Chapter 14 #2
She breaks away from the kiss and looks around, breathing hard again.
The lights of the school have faded into the background, and while we didn’t bring a lantern with us, my eyes have adjusted enough to see the dark trail ahead of us while it cuts through the woods.
The horse can see even better than we can.
We are alone out here, and while I don’t remember how much time we have before we hit the village of Sleepy Hollow, I know it’s more than enough.
I run my mouth down her neck, realizing I may be coming on too strong, despite what we just did. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
She lets out an amused breath. “Is that so? I thought you always had to be in control?”
“Doing whatever you want is me being in control,” I tell her. “So long as I’m giving you pleasure.”
“Mm-hmm,” she muses, resting back against me. “You know, you’re pretty good at making someone forget things.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, my hands taking over the reins again.
“The ritual,” she explains, her voice dropping a register. “I was terrified of the whole ordeal, and yet how quickly you were able to wipe that terror from my mind. How quickly my body moved on under your touch. Is that part of your magic?”
I scoff. “It’s not magic, Kat. It’s that terror heightens our emotions. Our senses. Our hearts beat like hummingbirds, and all that energy needs a place to go. Sex is the perfect place to put that energy. The terror only makes it more divine. It primes it.”
“Do you make a habit of making women climax after they’re scared? Do you have a habit of scaring them?”
“Sometimes,” I admit. “Men too.”
I hold my breath and wait. Witches, as a whole, are open-minded when it comes to different forms of sexuality.
I like to sleep with both men and women.
But Kat comes from a small town and wasn’t quite raised as a witch.
It’s possible she’s not as tolerant as I hope.
I wasn’t even aware of my sexual preferences until I moved to San Francisco. Ironically until after I was married.
“Oh,” she says softly.
“Does this displease you?” I ask, my jaw feeling tight, ready for some form of rejection.
She swallows and shakes her head. “Not at all. I’ve just never…”
“Never been with a woman? Never knew a man who’d been with men?”
“Never to both of those,” she says. “But I’m okay with the idea of it.” She glances at me over her shoulder, her eyes bright even in the darkness. “At least with the idea of you with other men. You seem so worldly, and I feel so sheltered.”
“You won’t always be sheltered,” I tell her. “One day, you’ll move someplace far away from Sleepy Hollow.”
A moment of silence passes. An owl hoots from the forest. “Will you come with me when I do?” she asks. Her voice is so delicate and shy that it sends a bolt of anguish through me, this unbearable urge to protect her.
“I would like that,” I tell her sincerely. “Where would you like to go?”
“Anywhere,” she says, her shoulders relaxing. “Anywhere at all. Manhattan seems nice.”
I tense up.
She quickly adds, “But I know you came from there. So maybe that’s for some other time.” She pauses. “Do you have bad memories from New York? Is that why you came here?”
I sigh heavily, the past feeling too close at times. “New York, no. It was a blur of opium. A lot of being poor. I should have worked, but I didn’t. I just wanted to forget everything. I wanted to be someone else.”
“Did you break any hearts there? You must have.”
I chuckle. “No. No, but I was close to having my heart broken.”
“Really?” She sounds so surprised. “By a man or a woman?”
“Does it matter?”
“I’m sorry. I was just curious.”
I rest my chin on her shoulder, embracing her from behind.
“I know you are. Being curious is the way to my heart. And it was a man. A poor, broken soul on the run from something I didn’t understand.
He was truly haunted, sick in the head, and yet beneath all his turmoil, I saw someone worth saving.
After all, I was running from something too. ”
Myself.
“Did you try to read his memories?” she asks.
I swallow uneasily, feeling shame. “Yes. I tried. I needed to know what ailed him, what he was running from. But we were only together for a couple of weeks, and I experienced the same thing I did with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“He blocked me. I couldn’t read him. I could only feel what he felt, and there was a lot to sift through on that alone.
