“Undead strength, yes.”
“Oh.”
With the wind neatly taken out of her sails, she did as he instructed and leaned to her right as he gently lifted her off the horse and lowered her to the ground. It was a long way, as the horse was ridiculously tall, but he barely jostled her as he settled her on her feet. Then, wonder of wonders, he simply let her go.
Of course, she’d already tried to run, and where would she go now? She was in the Between, with a supernatural hurricane portal between her and home.
“Thank you,” she said when she felt less off-balance.
“No problem,” he said, finally letting some of his formality slip. He dismounted, too, though he kept the horse’s reins in hand. “I assume you have questions?”
“Only about a million.” She looked around, then decided to get the first, most important ones out of the way. She looked right at them as the other two dismounted and moved in closer, their horses at their backs. “What are you?”
“Headless Horsemen,” Jerome, the smartass, answered. Unfortunately, he didn’t sound like he was joking this time. “Emphasis on the headless part.”
Aaron sighed. “There’s an explanation, but it’s a long one. Maybe it could wait until we’re back at camp?”
“Where’s camp?” she asked, frowning.
“It changes,” Chad answered, stroking his horse’s nose. “We move around to avoid discovery. We don’t want the other Horseman’s infamy. We just want to be left alone and do our duty as rarely as possible.”
She blinked. “Yeah, I’m gonna need an explanation there.”
“At camp,” Jerome said, sounding put-upon.
“Fine. Whatever.” She grunted. “But why are you human… well… headless, but with human bodies, I guess… here—wherever here is—but you’re like bundles of twigs in the real world?”
“Because we’re nothing but bones there,” Aaron said, fidgeting with his horse’s reins. “Is it gross? I bet it’s gross. We’re really sorry. But the jack o’lantern heads are cool, right?”
“Um.” She thought it prudent not to mention she’d just about peed herself while they’d thrown them around her. “One more thing, and then I guess we can go. Where….” She gestured around the watered-down landscape. “Where are we? The Between, I mean? Where is it?”
Chad sighed. At least it didn’t sound like lonely wind blowing over an empty eye socket now.
“Between, as in between moments. We’re outside of time. We’re cursed, you see, to never rest, to be ever wakeful for foolhardy souls alone. To usher them into the Beyond, where they learn forever what lies past time, past the Between. That’s what happens to people who wander alone and fall upon a Headless Horseman’s sword.”
She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself.
Jerome, on the other hand, snorted. “Well said, Fancy Pants. Putting that history major to good use again. Why don’t you just use real words like the rest of us, dude?”
Aaron tsked. “Forgive them. Chad wanted to retire as a writer and made the mistake of telling us once when he was drunk. Jerome never let him live it down. Even now.”
“That is privileged information,” Jerome said, though he sounded amused.
“And Jerome, as you can probably tell, was in law school.”
But Esmie was still stuck back in the Between, the Beyond, and what happened to those wandering alone. Because she had been wandering alone, and look what had happened. She should have died on a Horseman’s sword. Why hadn’t she?
Because these Horsemen didn’t kill women? Because they were ASP men, frat boys from her own campus? How was that even possible?
At camp,she could hear Jerome say in long-suffering tones.
“Hey, are you okay?” Aaron asked, his voice gentle and considerate.
“No,” she said honestly.
“Oh. I’m?—”
“I know.” She shook her head. “You don’t have to say it.”
