“Because we dared disturb his grave, we will know his unrest until his head is returned to him. We will ride as he has for over a century, sleepless and unstoppable, beheading lonely souls wandering where they oughtn’t in the midnight hour and sending them to the Great Beyond to find whatever torment lies there for the unwary and the unwise. He rests now for the first time in centuries because we ride in his place."
Her eyes wide, she felt like a child listening to a particularly scary bedtime story. Surely, this was nothing but a campfire tale.TheHeadless Horseman? From Washington Irving’s tale? That couldn’t be, could it?
“Unfortunately, if the old story is true,” Aaron said, “his head was blown off by a cannonball, so finding and returning it to him is impossible. So we ride, and it’s 2026, so you tell us. It’sonly been….” He paused and seemed to count in his head. “Huh. Thirty-eight years. But it feels like an eternity already.”
“I could be on the Supreme Court,” Jerome said, sounding less like a smart ass and more like a vulnerable human being for the first time.
She stayed as silent as they fell, absorbing the story, poking at it mentally for holes. Hell, the whole thing was full of holes. None of it could be true, but… frankly,allof it had to be true if anything that had happened to her in the past few hours was real. She’d been chased around a cemetery by Headless Horsemen. She’d ridden through a portal to some sort of pocket dimension.
Their story was as likely as anything else.
“Whatever happened to the girl?” she asked, then immediately wished she hadn’t.
“No idea,” Chad said drily. “We must have lost track somehow.”
“I’m sorry. Stupid question. I know. My bad.”
She marinated on the tale for a while longer, then frowned and shook her head. “Okay. Okay, I can maybe understand all of that. Maybe.”
“Maybe?” Jerome demanded, incredulous.
“But why are youhere?”She gestured with her hands at the ground they sat on. “Not here as in the Between but here as in Missouri. Why aren’t you still in Sleepy Hollow?”
Three sets of shoulders swiveled back and forth as the Horsemen looked at each other without eyes to actually do so. Jerome lifted his gloved hands.
“I don’t get it,” he finally said. “Why would we still be in Sleepy Hollow? Whywouldn’twe come back home?”
Aaron shrugged. “We’re cursed to never sleep, to always ride, but we weren’t cursed to do so there. I guess it never occurred to us not to come home.”
She huffed. “But… how will you ever find the Headless Horseman’s head in Missouri?”
Chad grunted. “What are you getting at?”
“You said the only way to end the curse is to give the Horseman back his head.”
“Which was blown apart by a cannonball,” Aaron reminded her.
She held up one finger. “As far as the story goes.” She shook her finger. “But even the old guy telling the storyinthe story says he isn’t sure he believes the tale. Maybe that’s not what happened.” At their combined silence and unnerving headless attention, she grunted. “Look, there’s this awesome movie from like twenty-some years ago that told a different story. Maybe what really happened is completely different, like the movie.”
Aaron put his hands on his thighs. “What did the movie say happened?”
“Not important,” she said, brushing this off. “It can’t be true. I’m just saying both stories are probably fiction, so we should probably try to find the truth. And we can only do that in Sleepy Hollow, where the legend started.”
Chad’s shoulders swiveled toward her again. “Why would you help us? We scared you. Not on purpose, mind, but we definitely scared you.”
She rolled her eyes. “You did. Not even gonna pretend you didn’t. But you’re forgetting one very important fact.”
“What?” all three asked at the same time.
“Saving you three will set me free, too.” She looked around at them while they apparently looked around at each other again. When they didn’t speak after their silent confab, she rolled her eyes yet again. “If you’re not in the Between anymore, there’s no reason to keep me in the Between. We all go our separate ways. Problem solved.”
“Wait,” Jerome said, sounding confused, “is that… can that be?—”
“Deal,” Chad said, holding out a gloved hand and sounding eager for the first time.
“Deal,” Aaron said, too, also holding out his hand. “I didn’t want to have to drag you here, anyway. If you’ll help us out, too, so much the better.”
“It can’t be that easy,” Jerome protested, crossing his arms. “There has to be a flaw in the logic.”
