Chapter 4
Jesus Christ, it took a long time to ride a horse from Missouri to New York.
Esmie was bored. With a capital B. She wished her cell phone worked. She could at least pop in her headphones and listen to a podcast or an audiobook or a playlist or something. This was agony. Mental and physical.
Yes. Her ass was killing her. They hadn’t taken a break since they started out, and it must have been hours. It was misery. Torture.
And so boring.
“So,” Chad said, speaking for the first time since Missouri. “What’s your major?”
Her spirits rose. Conversation, she could do, and gladly. “Criminal justice.”
“Hm. Are you going into law, too?”
“Did I hear my name?” Jerome asked, riding a little closer to their side.
“No,” she and Chad said at the same time.
Jerome snorted but didn’t move away.
“And no,” she answered the prior question, “not a lawyer. I want to be a crime scene investigator.”
Chad whistled low. “That’s impressive. You sure you want to see that sort of gore and violence every day?”
Her jaw firmed. “I want to help people find closure on the worst day of their lives.”
“Hm.”
They rode in silence—not total silence, as the creaking of the saddles made for a strangely pleasing backdrop of sound, as did the clop of hooves over various ground coverings and the occasional snorts from the horses—for a while longer before he tried again.
“I sense that comes from experience.”
She sighed, her shoulders slumping. “Yeah, okay.” She girded her mental loins. “When I was thirteen, my dad was gunned down on the street outside a gas station convenience store. To this day, they don’t know who did it. Never caught the guy. I just… I feel like I could have done something if….”
“Ah.” His gloved hand lightly touched her arm, then returned to his thigh. “I’m sorry you went through that.”
“Thanks,” she said, feeling awkward now and falling silent.
The horses snorted. The saddles creaked. The hooves clopped on asphalt, the current ground cover. Otherwise, they were surrounded by an eternal hush. No birds. No chirring of bugs. No traffic noise.
“That could’ve been your villain origin story,” Jerome said mildly. “Like in the movies.”
She shot him a look, but since it was impossible to judge his expression, she decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“I guess I decided to make it my hero origin story instead.”
“Good choice,” Chad said.
It sounded as if he were grinning. It was a good sound, but it did make her wonder how words without mouths to shape them could sound as if they came from smiles.
“No hate,” Jerome said agreeably, putting up a hand.
“I wanted to be a lawyer for similar reasons. My aunt and uncle were run down in the street by a couple of kids drag racing. They were just dumb kids, caught because their cars were totaled in the wreck. The dumb kids were lucky to get out alive themselves, but it didn’t feel like they got enough punishment.
Vehicular manslaughter when they were doing seventy-eight in a forty-five?
” He made a “pssh” sound that, again, made her wonder about the shaping of lipless sounds.
“So I get it. Sometimes, you just want to do some good in the world. Right some wrongs.”
She eyed him for a moment as if looking for sarcasm, but again, none of the usual visual cues were available. After a while, she again decided to take him on faith and nodded, albeit slowly.
“What about you, Chad?” she asked, turning slightly to look back over her shoulder, then realizing the futility and facing forward again. “What’s your hero origin story? What did you want to do with your history major?”
“You remember that?” Again, he sounded amused.
“It’s amazing how much sheer terror pulverizes details into your brain,” she said, deadpan.
He snorted. “I wanted to work in historical preservation. There’s a lot of history back home just going to rot because it’s not Confederate history. I wanted to highlight some of the brighter, more enlightened side of Missouri’s past, hard though it can be to find.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Wow. That’s really cool, actually. And then you wanted to be a writer. I can imagine that being really rewarding.”
He cleared his throat. Both interesting and distressing, and she was glad she couldn’t see it from this angle. “Well. I thought it might be. Anyway.”
His discomfort was clear enough in his voice that she didn’t need to see his nonexistent face, so she turned her attention to the quieter of the three.
“What about you, Aaron? What did you want to do with your MBA?”
He sighed. “I don’t have a hero origin story, Esmie. Sorry to say, but I just wanted to make a lot of money.”
“Hey, now,” Jerome said, surprising her. “To be fair, he came from a really poor background, so I don’t blame him one bit. And he always said the first thing he’d do with all that money was buy his mama a big, brick house in the richest neighborhood in town.”
“Aw.” She smiled at Aaron, abruptly aware from the way her smile went crooked that her face had swelled from her faceplant into the gravel.
