Chapter 13
“Ms. Lewis,” said a voice on the other end of the phone line, a quick-talking tenor. “You’re a medium, right?”
“Sometimes,” said Hazel. She sat on the porch, swatting at mosquitoes with the hand that didn’t hold her phone and staring off at the forest. Near twilight, with the living trees green in the late sunshine, it had its pretty moments. “I’m not taking clients in person right now, but—”
“You did a séance for Clarence Chapman?”
Hazel grimaced. “I’d like to know who this is,” she said, “and why you’re calling me.”
Clients started out shy sometimes: I’m being haunted; here’s my name and information didn’t come easily to most people in the modern world.
Hazel had learned patience for the sake of both their welfare and her bank account.
Sadly, that meant lowering her defenses, and that in turn left an opening for people who took a very different sort of interest in her affairs.
Her caller, for instance, who sighed like Hazel had just demanded a comprehensive employment history and a blood test. “Scott Edwards. I work for , and—”
“No comment,” said Hazel, and hung up.
Scott had been the third reporter that day.
One of them had sounded almost respectable.
Hazel hadn’t bothered to ask any of them how they’d gotten her number—even assuming Steve and his boss had stayed professional, it was pretty easy to unearth records like that—and had only considered changing it for an hour or two.
It wouldn’t help much, not unless she wanted to abandon her clients completely.
If her situation had been less complicated, she might have agreed to a story.
The worst a reporter could normally do was paint her as a flake; she’d lived through that before and even gotten a few jobs out of it, the sort where she mostly provided a shoulder to cry on rather than spiritual intervention.
Publicity now would probably attract police attention, though, and both of those would introduce new factors that Hazel really didn’t need.
She was dealing with quite enough people already, and she didn’t even know who one of them was—or if it was a person.
If the face from her first night had been real, its owner had gotten more subtle, or adjusting to her new life had tired Hazel out enough to blunt her senses. She hadn’t even seen the flicker of its red eyes in the evenings since, much less caught a glimpse of its outline.
She still couldn’t believe it had just left.
And she had, maybe, caught less blatant signs: motion out of the corner of her eye, gone as soon as she looked directly, that wasn’t fluttery enough for moths or bats. Normal nighttime creatures were making themselves familiar, which made the abnormal stand out.
More often, she hadn’t seen anything at all.
She’d simply felt a presence, a sense of being watched, that she couldn’t track down even when she risked attuning her senses to the ethereal.
Once or twice she’d called “Hello?” to the empty room, getting no answer and feeling alternately stupid and creeped out—that was generally the moment in movies where a guy with a chainsaw and a hockey mask emerged from the closet.
Hazel remained chainsaw-free, and her closets had stayed empty once she’d evicted an annoyed squirrel, but the feeling had returned again and again.
Maybe it was her own mind playing tricks on her, twisting the solitude and the knowledge of her situation into a more tangible threat.
Maybe not. She was done simply wondering which.
The sun slipped behind the trees. Crickets began to sing, loud and monotonous. Hazel ducked inside to put her phone in her room and bring out a pair of candles and a book of matches. She already had her knife.
Kathy and Jess had helped more than they’d known—even more than Hazel had at the time. The house had no dramatic history, no evil except what Hazel had brought with her, and that opened up opportunities.
It was Friday at twilight. Hazel wore her knife at her belt and carried folded-up packets of herbs in the pockets of her jeans—salt and garlic, like she might need to start an emergency stir-fry at any moment. She’d made the wards on her safe rooms as strong as she could manage.
She’d established herself in the house as well as one person could. Now it was time to find some allies.
* * *
The ethereal shaped itself differently outdoors, especially in spots with no particularly significant history.
Without human emotion to give it specific form, the ethereal became a talented eighth grader’s drawing of the landscape, where trees were straight brown sticks with a few squiggly branches and clumps of leaves and grass was an almost uniform swipe of flat green underfoot.
The crickets were barely audible, and the air was mild, windless, and odorless.
Old-time spiritualists had said that the dead went “beyond the veil,” and that was how the unclaimed ethereal always felt to Hazel: like there was a layer of gauze between her and the physical world or the Vaseline basic cable movies had used to censor sex scenes.
