Chapter Text
1781, Hudson Valley
Tom could taste iron in the air. Blood. Powder as well, lingering on the ground and on the trees. He couldn’t say he was surprised by the scenery. He had expected as much, with a bit more bodies maybe? The place was silent, still. An open aired graveyard with no graves. The mission Washington had given him had been shorter than what he had expected. Barely a day and a half. Now, the ‘battlefield’ (if you could use that term here) was empty. He would need to go to the town. Hopefully, Crane would refrain from lecturing him until Tom had had the time to tell him where the cup had been hidden. If he was honest, Tom would be fine with the lecture. Because it would mean he had been wrong. Wrong, and a coward. For once, he was fine being both.
Near the town, his hopes significantly dropped. He could see people, nurses in bloodied clothes, rushing in and out of the building which he knew to be used as a makeshift hospital. As he got closer, the red-head noticed a boy, feeding a couple horses nearby.
“Hey kid!” he called out, “What are the news?”
The face the boy made expressed quite well how pain stricken the town’s population had to be. In the end, he answered with a rocky voice:
“At least we won.”
A Pyrrhic victory then, Tom thought as he thanked the other with a nod. It was the best outcome he had been able to foresee when presented with the battle plans two, maybe three days ago now. At least it had been on a small scale this time, but the thought brought him no solace.
He didn’t find anyone he knew or recognised in the hospital, though he couldn’t help but use a few covert spells to lift some of the pain of the dying and the injured. However, as he exited through the other side of the building, which opened on the river, he quickly noticed a red-haired woman. She stood there, her back turned to the town.
“Katrina?”
Tom had waited until he had reached her to call her name, as to not surprise her. They hardly got along as it was, it was better not to worsen the situation. Especially now.
“Where’s-”
Before he could finish his sentence, burning pain exploded against his jaw. The sound of the slap echoed in the surrounding silence. Tom’s lips had remained parted but no sound crossed them. If he had seen it coming, he hadn’t moved to avoid the hit.
“Where were you?!”
Katrina’s voice was hoarse, her eyes red. Tom didn’t need to ask. And yet:
“What happened?”
He had spoken without even knowing it. As if this could all just be a misunderstanding.
“What do you think happened ?” Katrina spat, her hands clenched on the fabric of her skirt, her fingers white.
Tom almost expected her to strike him again but she did not. Her anger consumed her, crossing the borders of the body to the point where the surrounding air seemed hotter. She had despised him before, but all the pirate could see now was hate.
“He was heavily wounded. By the time he was brought to me, there was little I could do to save him,” she explained, her voice struggling to remain steady.
“So Ichabod is dead,” Tom concluded, sparing her from saying those words herself.
He wasn’t sure what he was feeling. Numbness, maybe. Perhaps his mind had finally reached its limits. Lost too much, seen too much. It was a wonder he was still walking around after all. The pain would likely come later. A faint voice taunted him from the edge of his mind:
“You should be happy, at least you were right.”
Tom couldn’t tell if it sounded more like Ichabod or Aster.
“You could at least pretend to care,” Katrina’s voice pulled him back into reality, “What did you have to do that was so important that you could not be by his side?”
The oldest shrugged:
“Nothing worthy in your eyes, I presume. If I had-”
“-been here? Yes, if you had been here, my husband would most likely be with me now,” Katrina interrupted, her words knife-sharp, “Even something as wretched as the powers you wield could have been used to do the right thing for once!”
For the first time since they had met years ago, the woman’s words made Tom wince. White spells, or witchcraft, had never been his
forte
, but she had a point. Surely, there would have been something he could have figured out.
Before he could think of something to say, Katrina pulled away a strand of his hair. He ignored the small sting of pain:
“What?”
“I don’t want to see you here ever again.”
Strange words followed her sentence that Tom did not understand at first. Then came the pain. The blow was similar to being shot at close range. His ribs took most of the impact, the bones breaking, splinters piercing the flesh. His sight faded to black.
The pain, or maybe it was the rain, awoke him what seemed to be seconds later. The sky over his head was dark, proof that he had been unconscious for at least a couple of hours. With a wince of pain, Tom stood up. He was in what seemed to be an empty field. Given the positions of the stars, he could tell he was now states away from Sleepy Hollow. Around him, the ground was scorched, grass dying under his feet.
“A curse,” Tom understood with an impressed whistle, “You can be proud of your wife Ichabod,” he chuckled, brushing the dirt off his clothes as he addressed the emptiness by his side, the taste of iron filling his mouth, “She’s moving up in the world. It must have taken quite the amount of power to send me this far away. But she’s straying from her path as a white witch. And I’m afraid that might be my fault as well.”
