“What’s brought this on?”
Zef reddened and spread his hands. “Where were you?” He kicked the piano. “Where were you, you witch?”
She went to him. “Don’t.”
“Why? It’s true now, isn’t it? I can say it all I want. Witch witch witch witch witch.”
Valerie lost her cool. She slammed a fist on the lid, hard enough to vibrate the strings. She swept a pile of sheet music onto the floor, filling the space between them with angry staccato chords. If not for the Dead Zone, all the windows might have blown out. She composed herself, fingering the red-gold seashell at her throat. “I’m sorry. I can’t take this tonight.”
“Fine. I can’t take you either.”
“Stop. Talk to me. What can I do?”
Zef turned a circle. “I saw my dad today, you know. Sitting in a pile of garbage, like always. Telling me he loves me, like always. Lying to my face, like always. My mom’s… like she is.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m just feeling… screwed over.” He sniffed, squared his shoulders. “He used to knock me around a little, you know. You did know, didn’t you?”
The words hung suspended, waiting for the next downbeat. Valerie massaged her hand. Finally she brought it to her valve. “I suspected.”
“No. You knew. I used to come running downstairs. You knew.”
“I—”
“Admit it.”
Valerie hung her head. She knelt and gathered the music into her lap one-handed. “I yelled at Hadewych. I did. Best I could. But not enough. I never had—the voice. I was a coward back then.”
Zef scowled down at her. “Don’t I know it.”
“But I was always there—to listen.”
“I know. To listen and to make me cookies and to put a steak on my eye.”
“That only happened once.”
“That you saw.”
The air felt crystalline, somehow, as if it would shatter if their emotions rose to too high a pitch. Valerie hugged the scores to her chest. “How bad did it get?”
“Bad enough.” He sat at the piano in silence. Valerie stood looking at him, feeling shame and helplessness. She should have been braver. Why is bravery so rare in the world, when so many things need doing? After a minute, he played a few dissonant chords. “Guess I should have taken you up on those piano lessons.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“‘Only pansies play piano,’” he quoted, in perfect imitation of Hadewych.
She stood. “He’ll never hurt you again. I promise. I’m not afraid of him now.”
Zef closed the keyboard and laid his head on his arms. “I wish you’d been less afraid when it counted.”
“So do I.”
His shoulders heaved but he didn’t show his tears. “My dad is a monster.”
“I know.”
“My mom is—pretty bad too.”
She laid the music on the piano. “I’m sorry.”
He wiped his face and looked at her. His lower lip trembled. “What are you, Valerie?”
She sat next to him on the bench. “I’m here.”
His face crumpled.
She opened her arms.
And they embraced, sobbing.
“I can’t believe you’re home,” said Paul Usher.
“I can’t believe it either,” said Kate.
“It’s a miracle,” said Mather.
Kate wished Mather had let her speak with her dad privately. Mather stood in the corner of her new bedroom, listening to their entire conversation on speakerphone. She stood, dry and in clean clothes, rubbing her arms, feeling exposed and awkward, clumsy and big. She’d forgotten what having a body felt like.
“Okay then,” Usher said. “I’m on my way, baby girl.”
“You’re leaving now?”
“Yeah. I’ll take the town car. I should be home by dawn.”
“Paul,” said Mather, with an edge. “You have a debate tomorrow night. The last debate.”
“Screw it,” said Usher. “I’m losing this damn election anyway.”
“You will if you no-show. Kate is fine. We’ve got her here. There’s no reason to rush back.”
“No reason?” Kate couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Mather raised a finger. “You don’t want to spoil your father’s chances, do you? This whole affair has done enough damage.”
“Shut up, Simon,” said Usher.
“What does he mean, Daddy?”
“Nothing I can’t handle. We had a big article come out yesterday morning. ‘Paul Usher hiding daughter’s disappearance.’”
