Hollowed: Return to Sleepy Hollow, the Complete Duology

by Candace Wondrak

  My lips were on his for a few seconds, but he didn’t kiss me back, so I eventually pulled away. Though he’d told me he wanted me, spoke his first words to me earlier today, he did not make any moves now. Why? Did he change his mind?

  God, I felt awful now. I dropped my hand from his face, hating that I’d crossed the line—especially at a time like this. I guess I was weaker than I thought I was, huh? “I’m sorry,” I quickly muttered, pulling away from him completely. Or…trying to, at least.

  Wash didn’t let me go; he pulled me back to him, practically tugging me onto his lap. He said nothing as his gaze dropped to my mouth. I sat on his lap with my legs hanging off the side of the bed, right in between his. I almost felt like a child where I was, compared to him, but the truth was that neither of us were children. We were both adults, even if we weren’t both strictly human.

  I was human with a bit of witch in me, and Wash? Wash was whatever he was, human turned spirit or spirit turned human. It didn’t matter.

  This time, he was the one who closed the distance between us. This time, Wash made the move. This time, when I felt his mouth on mine, he was kissing me back, telling me in the only way he could that I was not alone in what I felt.

  A fire ignited within me, and I immediately lost myself in him. The feeling of his mouth on mine, our lips entwined. My arms hooking around his neck and holding him closer to me, as if either of us would dare pull away. His hands roamed my back, gripping the fabric of my shirt with a fervency I never knew he was capable of. I gently bit his lower lip, initiating a deep-throated moan from him that made my inner thighs tremble.

  Such a low, deep moan. His voice—God, why didn’t this man talk more often? And what other sounds could I get him to make? I needed to know, had to hear them for myself, mostly because his voice was like honey mixed with whiskey, sweet and smooth, rough and scratchy at the same time.

  In this moment, we devoured each other as only hungry, desperate people could. We needed each other more than words could say, but our actions more than made up for it. I turned until I sat on his lap and straddled him on the edge of the bed. When I ran my tongue over his bottom lip, he moaned again, holding me harder, tighter against the steel-like muscles on his chest. A growing hardness pressed beneath me, and it took every ounce of self-control in me to not push Wash down on the bed and yank his pants off and see just what I was working with.

  From what it felt like…it was a lot.

  Was it a mistake to kiss him right now, to do this? Probably. Should I be in the other room with Crane and Bones? Definitely. This…this was just a distraction. A beautiful, passionate, undeserved distraction that shook me to my very core.

  I needed more. I needed so much more than these spare moments would allow, but what I needed would have to wait. Even though I wanted to continue this, I knew we couldn’t. As it was, we probably already had taken this a bit too far, no thanks to me and my horny side.

  Better horny than sad, right?

  Then again, better face reality than hide from it while having sex with Wash in a bedroom that wasn’t his.

  Okay, when I put it like that, it was ten different kinds of wrong, even though it felt good.

  I sluggishly pulled my lips off his, opening my eyes to find he already stared at me, expectant but not upset. “We should stop,” I whispered, my voice ragged, my breathing unsteady. Of course I didn’t want to stop, but anyone could see how wrong this was. Bones needed me, needed us, so we couldn’t hide away in his bedroom and fuck.

  Even though I really, really wanted to.

  Wash nodded once, his mouth a bit red from our make-out session. He said nothing as I crawled off him, being sure to fix my clothes as I stood up. Wash took his time standing, glancing down at himself and seeing the hard-on pressing against his pants. Had he ever had an erection before, being the Headless Horseman? If he was a spirit who was never a man…I’d say no. If he was a human before all this, then maybe. But then again, maybe not. It was quite possible he had no memories of his human days, if he ever had them.

  “You can stay in here until it goes away,” I suggested, giving him a tiny smile, though the last thing I felt like doing was smiling. Yep, the awful, depressed emotions were back in full force, ready to take over and make me bawl like a baby.

