Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Someone has been doing magic on me. The Sisters. It has to be. It’s always them. Even before I left Sleepy Hollow, I knew it was them.
But is that why I left? Did I leave Sleepy Hollow because of them?
Or was it something else?
Someone else?
My heart pangs with shame. Then lust. Then something like love but softer and more innocent, like the love you throw around as a child. With abandon, to anyone, anything, not caring where it lands.
I look at Kat.
My beautiful Kat. How she’s grown. Changed. And yet it’s still her. A woman. A goddess. A witch.
She is the balm on my wounded soul. She soothes where everything burns. She smooths the scars flat until I can pretend I’m whole again.
Now, in this candlelight, with her hair down her back like the smooth, shiny cornsilk we’d shuck during those late, hot summers, she glows. Gleams. She’s an angel, and I’m a devil, and that means the devil won’t stop. The devil never does. He’ll dirty everything he touches.
Her eyes are different now, though perhaps she says the same about mine. I look in the mirror, and I don’t even recognize my face sometimes. But her face is older, braver, stronger. Kat was never a meek girl. She may have described herself as sheltered, but I don’t think that’s true. Her father did what he could to shelter her, and after he died, she turned to me. Yet she wanted to push her boundaries.
She wanted to leave.
And now her mother is telling her she must live at the school.
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” her mother says, nibbling at a piece of meat that she never quite eats. Her whole meal is a mess of food that never makes it into her mouth. It doesn’t sustain her. Her skin is sallow and drawn, and her eyes are greedy, and nothing sustains her.
“I did, but, but, you were so against it,” my Kat says. “And now that Brom is there, you’re saying I must go.”
I act like it doesn’t hurt, but it does, and I’m a bad actor. I wince. Shards of glass in my chest. She doesn’t want to be close to me, is that it? Is it this professor? Is he the problem?
My thoughts go to him against my will. I don’t like thinking about him. He seems familiar and a stranger. I don’t like the way he looks at me. Like I’m his friend. More than a friend. He makes me uncomfortable with how comfortable he makes me feel. When he held my hand, I wanted to die. I felt him inside there with me. I also felt that other part of me. The one that hunted me. That one hates the professor, and so I hate him too.
Was he really with Kat? My Kat?
Does he love her? Does she love him? Did they only fuck? Does he give her greater pleasure than I did?
I’m gripping the knife again.
The rest of dinner fades into nothingness. I feel the dark inside of me wanting to rise, and I manage to keep it at bay. I know it’s a foreigner in my system, an intrusion, but as long as I stay in control, it won’t infect me. I can hold it back.
Kat is upset. She leaves the dinner table and steps outside into the cold, grabbing a shawl from the rack, saying she’s going to check on her horse.
“I don’t understand,” Sarah says to me with a sorry smile. “All she wanted was to be on campus. I’m sure she’ll come around. She has no choice.”
I excuse myself. I try to smile, but from the look on my parents’ faces, I might look like a monster grinning. I don’t explain what I’m doing or where I’m going, but I don’t have to.
I open the door and head out to the stable.
It’s a cold night. Frost has settled, and the grass crunches beneath my boots. A cornfield stretches from the back of the house to the barn, the stalks tall but wilted and spent, glimmering like ice under the pale moon. I hear her in the stable, cooing gently to her horse, and cross the pasture to her. She has a siren song. She always has.
The lantern hanging outside the stall flickers at my approach. I’ve noticed this now, how the lights never stay still. All supper, the flames on the center candlesticks danced, the fire at the mantle joining in. No one thought it was strange. Everyone thought it was strange.
“Brom?” Kat’s voice rings out, soft as summer air. But there is no mistaking the changing season—everything around her is cold.
I stop by the stall and stare at her. Her horse, Snowdrop, raises its head and snorts, ears back, tail swishing. I look into the grey mare’s eyes and see the reflection of myself in them.