Page 67 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

Yes, that’s a leg.Hazel could see the shoe.

Her stomach turned over, hard, but she fought down the urge to vomit.Identification first, then barfing, she told herself.

Casper was shaking at her knee. Hazel reached down and scratched him behind the ears. “Go home, boy,” she said. “You did a great job. I’ve got it now.” Whether or not that was true, Casper obeyed the command and vanished, leaving Hazel to look around on her own.

Motionless, irregular shapes littered the lawn. The first one Hazel turned the flashlight on was really more of apile. She looked away in a hurry. No information there, or at least none she wanted. Next came an arm and white bones that could have been part of a rib cage. A small, dark object shone nearby. Hazel noted its location for later and moved on, buzzing flies providing an unwelcome soundtrack for her search.

The human body didn’t have many round parts, so Hazel had a pretty good idea that she’d found the head even before she started to swing the light in its direction. Her stomach cramped again, painfully this time, and the flashlight beam shook as she aimed it.

It wasn’t Maxwell.

Relief hit Hazel around the kneecaps, but there was no place to sit down without coating herself in blood. Knowing she couldn’t holdout much longer, she stared hard at the head, trying to place it. The dead person wasn’t Jess, Kathy, or any of her friends from outside the town, but they did look familiar, or as familiar as a mangled, severed head could look.

No hair, she noted, or none on the head. Blood covered a lot of the lower face. Hazel squinted to see more clearly.

Then she was staring into a translucent mask of rage, the face of a ghost that had slammed themselves into the physical world fewer than three feet from her. Their head was shaved, like the one on the ground, and their ethereal form was more intact than their physical. Hazel saw the soul patch and made the connection for which she’d been grasping.

You bitch, said Albert Gordon’s ghost, quiet and venomous.You got me killed.

Chapter 36

“I’m sorry about that,” said Hazel. The apology came out flat, almost nonchalant, and that didn’t surprise her. She felt like she was far outside her body or talking in a dream, which meant her system had reached its outer limits.

You’resorry?

“Yes,” Hazel said, and walked back into her house.

Albert followed her, making his presence known even though Hazel refused to look behind her.

What the hell was that thing?he demanded as she surveyed her bedroom from the hallway.

The window was a total loss. She could probably tack a blanket up over the hole before she went to bed, which wouldn’t do much about insects but might keep birds from flying in. Sleeping in a room without wards was a terrifying prospect, though.

You summoned it, didn’t you?Albert went on.

Hazel sighed, marched into her room, stuffed her phone into her pocket, and grabbed two blankets and a pillow from the bed. She had been spending a lot of time on the floor lately. This incident really suffered by contrast.

Don’t youcarethat I’m dead?

“I don’t know. I didn’t. And yes, I do,” said Hazel. She crossed the hallway to the bathroom as Albert yelled complaints from outsideher remaining protections. “I didn’t need the hassle.” She didn’t hear his response.

In the bathroom, she spread out one doubled blanket and put the pillow at the end. The result just barely gave her enough room to lie down—she was lucky she was short—but at first she just sat. She’d undress in a moment, stretch out and let weariness do its work.

First, she had one more unpleasant task.

Hazel opened her phone, went to her contacts, and dialed her ex-husband.

* * *

The next time Ligat came to Hazel’s property, he had to hide again. Policemen infested the yard, which they’d surrounded with yellow tape, and Ligat couldn’t entirely blame them for all their inconvenience. He couldn’t think the place looked like a slaughterhouse either; slaughterhouses were probably more orderly.

If anything, Hazel’s yard called to mind a few of the stories he’d heard about the Great War—notthe sort that came out in mixed company, or before heavy drinking. Men who’d been too near a shell might have looked like the former person scattered around Hazel’s lawn.

Ligat searched for her almost immediately, and relief surged up in his chest when he spotted her standing by the driveway, speaking to a policeman and a person in a suit. He didn’t try to get a better view, since being in the ethereal only gave him partial camouflage and he had no wish to cause trouble. From his post in the trees, he could see that Hazel stood upright, with no missing limbs or obvious wounds, and that she was talking calmly. That was enough to make his muscles unclench.

He also saw the ghostly form hovering at Hazel’s shoulder, which she was ignoring splendidly. It was only a transparent human shape at Ligat’s distance, with the suggestion of both height and masculinity,but Ligat assumed he was seeing the previous owner of the remains that a uniformed person was putting into plastic bags.

The policeman peered past Hazel to the porch as Ligat watched, shaking his head slowly, and said something about animal control. Hazel nodded. The person in the suit held up a hand to make a point, and the ghost spotted Ligat.