Page 62 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

It’s been a really slow couple days here, and I thought it was a really shitty thing he did to you, so I did some Google searching. I figured most people use aliases that are close to their real names. Makes it easier to remember.

The only Maxwell Redfern I found was…well, I’ve attached the article. I’ve retyped this sentence three times. I don’t want to come off all Discovery Channel, I’m sure there’s a perfectlygood explanation for this. I just don’t know what it is.

Anyhow, please tell me to fuck off if you want. Or ask questions. Or just pretend this never happened.

Jess

Hazel, who’d been reading her email while she ate lunch, put down her tomato sandwich and eyed her phone.

Oh, Jess, she thought with unexpected emotion. Talking through her problem had been generous by itself. She’d never expected the librarian to spend their own time on it—and as much as the effort touched her, the potential consequences worried her. People who gave fake names generally didn’t like having other people look into them, and Jess was a nonbinary librarian in a small town.

She tapped on the attached PDF and sipped soda while her phone slowly proceeded with the download, wishing for about the tenth time that day that her laptop hadn’t gone down in a blaze of interdimensional glory. Cosmic static didn’t really do much for her situation, anyway, and her latest reading hadn’t offered much help either. A book on human sacrifice had included several chapters about various means of making living people conduits to just as varied underworlds, but had been more anthropology than specifics. It also hadn’t included any suggestions about reversing the process. Hazel guessed the question didn’t come up very often.

It had been several days since Chapman had given her his little lecture. He hadn’t shown up again, to her relief, and either Ligat had stayed away too, or he was lurking out in the trees. Hazel had considered going out and calling him but hadn’t wanted to give away that the two of them were on speaking terms.

Also, she would have felt pathetic trying to get in touch without any reason. She wasn’t so desperate for company—or sex—that she’d start wandering around like a Tennyson maiden, crying out the nameof a guy who was dangerous against his will at best. It was possible that she imagined his comments when she read particularly ridiculous bits of “occult lore,” or that she wondered what he was up to just before she fell asleep, but that was as much as she’d admit even to herself.

Maxwell popped up in her thoughts almost as often. She’d tried to dismiss him as another asshole reporter, not worth her time, tried to distract herself, and tried to let her mind move on the way she’d learned in meditation. It had worked about half the time until she’d opened her email and seen the message from Jess.

She stared at the gradually filling download circle and barely tasted her soda.

The attachment opened, revealing a grainy newspaper article with a black-and-white photo.Bright Young Things Get“Into the Spirit,” the headline read, because the lifestyle section’s sense of humor hadn’t changed since before it evenwasa lifestyle section.

It’s a supernatural summer in Torquay this year as Madame Ivanov graces us with a stop on her tour of lectures and séances—and a few of the faces around the old Ouija board might look more familiar in nightclubs! From the right, Cecily Sheridan has swapped tennis lessons for table-rapping, while longtime beau Hugo St. Clair sits next to her, prepared to defend his lady from any ectoplasmic threat. Maxwell Redfern, on St. Clair’s other side, told this reporter that “one should never turn down a new experience”—an adventurous sentiment from the young scholar!

In the photo, a group of people on one side of a séance table smiled for the camera with expressions that ran from sheepish good nature to an almost hectic enthusiasm. Cecily sported a feathered headband and bobbed hair, while the other woman present was wearing a floaty, caftan-type dress, and all the men were in suits. Thearticle was from June 1925. Most of them didn’t look like they’d have been old enough to fight in World War I, but they’d have been old enough to remember, to have lost fathers or brothers, to bear a fair set of scars. Maybe exploring the next world seemed like a great idea when the normal one had let everybody down.

Maxwell Redfern of the article gangled at least five inches above his neighbors, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and had a sharp, curious face. The picture couldn’t show color, but Hazel would have bet that his hair was tawny brown and his eyes vivid green.

Family resemblances could be strong, and people passed down names all the time. Hazel knew it was possible that she was looking at Maxwell’s great-grandfather, and he himself was a perfectly normal human.

She also knew that was bullshit.

Chapter 33

“Well, he can’t be a ghost,” she told Tiffany, just like she’d told Jess, but letting even more of her bafflement come through. “He’s…very physical, for one thing, without any rituals on my part. And the dryad would’ve let me know if a ghost had walked into my yard.”

“A, um, demon?”

“Same deal.” Hazel leaned against the porch railing, letting her eyes unfocus as she stared across the yard. She’d just called to let Tiffany know she’d sent over the last batch of papers, but her boss had a therapist’s ability to draw out stories, so she’d summed up the situation for the third time, now with more information and even less certainty. “Even a human might have gotten Bramble’s attention if they were a magician, or personally haunted, or otherwise in active contact with the ethereal.”

“Good. Making out with demons doesn’t end well. I don’t have to be a medium to knowthat.” Tiffany hesitated, then gave in to one of her rare moments of curiosity. “Can demons be sexy?”

“Ummm,” said Hazel, glad that Tiffany couldn’t see her blush. Ligat wasn’t technically a demon, but he wasn’t technically human either—and the less-human bits definitely hadn’t put her off. She bit her lip and tried not to remember too vividly. Tiffany would notice if her voice suddenly went breathless. “Nobody’s really done a comprehensive study, and the legends suggest that at least a few of them canlook good, but most really don’t.”

“How do they tempt people to the dark side, then?”

“If you’re talking to a demon, you don’t generally need a whole lot of temptation. And most people aren’t going to sign away their souls for a single partner, even a really hot one.”

Tiffany snorted. “You’re kidding me.”

“Uh-uh. Look, if Sebastian Stan wanted to sleep with you—”

“I like where this is going.”

“You’d spend a lot of money to fly out and meet him. Maybe you’d make up a story or two to dodge some questions. And maybe you wouldn’t even care that much who else he might have been dating.”

“Sure,” said Tiffany, in a voice that said she knew abutwas coming.