She must look quite a sight. “That’s really sweet, Aaron.
And there’s nothing wrong with not wanting to be poor anymore.
I’m on three different scholarships at MSU and a T.A.
for the stipend. And I have a non-school job on top of that. ”
Jerome grunted. “So how did you have time to be out walkin’ after midnight in a cemetery?” he half-asked, half-sang. “And why, for god’s sake? A pretty girl like you all by yourself?”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay, you’re definitely from the Eighties if you think ‘a pretty girl all by yourself’ is an okay thing to say to a woman.”
“Huh?”
“And second, I’m so not pretty right now with my face all swollen up like a pumpk—uh—” She cut herself off and coughed.
“Anyway.” She cleared her throat, her bluster failing her.
“Er… uh… Yeah. I was supposed to wait for my friend, Tavia. But I needed the research for a paper this week, and Tavia and I couldn’t sync up our schedules until Monday, so…
I came by myself.” She sighed, caught back up with her runaway mouth.
“Not my best idea, I admit. But how could I have known?”
Chad patted her arm lightly, probably with sympathy. Jerome grunted again, but thankfully didn’t say anything. Aaron sighed. Jerome’s horse snorted loudly, jetting steam into the muted air, as if it agreed.
“Anyway,” she finally said when the moment stretched out until it was uncomfortable, “I didn’t mean to get caught alone, and I thought a cemetery would be safer than C Street or somewhere like that.”
“C Street?” Aaron asked, a frown in his voice.
“Commercial. It’s pretty scary after dark. It’s not necessarily great before dark on some parts, though they’ve classed up a few blocks and call it Historic C Street these days.” She shrugged. “I just didn’t figure anyone else would be around.”
“Fair,” Jerome said, surprising her. “That is, after all, why we were summoned.”
“Yeah,” she said, drawing the word out. “How does that work, exactly? You said you don’t take women, but you’re summoned to take lonely souls out wandering in danger on their own. How do you know which is which?”
Chad chuckled, and to her surprise, it was a rich, deep sound, and not at all creepy. Admittedly, she wasn’t looking at a cross section of the anatomy of his throat while he was doing it, but still. It was a good chuckle. She liked it.
“In our defense, you were wearing a bulky sweatshirt with a hood and your hair stuffed up under a stocking cap.”
She shot him a look over her shoulder. “Details. Answer the question. Can you, like, choose who you do and don’t take? Or when you’re summoned, as you called it?”
He sighed. “You’re going to ask all the way to New York if we don’t answer, aren’t you?”
“Obvs.”
“That means yes, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Dammit.”
She grinned, then was surprised by the genuine expression on her own face. She was in deep shit here with no sure way out of it, but she was starting to sort of like these three headless guys. They were surprisingly kind souls. Even Jerome, for all his sass.
“Fine.” Chad cleared his throat, for which she was grateful to be facing forward. “As we have no sense of time passing, it could be minutes or years between summons.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” She put up a hand and shook her head. “I thought time didn’t pass there while you’re here.”
“It’s complicated,” Jerome said. “Time doesn’t pass, but it does move. Dammit, I can’t explain it. Aaron?”
“What?” The poor guy sounded like he’d been goosed.
“Explain the thing.”
“Me?” he practically squeaked. “I’m no physicist. I can’t explain it at all.”
Chad sighed. “Anyway. We have no way of knowing when time has moved on. All we know is that sometimes, when conditions are right—the midnight moon flirting with the clouds, a foolhardy person all alone—”
“Sitting right here,” she said, deadpan.
“—the wind, the thinness of the Veil. The conditions have to be right for the portal to open. But when it does, we are summoned, and we ride. If we see from a distance that it’s a woman, we pass her by.
We have that much control. We can’t escape being summoned, but we can stay our hands, as long as we don’t always stay our hands. ”
She turned to look at him over her shoulder again, but it was Aaron who answered the unasked question. This one, he apparently understood just fine.
“We tried that at first. We didn’t want to believe we were truly cursed. But it was true, and the longer we refused to kill, the less control we had.”
“Until we had no control at all,” Jerome finished, his usually snarky voice dead flat, his hands fisted on the reins.
“We learned our lesson,” Chad said more quietly. “We do have to take heads, but we don’t have to take them all. It’s the bargain we’ve struck with ourselves to hold on to what’s left of our souls.”