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)
“Ow!” she cries out, trying to pull her finger away, but I won’t let her go. I can’t.
“Go to Hell, Brom!” she yells, kicking at my shin.
“I’ve already been to Hell,” I sneer at her, the darkness bubbling up and up now. It wants to take over. It wants me to claim her. “And Hell isn’t done with me.”
“I’ll scream,” she says as my grip goes to her wrist. Fury and panic flood her eyes. “I’ll scream if you don’t let go of me.”
“Do you think anyone will care? This is what they want, don’t you see?”
And at that realization, the darkness fades enough for me to see clearly.
What I’m doing to her. What I’m saying.
I drop her hand and step back.
“I’m sorry,” I say, but my voice is shaking, and the words sound empty.
She stares at me with pure venom.
Venom and sadness.
Betrayal.
“I didn’t mean to…I didn’t mean what I said,” I add. “About your innocence.”
She glares at me. “Perhaps I’m not so innocent. Maybe you did lead me down that path. There wasn’t just you. There was that farmhand. Joshua Meeks.”
I picture him in my head. Stocky, blond, always smiling. She was with him too? “You’re just trying to hurt me now.”
The darkness starts to come in again like the tide.
“So what if I am!” she snaps. “And yes, now there is the professor, but it’s not…” Her lip curls. “You have no right to be angry about me and Professor Crane. About anyone. You were gone. And Crane is a good man, more than you’ll ever know. He wants to help you. He, he—” She cuts herself off, slamming her lips shut, her nostrils flaring. “I think you should leave.”
The darkness wants me to stay.
But I am better than that.
“Alright,” I say to her with a nod. “I’ll go.”
I turn and walk out of the stall, then look at her over my shoulder. “Daffodil,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t call me that.” She glowers. “Don’t call me anything.”
I swallow that down. The rejection.
I walk away into the night.
I know the darkness will come before I get home.
Chapter 21
Crane
I can’t sleep.
Rain falls lightly against the windowpanes, and the candles I have lit in a row on the sill flicker slightly in a draft, a shield against the dark. The clock on my desk ticks loudly as it has all night, counting down the hours and yet never seeming to move. It was one in the morning, and then it was three in the morning, but now it is two in the morning, and I can’t tell if I’m awake or dreaming.
I dig my nails into my hand until it hurts.
I’m awake.
I am awake, too awake, my brain bouncing around from thought to thought to thought. I think about Brom walking into my classroom this morning. How it pained me more than I thought that he didn’t remember who I was—me, the man who opened his bed to a stranger in need for a few weeks, a stranger on the run. And how now, whatever Brom had been running from had brought him back here somehow, I was sure of it. None of this makes any sense unless you involve witchcraft, but if the Sisters brought him back here for some reason, then the question is why? And why did he leave Sleepy Hollow in the first place?
When I can’t come up with any answers, I move on to Kat. My favorite thought. Lovely, beautiful Kat, whose body and soul I feel preternaturally drawn to. I feel like I’m just getting started with her, that I was just about to plunge headfirst into the abyss for her, ready to drown in all she was offering.
But now I don’t know how to proceed. I want to proceed—I want her in all my dark and deviant ways—but with Brom now stepping back into the picture, that surely complicates matters. There’s no doubt this was the man who once brought her pleasure, just as he had for me, and perhaps a man she was in love with. Maybe still is. Would she even want me now that he’s back? Will I be discarded? It wouldn’t be the first time.
And then I think about Sarah. I think about Kat’s strange witch of a mother and how different she is from the other sisters. She barely even looks like them, doesn’t seem to have much love for them, seems separate from them in nearly every way. But she’s a woman with secrets nonetheless.
Staying at her house overnight, I was bombarded by so many emotions, ones that seemed to belong to the house itself, a house with a soul. I felt love, a strong love between a father and a daughter, so unlike the one I had with my own father. But I also felt fear. I felt so much fear hidden in the dust that’s swept under the beds. I felt the fear Kat’s father had for Sarah, something that didn’t surprise me considering Sarah’s cold and controlling demeanor, but also fear that belonged to Sarah. Whether that fear is for Kat or for her sisters, I’m not sure. But there is something off about the Van Tassels. Something very, very off. And I’m not even sure Kat is aware of it.