Chapter 7
After three and a half hours on the road and a gas station bathroom that she’d have held up against the worst of the ethereal realm, Hazel turned off a bumpy Pennsylvania back road and parked in front of a long, one-story brown house.
Clover spread across a wide field to its left, a row of maples bordered the road to its right, and in front was a long, smoothly paved driveway with marigolds growing thickly on either side.
The door of the house opened as Hazel got out of the car, and a man in a wheelchair rolled out to meet her.
Summer looked almost exactly like she remembered him too—braided red hair streaked with gray, broad shoulders, pale blue eyes behind wire-framed glasses—but he didn’t give Hazel the alien feeling that so many other familiar things had.
Maybe it was because she didn’t see him every day, or because any situation where they met was almost inevitably strange.
Mostly, she just couldn’t imagine feeling odd around Summer.
He’d been solid ground ever since she’d come to him fifteen years earlier, looking for information about a haunted lake.
Unlike previous mentors she’d managed to find, he was also only a few years older than her, and one of the only other people she knew who had the energy to actively address the ethereal.
The chair gave her second thoughts, though. If his leg was bothering him too much for just a cane—
“I can tell what you’re thinking,” he said, coming up to her, “and you should stop being a damn fool. I know my limits better than you.”
“Well, yes,” she said, flushing, “but I didn’t mean to impose.”
“I’ll ‘impose’ you if you keep on talking like that.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You don’t want to find out.” Summer grinned, fox-like. “Give me a hug, Hazelnut, and come get a beer. I think we’re both gonna need one.”
Human touch was embarrassingly comforting.
She leaned her head on Summer’s shoulder longer than she ever would have done before Chapman’s house, breathing in the mint shampoo he used and the scent that clung to his shirt.
The nurses had been kind, but professionally so, and the odor of disinfectant that had come with them had only been a reminder of that distance.
Embarrassment started to outweigh comfort before too long, and she pulled away. “Sorry.”
“Hush.” Summer punched her lightly in the shoulder before she stood up, then wheeled himself around and into the house.
Hazel followed, noting the little changes in the year or so since she’d last visited: pink rather than red geraniums in the pots on the porch, window and door frames painted blue, and a hex sign with orange tulips above the door rather than the blue five-pointed star she remembered.
The kitchen, with its wide cabinets and small fridge, was pretty much the same.
So was the beer, which they took back out onto the porch.
Hazel sat in a hand-carved rocking chair to drink hers, stretching out her legs with a sigh, and accompanied it with a handful of potato chips.
“This is my second meal in three days that isn’t nutritionally balanced. I’ve missed it.”
“Aw, now, don’t insult my beer,” Summer said. “It’s chock-full of vitamins and minerals. You could live on it for weeks.”
He was probably right. Summer didn’t make his own beer, he’d said, but the cloudy brown bottles had no labels, and he’d never revealed his source. It tasted different each time Hazel visited—a hint of maple this time, vaguely citrusy on her last trip.
It was also strong, a trait that Hazel would have avoided in almost any other company, especially with disgusting supernatural phenomena popping up right and left, but Summer had heard about her situation and still made the offer.
She rarely questioned his judgment in magical matters, and never when it came to alcohol.
“The clerk at the impound lot probably had his story on TikTok fifteen minutes after I left,” she said, gazing out past the marigolds to where the hills rose up against the purpling sky. “I’ll try and make sure nobody connects you to me, but…”
Summer shrugged. “If it happens, it happens. I’m not too worried about reporters or tourists.” His tone suggested he had ways of dealing with both, and Hazel believed it.
“But you’re worried.”
“There’s such a thing as small talk, you know,” said Summer, with more affection than real criticism.
“We talked about the beer.” Hazel looked into her bottle, tilting it to see the liquid inside slosh. “And I’d rather get business out of the way first. Otherwise, it just feels like we’re trying to ignore the obvious.”
“All right, fair enough. Let me hear the whole story, then. Even what you don’t think is important.”
“‘Omit no detail, however slight,’” Hazel quoted back at him. She took a long drink of beer before she began and had finished the bottle by the time she wound up telling him about the moments before her phone call.
Summer drank slowly as he listened. Once in a while he asked a question, holding up a hand first so he didn’t disrupt Hazel’s train of thought too badly, and she answered as well as she could.
Yes, the house had seemed normal from the outside, plants included.
Yes, all of the screaming in the hospital had sounded human, though she couldn’t be a hundred percent sure.
She didn’t remember any dreams, though that could easily have been the drugs.
“And you had a normal drive down here?” he finally asked, after Hazel had finished.
“As normal as Route 1 ever is.” Hazel set her beer bottle down on the small wooden table between them, not quite removing the temptation to fool with it as she talked but at least making it harder to indulge. “That’s all, except for whatever I completely missed.”
