“I can’t just disappear.”
“It happens every day.”
She huffed, throwing out her hands. “This is crazy! We’re in the middle of a… well, not acitycity, but a small city, anyway. There are thousands of cars going by just over there.” She gestured off toward what she hoped was an easterly direction toward Highway 65, though she was hopelessly turned around by this point. “You can’t be real, this can’t be happening, and I can’t just disappear!”
Burning triangle eyes stared at her, the offered hand unwavering. A horse whuffed and pawed a hoof impatiently at the grass. Her eyes darted from one impassive jack o’lantern face to another to another. None of them spoke. No human expression met her pleading stare.
There was no way out. She’d already tried running. What else was there?
Trembling all over, she reached out and took the offered hand. Twiglike fingers closed around hers through the coarse fabric of the glove. A gentle tug, and Headless Horseman Chad led her over to one of the enormous black horses. He helped her put her foot in the stirrup, then guided her up onto the saddle.
“Scoot forward as far as you can.”
She did so. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Her life was over. She had become an unperson. One of the missing. She would be like the Springfield Three—the mother, daughter, and friend who vanished back in the nineties and were never seen again. Tavia would look for her, she knew, and her mother who had already lost so much, of course, but would anyone else? The police? For how long?
“What’s your name?” the Headless Horseman said as he slid into the saddle behind her, squashing her up against the pommel until he shifted backwards a little to give her room. Not that she cared. She could fall off and it wouldn’t matter.
He took up the reins, arms on either side of her. He felt… insubstantial behind her, like a coat filled with tree branches, but he was weirdly solid, too. A strange dichotomy she didn’t bother to ponder at this late date. It wouldn’t save her to know, so she didn’t care.
Oh, right. He’d asked her a question.
Sighing, she let her shoulders slump. “Esmie. Esmie Laurent.”
“Well, Esmie Laurent, I ask only that you hold on tight. We ride fast, and the crossing can be treacherous.”
A niggle of interest stirred her, and she tried to quash it. Nothing mattered anymore. But… the crossing. What could that be? And why would it be treacherous?
Despite her glum determination to not care, she grabbed onto the saddle horn and leaned forward as the horse reared and screamed into the night. She had no interest in fallingback against him and finding out if his clothes were filled with branches or not.
Thankfully, the horse finished its dramatics, spun, and headed back through the cemetery, sparks flying from its hooves as it thundered down the gravel paths. A wall rose up out of the dark, and Esmie felt more of her lack of care falter as it drew nearer and nearer.
“Uh… mister?”
Nothing. No change of pace, no slack in the reins.
“Mister!”
The wall was surely too high to jump. He surely wouldn’t try to jump it. Her legs tightened on the horse’s girth, her fingers clenched on the pommel.
“Chad, the wall!”
He chuckled. The bastard.
“It’ll be all right, lady,” one of the other horsemen called from behind them, but she couldn’t believe that with the wall bare feet away and no room to either slow down or surely to take the leap. They were going face first into the wall. Nothing could stop that now.
A sudden wind kicked up, blowing gale-force into her face. She fell back against the horseman’s chest despite her best intentions, and she was frustratingly reassured when he wrapped an arm around her, holding her tight with a branchy arm. Her hair flew around her face in a tangled mess, leaves and dirt twisting it into a dervish.
Not just a wind, she realized as she gripped the pommel with panicky hands. A windtunnel.A vortex, with a great, swirling blackness at the center. A portal.
The crossing. They were crossing into the Between. She really would be gone from the real world, gone where no one could find her. Her mom, her students, Tavia?—
“Hold on!” the Horseman roared into her ear against the howling of the wind, and without argument, she did as he said, latching onto his arm with one hand and the saddle horn with the other.
She had no intention of being blown off this horse and set adrift in the howling storm of crossing. Who knew where she’d end up?
Buffeted from every side, they clung to each other and to the horse as it leapt straight for the roiling darkness at the center of the storm. The great beast screamed a challenge as if daring the portal to give them everything it had. Had the Horseman said the crossing was treacherous? Understatement. Severe understatement.
Wind ripped at them, trying to spiral them apart in every direction. Bits of leaves, gravel, dirt, and twigs battered them, cutting at Esmie’s exposed face, tearing at her clothes. Boiling, roiling darkness pulsated at the center of the mess. She dreaded it. It grew like a cancer in the center of her vision, holding her attention despite the yowling chaos around her.
