Chapter 20
Brom
Darkness.
For a moment, I see only darkness. Hot. Putrid. Oozing. Black nothing. Black everything.
There’s a flame in my heart, dark fire. It consumes all, eats everything, leaves nothing.
Destroy her, the voice inside my head says, malevolence dripping with its every word.
Fuck her.
Capture her and fuck her.
Defile her.
Listen to her beg for mercy.
Make her take your seed.
Destroy him.
Drill a hole in his eyes with your cock.
Fuck his brains until they’re coming out his ears.
“Brom,” my father chides from beside me. His voice is fearful. He’s always sounded afraid when he talks to me, but tonight, he trembles with it. It’s enough to pull myself out of the black ooze, to separate from the thing I fear is inside me.
The other man.
The other me?
I look down at my hand. I’m gripping a knife. So tight my knuckles look dusted in snow.
I glance around.
No one is paying attention to me.
Everyone is paying attention to me.
Kat looks flabbergasted. Her mouth open. She’s upset with her mother. She’s been upset the whole night. Because of me and not because of me.
“What do you mean I’m going to live on campus?” Kat says, her voice high and brimming with confusion. She’s been operating at this level ever since I reappeared.
Reappeared.
As if I’m a magic trick.
Here in one hand, then appearing in the other. A coin behind the ear when there was nothing before. A rabbit in a hat.
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 strange. 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 it makes me want to 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 mantel 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 gray mare’s eyes and see the reflection of myself in them.
For a moment, it looks like I have no head.
Hot steam flows out from the horse’s nostrils, and I reach out, gently stroking her velvet muzzle. I feel her calm, and my gaze goes to Kat beside her.
She’s standing there, her shawl clutched. Wary. Her soft, full mouth held together tightly.
“Kat,” I say. But that’s all I can say.
She stares at me for a moment, and then her expression softens, her hand going to Snowdrop’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I couldn’t stand to be in there a minute longer. I know I was rude.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me,” I tell her. I want to go to her. Touch her. Kiss her.
Fuck her.
Defile her.
Spread your seed inside her.
I blink the voice away. “I know how strange all of this is for you.”
“And for you,” she says, and she’s coming to me now, stopping a foot away in the sawdust. She stares up at me, anguish in her pretty blues, her pulse visibly ticking in her throat. “They all act like it’s normal. As if the past four years never happened.”
But it is like it never happened.
I reach out, and I take her hand in mine. Her skin is cold but soft, so soft. I wrap my fingers around it, feeling how fragile her bones are. How easy it would be to crush her.
She must be protected from all of this, I think.
She must be protected from me.
“I think you’re right to not want to be at the school with me,” I tell her.
Her chin dips. “No. That’s not it. It’s not that I don’t want to be with you….”
“Is it him?” I sound petulant. I don’t care.
Her eyes widen.
“Him?” she repeats.
Oh, but she knows who I mean. She is pretending.
“The professor,” I say coolly.
“Professor Crane? No. It’s nothing to do with him. I don’t understand why my mother changed her mind so abruptly.”
“Perhaps she didn’t want you there alone, but now that I’ll be there, she feels I can protect you.”
She studies me for a moment. “Do you really believe that?”
“I would like to believe that.” But I don’t. Because I don’t know that I’ll be able to protect her from myself. And her mother has never cared to give her any protection. She would offer her own daughter to the wolves if it would please them. I feel she’s doing that now.
And I’m the wolf.
Kat shakes her head, gnawing on her lower lip. Her attention goes to Snowdrop, her pale hand on the horse’s white coat. “My mother doesn’t want what’s best for me. I know that now. I always knew it, but I didn’t want to believe it. Now I know.”
I can’t help but give her a fleeting smile, my heart warming with pride. “You’re all grown up, Kat. You finally see the truth.”
“What do you mean?”
“That your mother has never been on your side,” I tell her.
“What do you mean?” she says in a quiet voice, looking uncomfortable. “What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know, Daffy. Remember when your father brought you home that pet rabbit for your birthday?
You had been so happy, and I think your mother hated that.
She said the rabbit was a rodent and unfit to be a pet for a young lady and made you give it up.
I think she was jealous of your connection to the animal, same connection you have to Snowflake.
I didn’t really know what I was seeing at the time, but I knew that your mother never had your interests at heart, let alone your best ones.
It was the same with my own parents. I knew they didn’t care.
They still don’t. You see that, don’t you?
You’ve always seen that. You could have told me, but you didn’t. ”
She looks down at her shoes, and I give her hand a squeeze. “Neither of us have parents who care. You were lucky you had your father. He was the only one who did. We have to look out for each other.”
“Look out for each other?” she says with a snarl and rips her hand away.
Her anger shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.
“You should have been here to look out for me! To protect me when I had no one. Instead, you took my virginity, and then you left me! You left me, Brom!”
Her words sting like nettle. As if this is my fault?
“I didn’t take anything. You gave it to me. And I told you I don’t remember why I left,” I grind out, feeling anger rising from that dark place, where the thing resides. “How many fucking times must I explain that?!”
“You took my innocence,” she decrees, jabbing her finger into my chest. “You took it, and you left me. You used me and discarded me. I spent four years thinking your disappearance was all my fault!”
I reach up and grab her finger, gripping it hard.
“I was lost for four years! I don’t know what happened.
You think this is all about you?” I squeeze her finger harder, feeling darkness flood my veins.
“And fuck your innocence. It seems like you’ve thrown that away like a dirty rag. I know you’re screwing your professor.”
“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 flood 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.
“All right,” 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 grab my horse and ride off into the night.
I know the darkness will come before I get home.