Magic or not, practitioners were squishy mortals. When a gust of wind hit me and the others, we clung against the fence for dear life. Maybe I should've made a potion of gecko hair. That way, not every breeze would blow me away.

Nathan's mojo wasn't going to work on these hellhounds' emotions forever. They'd tear apart if we didn't bring the Book of Samael to the Council now.

Nathan's jacket had been torn by the weather and by the many times he had been blown against the fence. Yet, he was still the strongest and most experienced of us.

Isa caught my broom when Dad threw it out of the car. It was technically illegal for people who weren't mages already to carry staves, as that was the equivalent of forging academic titles. It was not illegal for us, however, to use tools that had the same function as staves but had distinct designs. When we took a broom and craved all the runes usually associated with magic into its wood, no one could complain.

"You aren't serious about this?" Nathan asked.

"You want to fly through the wind alone?" I asked. "You're tired. You had to walk through the storm just to get to the library."

Nathan's knees clattered, and he was forced to rely on his staff as a cane. "If you die, that's on you."

I realized the risk I was taking. I put a lot of faith in the whole emotion-energy sucking my new familiar gave me. If I tired, slipped, or overestimated myself, I was going to fall to my death. The same applied if I sat here and let the Wild Hunt destroy everything.

I held the broom with one hand and held onto the fence with the other. Nathan got to hold the Word of Samael because let's be real, he had better chances of completing the flight if anything went wrong. I was just the backup plan.

There's a thing people don't tell you about riding broomsticks. It hurts in the groin. But it's easier to fly astride than sideways, so I mounted the broom between my legs and kicked off.

It was just like what Darcy had already shown me. My feet left the ground, my body soared into the air, and the blood pounded through my ears.

Nathan flew before me. He gave me breathing room with his wind shadow, but the wind wasn't our only concern.

Once I was in the arch, it was easy to stay in the middle of the lane. I just needed that initial burst of power from people's belief to get started. Nathan's glamour extended far enough to protect me from being seen directly. The thing I did with the girl still gave me life energy, but people couldn't connect it to me, so I was safe from retaliation from other supernaturals.

Flying for the first time was nerve-wracking, especially in a storm with wind speeds of over sixty miles per hour.

The wind blew me a whole block south, closer to Summer Hill Cemetry where Mrs. Turner had been buried.

Nathan flew before me. He gave me breathing room with his wind shadow, but the wind wasn't our only concern.

The Hunt arrived. A ghost tornado including Mrs. Turner's ghost attacked us head-on.

Nathan threw himself into the crossfire. He held a little saltshaker with which he tried to ward them off, but he already exhausted himself through the flight and I wasn't sure if he was strong enough to hold them off all by himself.

I wanted to fly closer and help him, but Nathan glared.

I couldn't help him, as much as I wanted to.

He flew closer and showed me the Book of Samael.

Ghosts crashed into the invisible barrier he had created with his salt shaker and sought to pierce it to come closer to him, me, or the town. He had to hold them off. And while he was doing so, someone needed to transport the book.

He held his arm stretched out.

I wasn't sure if I could come close enough to him. Not without being blown against him and being thrown to my death.

"WILL YOU TAKE IT OR NOT?" he yelled.

I shrieked. I had to remind myself that he wasn't angry. He just had to raise his voice to make himself heard across the wind.

I took the book from him and flew out of town. Out of the wards the Hunters must have placed outside this town.

Oh boy. If those ghosts already bothered me, how many did they have outside the warded areas? Enough to shove me to my death, that was sure.

Thousands of amorphous silver shadows sparkled in the moonlight. It was said that the difference between a ghost and a familiar was that a familiar at least convincingly looked like a physical being. The ghost swarm didn't scare me. I saw two Hunters in the distance who probably prepared a ward to ensnare those spookies so that I didn't have to bother.

I considered flying closer to one of them. I considered giving them the book and having them carry it on.

My considerations were cut short when the sounds of military jets and helicopters roared through the storm. They weren't stupid. They could see the Headless Horseman and they were approaching Sleepy Hollow just like I did to get a shot at him. It wasn't far until the Horseman's center of worship. The Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow region was just a few miles south of Summer Hill.

I could feel people share videos about me which gave me a small boost, but each drop I got felt like it might have been my last.

It was only now that I remembered I had left Nathan's glamour.

An attack helicopter spotted me. It had a machine gun mounted to its face and pointed it at me.

I slowed my flight down. I didn't want to risk anything, not with so much on the line, but slowing down my flight only made me more vulnerable to the wind.

Don't get me wrong, the helicopter suffered, too. Its blades weren't indestructible and its body was not immune to aerodynamics, but that thing was still a trillion times more adapted to the storm than I was. My broom jerked around like it had its own will while I was hanging on with only one hand. It shook so hard, I swear I'd have fallen off had my hand not been practically glued to it.

