Chad snorted but stepped over beside her and lifted a hand. “Okay, now that we’ve all regained our senses, let’s sit down and have an adult conversation. Agreed?”
She grunted and turned to look over her shoulder. “What about your—oh.”
The horse was already unsaddled, unblanketed, and munching on grass behind her. The grass wasn’t exactly green and didn’t look particularly appetizing, but it didn’t seem to bother the horse, so she didn’t bring up the fact.
“Never mind. So I do have some questions.”
“I thought you might.” Chad sat down beside her, crossed his legs criss-cross-applesauce, and laid his gloved hands on his knees. “Shoot.”
The other two Horsemen sat down to form a rough square. She looked around at them, debating mentioning how crazy it was to be talking to three people who had no fucking heads, then gave up on sanity and took the plunge.
“Okay. I’m going to skip the craziness of you being Headless Horsemen for now. We can talk about that later. How are you guys apparently students from MSU? Make that make sense for me, please.”
Aaron raised his hand a little. “What year is it, Miss Esmie?”
“You can just call me Esmie. And it’s 2026.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why? What year do you think it is?”
He nodded, his lips tucking in a little grimace. “It’s been longer than I thought. I was guessing somewhere in the early teens.” He shook his head slightly. “Time doesn’t progress here, obviously. We just keep getting caught between moments when we cross into the Now and back.”
She blinked. “I don’t think that makes sense. Either time progresses or it doesn’t. How can you be aware of the passage of time if time doesn’t pass?”
Chad lifted a hand. “The Between isn’t really ahere,so when he says time doesn’t pass here, he’s really saying time stops the second we cross over and starts again the second we cross back. This place? Where we are right now? This moment? Never exists again once we leave it.”
She tried to work her mind around that for a long moment, but quantum physics, if that’s what it was, was so not her field of study.
“Uh,” she finally said, “that’s a little beyond me. Does it have something to do with how you guys are students from my same university? Because I’m not seeing that.”
“It does,” Jerome said. “See, we went to your school back in 1988.”
She blinked again. “I’m sorry?”
“Would’ve graduated with my master’s in criminal justice in less than a year.” The headless body shrugged. “Chad would’ve had his history degree a semester before me. Aaron was a year behind us, but he was our friend through Alpha Sigma Psi. Buncha school chums, living the dream.”
Aaron sighed. “Must you make it sound so grand?”
Jerome snorted. “Dude, we’re headless. If that isn’t worthy of an epic story, I don’t know what is.”
Chad cleared his throat, which was strange and horrifying and something she hoped to never see again. “Okay, maybe I should take over. This would take an eternity even here if left to you two.” His shoulders turned toward her, suggesting his full attention was on her. “To get right to it, coming up on Halloween, we made a stupid mistake. We all fell for the same girl. She was this cute Goth girl, a transfer from New York, and we were preppy ASP men who thought we were better than Missouri, and we lost our heads. Not literally yet, but you know what I mean.”
Jerome snorted, and Aaron let out a surprised little giggle, but Esmie was not amused. She stared at Chad’s messy severed neck and waited for him to continue. It wasn’t a clean cut. A notch in the middle spoke of an interrupted chop and a second swipe. It made her gorge rise in her throat, even though it wasn’t at all bloody.
“Long story short, she told us if we went to New York and came back with the Headless Horseman’s skull, we’d win her… well, her hand, let’s say.” He left a very deliberate pause that,thankfully, nobody filled. Not even Jerome. “So, like idiots, we packed our bags and headed out for Sleepy Hollow, found the Horseman’s resting place, dug him up, and… no head.”
Her shoulders had tensed through the summarized tale, but they relaxed now, and she rolled her eyes. Why bother telling the tale at all if it was just a bunch of pointless dramatics?
Jerome reached down and pulled his sword partially from its sheath. She flinched at the sudden sound.
“So we stole his sword, instead.”
Now, she looked appalled.
“What? We figured it was close enough.”
Rolling her eyes, she scoffed.
Aaron sighed. “What we didn’t figure was not even getting to the tree line before the Headless Horseman, in all his macabre glory, rose up and cursed us for our audacity. Literally cursed us, not cussed us out.”
She looked from one to the other, then back at Chad, whose shoulders rose and fell.