“Ah!” Mather leaned over the speaker. “But now you can announce Kate’s return at the debate. Should be good for six points. I know you’ve missed her, but let me be the harsh voice of reason here. Come back day after tomorrow, after the spinning is over. There’s a bad storm between us anyway.”
Paul sighed. “What do you want, honey?”
All Kate wanted was for her daddy to come running home and throw his arms around her and make it better. All she wanted was to lean over this speaker—so like the Spirit Box of the Ghost Hunter—and scream, “I am here! I am here!” She knew her dad would run home if she demanded it, but some things you just don’t demand. If you have to demand them, then they’re not worth having.
“Whatever you think,” she whispered, hugging herself a little tighter.
Usher sounded thoughtful and impressed. “Did you say… six points, Simon?”
“I did, sir.”
“That’s… almost enough.”
“Maybe ten.”
“And I should break it at the debate?”
“Wait for Wood to hit you with the ‘neglectful father’ line. Use the Kate reveal to counterpunch.”
“Good idea.”
Kate’s heart sank. She felt insubstantial again, as she’d felt in the cemetery. No up or down, nothing to hold her to the earth. “So. You’ll be back—”
“Day after tomorrow, baby. Okay?”
“Sure. No problem.”
Mather cleared his throat. “Paul, don’t skip your afternoon rally that day. Let us bring her to you. As soon as the rain clears. She can join you on the stump. The press will need to see her, and she shouldn’t be down here anyway. She might get possessed again.”
“Yeah,” said Kate. “And imagine how many points that would cost you.”
“What was that, honey?”
“Just a joke, Daddy. Just a joke. I’ll… see you whenever.”
Kate locked the door as soon as Mather left. She checked all the bedroom windows, making sure they were fastened tight. She looked out over the rain-lashed grounds of Lyndhurst, over the long drive turned cataract by the storm, running black between the writhing linden trees. In the far distance, she could see the gates of the property, locked tight, and the brake lights of some car passing on Broadway, like two predator-eyes peering through the iron bars. She hid behind the drapes until the eyes passed by. Down below, men in black body armor stood alongside the porte cochère. Guards manned every corner of the house and strategic points to either side, like onyx statues, unfazed and un-eroded by the pounding rain. Her father kept his men armed with the latest high-tech weapons. That was something. She had asked Mather for a gun of her own, but he’d refused her. Lyndhurst Manor was safe, he’d said, and poor little Kate could trust in the people around her and relax.
Like hell she could. None of them knew the danger. None had felt what she had felt, that overwhelming crush of another personality breaking all the locks of your soul, evicting you, leaving you to stumble homeless and bodiless among the graves. She knew better than to think she was safe, even for a moment. Two strong guards had failed to protect her on the night Agathe came calling at the Usher house. Red and Big Gulp had died as easily as if the witch had flicked a switch to kill their lights. Kate’s gun hadn’t protected her either. Nothing physical could protect her from the hag that stalked this rain. Only magic could.
Her fingers went t
o the talisman. Still there, as it had been ten seconds prior, and ten seconds before that.
She resented the lamplight, as if she stood on stage, revealed to some audience outside. She turned off the lamps and pulled the curtains tight. But she couldn’t shutter the wide skylight above. It snapped a white sheet of lightning-flash across her bed, and the rain on its panes of glass sounded like the spill of a coin collection.
Kate went to the closet, searching for something to sleep in. Jessica had left a nightdress on the duvet, diaphanous and ghostly. That wouldn’t do. She found boxes of dusty outfits—seasonal clothes for the mannequins—and pulled them on, layer after layer. Summer shirts and sweatpants and blouses and winter sweaters, until she felt armored and, if not safe, at least… comforted.
Someone tapped on the door, and she tensed.
“Kate? It’s me.”
She didn’t open up for Jason. She made sure by touch that her door was locked, and she whispered through the wood, “I’m… not wearing anything. What do you want?”
“Just checking on you. You didn’t say much on the way here. Are you okay?”