Linh Nguyen was used to act as security detail. When Camille Drescoll had hired her after her discharge from the army, she had expected just that. A young intellectual, with too much time and money, who knew they would get into trouble eventually. Her work had quickly exceeded those expectations. First, because her title was ‘personal secretary’ and she did more of that and public relations than any security. Secondly, because Camille didn’t seem to need her at all! But the job was interesting, well paid, and she had learnt to get along with her employer and their strange personality. Then, those two people from Sleepy Hollow had shown up and, in less than a week, everything had taken an even stranger turn. She had already been aware of Camille’s second job, they had taken the time to introduce her slowly and carefully to the supernatural and what they did in their spare time. However, she hadn’t been let in on everything that had happened these last days, and she couldn’t help but wonder why the child Camille had asked her to keep an eye on had silver hair. She knew how the kid had landed here and why. After all, Linh had helped selling that story to the police. Still, she had a lot of questions she wished to ask Camille when she would see the latter.
“Oh, I didn’t expect you to still be here.”
Linh turned around in the seat she had been working in. On the doorstep of the hospital room stood a police officer with dark auburn hair and a skin pale enough to make chalk jealous. She seemed about her age, maybe a couple of years older, though her smile made her look somewhat young.
“Camille asked me to keep an eye on her,” Linh explained, glancing at the bed where the kid slept.
Officer Islay chuckled as she stepped in the room:
“My boss asked me to do the same thing. I meant to ask,” she began, “What’s Drescoll’s link to this case? I’ve heard that Mills is the one who asked them to consult, but we found them in the forest with blood on their hands, and the kid in their arms.” she explained, uncomfortable at the idea that Linh could be offended by her words if she understood them as suspicion.
Still, she found the other woman easy to approach and felt comfortable enough to ask her own questions.
The secretary shrugged:
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she replied, putting away her phone, “It wouldn’t be the first time that Camille had contact with a cult. They tend to dislike our work, and their… Personality. From what I understood, they knew the previous sheriff of Sleepy Hollow. Guess they took a liking to your guy,” she concluded with a grin.
Islay seemed surprised as she listened to Linh’s conclusion. When you worked in Sleepy Hollow, as an officer, you quickly understood that things weren’t quite right in that town. Eventually, you stopped being surprised and, when a case became too strange, you knew you needed to call in Mills and Crane. Sometimes, you had the first’ sister hovering not too far, but it was usually just the two of them. Any outsiders were an event. Especially one that had their own Wikipedia page. Therefore, and after seeing how they behaved with the duo, Islay had made her own assumptions.
“Really? I was sure they knew Crane somehow.”
Linh shrugged, going back to her computer’s screen.
“If they do, I’ve never met him and I have been with Camille a few years now. Maybe they just bonded over the case?” she replied, though she knew it wasn’t the truth, but the numerous clauses in her contract were more than enough for her to be a perfect actress, “Anything new about this sleepyhead?” she asked casually, even if the answer she would get would most likely be thin, if existent at all.
Islay made a face, her eyes leaving Linh’s silhouette to land on the sleeping shape under the covers. That was more than enough for Linh to understand that yes, there had been a development.
“I can’t share anything about an ongoing case, but we’ve come across new information,” the officer eventually said to the other’s slight disappointment.
After all, that wasn’t much to go on. Now, she could only hope that Camille would tell her what was going on. She didn’t like being unprepared, and that whole operation had been a full-on improvisation, courtesy of her boss and to her greatest dismay.
What Islay hadn’t been able to tell Linh was that a file had been found which mentioned a child fitting what they knew about the silver head. However, that child had been considered dead, which was why she hadn’t appeared in the initial search. Her name was Viviane Norvell, and she had supposedly died 8 years ago. Abbie couldn’t help but think that she, if it truly was her, would fit right in with their team. After all, between Frank, Crane and now Tom, they had experience when it came to coming back from the dead. Though Viviane had ‘just’ gone missing with her parents and brother during a hike on the Appalachian Trail.
“Who takes their five-year-old child on a hike in the Appalachian mountains?” Frank noted, incredulous, as he went through the file Islay had found for them, “People go missing all the time there!”
“The autopsy report would tend to agree with you, I’m afraid. The bodies of the son and mother were found and enough limbs for the father for him to be recognised as dead by the state. The girl was so young they were not even surprised not to find any trace of her,” Crane pursued, spreading the autopsy reports on the table.
Two bodies, an entire, though decomposed, arm and pieces of a foot, had been found on the course of weeks about a month after the disappearances had been reported by colleagues and friends of the parents. The car had been found after a few days of search, parked far away from the usual lots assigned to that purpose. It hadn’t been broken into, and the bodies had not been attacked by anything human. It all seemed like a terrible (and completely preventable according to Frank) accident.
“We don’t have any dental records for Viviane and the family’s DNA is not on file either,” Abbie pursued as she went through the case.
