Page 49 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Hazel squeezed her eyes closed, counted to ten, and then looked again. The bite still looked the same as it had the day she’d banished the wallpaper flowers and met Ligat. If she were fooling herself about that, she was doing better at it than she’d ever managed before.

Given how quickly the influence had progressed earlier, the lines should have been halfway to her heart and her hip should have glowed like a miniature and very creepy sun. What was different?

A rustle in the bushes nearby interrupted her thoughts. Hazelshifted her weight back and dropped her hand to her knife, quickly enough that she was both impressed and unnerved at herself, then watched as the dryad unfolded in front of her. Berry-stalk eyes rose up in a different place than before, and the rough shape of a mouth opened beneath them.

“S-someone came,” the dryad said. The ethereal gave it a voice like wood creaking in a wind. “Mortal. Didn’t catch. But someone was here.”

She tried to think of the best possibilities. Tiffany or Summer might have sent her a package, and the driver might have taken some time figuring out how to drop it off. A hunter might have gotten lost. A Girl Scout might have come by to sell cookies. Hazel kept her voice calm and slow, even while the back of her mind yelled out all of the worst options. “Are they still around?”

“Left,” said the dryad. “Sun was high.”

The tide of fight-or-flight impulse ebbed, though Hazel kept her hand on her knife. She took a cautious step forward, out of the ethereal and into the physical space of her yard. “Were they—” She hesitated, trying to figure out how to fit human descriptions into dryad vocabulary.

Then she saw the footprints and stopped completely.

Hazel’s efforts with clover seed and bluebells had started bearing fruit, and the yard was full of small green sprouts, but there was still enough mud to show the imprints of large shoes. The tracks became slightly less clear as they went up to Hazel’s porch—where, she saw, there was no package—but if the intruder had tried to cover their tracks, they’d done a half-assed job at best. She followed the marks, her head beginning to pound, as they went up to her door and then around the house.

The tracks stopped at each of the windows. No surprise there, but the confirmation was enough to make her clench her hands and grit her teeth. The dryad, unexpectedly tagging along behind her, watched silently.

Her visitor had left no other evidence, or none that Hazel couldsee. She suspected they’d tried both the windows and doors, but there was no way to know without a fingerprint kit, and maybe not even then. All the smart criminals wore gloves. She suspected Chapman had. The idea brought a variety of stomach-churning images to mind and made her acutely aware of just how thick the trees had grown around her yard and how empty the road was.

Maybe her visitor hadn’t come with a personal motive.

Before her mind could vomit up details from half a dozen crime documentaries and another five or six horror movies, Hazel turned and bowed slightly to the dryad. “Thank you for warning me,” she said. “I owe you.”

The creature didn’t give any sign in return, though its leaves rustled before it loped back into the forest. As inhuman as it was, its absence left Hazel feeling even more alone, conscious of the cold air on the back of her neck and the lonely call of a bird somewhere off in the trees.Inside, she told herself. Inside there’d be four walls around her and, more importantly, her phone and all the other connections to the outside world. She doubted the police would come and investigate, and it wasn’t like any other—

She stopped halfway to her front door.

Theremighthave been witnesses. At least one.

“Maxwell?” she called, embarrassed and nervous at the same time. She crossed the yard back to the edge of the forest, cupped her hands around her mouth, and called again. “Maxwell? Are you there?”

A startled bird flew up from one of the trees, wings beating, and some small animal rustled in the leaves beyond. Hazel didn’t get any other answer. Either Maxwell hadn’t come by to check out the local birds—bad British pun not intended—he’d come and gone, or he was out there but couldn’t hear her.

Or he ran into the guy who made the tracks, said the catastrophizing part of her mind. A grim carousel of images came with the thought.

She forced herself to take a deep breath, then shoved her thoughts roughly into order. Maxwell was probably fine. He probablyhadn’tcome by, her visitor probablyhadn’tbeen an axe murderer, and even if she was wrong about both those things, the odds of them encountering each other would still have been pretty low. If they had—well, one way or another, Hazel running off into the forest wasn’t going to help.

Maxwell hadn’t left a number, but she went inside to get her phone anyhow, regretting that she didn’t have time to take a shower. Running into him when she’d just had sex with somebody else would be awkward. Under the circumstances, though, a little awkwardness sounded just fine.

* * *

The road was sort of paved, in that the highway department had put asphalt down at one time, but anywhere from five to fifty years of half-hearted maintenance had left it bumpy and pitted. It curved uphill in the direction Maxwell had said he came from, with a shallow gully on the right-hand side and the land rapidly falling away on the left.

It took three minutes for Hazel’s thighs to start aching. Her plans for the rest of the day had involved a hot bath and a microwave pizza, not more hiking, and she steadily, silently cursed her uninvited guest as the hill got steeper.

As she neared the first curve, a knee-height glimmer of blue caught her eye, and she looked down to see Casper trotting along by her side. “Hey,” she panted, relief lifting her mood. “You okay?” He wagged his tail.Hedidn’t seem to have a problem with the hill—being a dog or being dead or both had its moments, apparently.

He kept up easily while Hazel walked on, passing a cornfield where the stalks grew lush and green and then another stretch of bare ground. That brought her to the top of the hill, where she stopped to get her breath back and doubt began to catch up with her.

The countryside spread out below her on her left-hand side, treesand fields interspersed like in an old painting, until it faded off into a series of wispy blue hills. A few tiny cars crawled along the roads running through it, and a few more houses stood in the middle of the fields or just beside the trees. Some of those buildings clumped together, but most looked at least a good walk apart.

Despite the view to the left, a wide bend in the road kept Hazel from seeing much in front of her. Maybe Maxwell’s sister lived along there, or at the bottom of the hill. Maybe he was energetic enough to walk a mile to Hazel’s house and then wander around looking at birds. He’d certainly seemed to be in good shape, she thought, and the memory carried a surge of heat despite the circumstances and her own weariness.

She shook her head to dismiss the feeling, then looked down at Casper. “Keep going?”

He wagged his tail. Hazel didn’t think that was an opinion on anything but hearing a human voice, but she still managed a smile. “Good boy. Okay. At least it’s downhill.”