Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution (17 page)

Al spent the better part of half an hour digging around trying and failing to find what he was looking for. He might not have taken so long if he didn’t keep getting distracted by shiny things—sometimes literally, as the collection included a lot of jewelry. He’d been the caretaker of the library for ten years now, and he’d acquired a few pieces on his own, but there were still a lot of things that Dad and Uncle Charlie, not to mention Grandma before them, had collected that Al hadn’t yet catalogued. He’d been
meaning to get around to it, but cataloguing had always been Al’s least favorite part of librarianship.

Serving the public, he loved. There were few things more satisfying than helping someone find what they need, especially when it was clear when they arrived at the desk that
they
didn’t even know what that was, at first, until Al helped them get there.

Putting the exhibits together was also fun—finding all the wonderful treasures that he and his family had accumulated over the decades and finding the right combination of them to make for a particularly fine display …

He even liked shelving, which was usually the top of the list of library workers’ least favorite tasks. The act of putting a book away in the right place so it could be found again by the next person who’d need it gave him a huge sense of accomplishment for some reason.

But he hated cataloguing. A tendency he was regretting at this particular instant, since if he had catalogued it all, he’d know where to find the stupid thing.

It was right when he found it that he heard Diana’s voice from upstairs. “Yo, Al, food’s here!”

“Be right up!” he called up the stairs. The item had been wrapped in cloth and stored in a small wooden box that was slightly warped. But then, the box in question was more than two centuries old.

He set the item, still cradled in the cloth that
it had been wrapped in, aside on top of one of the crates.

As he hopped up the stairs, taking them two at a time—suddenly, he was really hungry—he heard a horrible scream from upstairs.

He hesitated, stumbling on the top step and almost falling back down them. Reaching out, he snagged the railing with his right hand, and managed to right himself, but his wrist twisted in an odd direction.

Wincing with pain, he cradled his right hand in his left arm and continued up the stairs more slowly.

The last time he heard a scream like that, it was when Corbin’s silver bullets had struck the flesh of the demon Uzobach.

“Diana? Ray? You guys okay?”

Silence greeted his request.

Throwing common sense to the wind, he left the staircase and slowly worked his way to the doorway that led to the main part of the library.

He saw nothing except for the main desk, the computer stations, and the many shelves of books. He heard nothing except for the low hum of the computers and that annoying flickering buzz that one of the fluorescent lights always made no matter how many times he changed the bulb.

Slowly, he moved into the library. “Hello?”

Reaching into his pocket, he fumbled for his cell phone. He took it out, pushed the button on top—and nothing happened. He winced, remembering
that he’d intended to stick it in the charger an hour ago, and then never did.

There was a phone on the main desk. Just about thirty feet away. All he had to do was get to that and call 911, because there was no way Ray and Diana would just go quiet like this.

That was when he realized that he couldn’t even hear the squawk of either cop’s radio, which had been a pretty constant noise the past day. He’d gotten so used to it, he didn’t notice it anymore, but now it was conspicuous by its absence. And Diana had only told him to come upstairs a few seconds before. What could have happened to her in so short a time?

That he had about half a dozen answers to his rhetorical question off the top of his head did not make him feel any safer, or any less exposed as he slowly made his way to his desk.

He reached his desk, and started to grab for the phone when he saw the bodies.

Prior to tonight, Al would have said that the experience of seeing his father with a huge hole in his chest—and then later seeing him walking around despite still having the selfsame hole—would have inured him to seeing dead bodies.

He was incredibly wrong.

Corbin had told him he didn’t want to see what the demon did to Uncle Charlie, and he was finally starting to get what the sheriff had been talking about. Because lying in the center aisle between the
bookcases were two torsos, four arms, four legs, and two heads.

The body parts were strewn haphazardly about the aisle, but the heads of Officers Ray Drosopoulos and Diana Han were positioned so that their dead eyes and open bloody mouths were staring right at the desk.

Al was all set to bend over and throw up when he felt a very long, very cold piece of metal impale him in the back.

From behind him, a voice said, “Sorry, but I’m afraid I need your blood.”

