Page 86 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“An accelerant. This fire’s a little too slow to catch. Give me your hand.”

Wanting nothing less except the penalty fornotdoing so, Maxwell obeyed. Perthrux’s fingers were squashy against his skin as the demon placed the bottle in his palm, then closed his fist around it.“Take good care,” it said. “If you haven’t managed to make her drink this in three days, I may have to start doubting your…approach.”

It gave his hand a squeeze for emphasis. The cold flesh almost bruised his hand, but Maxwell barely felt the pressure.

He knew exactly what the demon meant.

Chapter 45

“You,” Chapman snarled. One eye had burst since Hazel had seen him, replaced by a glaring yellow light in the blackness of its socket. His face flexed in strange places as his mouth twisted with rage. “You trespassingwhore.”

He lowered his head and charged her.

Fear expanded Hazel’s perception, slowing down time enough that she could hear each time his feet hit the floor and the obscene liquid sounds his body made on impact. Shadows and candlelight broke up his run like a low-rent strobe, giving her distinct flashes of his raised hands, his open mouth and missing teeth.

She caught herself before she could step back. The thing coming toward her couldn’t die again, was wrong on every level, didn’t belong to her world. Every human instinct Hazel had screamed at her to run.

But she knew more than her world, and death wasn’t the only option.

Iron lay cold in her hands. The earth was solid beneath her feet. The ethereal world shimmered around her. Hazel squared her shoulders, stared directly into Chapman’s eyes, and quietly spoke. “He’s here.”

Confusion slowed Chapman for a moment, though Hazel knew it wouldn’t buy her much time. “He?” the dead sheriff demanded, breath like three-day-old hamburger washing over Hazel’s face. “Who?”

A translucent blue fist caught him in the stomach. Hazel heard bones snap. “She wasn’t talking to you, asshole,” said the ghost of a young man, hiking his knee into Chapman’s crotch. Whatever rotted there still had feeling, apparently; Chapman doubled over. “Bet you don’t think the junkie’s so pathetic now.”

He moved forward, but Chapman had some of his old instincts too. He ducked the next punch and grabbed the ghost of Jerold Lane by the wrist. “Maybe I do.”

“Dumbass,” said Jerold. He brought his head down into Chapman’s face, and while the contact made him grunt with pain, the rotting man roared with rage and agony. Releasing Jerold’s wrist, he stumbled backward.

With sweaty fingers, Hazel spun the top off the iron jar. The smell of myrrh cut through both Chapman’s scent and the basement’s. She wet her lips. “Clarence John Chapman—”

“NO.”

Pus-yellow light flared through Chapman’s body, and a wave of power pulsed through the room like a thunderclap. He dodged desperately around Jerold and shot forward, a malignant arrow aiming itself at Hazel’s hands, until another ghostly form appeared to block his path.

“I hadkids, youson of a bitch,” screamed Pamela, just before sinking her fingernails into Chapman’s cheek. He’d barely started turning when she yanked downward, and she didn’t stop there.

The man deserved everything he was getting, but sheer physical sympathy made Hazel wince, especially when Chapman managed to pull away only to have Jerold grab him by the throat. She didn’t think even living flesh would have put up much resistance. The undead stuff grew back, at least enough to keep Chapman in existence, but the way he howled sounded like it wasn’t a fun time.

Hazel looked away from the scene, down into the jar she’d prepared. The cloth doll there was just a lumpy shape in the darkness. “Clarence John Chapman,” she began again. “I bind you to cloth. Ibind you to your sweat. I bind you to your skin.” Stephanie had been too busy to get rid of Chapman’s old clothes, including a convenient, if repulsively stained, undershirt. “I bind you by—”

She read out a sequence of names, some long and twisting, others only thumping syllables. Chapman’s screams began to sound hollower as she went on. The jar got heavier at the same time, pulling at Hazel’s wrists, and the doll inside started glowing red.

At some ethereal cue Hazel couldn’t sense, the ghosts let Chapman go. As they moved away, he lunged blindly forward—

—and beams of red light streamed out of the jar, catching him in a translucent net.

He hung immobile in front of Hazel. His uniform had been shredded in places, and she could see clear to his bones. Half his face was gone. He glared at her all the more intensely for it, as though the ghosts had stripped him of everything but hate, and he managed to move his mouth at the last.

“You’ll die.” The words floated out of his throat like a distant echo. “You’ll die, and the world will burn.”

“Eseru!” Hazel snapped out the final command.

The net closed around Chapman, covering his face with lines of red light. The jar hummed with a sudden jolt of energy. As Hazel tightened her grip, the power inside the container yanked the net toward it, taking Chapman along for the ride. He both shrank and became transparent in almost no time, flickering from a rotten man-size corpse to a humanoid mote of light as short as Hazel’s forefinger.

“…burn!” she heard him say again.

Then the light took him into the jar, and Hazel slammed the lid down. All at once the light and most of the power vanished; the jar hummed slightly in Hazel’s grasp, but that was it. She stood in a bloody basement, half her candles out, exhaustion already starting to set in.