Page 81 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

As he expected, he got no response. Maxwell wasn’t sure how Perthrux itself retrieved information from its servants. He suspected he didn’t want to know—and if the message ended up missing parts, he doubted that he’d mind.

* * *

Watching Brandon drive off never stopped being weird. Conversation got easier quickly, especially with police procedure to give them both an impersonal focus, but his departure always brought up a variety of emotions. At first, it had been the past and the present colliding. When he left for the final time, Hazel watched with a mixture of sadness and relief.

He didn’t belong in her world, staying would have put him in danger, and she didn’t even miss him very much in her normal routine. All the same, she sat on the steps with a mild sense of melancholy as the rented Nissan turned the corner and vanished from her sight.

“Am I intruding?” Maxwell asked, rounding the corner of the house. He’d mostly taken mortal form, but his skin gleamed silver at certain angles, and Hazel could see the faint lines of sigils on his face and neck.

“No. Company would be good.”

As he took a seat beside her, he glanced over to the road. “I thought about coming to introduce myself properly,” he said, “but that might have been more trouble than it was worth. For you, that is. Perhaps for Mr. Miller as well.”

Hazel nodded. “I hadn’t told him about you. Not that I’m hiding—” She stopped before she could say what she wasn’t hiding.

They hadn’t slept together again, in either the literal or the sexual sense. Right after the failed attack, it had been safe enough, but Maxwell could no longer be sure that the demon wouldn’t yank onhis chain at an awkward moment. Hazel agreed with the logic, which didn’t keep her from flushing when his thigh brushed against hers.

More safely in one way, more dangerously in another, she leaned against him without thinking—not because she was horny, but because having him near loosened some of the knots her spine seemed made of these days.

I’m not hiding our relationship, sure, not a big deal in theory. She was an adult, and she doubted that Maxwell was the sort to go running for the hills at the classification; they unquestionably hadarelationship, even if an undefined one.

Still, the words sat in her throat like incantations, too significant to say out loud in case they damaged what fragile peace Hazel had made with her circumstances.

“I’m not trying to keep you a secret,” she went on. “But Brandon knows enough to figure out you’re part of all this. Explaining why you don’t have to deal with the police would’ve made him more uneasy.”

“Not unreasonably.”

“No.” Hazel had to smile, though wearily. “That was always part of the difficulty—he almost always has a point, he’s a good guy, and he really comes through in a crisis.”

She remembered and was surprised at how clear the memory stayed after almost two decades, how he’d sat on her dorm room bed after they’d gotten back from Planned Parenthood, matching the pairs of her socks that he’d washed and rubbing her back when the cramping got bad.

“I wouldn’t have wanted a horrible ex,” she went on. “I was really very lucky. But figuring out that what you have with a genuinely good person doesn’t work, and it won’t work…”

“Difficult, I’d imagine.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I’m getting maudlin.” Movement in the tree line caught Hazel’s eye. It was gone when she turned her head, and probably had simply been another bird or insect, but it gave her a good excuse to look away from Maxwell for a second. “The good news isthat the police have basically closed the case. Animal control couldn’t find a suspicious bear, so they decided it probably wandered off and died of whatever it had. Since it didn’t bite me, and I’d definitely have noticed if it had, I also don’t have to get rabies shots.”

Maxwell grimaced. “Thank God for that. I had an absolute horror of mad dogs when I was a boy—not that we had many wandering about, you understand, but facts never stopped me.”

“It was volcanoes for me. We lived in New York. Go figure, huh?”

“Children are baffling creatures. Even the one I once was.”

A squirrel half ran, half bounced across the yard, ran up a tree, and paused midway to give some other creature a piece of its mind. Farther into the forest, a bird Hazel didn’t recognize sang a few notes before repeating itself.

“Eastern Phoebe,” said Maxwell absently. “They always look like they think they’re clever.”

“You really were—are—a bird-watcher, then?”

He nodded. “Most of what I told you was true at base. I changed a few facts to fit the situation, that was all. Deidre really did make wine—and I assume she would have been desperate to get rid of me for a few hours, if I ever had stayed with her for very long.”

It struck her suddenly how much he’d lost. Confusion, exhaustion, sex, and logistics had shoved themselves into the driver’s seat of her brain ever since she’d found out that Ligat was Maxwell and vice versa. Hazel had thoughthe was humanandhe’s been enslavedandhe’s really on my side, even recognized that he’d put himself in danger to help her, but until then she hadn’t really considered whathe was humanmeant.

Once he’d had a sister who’d made wine and gotten exasperated. He’d watched birds, he’d been nervous about rabid dogs for the usual weird kid reasons, and then he’d said the wrong thing to the wrong being, and it had all gone away. Instead, he’d gotten a hundred years or so of torment serving a demon. Hazel’s brain blanked out a little when she tried to imagine what that would have been like.

“I think I’d have liked her,” she said, and took his hand.

Chapter 43