“You told them,” Leona says, seething, leaning in across the tub.“You told them to run and hide, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t,” my mother says, shaking her head.“I didn’t.”Then she meets Leona’s awful gaze.“But I wish I did.”
Leona straightens up, a smirk on her fleshless mouth.“Hmmph.Thank you for being honest, Sarah.At least we know now that we can’t trust you.”
And at that, Leona puts her hand out and lights the bloody bathwater on fire.
“You should have burned like your ancestors did, my dear daughter,” Leona says to her as my mother screams and tries to crawl out of the bathtub.The flames catch, burning higher, and the heat fills the room, and it’s only by sheer luck that where I’m standing is still in shadow.
“No!”my mother cries out, the agony going straight to my heart, and the fire engulfs her head, the blood burning like she’s been doused in oil.She screams again, and I am certain any teachers left in this building will hear it.
But where will they go?
Where can they go when the coven will find them anyway?
Leona and Ana turn around, their cloaks swishing around them as they leave the room, and I am left alone with my dying mother as she burns and drowns in the bathtub.
And I can’t even save her.I want to.Despite all she’s done to me, I want to save her.I want to try and redeem her, as if that will spare me some awful fate.Blood runs deep, and it holds tight, and I want to spare her from this horror, solely based on the fact that I think she would have spared me.
But I can’t.I just stand there in the shadows, and I watch as she’s burned to a crisp, until the flames go out, plunging us back into moonlight, and her charred body sinks beneath the surface.
Until it looks like it did when I first came into the room.
As if nothing had happened at all.
33
Brom
The day the horseman caught up with me I was in Manhattan, standing outside a laborers’ union, looking to see if I could find some work.I had this awful feeling that I was being watched, which normally wouldn’t have felt unusual.After all, for those four damn years I had run away from Sleepy Hollow, I thought I was being watched everywhere I went.
But this was different.This was a sense of being watched from inside.
The feeling that there was someone else, not just inside my mind, but inside my body.
I had never known fear like that before.
To know my soul was halved and quartered.Compromised beyond my own hand.
After that everything went black, a blur, until I found myself in Sleepy Hollow again.
But tonight, now, I’m already in Sleepy Hollow.
I just know I’m about to find myself somewhere else.
I can feel that darkness, that blackness, that blur, waiting to take me there.
There’s a knock at my dorm door and with it I sense death.I almost laugh.I know it’s not Crane.I want it to be Crane.I want it to be Crane and Kat, I want to tell them I’m sorry.
But it’s not them.
It’s my destiny.
I get up from my bed and walk over and open it.It’s just a formality anyway.He would have axed open the door and let himself in.
On the other side is the horseman himself.
Eight feet tall, no head, cloaked in black.