“So we need to exhume the bodies. Reyes is going to be so glad I've come back,” Frank muttered, a tired hand on his forehead.
“Better be a pain than to go behind her back and get caught,” Abbie retorted with a face.
She had no wish of being caught red-handed, digging up a coffin. According to the file, there was no extended family to go to, which meant that her boss (and the judge Reyes would have to go to) would have all the media attention.
“We could always ask for advice on illegal solutions to Miss Jenny or Thomas,” Crane suggested, all too aware that the legal route would take time they did not have.
And, well… Jenny had already robbed graves (more or less).
Tom, like a good number of people, quite disliked graveyards. The still atmosphere, the lack of animal life… It made him claustrophobic, no matter how open the area was, no matter if the moonlight kept everything clear for the eyes. The stench of death that crossed the coffins, urns and even the soil didn’t bother him, though. He was used to it and knew it was either his mind playing tricks on him or on some ability he hadn’t fully discovered yet.
“I don’t like this,” Frank muttered, crossing his arms over his chest, his eyes drilling holes in the nearest headstone.
“Me neither, I hate graveyards,” Tom nodded with a hint of disgust in his voice.
“What, you’re scared Scooby?” Jenny mocked, dropping her bag to the side, a smirk on her lips.
She had been the one to get them inside the graveyard, had found the emplacement of the graves and how to enter the place unnoticed with little but a screwdriver, duct tape and her phone.
Abbie laughed.
“Depends, do I get a Scooby-snack afterwards for being brave?” the redhead immediately retorted with a matching grin, forgetting his uneasiness thanks to Jenny’s humour.
Frank and Abbie sighed, while Crane (who had no idea of what a ‘Scooby’ was) ignored that part of the matter as he passed Frank to join Tom and Jenny. The first’s behaviour was not unknown to him.
“Please try to avoid your usual shenanigans,” he only said, an eyebrow arched as he stared at Thomas.
The latter chuckled but did not reply, appearing to agree with Ichabod. He dropped unceremoniously on the grass. By his side, a bronze plate read as follows: Melania Norvell, beloved mother and friend.
“Did you find everything?” he asked, looking up at Abbie (who was currently enjoying the feeling of towering over someone for once).
“Most of it, you’re lucky the archives are such a mess, I found you a skull. Why did you need ivy?” she asked, putting the small grocery bag she had brought next to him.
“You’re asking about the ivy but not about the skull?” Frank retorted, incredulous.
Abbie stared blankly in front of her. Frank had a point. She should have asked about the skull. That was the creepy part. Her perception had really got messed up.
“Don’t worry, it’ll make sense in a minute,” Tom reassured her as he started pulling things from the bag.
He placed an old, discoloured, skull on his laps, turning its face towards the ground before nailing the long strings of ivy on the base of the bone. Frank, first surprised, now just looked jaded. The hammer hit had been precise enough not to cause any crack in the bone. Face turned towards them, Thomas put the skull on the grass, darkening his left hand by pulling two pieces of coal from the bag. With a hum, the pieces began to float before inserting themselves in the eye-sockets, crushing their edges until they fit perfectly. Tom cleaned the black powder with his fingers, using it to draw a line on his now closed eyelids.
“ My sight to replace yours,
Your teeth to replace mine.
Ivy for limbs,
Nails for bones,
Move yourself for my hands,
Bring me what lies below .”
When Tom opened his eyes, their green was clear, almost translucent, easily letting through the striking white of the cornea in the darkness. But that was nothing compared to the white sparks which had appeared in the skull’s eye sockets. The ivy bristled, curling around the skull like a cat slowly waking up. Then, the strings dug themselves into the ground, harshly pulling the bone behind them until there was nothing but a hole in the grass.
“What exactly do you need?” the pirate asked, his eyes moving without seeing those around him.
“Something with DNA. Bones, tissue, hair…” Abbie informed him, her own eyes not leaving the hole through which the skull had disappeared.
Tom hummed softly, but it was lost in the rustling of ivy in the grass. There was a thud, the strings pushing back towards the redhead before rushing in the ground once more. This time, no thud, but the sound of wooden planks breaking.
“So much for preservation,” Frank muttered, “I don’t suppose you could Reparo that afterwards?”
Jenny stared at him:
“Since when have you seen Harry Potter ?” she muttered, leaning in so only him would hear her.
Frank shrugged:
“I got a teenage daughter, she harassed me into it.”
Unlike the mocking, though fond, look on Jenny’s face, Tom frowned.
“Never been to Hogwarts but I’ll try.”
While the action didn’t seem tiring in itself, it did seem to require a lot of focus. It was a claw machine game where you could barely see anything and where the price would be a piece of a corpse. As if to prove this last point, Crane heard the sickening sound of bone breaking and teeth tearing flesh away.
