Page 58 of Hollow

“Wait a minute,” I speak up. None of this is making any sense. “He just got back, yes? As much as I would like to see Brom, doesn’t he need to be with his parents alone? I’m sure they want to talk to him.”

“Darling,” Leona says with a sympathetic tilt of her head. “Didn’t you know that Brom got back days ago? I’m sure it would be fine with them all to join you tonight.”

I turn to Brom in surprise. “You’ve been back for a few days and you didn’t tell me? You didn’t come by and…and…”

There was no news of it. Nothing.

He stares at me for a moment, and he must have learned something from Professor Crane already because I can’t read his face at all. He doesn’t say anything either.

I’m not sure I have a right to feel it, but I feel utterly betrayed that he’s been back and he didn’t even come by to say hello, to let me know he was in Sleepy Hollow and he was okay. What has he been doing?

“He’s been ill,” Sister Margaret says. “Have some compassion, Katrina.”

I look at all of the Sisters. They’re all staring back at me with an expectant look in their eyes, like I’m supposed to shrink into the background like my mother did.

“I do have compassion,” I tell them. “I’ve been sick with worry for years, thinking he was dead, and suddenly he’s back, my best friend is back, and I’m supposed to just be understanding that this was kept from me for days?”

“I’m sorry,” Brom mumbles.

But the fact is I’m not mad at him, not really. I’m not sure what I’m mad at; I’m still trying to get a handle on it. Everything is happening so fast and at once. Me and Crane together, then the horseman, then Brom back in our lives. It’s overwhelming, like I’ve been torn into too many different directions and too soon.

“Perhaps we should let you get back to class,” Leona says. “I’m sure it won’t take long before you’ll be hitting it off like you used to.”

She gives the other witches a look and a sharp jerk of her chin, and they start floating down the hall away from us.

“Sarah,” Leona barks at her. “Come.”

My mother meets my eyes, and for one moment, I see fear. Pure terror, as if she’d just been asked to stride into Hell. Then she turns, her head down, and follows after her sisters.

And I’m left in the hall with a boy I once knew who has turned into a man that I don’t.

Chapter 18

Crane

“Professor Crane,” a student named Matilda, her brown, unruly hair always in a high bun, puts up her hand and starts waving it once I notice her. She’s huddled in the corner with two other students, Josephine and Mark, trying to enter each other’s minds and, from the looks of it, not having a lot of luck with it.

I go over to them, but my eyes drift over to Kat and Brom where they sit with their desks turned toward each other. I’ve been watching them the entire class, unable to look away. The student they’re working with, Paul, has given me a look a few times as if to ask me what my problem is, why I’m staring, but I can’t explain it to him any more than I can explain to them.

How is this happening? How did Abe, my Abe, end up in my classroom?

It’s him. There’s no doubt now that it’s him. When I first walked into the room, I thought I was looking at a ghost from my past. Then I figured there was no possibility this could be the same man I’d been with in New York. Despite looking exactly the same as before, there was one big difference: he no longer looked afraid. That fear was replaced with a blankness. And when he looked me in the eyes for just the briefest of moments, his eyes held nothing in them. They were glass black and empty. He didn’t see me at all. No recognition, no nothing. I would have been insulted, as if my cock was that forgettable, had it not been so confusing.

But when Sister Margaret announced him as Abraham Van Brunt, that sealed the deal.

It was him.

My haunted lover.

My hunted lover.

And he’s here for reasons I don’t understand.

Then there’s the fact that Kat knows him. Knows him well. Perhaps even loved him at one point, judging by the fierceness of their embrace.

Jealousy stabbed me like a knife to the heart. I was jealous of him. I was jealous of her. Two humans I craved having this ease and intimacy with each other, giving each other what I wanted.

But then they were called out into the hall by a Sister Margaret that I barely recognized, her face stretched with glee. I don’t know much about Sleepy Hollow, I don’t know their legends and their ghosts and what has happened in the walls of this school or in the streets of their town, but it’s apparent that both Kat and Abe/Brom/Abraham have some twisted history here.