  I left Wash in the bedroom, touching my lips as I walked through the house. I couldn’t believe what I did, what I almost just did with Wash—and in Bones’s bed, too. For shame. Someone get me a red letter A and pin it to my chest. Bones and his situation was what I should be focusing on, trying to find a way to separate the spirit from him without killing him, not finally getting freaky with Wash.

  I found Crane sitting near Bones; he’d pulled up a chair to sit beside him as he cleaned his arms. Bones looked better, less covered in blood, although his clothes were still stained in numerous places. His blonde head hung low, and he was still unconscious. Crane was in the process of wrapping a bandage around one of the particularly deep cuts on Bones’s arm when I came in.

  “How is he?” I asked, not knowing why I bothered. It’s clear Bones was unconscious, and that he was possessed. Shitty would be the answer.

  “Not well, I’m afraid,” Crane replied, finishing up before glancing at me. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, Kat. As far as I know, once a spirit enters a body, it can only leave the body once the soul is gone—and even then, we know a spirit can inhabit a corpse too, though not for long. Expelling the spirit without harming Brom is…” He trailed off, refusing to say the final word: impossible.

  No. Nothing was impossible. You just had to work for it. If spirits were real, if the Headless fucking Horseman was real, there had to be a way to do it. If I had to wade through research and figure it out myself, I would. I hated shoving my nose into books that were hundreds of years old, but I’d do it.

  “There has to be a way,” I said. “There has to.”

  Crane got up and rubbed the back of his neck. His eyes drifted toward the other body lying on the floor, and he said, “I need to figure out where he came from, but if you want to start researching, I can take you back to the house—”

  “No,” I cut in with a vehement shake of my head. My auburn hair flew every which way, but I’d already made up my mind. “I’m not leaving his side.”

  “Alright, however I’m not sure how we’ll come up with a solution while watching him,” Crane spoke with a sigh. He disappeared into a side door leading into the garage after muttering something about gloves.

  Crane’s negativity was deserved, and it made sense, but still I did not want to face the fact that we might lose Bones. I’d grown up with Bones. Bones was the only good thing about this place for so long, the only part of my summers that I looked forward to. Without Bones, Sleepy Hollow just wouldn’t be the same.

  I went toward the chair Crane had been sitting in, a plain wooden thing that had somehow collected a few drops of blood. I pulled it away from Bones, not wanting to sit too close to him. The nearness would only hurt me, and I was already breaking inside. At this point, I wasn’t sure how much more I could take.

  “We’re going to save you,” I told his unconscious form, hoping, praying that somewhere inside that body, Bones could hear me. And I hoped he believed me, too. Without any hope, he wouldn’t have the will to keep fighting. I had no clue how strong his soul was, how long it would last.

  It didn’t matter though, did it? The spirit possessing him didn’t want an extended meal; it simply wanted to kill him. It wanted to hurt me, for whatever reason. If it thought all it would take for me to let a spirit in was me watching Bones die…well, it might be right, but I planned on doing my best to avoid that particular ending to this.

  Bones would live, I would see to it.

  A breeze came out of nowhere, and I felt the charmed pendant on my chest start to move. None of the windows were open, and none of the doors were. There should be no breeze, and yet there was.

  Knowing what happened the last tim
e there was a random breeze, my hand flew up and stopped the pendant before it could fall off. No random trips into the otherworld for me this time.

  The wind abruptly halted the moment Wash made an appearance, coming from the hallway with a stern expression on his face, almost as if he knew what had just happened. His black eyes fell on me, on my hunched position in the chair, his mouth a thin line. No more erection, thankfully.

  I was about to ask Wash about it, but Bones stirred. Or, rather, the spirit inside of him did. His neck slowly lifted, and his blue, cloudy eyes opened, staring right at me from the get-go. When he smiled, it was not Bones’s easy, dimpled smile. There were no dimples, which was an odd sight.

  “The little bird thinks she’s ready to fight her, does she?” Bones asked, his voice falling onto my ears like nails on a chalkboard.

  My eyebrows furrowed instantly, and I glanced at Wash before asking, “Who are you talking about?”

