“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, youwerewearing 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’talwaysstay 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 itwastrue, 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.”
They rode in near silence again, listening to the clopping and the creaking and the occasional snort of the horses. Esmie tried to absorb the latest bombshell in a night full of bombshells. Or was it still night? Or would it still be night if time still existed? Or had time moved on, as they put it? Jesus, her head hurt. If only she’d brought along some ibuprofen for her walk in the cemetery, though she’d have to dry-swallow them if she had.
And then, she felt it. Not a headache, though that was bad enough on top of the lingering sting in her face and knees.
“Uh, guys?”
