Chapter 6
“You’re the girl from the house that blew up, right?
” A boy barely out of his teens, pimples spotting his chin above a scraggly beard, leaned over the impound lot’s counter and goggled at Hazel without even trying to hide his curiosity.
His name tag said he was Steve. His shirt advertised a rock band she’d never heard of.
She nodded. “It just collapsed, though. It didn’t explode.”
Steve had clearly wanted a different answer. “Really? You sure? Because I heard that the old guy had rigged it up with dynamite and shotguns. Gone a little…” He whirled his index finger beside his temple.
A noisy overhead air conditioner blasted an icy breeze directly down on Hazel, making her shiver despite the sweat suit she’d added to her hospital bill, and her leg had already started to ache.
Three people had been in line in front of her, defying all her expectations of Orange River—or maybe it was just a town where people spent a lot of time parking in accessible spaces.
“I wouldn’t know. I barely met the guy. Can I have my phone, please? ”
“What does it look like?” Denied gossip, Steve became a stickler for procedure.
“Yellow iPhone 14, dark blue plastic case. There’s a pride sticker on the back.”
“Hold on.” Steve ducked behind the counter, rummaged, and came up holding the first familiar object Hazel had seen in days. She reached for it without thinking, and he stepped backward. “Unlock it first.”
She couldn’t actually blame him for that. Letting somebody take an iPhone that didn’t belong to them would probably have gotten Steve fired and the lot sued. “Sorry.”
Steve laid the phone flat on the counter, keeping his fingers on the top. “Go ahead.”
As Hazel leaned forward to tap the screen, pain shot outward from the bite on her leg.
She was only annoyed at first—her doctor had told her that might happen for a few days more, especially when she wasn’t taking the good painkillers—but then she touched the first number of her passcode and her finger sank into the phone.
Icy slime coated her skin up to the first knuckle.
Hazel yelled in revolted surprise as she yanked her finger back, sure that Steve thought she’d gone crazy herself but not caring enough to look up at him and check.
She was too busy wiping her finger on her sweatshirt, staring at her phone, where eyes had suddenly replaced all the numbers on her keypad, and trying not to scream again.
“Jesus,” said Steve, with unexpected revulsion in his voice. Hazel thought he might have seen the eyes too. “Is that blood ?”
A dark red puddle was slowly seeping from underneath the phone.
Steve, who had forgotten security, dropped his hand to his side and scrambled backward, cursing in a progressively more breathless voice. Beneath his blond beard and the constellation of red zits, his face was grayish-white.
As though Hazel had finished entering her passcode, the input screen disappeared.
A picture of her screaming face replaced it.
Hazel’s normal clutter of apps had vanished, leaving nothing to obscure how her mouth was open far beyond what biology should have allowed.
A strange gray light from behind it illuminated the bleeding stump where her tongue had been.
She felt a cold stab of anger, equal parts irritation and violation, that overwhelmed all other emotions. Later she would consider what the haunting meant and worry. Just then, her only coherent thought was You have got to be kidding me with this.
“Pen,” she ordered the hapless Steve.
He turned his stunned face to her. “Huh?”
Hazel didn’t wait to explain, just leaned over the counter and plucked the ballpoint from off a clipboard.
She left it capped—no point damaging her phone if she didn’t have to—licked the end of it thoroughly, and then sketched a circle on her cell phone screen with the quick, controlled movement of an experienced short-order cook chopping vegetables.
The screen hissed at the contact. Steve yelped.
In the picture, Hazel’s mutilated mouth worked, almost forming words.
“Sophomore films won’t stop me,” she told it, and drew the next concentric circle, the second part of a pattern she’d learned from an old woman in Maine.
She kept the pressure as light as possible.
The rot-soft glass threatened to give way under the pen, and Hazel was pretty sure that’d break the charm.
During the third circle, the screen started hardening again, and relief poured through Hazel.
The last part of the charm would’ve been tough if she could still poke through the glass, sure, and the change was a sign that the spell was taking effect, but mostly she was just glad she didn’t have to feel that unstable squishiness dragging beneath the pen.
Promising herself that she’d wash her hands with Lysol and hot water later, Hazel lifted the pen. The image of her face was faint and unmoving behind solid glass. She couldn’t see the stump of her tongue any longer, but her jaw still gaped open.
“Kainim ma!” she snapped, and brought the end of the pen down into her photograph’s mouth, right at the center of the circles she’d drawn.
A buzz went through the room. It was too low and too textured to sound quite like electricity, although a light bulb popped overhead.
The phone screen went white, then, after a second when Hazel did her best not to have a heart attack, returned to the normal keypad and instructions to enter her passcode.
“Oh my God. What was that? What’d you do? What did you say? Is it over?”
She’d almost forgotten about Steve until he started babbling. When she looked up at him, he was staring at both her and the phone, not daring to either step forward or take his eyes off them—in a metaphorical sense, fortunately.
“Get me a paper towel and some Windex, please,” she said, gesturing to the puddle of blood. Apparently, it wasn’t the kind of manifestation that completely faded.
Drat.
“But—”
“It’s going to stain your counter if we wait much longer.”
The ethereal world evidently held no terror compared to the wrath of Steve’s boss. He scurried to a back room while Hazel rubbed the center of her forehead, where a headache was rapidly starting. Improvising banishment never left her feeling fantastic.
He barely waited to come back and hand her a roll of paper towels before repeating himself. “What happened ?”
