Chapter 9
Still alive, Hazel texted Summer, leaning back in a brown corduroy armchair. She’d gotten it off Facebook, but except for her bed and a folding table, it was still the only furniture in the house that she trusted. I’d knock wood, but the floor might fall apart.
The house’s siding had once been olive green but probably had never looked good, and the years had faded it to the color of dubious milk as well as making it sag and wrecking one of the gutters.
Clumps of faded grass and bedraggled dandelions forced themselves up through the churned red dirt outside.
Beyond that lay a tangle of briary undergrowth and assorted trees—some pine, some maple, many dead—and then, far enough east, a dirt road.
Conditions didn’t improve much inside. Hazel had cleaned out the bedroom, bathroom, and front hall that afternoon, applying a variety of chemicals she chose not to tell Summer about, and the effort had resulted in very bare but clean rooms with an eye-watering lemon and pine scent.
She’d picked the only bare-walled room in the house for her bedroom, even though it had faux-wood paneling that would probably give off hallucinogenic gas if she lit a match within fifty feet.
The other rooms had wallpaper. Hazel didn’t feel up to confronting the wallpaper yet, or really even contemplating it.
knock it all down, the response text said, build a log cabin.
You can come do all that for me if you want.
Both of them knew it wouldn’t happen. Knee problem or not, Summer was tied to his land and the creatures living there.
He could go to town once a week, and once in a while, generally in winter, he could manage a longer absence, but staying an hour away for as long as serious construction would take was not an option.
Hazel had bought the house; she’d have to live with what wasn’t too bad for a while and make the changes she could manage. Bleach was just the start.
She finished her water, pushed herself back to her feet, and braved the possibly psychedelic walls by lighting the candle on the card table.
Her hands shook a little as she struck the match, just as they’d done when she’d cast the runes, but the flame held steady and the wick caught without any trouble.
For the first time since Chapman’s house, Hazel slipped between the worlds on purpose.
The ethereal itself wasn’t quite as bad as she’d feared.
After her morning of cleaning, she almost welcomed the sudden drop in temperature, and the house didn’t look any worse in the blue-tinged light.
Shadows gathered in the corners, dense and black and almost tangible, moving in the corner of Hazel’s eye when she looked away, which wasn’t great but wasn’t much of a surprise.
Her own body scared her the most.
Summer had said she’d become a conduit, that she was corroding the world, and Hazel had seen enough to believe him even if she hadn’t been inclined to trust his judgment.
Once she realized what the faint, pallid glow around her left thigh was, she wasn’t surprised—but the initial sight jarred her into confusion, and figuring out the meaning just replaced it with a surge of dismay.
The connection was already real enough to be visible.
Hazel wasn’t sure how powerful that meant it was, but she’d hoped to get more time.
Faint lines radiated from the wound site like cracks in glass.
They didn’t go very far, but their trajectory was obvious: down to her foot, across her pelvis at both the front and back, and up to her shoulder.
Hazel suspected the wound would run up to her head eventually.
She didn’t know what would happen when it did, but she thought it might be the sort of experience that made her choose death—if she still had the choice, that was.
Pulling on her flesh itself didn’t move the lines, and her fingers went right through the glow, meeting on very mundane-feeling denim.
Idiot. Summer would have fixed you last week if that were possible, she told herself, but could only manage a half-hearted scolding.
She’d known that when she reached for the wound, and she’d still had to try.
Time to do what she could then.
She didn’t need her knife or blessed water—though she’d set the latter out in its bowl—because she wasn’t going very far at all into the ethereal.
If she was going to corrode the barrier between the worlds, the best protection would be a room or two where the physical dominated as much as she could make it.
First came salt, which she’d left out in the sunlight at noon and now scattered in a circle as close to the walls as she could manage.
The shadows shriveled away from it, and the grains sank into the floorboards, small points of light against the dark, splintered wood.
Most people in the physical world wouldn’t be able to see them, but all but the strongest creatures of the ethereal wouldn’t be able to pass through the circle as long as it lasted, and the world would stay normal inside it longer than in most other places.
A circle could never cover all of a square, so Hazel next picked up a handful of coffin nails—long, rough things with flat heads and almost blunt points.
The bedroom window opened in the center of the eastern wall, so she started by sticking a nail into the top of its frame and went from there, holding her breath as she steadied each of the nails and tried not to picture the hammer coming down on her thumb or her knuckle.
Hammering itself was pretty satisfying once she could let go, and even better once she moved from the window frame to the corner of the room.
The angle was better there—Hazel didn’t worry about shattering any glass—and she could let herself revel in hitting something with a hard object.
The energy might even lend strength to the spell.
Stay in place, she thought with each swing, sending the instruction toward the fabric of the world. Keep the physical physical. Keep the dead gone. Stay here. Stay solid.