She almost broke into tears. She almost opened the door and threw her arms around his neck. She almost said, “No, I’m not okay. Please stay with me tonight.” But she did none of these things. She gave her voice a bright shield and said, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“After what we’ve been through? Maybe you shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’m a big girl, Jason.”
“I know.”
“Go to bed.”
“Okay. Sorry.” She waited, but heard no footsteps, only, “Are you sure?”
Kate wasn’t sure. Was she a big girl, really? Or was she a little lost firefly? Her body felt big. Enormous, as if she had become Godzilla, crushing the carpet with titanic feet. But her soul was still flickering, deep inside this beast of a thing. She felt alien to herself and alienated from everyone else—from everyone who owned their skins, free and clear. Even from this boy whom she—
“Good night, Jason.”
“Good night.” Again no footsteps. “I—”
“Get some sleep.”
She listened until she heard a sigh and his lumbering size seventeens receding. In a panic, she wrenched the door open and searched the hall, but Jason was gone. She hyperventilated for a few seconds, withdrew into her chamber, and tested all the locks until she was satisfied.
She tripped on her way to the bed, but her extra padding protected her from injury. It felt wonderful, actually, to feel the world spin around her again. It was gravity that felt strange. She’d forgotten how it weighs you down, keeps you in one place. She lay on the floor, sweating inside her many layers, curling into a ball. The dark crevasse under the bed reminded her of the crypt beneath the Old Dutch Church. That had always been a safe place to sleep. She would sleep there until Mr. Irving came to fetch her.
She wriggled beneath the bed and lay listening to the rain, worried for Gunsmoke. Her fingers touched the talisman each time the skylight caught lightning.
Still there.
Still there.
Still there.
She blinked in the darkness, again and again, and fell into her ghost-sleep at last… but only when the murky light of dawn told her she was safe.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
“The War Council”
Jason slept for fifteen hours. Not in a filthy cot in a dusty lighthouse, but in a four-poster bed with carved eucalyptus leaves and great eagles on the headboard, under sheets that felt like whipped cream and angel feathers. He slept without nightmares, without any dreams at all, and when he woke, his head felt clear and ready for action. He woke to a gourmet lunch served on hundred-year-old china, to café au lait and strawberry danish and gloriously cold milk. He woke to electric lights and hot water and… safety. He took a long shower and shaved. He put on clean clothes—fresh, sweet-smelling, laundered, well-fitting clothes—and gratefully swallowed the pain pills Joey had scrounged up. His shoulder ached, and his nerves were shot, but he’d slept without leg cramps or severed-head laughter or the threat of Hadewych’s return. He was alive and free and back with his friends.
He wanted to do many things. He wanted to confront Mather about the summons ten years ago, the summons that had taken his parents away, to see if it was connected to the Appointed. He wanted to eat until his stomach burst. He wanted to play “Death and Carnage” with Joey, to spend an hour on the internet looking at cat videos, to try like hell to magically couple with Kate—for as long as it took until her Gift returned, and then a month more for good measure. He wanted to forget the cellar, the altar of skulls, the crimes of William Crane, and the many horrors he’d seen. But most of all, he wanted to rid Sleepy Hollow of its monsters, by any means necessary.
The afternoon breathed its last. Night fell, almost imperceptibly. The grey-green light that filtered through the torrential storm dimmed and darkened, as if the world were falling down, down, down into some abyss.
A red moon was coming, the clock was ticking, and they needed a plan.
Jason, Kate, Joey, and Zef met in the music room at nine p.m. If anyone asked, they had merely assembled to hear Valerie play piano. But this was no concert. It was a council of war. They huddled around the instrument, whispering over the music, telling their ghost stories.
Jason went first. Over the slow movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique, he wove his tale of the zethaak puzzle that opened the cellar, of Brom’s water lock, exploring Agathe’s lair and getting locked underground, of finding the altar of skulls, fleeing Eddie Martinez, and falling from the Tappan Zee Bridge. He hesitated, but laid out the crimes of William Crane too. That part embarrassed him, and he felt oddly sorry for Ichabod, who’d had such a father. As he described his ordeal at the lighthouse and the death of Dr. Tamper, his voice cracked a few times, but he held it together.