Hazel was as solid and detailed as usual, and the knife was even more so, weightier than it had been in the physical world and cold in her hand after she’d used it to cut a door open.
She returned it to her belt reluctantly.
The demon was probably still low on power, but it almost definitely wasn’t the only threat around.
She was trying the diplomatic approach, though. Knives tended to hinder that.
Nothing moved in the yard or the trees at its edge.
If the watcher was around—if they even existed—they were hiding well, and none of the ethereal’s native beings had taken an interest in the place.
Hazel could see a few bright flashes in the distant sky, but they stayed a long way off, too far for her to even tell where they were going.
The candles burned steadily behind her as she cautiously descended to the yard.
Four wooden steps covered much more distance in the ethereal than the physical, and when Hazel looked over her shoulder, the house loomed up behind her, the candles on the porch far above her head.
The windows of the rooms she’d warded glowed yellow, but the rest of the building had become just a black silhouette.
Hazel turned back to the yard.
“All ye of gentle and good humor,” she said, raising her hands with the palms turned upward, “hear me, I beg.”
She’d picked the incantation up out of a book that claimed to be from the fifteenth century, and though Hazel had her doubts, she suspected both gentle and good humor might have had slightly different meanings when it was written.
She didn’t want to risk changing it anyhow—words were important, she didn’t know the precise function each served, and all ye who will only mess up my enemies just sounded awkward.
“I seek sentries. I seek guards. I seek whatever help and companionship you would give. And I offer tribute in return.”
Hazel took a small jar of honey out of her jacket pocket, slowly and ceremoniously twisted off the lid, and laid it on the ground in front of her, where its surface shimmered in the muted, fading sunlight. She stepped back, kneeled, and waited.
She had no idea what answer she would get, if any.
Human ghosts would probably have made themselves known to her as soon as she’d started messing with the ethereal—most of them were either glad to talk with somebody new or enraged at an unfamiliar presence, and either way they didn’t tend to be subtle.
Most animals were part of a group soul and returned to it when they died. She’d never had much to do with plants.
But it was a figure of leaves and thorns who approached her first, loping out of the forest with the faint threads of vines glowing behind it.
Many-legged, low-bodied, it crawled across the yard and stopped by the jar of honey, then lifted its “head” to regard Hazel with a ring of blackberries like a dozen eyes.
“Hello,” she said, trying to sound like she knew what she was doing.
Make your requests and your bargain, the incantation had said, and hadn’t mentioned how to tell if the entity she was speaking to understood or agreed. Hazel wasn’t even sure if the bramble-creature was really looking at her or was just pantomiming a thing the plants knew animals did.
Imitation would show interest, at least. “I’d like you to let me know if creatures from the ethereal world show up here. Unless they’ve talked to me already. Can you do that?”
Slowly, the bramble-thing nodded.
“Could you also try and hold them in place until I say otherwise? Not at any danger to yourself, of course.”
It inclined its head again, then waited. Could wasn’t would.
Hazel paused to think. She’d practiced her part of the bargain about a dozen times before—wording was important—but it was impossible to know what any given being would value until it appeared, if then.
“In return, I’ll plant over here”—she indicated the packed, cleared earth around them—“and I’ll bring compost to the woods once a week. Is that all right?”
The bramble-creature was the one to pause.
Hazel glanced around as it considered the offer, not wanting to seem either rude or desperate by staring.
The cracks radiating from her hip looked about the same as they had when she’d set the wards—although, of course, it was hard to tell on herself.
The light had faded further, and stars had come out, multicolored in the ethereal sky.
Off by the side of the road, the mailbox loomed larger than its physical counterpart.
It was far more detailed than the rest of its surroundings, too, the numbers clear and the tin bright and dented.
Emotional resonance, thought Hazel. She’d never gotten anything more exciting than a political flier there, but once upon a time—
Rustling drew her attention back to the bramble-creature. The spirit extended one of its vine-legs, dipped it into the honey, and then drew it back.
“Then these are our terms,” said Hazel, and scooped out honey with her own fingers.
It tasted much better than she’d expected, warm on her tongue and with an edge of both fruit and iron that Hazel was pretty sure would have been absent if she’d just put it on her toast that morning.
The creature stayed just long enough to observe that she swallowed, then went back into the forest, moving without any apparent hurry but disappearing in almost an instant.