WHEN CRANE ENTERED
the Whitcombe-Sears Library, his nose was immediately assaulted by an all-too-familiar smell.

It was one that often invaded his nostrils on the battlefield, and had done so again most recently at the Cortlandt Museum.

The smell of death.

At first, he hadn’t encountered it much. Initially, his time both as a redcoat and as part of the Continental Army was mercifully free of the appallingly high body counts that some of his fellows had dealt with.

But then he found the settlement outside Albany that Serilda had destroyed. The sheer number of bodies was overwhelming, and the stench was just
awful
. Over the years, he would encounter death
more times than he could count—including his own—and he had yet to wholly get used to it.

Were he lucky, he never would.

Now he found himself confronted with another charnel house, this in the passageway between rows of bookcases. He found another massacre very much like the one in the Tarrytown museum. This time it appeared to be two of Irving’s subordinates in the local constabulary.

Then he heard a moan from behind the desk, which was located at the far end of the space—where the altar would have been when this structure had served as a house of worship.

Gingerly moving past the torn-apart bodies of the two officers, he worked his way back to find a man with receding gray and white hair, lying on the floor behind the desk in an ever-increasing pool of blood.

“Damn.” Crane ran to him and tried to see how bad it was.

“Call … help …”

Crane cursed himself for a fool, and immediately fumbled for his cell phone. He recalled that via the simple expedient of dialing the number nine followed by one twice, he could summon police, fire brigade, and physicians, all at the same time.

Two of those three were needed now.

“Nine-one-one, please state your emergency.”

“I’m at the Whitcombe-Sears Library in Sleepy Hollow—there are two murdered constables, and
the proprietor of the library has been badly wounded. He has lost considerable amounts of blood.”

“All right, sir, stay there, please. Emergency medical technicians and the police are on their way.”

“Thank you very kindly, madam.”

“Crane …”

Looking over in surprise at the prone form next to him, Crane absently dropped the phone and said, “You have the advantage of me, sir, though I assume you’re Albert Whitcombe-Sears.”

Whitcombe-Sears nodded. “I—I have something that—that belongs to you.…”

“I—I don’t—”

“Downstairs … Storage room … On top of one of the crates, there’s anoth—another Congressional Cross.… It’s—it’s yours.”

Crane’s eyes went wide. “What?”

“Your—your cross … My—my family had it, since no one—no one could find any—any heirs to give it—it to.…”

“I will retrieve it shortly, sir. Please, do save your breath. The ambulance will arrive shortly, and—”

Then Whitcombe-Sears grabbed Crane’s right arm with an iron grip formed by his left hand. After the initial grab, though, the man’s strength weakened.

“They will try—try to resurrect Serilda with the blood of—blood of a descendant of one of the—the recipients of—of the cross.…”

Crane frowned. “I thought Washington was able to cast away death without any blood being used.”

“Blood—strengthens the spell … Connection to—to recipients stronger with time … Said they needed my blood when they stabbed me, so coven using—using
my
blood to strengthen
their
spell … You—you must cast the counterspell with—with one cross and the blood of its recipient.…” He managed to lift his right arm and point to the main desk. “There’s a—a
grimoire
on the desk.… Found it when I was—I was researching Mercier. Take it—it has the counterspell.…” His left hand’s grip on Crane’s arm strengthened, and Whitcombe-Sears tried to sit up. “Only
you
can do it!
No one
else!”

And then Albert Whitcombe-Sears coughed once and slumped to the floor. His left hand’s grip completely loosened on Crane’s arm.

The man was dead.

“
Requiescat in pace
, Mr. Whitcombe-Sears,” Crane whispered. Then he clambered to his feet, cursing himself for not arriving sooner.

For a moment, he just stared at the body of the man whose ancestor was a trusted comrade. Though Knox led the expedition, Whitcombe’s contribution was incalculable, and the cannon would never have reached Boston without him. Crane shuddered to think how the war would have proceeded had they not taken Boston in the spring of 1776.

Crane imagined that his friend would have been
proud to see what a good man his descendant was. And been as outraged as Crane was now at the manner of his death.