Zef did not. He lost it a little when he heard about Hadewych killing the doctor, and excused himself to stare out the window. A shutter had loosened on a pocket door; Zef let it slap the face of his reflection. Jason continued, giving an abridged version of Agathe’s tale and an account of his leap from the lighthouse with Kate.
Joey told his ghost story next, speaking over Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Jason wept to hear that Charley had been found, and that the little poodle was safe at Joey’s house, fed and groomed and sporting jungle-red toenails. Zef joined in to relate the homecoming massacre, and Jason listened with horror to their account.
“You saw William Crane?” he said.
Joey nodded. “And he said… I’m sorry man, but… he said you have to die, for this to end.”
Jason had expected this, but it was a chilling confirmation.
Joey looked fearful. “But of course that’s not going to happen. Right? Right?”
“Of course not,” said Kate, her fingers stroking Jason’s forearm. “Believe me, ghosts are fallible.”
“It’s Zef’s turn,” said Jason, changing the subject.
Zef told his own ghost story without expression, and without looking at anyone. He spoke of confronting his father, and his voice became morose and bitter. He glanced nervously at Kate when he spoke of Agathe, of how she’d burned his hand, of how she’d flown above the house during the attack on Gory Brook. Kate listened stoically. Jason put an arm around her for support.
Kate told her ghost story last, speaking over Joey’s musical request, “Pretty Women” from Sweeney Todd. Jason’s heart leapt to hear that she’d met Eliza, and that she’d done what she could to rescue his grandmother’s soul from bondage. Kate accepted his thank-yous. She’d come to the Horseman’s possession of Gunsmoke when Joey leaned across the piano and raised a skeptical eyebrow, his chin on folded hands.
“So,” Joey said. “You were a firefly.”
“Don’t,” said Kate.
“It’s just a question. Blink once for yes and twice for no.”
“Cut it out,” said Jason. “We don’t have tim
e for jokes. Agathe said ‘two nights’ and then she’d glut the millpond with blood. One night’s already here. We have until tomorrow and then… the moon’s red and the shit goes down. Everybody could be in danger. Okay, say we told Mather what’s at stake? Would he let us out?”
“No,” said Zef. “He doesn’t care about normals getting hurt.”
The group looked to Kate, who knew Mather better than any of them. She nodded. “He’d just cover it up and go on.”
“So we’ll have to escape,” said Jason. “Agreed?”
The group fell into silence, thinking, five heads bent over the piano keys. Valerie played a dissonant passage and Jason felt a jolt of fear. Not anything specific, just a little dart of terror, like a mouse zipping along the baseboard.
“Agathe needs her reliquary,” said Jason. “Maybe if we keep it away from her, she’ll postpone whatever she’s planning.”
“Where is it?” said Zef.
Kate lowered her voice. “We almost lost it in the river. But it’s safe. We hid it in the woods.”
“I hate to say this,” whispered Jason, turning to Kate. “She needs you too.”
“I know.”
“Don’t worry. I promise I won’t let her—”
“I can protect myself.”
“I know that, but—”
“I have the talisman. I won’t take it off. That’s all we can do.”
Jason reached for her. “Not all. If Valerie’s right, and Agathe can only use you because we coupled, then maybe you and I could…”
“I know,” Kate said, glancing at the others with a look of embarrassment. “Believe me, I know. And while I’m sure that would be… fun… drop that too, please.”
“Just an idea,” Jason said, backing away. He knew from her face that they wouldn’t attempt another coupling any time soon. He was the source of all her problems, wasn’t he? Hell, his ancestor was the source of everyone’s problems. Maybe he should just give himself to the Horseman, surrender, and satisfy the damn ghost.
SLEEPY HOLLOW: General of the Dead (Jason Crane Book 3) Page 55