“Bad times,” Summer said.
He didn’t speak again for a little while, just sat and watched the sunset.
Hazel knew better than to push him, so she made herself wait too, counting her breaths in a cycle of three until her body relaxed, her mind stopped trying to pick at the situation, and she could just look at the maples rustling in the breeze.
When Summer said, “All right,” she almost jumped.
He noticed—there was no universe in which he wouldn’t have noticed, here on his own porch—but he didn’t tease or even grin. “Come on, honey,” he continued, already starting to wheel himself off of the porch. “Let’s go and find out a little bit more.”
* * *
Summer’s front yard was pastoral, but his backyard was wild.
Behind his house, trees clustered close around a path just a little wider than his chair, one with large flat stones rather than pavement and the smell of mint heavy in the summer twilight. Ferns filled the undergrowth, and blackberries, and the bright flash of purple ironweed or blue iris.
A low wooden fence at the end of the path closed off a grove of trees.
Hazel recognized maple, birch, and the evergreens she always lumped together as pine or whatever, much to Summer’s pretend exasperation.
As she followed him in through the wide, simple gate, she noticed an apple tree too, the green fruit just beginning to grow along its branches.
The trees opened to reveal a small pool set into the earth at the very center of the grove and a low stone cairn next to it. “Go look into the water,” said Summer. “Don’t try and think about anything much, just settle your mind down. I’ll be right behind you.”
Hazel went, listening to crickets beginning to chirp and the sound of grass softly bending beneath her sneakers, glad that her spare clothing was much more casual than her normal outfits for meeting clients.
Jeans and a green-striped polo shirt still came off a little preppy in comparison to her surroundings, but nothing as bad as a suit would have been.
It might not have mattered—but you never knew with rituals. Correspondences had weight.
It was too dark to see her reflection in the water, so she peered down at the rocks lining the bottom of the pool.
She tried to let her mind get lost among them, following the lines between one stone and another, noticing the bumps and divots that might have been real or just tricks of the water and the light.
Perception was almost never completely true.
Summer spoke behind her, but not loud enough for Hazel to hear, or in any language she really knew. He talked in a calm, sibilant whisper, probably offering an explanation and then making a request. Hazel had seen him work before.
Sounds answered him, sliding and smooth from every direction. Hazel stood still and watched the water as they got nearer. A weight slithered onto each of her feet, and long bodies started climbing her legs, but she didn’t move except to breathe steadily.
The pool remained dark, blank. It usually did for her: Hazel had never been clairvoyant or really had any other talents except where the dead were concerned.
She glanced down to see the snakes circling her body.
These two were a matched pair of garters, almost double their normal sizes, that moved slowly and frequently looked back at each other with tongues tasting the air.
Consulting, Hazel thought, and wished they’d hurry up.
Snakes had never scared her much, but waiting for an examination to be over made her throat dry and tempted her to fidget.
The snake on her left leg neared the demon’s bite and reared up with gaping jaws and a teakettle hiss. Its tongue seemed to glow as it flicked rapidly in and out of its mouth, and its partner froze in place on Hazel’s right hip. They both gripped tighter than was comfortable.
“Easy, Johnny,” Summer rumbled, and then slid back into the whispers he’d used on the snakes earlier, reassuring them while Hazel forced her gaze back to the water.
Slowly the pressure against her legs eased, though the snakes stayed where they were for a long few minutes. Then the one on the right started moving again, traveling up past Hazel’s waist and over her elbow, while the other kept watch just below her bandaged wound.
“You doing all right there?” Summer asked.
“Okay so far,” she said, as the right-hand snake reached her shoulder. It stretched briefly up to the top of her head, pressing cold, smooth scales against her neck, and then began a journey over to her left side. “‘Johnny’?”
“Mm-hmm. That’s Willie on your back.”
“Good Lord. You really have embraced the hipster cliché, haven’t you?”
“That’s just another way of sayin’ I have good taste,” said Summer, but he clearly only had half his mind on the banter. That made Hazel more nervous than any other part of the examination.
Johnny and Willie met around her left hip, and while Hazel couldn’t see what they did then, sounds and movements gave her the impression that they were communicating.
She made herself keep staring at the fountain, where it had gotten too dark for the rocks to be visible, and chewed on her lower lip while the snakes slithered down to the ground.
“Huh,” said Summer, less than helpfully, and sighed. “You can turn around now. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“Sorry? Am I dying?” Hazel asked, proud that she managed to keep her voice level.
“No more than anybody else is. But life’s gonna get pretty hard for you. Other people too, if we’re not careful.”
She was glad she’d had the beer.