Page 18 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Stay in place, she thought with each swing, sending the instruction toward the fabric of the world.Keep the physical physical. Keep the dead gone. Stay here. Stay solid.

She didn’t thinkstay real. Magic dwelled in exact words, and the ethereal existed just as much as the worlds on either side of it. Hazel had spent a year of her childhood trying to deny that, and nobody had come out better for that effort.

The last of the shadows vanished as Hazel finished pounding the final nail into the western corner of the bedroom, and even the blue light of the ethereal had faded enough that Hazel might not have noticed if she hadn’t been looking. She wasn’t feeling the cold anymore either—though the sequence of walking and throwing and hammering could have contributed to that—and the glow emanating from her hip had gotten much dimmer.

It was a good start.

“Okay,” she said to the empty room, then pocketed more nails and picked up the salt bowl in her free hand. The hall and the bathroom waited.

* * *

By the time Hazel had pounded in all the nails she’d been able to get, the sky was dark. She’d thrown around enough salt to fill an ocean, she’d burned through two sets of candles, and she was bonetired, feeling every ache from both cleaning and moving furniture as well as a deep leaden weight in her entire body. The sensation was familiar from the more strenuous exorcisms she’d been in, other than Chapman’s, but it had never been quite so bad before.

A real dinner was too much effort. Even ramen meant boiling water and filling a cup, and she was too tired to trust her depth perception where the potential for second-degree burns was concerned. Hazel ended up back in the armchair, dipping pieces of bread into a jar of peanut butter and washing them down with milk straight from the carton.

She could almost hear her mother sucking her teeth every time she took a drink, and that was nearly as satisfying as the hydration itself.

After one slice of bread, Hazel had enough energy to feel satisfaction with the day’s work too. She’d cleaned, she’d moved in, and she’d warded the house from one side to the other, ensuring that she had a safe place to sleep and that she could answer nature’s call in the middle of the night without encountering a demon on the way. After thirty, those things became important.

She didn’t know the protections would keep the ethereal out completely, true, and she didn’t know what would happen when the effects of the demon’s bite started intensifying, but those were problems for Future Hazel. Present Hazel started her second slice of deconstructed peanut butter sandwich and decided to reward herself with an old movie. Her laptop was across the room, but she was pretty sure she had the strength for one final mission.

Hazel stood up, stretched—and then froze, staring at the window.

Moths fluttered against the screen in a futile attempt to reach the light. Beyond them, the world was shapeless darkness, even the moon too low in the sky at that hour for Hazel to see it past the trees. The nearest neighbor was a five-minute drive away, and the nearest streetlight probably half an hour farther.

She still thought she’d seen movement and not just the moths. A darker shape had made a less fluttery motion.

Probably a bat or an owl, she told herself.Maybe it even grabbed a moth for supper. You’ve got to start getting used to that stuff.

She did. The sudden tension in her body and her awareness of the moths’ constant collisions with the screen and the silence of the room were almost definitely because she was alone in the middle of nowhere and sheknewshe had enemies in the ethereal.Just because someone is out to get you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.

Hazel went over to the window—carefully, because that was how half the people in zombie movies got grabbed—and peered out.

Night in the country stared back at her, vast and indifferent. If she strained her eyes, she could maybe make out the gnarled shapes of individual trees just past the circle of dirt, leaves drooping and half their trunks rotted. Small creatures ran after each other in the undergrowth, rustling dry grass as they passed.

It had been much easier to see the beauty in nighttime forests when Summer had been with her. Honestly, it had been easier when she’d been a Girl Scout and camping with a bunch of other nine-year-olds, scaring each other with stories but trusting in nearby adults to keep the world logical. Now she knew better, and she was staring out at a tangle of woods, alone, looking for—

A face.

Hazel shrieked and jumped back, grabbing for the nearest object and ending up with the spy novel she’d been reading. She cocked her arm back, ready to throw five hundred pages of sex and intrigue in Istanbul at whatever lurked beyond the window, and found herself without a target.

The face had vanished, if it ever had existed. Only the moths had stuck around. Heart pounding, Hazel made herself take another close-up look and saw nothing again.

She waited for five hideously slow minutes before she let herselfretreat to her bed, where she allowed her shaking legs to collapse under her. The bed frame was secondhand and twin size, which saved money and space while seeming either juvenile or nunlike, but it was big enough and solid enough for Hazel.

“Jesus,” she said, as much a prayer to a god she no longer followed as a curse.

She hadn’t gotten a good look at the face. It had seemed human-ish and maybe male, though assuming gender from features was probably as bad an idea with ethereal beings as humans. Shadows had obscured most of it, but she’d seen a hint of red, like the night sky above a distant fire. Its eyes had glowed much brighter.

Many beings in the ethereal had red eyes. Hazel didn’t want to jump to conclusions—especially since the whole incident might still have been a projection of her nerves—but she refused to ignore evidence. When her hands stopped shaking, she took a blue leather journal and a black ballpoint pen from her personal bag and began to take notes.

Interlude 2

“She saw you,” said Perthrux.

The demon’s outer lair had likely been as elaborate, once upon a time, as the room Chapman was building for himself. Traces of extravagant details still lingered, but Perthrux had lost interest in interior decorating long before it had made Ligat’s acquaintance. It had let the skulls in its pillars wear down until an observer could barely make out the features, allowed its feet to etch a groove into the polished basalt floors, and built its throne simply from cold rock. Twenty-odd years before, the innermost chambers here had looked very different, but Ligat didn’t have any wish to check on their condition.

“She might have, my lord,” he allowed, keeping his eyes on the pillar. He could stand rather than kneel for briefings, a privilege Perthrux didn’t grant to many, but looking too directly at the demon in its home was never safe. “I doubt she knew it, if she did.”