“You wouldn’t believe a bug in the latest software update, would you?” Hazel wiped the blood off the back of her phone, grimacing as it seeped through the towel. When Steve didn’t answer, she went with the truth. “A haunting. I’m not sure exactly what.”
“And you got rid of it.”
“I did. Wipe the counter, please.”
He made a desultory attempt, mostly smearing the blood around, but that wasn’t ultimately Hazel’s problem. “How? What were those words?”
Hazel spritzed the back of her phone, applying a DNA-mutating amount of cleanser. “Ancient Sumerian, by way of Bangor. You shouldn’t have any more trouble.”
“Are you sure?” Steve asked, getting more of a handle on the counter.
“Nobody’s going to be surer, but you can call me if you do have trouble,” she added reluctantly, and wrote her number on a folded-over scrap of paper towel. “I’d like my car now.”
* * *
Both curiosity and procedure took a back seat to Steve’s very evident fear that Hazel would turn him into a frog. He handed over the replacement keys promptly and told her that her car was in the fifth row, obviously praying that he wouldn’t have to show her in person.
Hazel didn’t bother asking him to keep the incident to himself. She knew a lost cause when she saw one.
Her headache was progressing nicely by the time she closed the car door, but she was prepared for that much. The impound lot hadn’t taken the ibuprofen out of her glove compartment or the bottles of water out of the back seat.
Actually, other than taking her phone, nobody had moved a thing.
The seat and the mirrors were precisely the way Hazel had left them, the radio was still set to auxiliary mode, and even her half-full bottle of lime-flavored Diet Coke had kept its position in the cupholder.
A quick check of the trunk before she’d gotten in had showed Hazel that its contents were the same too: spare tire and jack, first aid kit, and a duffel bag with a spare set of clothing, some travel-size toiletries, and a cheap spy novel in case she had to stay the night in a place too haunted to use her phone reliably.
The familiarity was weirder, in a way, than if Steve or his boss had thrown out her Coke or set the radio to FM.
Each point of recognition made her feel like an archaeologist on a dig, finding the soda bottles and the seat settings of the Time Before.
They must not have liked the local stations, Professor. A cultural taboo, maybe.
It didn’t matter that the Time Before had been no more than two days ago.
A gulf had opened in Hazel’s mind, one she knew from other times and places.
That internal division stayed no matter how smoothly the rest of the world kept turning.
She could—would—bridge the gap as she went on, as she drove the car again, as she resumed her place in her audiobook, as she parked in her own space, unlocked her apartment door, braved the contents of her refrigerator, but those would be bridges. The chasm would stick around.
Hazel watched herself in the rearview mirror as she washed down the painkillers, noticing the lines around her mouth, the deep circles under her eyes, and the general impression that she’d been dead for a week.
She hadn’t planned on entering any beauty pageants in the next few days, and her last date had been two months back, but her reflection still concerned her. Willpower, anger, and fear could beat back exhaustion for a time, but her appearance showed what she couldn’t let herself feel.
What she needed was a month on a beach in Santa Monica, with a margarita and a bunch of coconut shrimp at her side and no ghosts for miles. What she was going to get was a three-hour drive and a tough conversation.
The hospital haunting could have been a coincidence.
It might even have been half of one—some lingering presence of the ethereal fight could have triggered an incipient haunting, the way strain could make a hairline fracture snap.
Hazel’s cell phone was a different story, and the two incidents in such quick succession…
She considered pounding her head against the steering wheel, decided that it would just make her headache worse, and drove out of the impound lot to find a drive-through coffee shop.
A cinnamon bun and a latte helped, but her real motive was the chance to linger in a parking lot without witnesses who’d just seen her banish a minor manifestation.
She didn’t talk on the phone while driving as a rule. This wasn’t the moment to start.
Hazel pulled out her perfectly normal cell phone and took a slow sip of her water.
The hauntings hadn’t hurt anybody yet, she told herself as she brought up her contacts list. Her situation wasn’t an emergency.
She took another sip of water, hit the number she wanted, and prepared to listen hard before she said a word.
If Summer sounded like he was in pain, if he even sounded tired—
“Hazelnut.” Summer’s voice, with its hint of a Southern drawl, sounded relaxed and cheerful. Mellow, really. “Always a nice surprise.”
“I’m afraid it might not be so nice this time. Nothing urgent, though.” She tried to sound sure about the latter part.
Summer’s mm-hmm had a very skeptical sound to it. “Well, I’m peeling carrots right now, and there’s nothing good on TV. You go ahead and tell me everything.”
That was all the invitation Hazel needed.
She began with Chapman’s call and sketched out the last few days from there, not going into too much detail but being far more specific than she’d gotten with Stephanie.
She stared out the window while she talked, only half seeing the chain-link fence in front of her and the hedges beyond it, hearing her own clipped, controlled voice from far away.
When she got to the part about waking up in the hospital, Summer clicked his tongue. “You could’ve called me. Had them call me.”
“Why? You don’t do healing when modern medicine works.”
“That’s—this is different.”
“And what could you have done from down there?”
“Come up.”
“That’s nice of you, but I wasn’t in any danger by that time, and they wouldn’t have let me out of the hospital even if you had healed me. You’d have made the whole drive and it would have just caused a scene.”
“You are the most ridiculous person I know sometimes. Go on.”
Hazel did. After she described the screaming, she heard Summer suck air through his teeth. “That it?”
“Sadly, no.” She told him about the phone. There was barely half a minute of silence when she’d finished.
“Get down here,” Summer said, not sounding relaxed any longer. “Fast as you can.”