  All Bones did was laugh.

  Crane emerged from the garage, worn leather gloves in his hands. He was in the process of sliding them on when he spotted that Bones was awake. His long legs drew him to my side. “What did he say?”

  “He asked if I think I’m ready to fight her,” I muttered, feeling…strange. Like I wasn’t myself. Like, deep down, a part of me unknown to myself already knew the answer. “But he won’t say who.”

  Crane analyzed this quickly. Behind his glasses, his eyes widened. To Bones, he inquired, “You mean to say you aren’t working by yourself?”

  The spirit wearing Bones’s skin flashed another dimple-less smile. “Tick, tock. Tick, tock, around the clock we go. Tick, tock. Tick, tock, soon you’ll all know.” His shoulders rose and fell with laughter as much as they could, considering he was taped to a chair using nearly a full roll of duct tape. “She hides, she waits, she plots, she baits. She’ll get you, you know. Tick tock.”

  Right. Because that wasn’t creepy at all.

  Crane let out a long sigh. “We certainly have our work cut out for us.”

  He could definitely say that again.

  Chapter Nine

  I came to the conclusion that spirits were ramblers. Both the one inhabiting Bones and the one who’d commandeered my dad’s body from the hospital morgue were talkative shits. I didn’t think they were the same one. I was ninety-nine percent sure that Wash had taken care of the one possessing my dad for good, using the other edge of his double-sided ax. This one…this one was different. It spoke a little different, and yet it was still super creepy.

  I sat on the floor, my back against the wall, staring at Bones. Crane was in the kitchen, cleaning up, and Wash stood nearby with his arms crossed, muscles bulging, as if his presence would scare the spirit in Bones. It wasn’t frightened, because it knew it inhabited a body I wasn’t prepared to lose.

  It had a leg up on us, that much was clear.

  Bones was smiling his dimple-less smile, and I wanted to vomit. I hated how smug this thing was. No matter what happened, we couldn’t let this thing get away with what it’d done. It had to pay, and it would do so with its life. I’d sick Wash on it, and do it with a real, genuine smile on my face.

  “You’re thinking,” I spoke to it, knowing I shouldn’t. Talking to this thing got me nowhere, and yet what else was there to do? At least until the body of the old man was taken care of. Then we could figure out what to do with Bones and the spirit. Now would be a really nice time for that book of shadows to pop up.

  But of course it wouldn’t. My luck wasn’t that good, so why would it reveal itself to me now?

  “You waste time trying to save him,” the spirit used Bones’s voice to speak, and the sound sent needles down my spine, poking and prodding and generally sounding awful. “He cannot be saved. He is already mine.” The smile on Bones’s face grew even wider before it added, “And he is delicious.”

  My fists clenched. Oh, how badly I wanted to pop this fucker in the mouth—but I’d only end up popping Bones in the mouth, so I couldn’t. Did spirits even feel while stuck in a human body? Could they feel pain or were they just passengers driving a car they could only control? Not feeling pain…it actually sounded kind of nice.

  “We’re going to find a way to pull you out of him,” I practically growled out, as if Bones was a cub of mine and I was his lioness mother. “And when we do, I’m going to make sure you feel every ounce of pain you’ve put us through.”

  The spirit said nothing more, simply continuing to smile that creepy, ghostly smile.

  I got to my feet, tossing a quick look at Wash as I said, “Watch him.” Bones needed someone to watch him at all times, just in case he pulled any funny spirit tricks. No, he wasn’t going to get away from us that easily. We had him, and therefore the spirit inside of him, and we weren’t going to let either of them go.

  I found Crane deeper in the kitchen. He’d placed a sheet over the elderly man’s body. I had no idea how long it would take for the corpse to start to smell, but I didn’t want to find out. The smell of rotting flesh…it’s something you never forgot, the absolute worst smell on this entire world.

  Crane reached for his glasses, taking them off his nose and cleaning the lenses. The old man’s beat-up wallet sat on the counter near him, its worn leather opened, his ID out. I peered at it, finding it had expired quite a few years ago.