In the distance, I could already see the spooky town signs of Sleepy Hollow. The town where people held expositions about the Headless Horseman, dressed up as him on Halloween, and read the short story in which he was most prominently featured.

I was never gonna reach those borders because I was about to die horribly. Until, suddenly, I managed to grab my broom with my other hand. The wind speeds lessened. It was still awful, but more like a gale than like a storm now.

I got the broom below me, although there was still a chance I'd fall off.

More helicopters came closer. The wind had never become as back as a hurricane; otherwise, my Dad couldn't have driven through it. That didn't mean the aircraft didn't benefit from a cool down.

Looking up, the source of said cool down stared me straight in the face. An astral projection hidden under glamour floated in the air.

It was a tall, thin man clad like a grey reaper who flew without a staff or any other assistive devices. He had nothing in his hand, except for the picture frame of Melas' astrally projected silhouette.

During A-ranked crises, it was standard to get even our highest-ups involved and Cornelius and Melas were no exceptions. A wave of energy emanated from them. Trees in the distance stopped swaying in the wind and aircraft that, in the far distance, fought to stay in place now flew in a straight line. Air molecules moved by the elementals received pushback from these two. They and many others were working on a spell designed to counteract a state-spanning storm. People were going to believe that the storm just calm down naturally. Or that the Horseman grew bored.

I, however, felt the scope of their energy standing before me. Them transfigurating a frog into a man before my eyes was nothing next to that.

The chin over Cornelius' long, white beard scowled before he covered me under a glamour. "Apprentice Carter. What you are doing here is an abomination! These people saw you"

The arm of mine that held Weber's book didn't move the way it should have.

"No, no, no, no," the new familiar in my head said. "Do you think I'll let you off the hook so easily?"

"Carter!" Cornelius spat. "Don't tell me you fell for the wiles of a Primordial? You don't have your familiar anymore!"

The storm hit me as harshly as Cornelius' words did. He noticed. My friends and I didn't talk about it much, the end of the world was a greater priority, but Siris was gone.

Forces more potent than the storm reached into me as Cornelius' projection moved his lips and mumbled awkward phrases. He reached into me like he tried to exorcise the Primordial out.

The storm picked up again.

Sleepy Hollow was near the Hudson River, you know, that little body of water that formed the informal border between New Jersey and New York. It stirred from waves produced by water elementals. Some didn't even bother with glamour and allowed themselves to be shot down by US Army aircraft while the hidden ones were only vulnerable to Hunters who interrupted or reversed their tricks.

There was one monster, however, against which no one stood a chance. He wasn't just a monster.

He was a minor god. People used to know him as the Dullahan. Now, he was called the Headless Horseman and he was on the opposite side of the river.

Although it was shaped like a horse, his mount was as massive as an elephant while the man himself was a titan. His arm was thicker than the bodies of the Black Knights swirling around him. He was clad in plate mail armor as dark as his horse and as thick as dragon scales. The head he carried was moldy with a hideous, perpetual ear-to-ear grin and pointy fae ears.

Its eyeballs moved freely in the skull and always watched me no matter from what angle I looked at him. The arm that didn't hold his head held a human spine with which he whipped his horse to make it gallop faster.

Water waves stirred when he moved through the air. A company of Black Knights and some wizards, including Mafalda's and Magnus' projections, had their staves pointed at him, trying to maintain wards that would prevent him from crossing the river and entering Sleepy Hollow. Helicopters shot missiles at him that phased straight through his intangible body.

I threw some gold coins near Sleepy Hollow. I didn't even know what I was doing. I just hoped that people might see this, might imitate it so that we had more souls working together to ward him off.

The Horseman strengthened the storm.

One helicopter crashed into the ground while others increased their distance.

I barely clung onto my broom, knowing that I'd have fallen had I been closer to the epicenter. My altitude shrank and shrank.

The Hudson River's flood waves devoured the coastline. I tried to fly higher and higher to avoid the waves before a gust of wind blew me off my staff.

I flapped my arms in panic. I clutched my necklace, but every last drop of aether in my body had already been spent and summoning the broom back to my hand was not an option anymore.

Soon, I'd hit the ground and crack my skull open. What was worse, I suddenly noticed blood on my clothes. According to Irish myths, the Dullahan doused people in blood and unlocked every door when he marked people for death.

Time froze for her as I saw the moldy head the Horseman held in his hand smile at me. Something told me that, if he wanted to, he could swing that human-spine whip in his other hand across the river to catch and crush me right here.

Lydia, did you give him my name?

"Only your last name, but it was enough to mark you for death," she said in my head.

I still had the book in my hand. Damn her. She truly mastered the art of contracts in life-or-death situations.

It might have worked for me back when I was facing the Nuckelavee.

It didn't work the second time.

I threw up the Book of Samael in Cornelius' direction before the Horseman spoke my name.