Page 82 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“Hazel?” Stephanie Chapman, obviously startled, still collected herself quickly. “Are you okay?”

Hazel couldn’t completely keep from laughing. “Hanging in there.” And really, except for the almost certain doom and the general threat of malevolent corpses in her den, she wasn’t doingbadly.

“Oh jeez, I’m sorry. I’d heard—well, I Google us once in a while, my therapist says I shouldn’t, but it’s hard to resist, and I saw that—”

“A bear killed a reporter on my property?”

“Mm-hmm. Or that’s the official story. YouTube’s got a couple conspiracy videos, but they don’t have a lot of likes.”

“Oh Lord.” Hazel leaned back at her table, gaze drifting idly over her notebook and the book of runes she’d been reading while she waited for the phone to ring. A mostly empty mug of coffee sat nearby. She suspected she’d need a fresh one before long. “Let me guess: aliens.”

“One of them. And, um, one of them thinks you gave the bear drugs and trained it to attack trespassers.”

“I think I’m flattered. Do they say what kind of drugs?”

Stephanie allowed herself to giggle. “I didn’t check.”

“Probably not worth getting that data point into the algorithm. How are you all doing? No weird incidents?”

“Well, not anysupernaturalones,” said Stephanie. She sighed.“It’s been an interesting few weeks. I’m almost tempted to change our name, except that feels too much like running away.”

“I get that,” said Hazel, who still maintained her web page as much as she could from a cell phone and occasional library trips. “The kids handling it?”

“Better than we are. Annette was getting into a whole goth phase already. I’m a little worried she might start messing around with, y’know, your kind of thing, to be honest. No offense intended.”

“None taken, believe me. It’s not a career I recommend.” One of Hazel’s legs still ached after she’d been on her feet for a while. She didn’t wake up screaming with visions of Chapman’s creature, but she suspected Maxwell’s presence helped with that, even when he was technically hiding in her closet.

“I’d just like her to learn how to talk to thelivingfirst, you know? And that’s hard enough at fourteen.”

Hazel winced in memory. “No kidding. I can have a word with her about the occult stuff if you’d like, though I doubt she’ll find out enough to get in trouble.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Stephanie said, either really meaning that or faking it well. “So, were you calling to check in?”

“No, I’m afraid I’ve got a question.”

“I asked you enough of them. The police haven’t told us a whole lot, though. Lee spent a day talking to them right after they discovered the, um, basement, and then they checked back in a week or so later, but nothing much since.”

“Not a problem,” said Hazel, staring absently at her notebook again. Runes in different colors of ink danced along the margins, alone and combined, with scrawled lines of text around them.Summoning and binding = Words of Creation?read one diagonal phrase, and another notedvirgin parchment maybe. Her fingers had started cramping before she’d made coffee. “I wanted to know about Clarence’s house.”

* * *

She was lying.

“Since my laptop exploded,” said Hazel, handing Maxwell a mug of coffee and a toaster pastry, “I’ve mostly been printing out files and scanning them when I’m done, and Tiffany’s been great about it. We keep a couple ledgers that I really need to handle in person, though.”

That much was probably true. Maxwell suspected that Hazel knew the same thing he did: Falsehood went down easier the more truth it involved. Her employer likely did have ledgers that couldn’t leave the office—but Hazel probably didn’t need to work on them the next day.

“An overnight journey?” he asked.

“I hope not. I can’t be sure, though. It’s a couple hours drive either way.”

They sat on the porch, as was becoming habit when they were both awake. Outside, one or both of them had a better chance of spotting any potential trouble—not to mention less temptation to indulge with two doors and a hallway between them and Hazel’s bed. Casper was curled up between them, a chaperone too engaging for Maxwell to truly resent, and the midmorning light turned all the shapes in the yard crisp and bright.

It would have been quite a domestic scene if Casper hadn’t been translucent and Maxwell hadn’t resembled a sinister monk from a Gothic romance.

He took a bite of his pastry, which seemed to be mostly icing and a more solid kind of strawberry jam, and examined Hazel with an ethereal eye. Her wound was progressing, he saw with no surprise—the wine could only hold off Perthrux’s influence for so long—but with an unpleasant lurch in his chest all the same. Still, the corruption was moving slowly. “I doubt a night in a hotel would cause too much danger.”

“From me…leaking, you mean,” said Hazel, nodding slowly. “But what about attacks?”