  “I searched his name,” Crane spoke, glancing at me once his glasses were clean and back on his head. The kitchen looked much better than it had when we walked in; all the blood spots were gone. Besides the body and the possessed Bones just around the corner, it was as if none of it had happened. “He’s from the local nursing home. The news just aired a story about him. They don’t know where he went, but reports say it looked like he hopped out of his bed and just walked out.”

  I said nothing, not knowing what the right thing to say in this conversation was.

  “Everyone there found it extremely odd when reviewing the security footage, because he’s been in a wheelchair with a bum leg for the last three and a half years,” Crane went on. “The whole town is going to be looking for him. Who knows if someone saw him come here? If the fingers point to Bones’s house, then it’s only a matter of time before they come here looking for him, which means…”

  I knew what Crane was getting at. “Which means we need to figure out what to do sooner rather than later.”

  He nodded.

  “And what are we going to do about him?” I glanced over my shoulder at the man under the sheet. An innocent man, one who was just weak enough for the spirit to claim and use for its own devices. “We obviously can’t leave him here.”

  Crane held up a finger. “I did think of something, but it requires Wash’s help.” He then explained the plan to me, which, if I was honest, was about the only plan we had when it came to this situation.

  Basically, we’d use Wash’s ability to go into the otherworld to our advantage. Use him to take the old man’s body back into the nursing home and leave him in his bed. Move him in the otherworld and deposit him in the real world. I knew Wash could do it; he’d pulled me from the otherworld on more than one occasion.

  “And what about Bones while all that’s happening?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t want to leave you here alone with him, but I do have to show Wash where the nursing home is, as I’m more than certain he doesn’t know what a nursing home is,” Crane stated. True enough, too. Wash wasn’t aware of what a lot of things were. A nursing home would probably only confuse him, and unlike ninety-nine percent of people today, there was no way Wash would be able to find it on his own if we gave him the address.

  Crane was right, though. Leaving me alone with Bones probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do.

  But still, what else were we going to do? This was the only plan we had, and once we got rid of the old man’s body—not a sentence I thought I’d ever think—we could focus on saving Bones.

  If I had to put myself in danger in order to save him, then so be it. Fo
r Bones, I’d do anything.

  “I’ll be fine here,” I said. “I have the charm, remember?” I lightly touched the necklace hanging on my chest, and Crane’s eyes fell to the pendant. Not to my breasts, but the pendant. “If you take him with Wash, I’m sure I’ll be fine. It’ll be a quick trip. You won’t be gone for long.” At this point, I didn’t know who I was trying to convince: me or him. Maybe convince us both.

  Crane stepped closer to me, saying, “You had the pendant on you before, when you—”

  “Yes,” I told him, recalling the cemetery incident. Though it felt like it had happened ages ago, it was only yesterday. Damn. My life in Sleepy Hollow either flew by or crawled along, like a snail. “But now I know what to look for. Any sudden, strange winds that don’t belong come creeping by, and I’ll hold the pendant to me, stop it from falling off.” Of course I didn’t tell him a wind had already tried to yank it off here—that would’ve been the last straw, I think.

  Crane gave me a look. “Kat, I don’t want to put you in danger again. If you hadn’t left the directions to Wash’s head, I—”

  Again, I knew what he was going to say. They wouldn’t have found me. Crane was speaking the truth, but it was a truth I didn’t want to hear, a truth that only made me feel worse—but then, of course, it made me wonder…

  “I will be fine here,” I said again, moving towards him. I wrapped my arms around him, giving him a hug that was meant to be comforting. Whether or not it ended up being comforting at all was anyone’s guess. “Go. It’ll take you less than half an hour.”

  Surely I could handle a half-hour alone with Bones and the spirit inside of him, couldn’t I?

  Crane gave me a long, hard look as I pulled away from him, as if he didn’t know whether or not to trust me. I supposed I couldn’t blame him, for it wasn’t too long ago when I had made some not so good decisions, but still.