Page 36 of The Horseman of Sleepy Hollow
"That is a selfish answer and you know it."
Exasperated, I shoved against his chest. "Are you trying to drive me away?"
"To keep you safe." His tone turned doleful. "Once you are back at home, we must never see each other again."
"Stop it. That is impossible. I cannot be apart from you, not for long."
"You are being foolish, Katrina."
"No,youare being foolish. You cannot make me love you and then send me back home to marry Brom. Is that what you want? Brom as my husband, hanging over me, cramming his kisses down my throat, rutting into me—"
"Stop!" Eamon clapped a hand over my mouth. "Stop. Very well, you can stay. Devil take me—you can stay as long as you want."
"Good." I pressed my cheek against his chest, listening to the rapid thump of his heart. "Then I will stay forever."
"For now," he amended. "Until you realize that you miss all the luxuries of home."
"I already miss them. But I have found something I would miss more."
His voice thrummed through his ribs into my ear. "You said something, a moment ago—that I made you love me."
"Did I?" I hid a smile in the fold of his shirt. "That does not sound like something Katrina the Coquette would say."
"It does not," he conceded. "But Katrina the Tender-Hearted and Compassionate, Katrina the Clever and Quick-Tongued, Katrina the Irresistible—she might have said it."
"Katrina the Irresistible," I crooned, lifting my face to his. "I think I like it. You must call me that again sometime."
We lay there a long while, sheltered beneath a latticework of whispers and promises—as if words could protect us from the savage world. As if the quiet night could go on forever, and reality would wait as long as we needed it to. As if our kisses had the power to stop time.
"Should we go back?" I whispered at last. "I'm a little cold, and the ground is hard."
"Of course." He leaped up at once, packing up our supplies. I rolled the blankets, moving carefully so as not to disturb my wound.
"Katrina, you should look at the valley," Eamon said. "It is so beautiful in the evening, with all the lighted windows."
"Just a moment." I tightened the blanket roll.
A sharp clapping of broad wings and a faint squawk startled me.
I turned my head in time to see Eamon untwist a scrap of something from the leg of a hawk I recognized. Brom's hawk, brown-feathered with wingtips as black as the night itself.
Horror shuddered in my throat—I wanted to scream, to tell him to stop—but he unrolled the paper before I could make a sound. Words floated from his lips—phrases spoken tonelessly in an unfamiliar tongue, ending with three words I knew all too well—"Katrina Van Tassel."
Eamon looked at me, his lips parted and his eyes already glazed with fell purpose.
The band around his throat glowed brighter and brighter. It dissolved from his neck and floated in a cloud of golden sparks, reforming in his hand as a shining scythe with a wickedly sharp blade.
"Katrina." His voice rasped from his throat between ragged breaths. "Run from me. Run!" The last word climbed into a groaning shriek as his neck jerked aside with a hideous snap. The skin stretched and separated, tendons popping free—and then his head tore away from his body. His beautiful face sizzled, splitting into fiery cracks that branched and widened as flames consumed his skin. Flakes of flesh, black as ash, fell away like shed scales, until nothing was left but raw white bone licked with gold and orange fire. Dark smoke streamed from the stump of his neck, like wild hair tossed on the wind.
The Thing before me was no longer Eamon. It was human-shaped, yet sickeningly wrong—a denizen of the uncanny valley, dripping with the horror of the Other and the Unmade.
The dullahan.
The Headless Horseman.
6
The flaming skull darted toward me, opening its skeletal jaws.