I didn’t push it. I didn’t talk to him about it or whether he was aware he was blocking his mind from me.
Then one day, he was gone. On the run again.
I still don’t know if it was something I did that made him flee or that he had something that was hunting him. ”
She grows silent at that, and I can tell her mind is working.
“That sounds terrifying,” she eventually says. “To feel someone you’re with is being hunted.”
“It was. But what did I say about terror leading to sex?”
“It leads to magic.”
It led to magic. I had magic with that man.
He was so wild and unpredictable, wearing every single emotion on his sleeve.
He felt everything in the same ways that I feel everything, but I’m always trying to run from it, hide from it, bury it under layers of aloofness.
He ran right into it. Embraced it wholeheartedly.
He was so damn messy in every aspect of his life.
And he loved it when I ruled over him. He was tall, though not as tall as me, and his muscles were huge. He was built like an ox, so strong and sometimes dangerous, and yet he’d let me dominate every single inch of him. The man sucked my cock like no one else had ever done before.
But I feel no need to dwell upon it. He was gone.
I’ve moved on.
“What was his name?” she asks.
“Abe,” I tell her. “Never gave me a last name.”
“Where did he—”
“Shh,” I say to her, cutting her off.
In the distance, I hear the sound of hoofbeats.
“Do you hear that?” I whisper, steering Snowdrop to the side of the trail just in case. Blackberry bushes reach out and scratch along our arms, pull at her dress.
“What are you doing?” she whispers as we duck under a branch.
“I hear a horse,” I tell her as the sound gets faster, louder. “They’re coming fast. I think they’re on the trail, but…” I turn my head behind me, seeing only darkness, then look forward again. “I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”
She lets out a small gasp. “Do you think they’re after you? For escaping?”
“It’s not a prison, Kat,” I tell her, but even so, I don’t feel so sure. Could it be one of the sisters out to get me and drag me back to the school? If that’s the case, I’m not going, no matter what they do. If I have to punch an old witch in the face, so be it.
“You could be in trouble for, uh, what you did to me,” she notes. “Maybe they saw or heard.”
“Did to you? I’ll have to remind them that you were a very willing participant.”
“That might not matter,” she says, and the hoofbeats are closer now.
She opens her mouth to say something else, but I slide my hand over her lips to keep her quiet and then pull Snowdrop to a stop. Luckily, the horse doesn’t make a noise, but its white coat will be noticeable in the dark of the woods.
I think about maybe taking the horse into the thicket and out of sight, and perhaps the rider will pass on by without noticing us. There’s also a chance that it’s not someone after us at all, but—
“Ichabod!” Kat cries out. She’s staring over my shoulder in horror, and I quickly whip around to see a big black horse just feet away, galloping toward us at full speed. Steam rises from its body, and on top of the giant horse is an equally giant man, dressed all in black with an ax at his side.
He doesn’t have a head.
He doesn’t have a fucking head.
It’s just like my tarot card vision, I think. This is what I saw.
And just like that vision, I know what’s going to happen next. Snowdrop will rear, and I’ll fall off, and this headless horseman will pull out his ax and take off my head.
This is how I’ll die.
“No!” Kat screams at the horseman as he’s upon us now, a black creature of death in the night, built from bones of fear, and he brings his ax in the air.
I cover Kat with my body, shielding her from the blow as Snowdrop whirls around and rears. I try desperately to keep us both on the horse while also trying to keep Kat from harm, and just when I feel myself slipping, Snowdrop’s hooves meet the ground again.
I glance up, ready to feel the slice of the blade in my neck, only to see the big black horse snort at me, its face inches from mine, and though the man remains headless, I can feel him staring at me.
Then he kicks at his horse, and it spins around and starts galloping down the trail toward Sleepy Hollow.
I straighten up, and Katrina lifts up her head, watching as the horseman disappears into the night. “He’s going into town!” she cries out, glancing at me over her shoulder. “We have to warn my mother!”