Chapter 27
Kat
Friday night is upon me in a flash. The entire week was a blur of sex with Crane, which happened as frequently as possible, most often in the school stables, though once on his desk in the empty classroom and once against a tree in the woods.
With each and every time that I submitted to him, succumbed to his wants and desires and deviant ways, I felt that energy inside me grow.
I felt it bond me and Crane together, fusing us.
It may not have been blood magic, but it was an exchange of something almost as powerful that is binding in its own way when two witches in the throes of ecstasy join together.
But where I’ve felt more than connected to Crane, Brom has remained an enigma.
He’s already moved into the dormitories.
I suppose it’s easy when you don’t have a lot of things to bring with you, but regardless, it did feel quick, like his parents couldn’t wait to get rid of him.
Which might have been the case. As a result, I haven’t seen him around all that much aside from being in a few classes with him.
Honestly, I don’t know what to do or say around him, at least not until Crane comes up with a plan, so I’ve been avoiding him and feeling awful about it.
Because it’s Brom. He was my best friend, the boy I shared everything with, the piece that had been missing from my life for four years as I moved from girl to woman, and he is back.
I should be spending every waking moment with him, but there’s that disconnect there.
He sees it when he looks into my eyes, the wariness, and I see the hurt reflected in his.
But I’m not pushing him away. I’m doing all I can to give us back what we once had.
Tomorrow, my mother wants to put my belongings in the buggy and move them up to my dorm, but until then, I’m trying to hang on to my last sense of normalcy.
Thankfully, when I stopped by Mary’s after school one day, she seemed happy to go to the town bonfire with me.
I was afraid she wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore after spending so much time apart.
Mary appears outside my door at eight, carrying a pouch with one hand and a lantern in another, a cheerful specter in the dark night.
“What do you have in there?” I ask her as I walk toward her, nodding at her satchel. I feel a little shy, as if I’m getting to know her all over again.
She laughs. “Oh, this? Mathias wants me to fill it up with as many treats as I can find. Candied apples, caramel corn, roasted chestnuts, and soul cakes.”
“I’m getting hungry already,” I tell her.
We start walking down the road side by side, the lantern swinging shadows on the decaying stalks of sunflowers and corn that line the road. It’s cold now, the promise of frost in the air, and I pull my shawl tighter around my neck, wondering what to say to Mary, wondering how much I can say.
But she cuts to the core of it.
“I hear Brom’s back,” she says, shooting me an inquisitive glance. “I can’t imagine how you’re feeling. Are you happy?”
I try to give her a reassuring smile. “Very.”
She raises the lantern to peer at me, and I wince at the light. “I don’t believe you.”
“I’m happy,” I tell her, pushing her hand back down. “Really, I am. It’s just a lot to take in.”
“Are you still going to get married?”
I hesitate, trying to figure out what to say. “I don’t know. To be honest with you, I don’t even know how I feel about it. All I wanted for the past four years was for him to come back, and now that he’s here…”
“He’s not the same,” she says.
I raise a brow, wondering how much she knows, if anything. “You could say that.”
“People change,” she says lightly. “That’s the way it goes. You’re not the same person you were back then either, I’m sure.”
She’s right about that.
“I know I’m not the same Mary who lived in Providence. Sometimes you change in different directions,” she goes on. “It happens. Nothing is in stasis. We are always changing.”
“Where did you learn that?” I ask.
“Well, it wasn’t from you,” she jokes. “Here I was thinking you were going to share all your studies from the school with me, and you’ve barely said more than hello.”
I rub my lips together, guilt panging me. “Listen, Mary, I know—”
She bumps her shoulder against mine in a skip. “I’m just pulling your leg, Kat. I know you don’t have any time, and…I know you don’t have a choice.”
“A choice?”
A knowing smile flits across her lips. “I know what you go to school for.”
Oh no. “You do?” I ask uneasily.
“I might be new to Sleepy Hollow, but I’m not dumb. This is a peculiar town, and the people are even stranger. I could tell you were a witch the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
I stop dead in my tracks. “What are you talking about?”
She turns to face me and starts walking backward.
“You don’t know this, but the first day I saw you, you were crouched by the sweet pea patch at the side of the road.
