Page 40 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Hazel had bought thick blue curtains for that window the day after she’d cast the wards and seen the face. She’d always pulled them tight when darkness fell, knife in her hand and every nerve on high alert in case whatever-it-was showed up again, until she’d met Ligat.

Closing the curtains had gone back to being a more casual habit after that, and she’d been too involved in her research to think much about it either way.

The night after her laptop self-destructed, she looked for him.

It was just an impulse, really. She was at the window, she knew he’d been assigned to keep an eye on her, and peering out to try toglimpse silver in the darkness was natural. Hazel was surprised she hadn’t done it before, though she wasn’t expecting the anticipation she felt when she looked around or the disappointment when she saw only the lawn and the trees.

Stupid, she told herself.

Sure, their conversation had been oddly fun for an exchange that had confirmed many of her fears, and yes, she’d had that dream. True, Ligat’s attitude toward the demon had seemed less Renfield-esque devotion and more the annoyed party line of an employee who knew any negative comments would show up on his performance report. None of that would make a difference when the orders went out. Ligat was still an enemy.

She shouldn’t be wondering when he’d seen her and how she’d looked. The idea of him watching her shouldn’t make her thrill all over, shouldn’t make her want to slow down when she pulled her shirt off or shift when she was reading on the porch so that her shorts rode up just a little more on her thigh.

If desire followed instructions, human history would have beenverydifferent. Hazel had never thought she was an exception, but she’d never really tested the theory before either. Her few past lovers had been perfectly acceptable men. Her crushes had been celebrities. The last time she’d really fretted over wanting a guy she shouldn’t, she’d been thirteen and deeply infatuated with the college student who worked at the video store and called her Hayley half the time.

Hazel flopped down on her bed, buried her face in her arms, and groaned. As if she didn’t have enough problems.

Maybe transference was the answer, she thought. Maxwell was cute. Nothing much couldhappenwith him, not unless she came up with a really good explanation for why she couldn’t leave the house for long or invite him in, but it would be far better to let herself daydream about him.

He made her heart beat just as fast, after all, and she’d wondered more than once what would have happened on the porch if she’dthrown caution to the wind and straddled his lap. He was kind. He was smart. Most importantly, he was normal.

* * *

She slept on her side, one hand tucked under her chin, her bed a pale island in the middle of a dark and empty room. Looking through her window—peeringthrough it, the lady would have said—Ligat thought of fairy tales and Norse myths. Hazel had managed the forest of thorns or the ring of fire herself, though. The modern girl was truly a marvel.

The last time he’d glimpsed her sleeping, she’d been in her apartment. It had been simply a circumstance then, a sign that she wouldn’t be active for a few hours, and Ligat had gone off to his own rest or attended to other duties. Curtains had blocked his view in the country ever since the first time Hazel had glimpsed him. Sometimes he’d caught sight of her pulling them firmly shut and known, as he had before, that he didn’t need to bother with observation for a while.

Ligat hadn’t seen any light from her room when he came through the forest and noticed the gap in her curtains. That wasn’t an impediment: He, like most ethereal creatures, could see in the dark. It probably meant that Hazel had already gone to sleep, but he drifted closer anyhow. When he saw her and confirmed his suspicions, he lingered this time, eyes tracing her shape through the thin blankets.

Hazel’s short hair spread out behind her on the pillow, a small dark nimbus that would slip like water between a man’s fingers. It had done that in Ligat’s dream, one of the few details he remembered, and he suspected his subconscious was spot on about its predictions. Her breasts would probably feel the same in his hands as when he’d dreamed them too. The thin shirt she wore to bed would provide almost no barrier.

He was half hard just looking at her, pushing at the fastening of his robes, and he wondered what Hazel would make of that. Had hebeen imagining the spark of heat he’d felt between them while he was bound? It had been a very long time since he’d flirted. Manners had changed.

Decency hasn’t.

The thought kicked like an electric current, shameful and startling in equal measure.

Dreams and sparks, whether or not they existed, weren’t invitations. Hazel wasn’t likely to welcome an enemy into her bed, nor to wantanybodywatching her when she was asleep. Ligat stepped back from the window hastily.

The medium had let down her guard, but Ligat wasn’t going to gain any useful information from that. As before, he had an excuse to head back into the deeper ethereal, to rest and return when she was more active. Spying on her like an adolescent who’d snuck in to see a fan dance was wasting time. All the familiar logic fell into place as he turned around and headed off.

The initial regret, though, that was new. More accurately, it was old: a voice he’d thought had fallen long since, from behind a door not just closed and locked but paved over.

A ghost had spoken to him.

Chapter 21

The next time Maxwell came over, Hazel was already sitting on the porch, taking careful notes from a pile of assorted research materials. She’d worked out a sort of system over the few days since she’d lost her laptop: looking up references on her phone, sending the links to her email, then printing out the articles at the library when she went in to check out books. It was costing her a small fortune in change—Dawsonville might get the funds to switch the library printer to card payment sometime in the next ten years, if it was lucky—and Jess was very tactfully not asking questions, but so far it worked.

Putting the laptop’s explosion together with what had happened to Chapman’s TV had also given her another angle to investigate, though the occult lore on electronics specifically was even scarcer than reliable occult lore in general. Hazel had branched out, deciding a wider grounding in how the things worked might help, and ended up diligently highlighting an article about radio and TV broadcasting.

…other waves’ interference. Cosmic background radiation, the remnants of the Big Bang, makes up about 1 percent: When you see static on an older TV, you’re seeing a tiny part of the formation of the universe.

“Huh,” she said.

The language of Creation was supposed to have a lot of power, though none of Hazel’s sources had gone into detail about exactly what kind or how to use it. They certainly hadn’t mentioned whetherbackground radiation counted. Proximity to the ethereal seemed like it could magnify any effects if it did, butifwasn’t a great foundation for a strategy.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to write it down. Hazel put down the article, reached for her notebook, and saw a tall, well-dressed man amble down the road.