“Sounds like you got a lucky catch,” Abbie warned the others, watching as the ivy curled on itself, drawing strange shapes in the grass as it pulled the skull away from the soil.
The bone looked even older now, dust embed in the smallest cracks. The faint flame on the now empty eye-sockets sent reflections on the blueish stones which were set in a gold ring worn by a decomposing finger. Between its lifeless jaws, the skull held a hand, having broken both the ulna and the radius near the wrist.
“You know, we just needed a bit of DNA, not a full on limb,” Abbie said, pulling blue latex gloves over her hands.
The light in the skull’s eyes died while Tom’s reverted to their usual green as the man groaned, in obvious discomfort.
“Christ, that’s a nasty headache,” he muttered, standing up carefully, “And yes, I know, but a skull hardly has opposable thumbs, so I did my best. Will you ask the sheriff’s office to do the analysis?” he pursued, moving to the hole he had created in the ground.
Abbie made a face as she placed the hand in an evidence bag. She could hardly picture herself bringing that to the precinct and ask for a DNA panel and comparison of the latter with their sleeping Junior Doe. Luckily, Frank saved her the trouble of explaining that out loud.
“Not through the sheriff, I’ll ask the Bureau.”
Tom nodded and, without showing a shred of emotion, carved a deep cut in his left forearm with a knife he had seemingly pulled out of nowhere. Crane could have sworn he had heard the pirate’s voice, low and slow, but the wind had seized it before he could make out any words.
“Jesus!” Abbie exclaimed, mostly by surprise, as she watched the redhead extend his arm over the hole, letting blood drip into the darkness.
Neither Frank nor Jenny batted an eye.
“What on Earth did you do that for?” Ichabod asked, on a tone Abbie could only describe as scolding.
This was confirmed as she saw her partner get bandages from her bag.
Tom gave them a confused look, scarlet now coating his fingers and the grass below. If he was in any pain, he was good at hiding it.
“You told me to fix the coffin.”
Now Frank looked a little confused as well. A light creaking noise began to make itself heard from below, which Jenny guessed came from the coffin fixing itself. Still, using blood magic to avoid pulling the target out of the ground seemed a little overdone. And then, she noticed the hole slowly filling up, grass covering rapidly the soil in a deep green wave which seemed healthier than the rest of the graveyard’s. Where blood stained the green, flowers began to bloom. She frowned.
“And you could not find a way which did not involve a blade?” Crane was saying as he moved to be by the pirate’s side.
“Alden, your spell-” Jenny began, but too late.
A branch emerged from the grave’s side, quickly growing.
“Ah, damn it!” Tom swore, moving his arm aside, covering his wound with his other hand to keep any more blood from reaching the soil.
The tree sprout, a pine given the few leaves that had already appeared, stopped at Crane’s hip but, unlike what Abbie expected, did not die on the spot.
“Someone cares to fill me in?” Frank asked, his voice flat.
“Couldn’t reach the coffin, so I revived its wood so it would fix itself,” Tom began, giving up against Crane’s glare and pulling away his hand so the brunet could bandage his forearm, “Lost my focus for a second and now we got a tree.”
Frank stared at the others:
“This. This is why you need supervisions.”
There was water trickling down the wall, pooling around her calves, tracing an ever rising ice line on her limbs. She could barely feel her feet now that the pain of the cold water had faded into numbness. She didn’t recognise that cave. It wasn’t hers. It was small, the stones almost knife-sharp under her fingers, the sand sinking under her weight. It wasn’t her room. No matter how bad she had behaved, they had never let it grow this cold. It had never been flooded, either. There was noise somewhere behind the stones but the water flow muffled it. Something moved against her ankle and she had to bite back a painful scream. It was thin, slimy and strangely warm in the cold water. It was disgusting and it twisted along her skin but it wasn’t a snake nor a fish. Long fingers grabbing her, pulling, but never breaking the surface. She tried to move away, her feet slow, struggling against the sand and the cold, but all she managed to do was cutting her back on the sharp stones. She sobbed, her throat burning but no tears in her eyes. The water reached her knees and so did the fingers, bruising her skin. It was too dark for her to make out anything but her hands. In a desperate attempt to stop the thing which was slowly pulling her down, she pushed her hands under the surface. The cold made her gasp and she almost lost her footing but she didn’t stop. The fingers escaped hers, quickly growing numb. Something echoed against the wall of the cave. Laughter. Ice breaking against stones, crumbling in the tide.
“Do not fight us child,” a voice slithered.
Lips barely above the surface, water falling in its mouth.
“Do not waste yourself above,” it pursued, teeth clasping, nails scratching her legs, “Allow yourself to fall, do not worry, we will not let you drown.”
Its grasp tightened around her and it pulled her under the surface.
Anne screamed.