She didn’t think stay real. Magic dwelled in exact words, and the ethereal existed just as much as the worlds on either side of it. Hazel had spent a year of her childhood trying to deny that, and nobody had come out better for that effort.
The last of the shadows vanished as Hazel finished pounding the final nail into the western corner of the bedroom, and even the blue light of the ethereal had faded enough that Hazel might not have noticed if she hadn’t been looking.
She wasn’t feeling the cold anymore either—though the sequence of walking and throwing and hammering could have contributed to that—and the glow emanating from her hip had gotten much dimmer.
It was a good start.
“Okay,” she said to the empty room, then pocketed more nails and picked up the salt bowl in her free hand. The hall and the bathroom waited.
* * *
By the time Hazel had pounded in all the nails she’d been able to get, the sky was dark.
She’d thrown around enough salt to fill an ocean, she’d burned through two sets of candles, and she was bone tired, feeling every ache from both cleaning and moving furniture as well as a deep leaden weight in her entire body.
The sensation was familiar from the more strenuous exorcisms she’d been in, other than Chapman’s, but it had never been quite so bad before.
A real dinner was too much effort. Even ramen meant boiling water and filling a cup, and she was too tired to trust her depth perception where the potential for second-degree burns was concerned.
Hazel ended up back in the armchair, dipping pieces of bread into a jar of peanut butter and washing them down with milk straight from the carton.
She could almost hear her mother sucking her teeth every time she took a drink, and that was nearly as satisfying as the hydration itself.
After one slice of bread, Hazel had enough energy to feel satisfaction with the day’s work too.
She’d cleaned, she’d moved in, and she’d warded the house from one side to the other, ensuring that she had a safe place to sleep and that she could answer nature’s call in the middle of the night without encountering a demon on the way.
After thirty, those things became important.
She didn’t know the protections would keep the ethereal out completely, true, and she didn’t know what would happen when the effects of the demon’s bite started intensifying, but those were problems for Future Hazel.
Present Hazel started her second slice of deconstructed peanut butter sandwich and decided to reward herself with an old movie.
Her laptop was across the room, but she was pretty sure she had the strength for one final mission.
Hazel stood up, stretched—and then froze, staring at the window.
Moths fluttered against the screen in a futile attempt to reach the light.
Beyond them, the world was shapeless darkness, even the moon too low in the sky at that hour for Hazel to see it past the trees.
The nearest neighbor was a five-minute drive away, and the nearest streetlight probably half an hour farther.
She still thought she’d seen movement and not just the moths. A darker shape had made a less fluttery motion.
Probably a bat or an owl, she told herself. Maybe it even grabbed a moth for supper. You’ve got to start getting used to that stuff.
She did. The sudden tension in her body and her awareness of the moths’ constant collisions with the screen and the silence of the room were almost definitely because she was alone in the middle of nowhere and she knew she had enemies in the ethereal.
Just because someone is out to get you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.
Hazel went over to the window—carefully, because that was how half the people in zombie movies got grabbed—and peered out.
Night in the country stared back at her, vast and indifferent.
If she strained her eyes, she could maybe make out the gnarled shapes of individual trees just past the circle of dirt, leaves drooping and half their trunks rotted.
Small creatures ran after each other in the undergrowth, rustling dry grass as they passed.
It had been much easier to see the beauty in nighttime forests when Summer had been with her.
Honestly, it had been easier when she’d been a Girl Scout and camping with a bunch of other nine-year-olds, scaring each other with stories but trusting in nearby adults to keep the world logical.
Now she knew better, and she was staring out at a tangle of woods, alone, looking for—
A face.
Hazel shrieked and jumped back, grabbing for the nearest object and ending up with the spy novel she’d been reading. She cocked her arm back, ready to throw five hundred pages of sex and intrigue in Istanbul at whatever lurked beyond the window, and found herself without a target.
The face had vanished, if it ever had existed. Only the moths had stuck around. Heart pounding, Hazel made herself take another close-up look and saw nothing again.
She waited for five hideously slow minutes before she let herself retreat to her bed, where she allowed her shaking legs to collapse under her.
The bed frame was secondhand and twin size, which saved money and space while seeming either juvenile or nunlike, but it was big enough and solid enough for Hazel.
“Jesus,” she said, as much a prayer to a god she no longer followed as a curse.
She hadn’t gotten a good look at the face.
It had seemed human-ish and maybe male, though assuming gender from features was probably as bad an idea with ethereal beings as humans.
Shadows had obscured most of it, but she’d seen a hint of red, like the night sky above a distant fire. Its eyes had glowed much brighter.
Many beings in the ethereal had red eyes.
Hazel didn’t want to jump to conclusions—especially since the whole incident might still have been a projection of her nerves—but she refused to ignore evidence.
When her hands stopped shaking, she took a blue leather journal and a black ballpoint pen from her personal bag and began to take notes.