Page 30 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

They did need the rain. That was basically Pennsylvania’s state motto, but it was true, and Hazel had eaten enough local produce to appreciate it. Besides, she always liked the aftermath of a storm. She could almost smell the combination of damp earth and cleansed air already.

No—that wasn’t the smell.

The scent grew stronger, rising above the faint odor of old wallpaper. Itwasearthy, kind of, but sweeter and muskier too, and less natural the more Hazel smelled it. Perfume, she thought, the cheap kind they sold in drugstores. A teenage girl might have still had tosave up for it, especially one whose parents had a small farm in the seventies. It would have meant adulthood, excitement, romance.

There was no source for it now. When Hazel stepped away from the wall, the odor still filled the room. She went over to the door, faced out into the hallway, and took a breath. The smell was just as strong, and the edges of the hallway were starting to blur.

Oh.

She turned back and saw only blobs of color where the cabbage-carnation-roses had been, yellow and green smudges fading into each other like watercolors where the artist had gone too heavy on thewaterpart. The window frame had flattened into a white outline, the electrical sockets on the baseboards had become simply tan squares against the wallpaper, and as Hazel watched, the concrete floor smoothed out to a uniform shade of gray. Seeing it made her eyes feel crossed.

Looking away didn’t help because she looked down at her hip, where the wound was glowing chilly gray-white and the lines it was sending out had become much more visible, scars Hazel could see through her T-shirt and shorts.

The infection is spreading, she thought, clinical and distant except for the sudden tightness in her stomach. As before, she touched one of the lines and felt nothing: no pain, no substance between her fingers that she could pull and try to uproot, just denim and the flesh below it.

It didn’t hurt. That was a small blessing. The unclaimed ethereal seemed to be spontaneously manifesting, which wasn’t great and probably had even less great implications, but at least it wasn’t a painful process. Honestly, the decor was kind of an improvement.

She raised her head, and the flowers were back on the wallpaper. This time they had mouths.

Small, flat teeth ringed a lipless hole at the center of each blossom, opening and closing with the mindless motion of dying worms on the sidewalk. Each set made a moist littleclickas they met andanother wet sound as they parted again, a regular rhythm just like the rain had been, and one might have been quiet but there were hundreds on the walls.

Hazel stumbled backward, which brought her out into the hallway. The threshold didn’t save her this time; the doorframe stayed blurry and flattened, the glowing lines on her body didn’t fade, and the flowers stayed on the walls, teeth clicking and parting and clicking. The holes between the teeth had more dimensions than anything else in the room, stretching far back into a space that wasn’t really behind the wall. They went out, too, and off to the side, and Hazel had to close her eyes as a nauseating sense of vertigo swept over her.

The darkness of her own head came as a relief, even with the constant noise of the flowers’ teeth, and Hazel’s options became clearer.

She inhaled deeply, smelling the perfume again and finding it almost comforting this time. The ethereal in the room wasn’t predatory and warped by its own nature. A person had lived there once, a girl who’d felt strongly enough about her first high school dance to leave a forty-year-old memory sealed in hyacinth and citrus.

Whatever the flowers were, or whatever had sent them, the room wasn’t their place.

Hazel drew her knife from its clasp, and the familiar weight of it in her hand brought the next steps to her muscles as much as her mind, triggering the memories not so much of particular actions but of the role she’d played off and on for twenty-some years. She was a professional. She dealt with hauntings.

The flowers were still there when she opened her eyes, but three steps brought her into the center of the room, and once she kneeled there, her focus narrowed to the blank canvas of the concrete floor. Hazel set the point of her knife there and dragged it up and right in a long, sweeping arc, leaving a glowing blue line behind it.

Hundreds of teeth kept clicking around her. The rain was falling somewhere, but Hazel couldn’t hear it.

She drew another line. The pattern spiraled out from under herknife. She half expected the flowers to start screaming or making threats, but they just kept on opening and closing their mouths, never changing their speed.

She could see the movement at the edges of her vision, the holes in the world and the flat, human teeth around them.

Hazel focused on the sigil and brought a Greek phrase up out of her throat. Power came with it, energy with a weight like an anchor that hit the material world andyanked. The concrete under her turned rough again in a shiver of transition, leaving her briefly off balance as a small depression opened under one knee, and the baseboard above it got its cracks and warps back. And, thank God, the mouths in the flowers vanished.

The room was normal again: ugly, dingy, with half the wallpaper torn off and duct tape covering cracks in the windowpane.

“Hooray,” said Hazel to the silence.

* * *

The silence didn’t last. As Hazel settled her weight back on her heels and considered getting a snack before going on with the wallpaper, a high-pitched noise from outside cut through the steady drumming on the roof. She was inclined to dismiss it as a bird at first—she didn’tthinkthey usually called to each other in the rain, but what did she know?—but after a few seconds, she heard it again.

Awooooo.

Since she was listening that time, she heard the series of yelps that followed the howl. It didn’t take Summer’s skill with the wilderness to know what that meant: A dog had gotten into her yard. Somebody’s puppy had run off and now was outside being aggressively miserable. Hazel couldn’t blame it, not with the rain outside, but the afternoon of phone calls and muddy paws waiting for her got a “goddammit” as she pushed herself to her feet.

Look on the bright side, she told herself.A wet dog can’t do muchdamage to this place.

She grabbed her raincoat from the closet and then, not trusting the locals to keep their pets up to date on shots, added the thick pair of rubber gloves she used for scrubbing floors. The dog kept barking while Hazel shoved her feet into galoshes.

“Oh, hold your horses,” she called back, but she hurried down the hall. If Rover decided to give up and try their luck elsewhere…well, the road was nearby and people didn’t brake well in the rain. Throwing open the front door, she hurried out onto the porch.