Then he lifted his head, a new smell overlaying the miasma of death that permeated the converted church.

It was, he realized, smoke.

Looking down the aisle of the library, he saw that one of the bookcases was alight. Only moments later, two more bookcases were on fire, and Crane knew he no longer had much time. Wooden bookcases filled with paper books would be nothing more than fuel for an ever-mounting fire.

Only then did he hear the weak voice over his cell phone, which was still on the floor. “Sir? Are you still there?”

He snagged the phone. “Yes, and I’m afraid you’ll need to send the fire brigade as well. Someone has set the library alight!”

“The ambulance is moments away, sir—I’m summoning the Sleepy Hollow Fire Department now.”

“My thanks, madam. Now if you will forgive me, I have a critical errand to run.”

Pocketing the phone in his coat and grabbing the
grimoire
that Whitcombe-Sears had indicated, he ran to the back room where Miss Jenny had said the exhibits were.

Not at all unexpectedly, the case with the Congressional Cross that had been issued to Caleb Whitcombe was opened, the cross itself gone.

Turning, he tucked the
grimoire
inside his shirt to protect it from the smoke and fire and to keep his hands free. The leather binding rubbed uncomfortably against his skin as he dashed to the staircase leading downward. He hoped the storage room that Whitcombe-Sears mentioned was easy to find.

It was, and it didn’t take him long to spy a small item wrapped in cloth. Grabbing for it eagerly, Crane unwrapped the cloth to find a cross that looked just like the one in Ticonderoga and the ones he saw photographs of on the computing machine.

For a moment, he just stared at it. He recalled receiving notification of his receipt of the Congressional Cross. It was, in fact, right after the very meeting of the Sons of Liberty that he and van Brunt had attended—the same meeting Katrina had shown him in a vision. A messenger had arrived at the small inn on Gold Street in New York where the meeting had taken place.

“Excuse me,” the man had said. He had been covered in grime, and had smelled of salt water, indicating to Crane that he had come to Manhattan within the last few hours by boat or ferry. “Do I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Willett of New York?”

“You do,” Willett had said in reply.

The messenger had then turned to Crane and van Brunt. “And might you two gentlemen be, or have knowledge of, Mr. Crane of Oxford and Mr. van Brunt, also of New York?”

“We are those gentlemen,” van Brunt had said in reply.

“Excellent. I have come from the Congress in Philadelphia with instructions to find you three. I thought fortune had favored me when I was told that you two sirs”—he had looked at Crane and van Brunt—“were scheduled to attend a Sons of Liberty meeting to be led by you, sir.” He had then looked at Willett.

“Fortune has indeed favored you,” Willett had said. “What news from the Congress?”

“They have appointed Mr. Washington of Virginia as the commanding general of the army.”

Willett had nodded. “An excellent choice.”

Crane, however, had frowned. His switching sides at the urging of van Brunt’s fiancée Katrina van Tassel was relatively recent. “I do not know the man.”

“He is,” van Brunt had said, “a gentleman of the highest order, and a great leader. He could command men to walk into fire, and all they’d ask is if they should leave their boots on. The Congress has chosen well.”

The messenger had gone on. “At Mr. Washington’s—pardon, at
General
Washington’s request, the Congress has also awarded ten men with the Congressional Cross, in honor of great achievement in the attempt to gain liberty for the colonies. Three of those ten men are from New
York, and it is my privilege to provide you each with official notification of your honors.”

At that point, the man had reached into the pouch that had been slung across his shoulder, and presented each of them with a rolled-up scroll secured with the wax seal of the Continental Congress.

Crane had broken the seal and unfurled his scroll. With a small smile, he had said, “You described this as a ‘cross,’ did you not?” He had held the scroll up for the messenger to inspect. “I was unaware that crosses were made of parchment.”

Chuckling, the messenger had said, “The Congress has commissioned a French silversmith known to General Washington to fashion the crosses. Upon their completion, they will be delivered to you. God willing, we will have at last resolved our conflict with the Crown by then.”