Oh. Yeah.”Thatthought, the notion that she probably did show up on the ethereal now like a highway exit sign, had still been buried. It came up attached to the realization that Chapman’s demon probably was lurking in the ethereal and not particularly pleased with her. “Great.”

He poked her in the side. “Hey. You handle those sons of bitches better than almost anybody I know. I’ll help out on this end, we’ll both reach out…”