We’d just moved in, and I was looking around the new neighborhood.
I heard your voice. You were talking to something.
I looked over at you in the field and saw you crouched down and commanding a frog.
Telling it what to do. It hopped from the ground to your finger and back again, onto your shoulder.
It seemed to delight you, and from that moment, I was delighted too. ”
I don’t remember any of this. Then again, I was often playing with animals, talking to them. I had no idea that Mary witnessed any of that. “That doesn’t mean I’m a witch,” I tell her.
“Okay,” she says, the lantern lighting up her big smile. “Then what are you? A normal, average human being?”
I could lie. I could tell her yes, I was normal and average, and act like she thought she saw something she didn’t. But I’m so damn tired of the lies. “I’m a witch,” I tell her.
She claps her hands together. “I knew it. And then Mathias was telling me all about the way the school looked and how spooked out he was, and I couldn’t help but put it all together.”
I glance at her as she walks beside me now. “And yet you still wanted to come to bonfire night with me?”
“Of course,” she says. “You’re just more interesting than you were before.”
With a grin, she hooks her arm around mine, and we walk the rest of the way to town like that.
It’s been a while since I’ve been in Sleepy Hollow proper, and it feels quite different now.
I’m not sure if it’s because I haven’t been around such normalcy in a long time or the fact that it’s a crowded beehive of activity.
It doesn’t help that so many of the townspeople stare at me as we walk down the main street. At least, it seems that way.
“Why is everyone looking at us?” I whisper to Mary as we go along the town square, where the giant bonfire is lit in the middle, the flames leaping high into the sky while townsfolk are gathered all around with hustlers and merchants selling their wares.
Carved pumpkins lit with candles line the path around the fire, their lopsided smiles setting the festive mood.
“Because it’s a small town, and you’re a prize, Kat,” Mary says.
Her words echo something Crane said to me during sex, that I was a prized student.
How confident that had made me feel. Yet now, I only feel like I’m being judged.
There are a few men on the other side of the fire leering at me, something insidious in their eyes.
We were at bonfire night last year together, but I don’t remember the men looking at me this way then.
Am I just paranoid now, looking for danger and the macabre everywhere?
“Besides, everyone is on edge because of the murder,” Mary adds.
My heart drops. Joshua Meeks. For a moment, I had forgotten.
Being at the school, it’s so easy to become insulated, and with what’s happening with Brom, it’s easy to forget how real the problem is.
But the man I was intimate with last year was murdered and gruesomely so, and I feel terrible that it left my mind.
I still don’t know how Brom plays into it, if he does at all, but I can’t help but feel like I brought this death upon Joshua.
“Weren’t you friends with him?’ Mary asks gently.
“We were friendly,” I say, “when he first moved to town.”
“Didn’t seem like a guy who had a lot of enemies.”
“No. He wasn’t that type.” He was kind and gentle and didn’t deserve any of it.
I have to wonder if any of the townsfolk knew about me and Joshua. After all, my mother somehow did. And, if they knew, whether they’re pitying me or if they’re thinking I had something to do with it.
I make a point to ignore the attention as we walk around, getting candied apples for ourselves, plus all the extra treats for Mathias.
Despite the strange atmosphere, it is nice to feel a part of the town again, the air filled with fried goods, apple cider, roasting chestnuts, and hickory smoke.
Mary and I find a bale of hay to sit on to watch the fire, the children running around at the base of it.
Despite the caginess in everyone’s posture, the children at least seem to be having a good time.
My mind drifts back to Brom and the way we used to play as children.
I remember being here at the bonfire with my parents.
My father had given us extra money for treats, and both of us were full of sugar, running around like animals.
How innocent we were back then. How little we knew of what lay ahead. How quickly all of that would change.
“Good evenin’, ladies,” a man says as he staggers drunkenly toward us. He’s my age, maybe a little older, stubble on his cheeks and drink glazing his eyes.
“Good evening,” Mary says stiffly, turning her body toward mine and eyeing him discerningly.
“What are ye pretty ladies doin’ here all by your lonesome?” he slurs, plopping down on the hay bale beside me and nearly falling off as he does so. He smells of whiskey and horseshit.