I headed over to Van Brunt, gently pushing my way through the sea of people that separated us. I had to glide through the crowd, not split it open. The element of surprise was often a ranger’s greatest asset and I had to capitalize on it. If I were someone like Valen, I probably would have just gone up to him and beat him until he went down, but this wasn’t the case. I was small, at least compared to my much larger opponent. It wasn’t long before I was behind him. I looked around in the brief moment of pause that I was granted. Most, if not all, the people were distracted by something else or had their backs entirely to us. I could easily stab him with my knife and finally be rid of the brute once and for all.
But I wasn’t going to kill him in cold blood. Instead, I walked up beside him and waited for him to detect my presence.
“Ah, I was wondering when you were going to show up,” Abraham Van Brunt greeted. “Though, I thought it was going to be you and your boyfriend.”
“Funny, but not as funny as the look on your face when you realize just how clever we rangers really are,” I remarked. Van Brunt grabbed me by my cloak and picked me up off the ground. “What, you’re going to kill an innocent little boy?”
“I know you’re not innocent,” Van Brunt grunted. “But I can very easily see that you are little. If you were any smaller, I would just have to crush you with one hand. You’re not even a full-fledged ranger yet are you? No, of course not. You’re just a sad, little boy, who thinks he’s going to play some big part in the world. Such childish thinking.”
“I beg to differ,” a newcomer said. He sounded like an older man, but with a crisp, sharp tongue. He stood behind me, so I couldn’t see him.
“Wait a second,” Van Brunt said, squinting toward the man behind. “You’re not the old drunk I scrapped with. How many of them are you?”
“Let me assure you,” the man said, before knocking down both me and Abraham Van Brunt. I hit the ground pretty hard, so I wasn’t quick to get up, but I could tell that he was standing over me. “There is only one of me.”
Before I could even get a look at him, he was gone. All I saw was his dark, olive-green cloak. A ranger’s cloak. Valen? No, he was too sick to even get out of bed, much less take on Van Brunt. But there weren’t any other rangers in the area. We would have known. I know rangers are all about the element of surprise, but that was taking it one notch too far.
I got up and looked around for him. There was no sign of him. I even asked some of the people around me to see if he had passed by them, but they all told me that they didn’t see anything. Van Brunt looked like he had taken a pretty hard blow. He wasn’t going to get up for awhile, that much was for sure. It made me wonder who had got him even more.
I was about to run back to Lloyd, who was watching over Ichabod in case Van Brunt was just a diversion, but I stopped when people started gasping. Then I heard shrieks. It wasn’t until I heard the neighing of a very angry horse, did I stop to see what was getting everyone riled up.
He stood off in the distance on his large black steed. A swirl of black fog followed the hooves of his dark steed. The rider wore all black armor, complementing the horse and overall appearance very well in a very horrifying manner. He did not glare out me, but I could tell that he was looking at me. I felt a great evil presence over me as I kept my eyes trained on him. I was petrified to where I stood. Frozen by the chill that ran up and down my spine. He did not speak because he had no mouth. But I could hear an unspoken murmur, like smoke moving in the wind, echoing from him. I felt evil chants seethe from where he stood atop his mount.
The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow was never really defeated. Valen had shot Van Brunt, who was dressed up the horseman to scare us off. That was why he had clinched his back the other day, because that’s where he had gotten hit by Valen’s arrow. The Horseman was not an evil spirit that could be summoned. It came when least expected.
And I was not expecting him.
Not at all.
