Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The line outside is longer than my patience, which is saying something, because I once sat through a nine-hour livestream of a guy peeling doll faces and gluing them onto pumpkins. Spoiler: the doll-pumpkins were cuter.
But this—this is different. This is the holy land. The House. The Haunted House. Capital H. Capital H.
I’m dressed for the occasion: shredded black sweater with glow-in-the-dark ghosts across the front, a leather mini-skirt that’s more belt than skirt, and tights with little white skulls crawling up my legs like they’re trying to escape.
My boots are high enough to count as a weapon and clunky enough that Bonehead keeps offering to carry me, which would ruin the aesthetic, so I hiss at him every time like a pissed-off bat.
My eyeliner’s smudged into something between vampire chic and I cried blood in the Walmart parking lot, and my lipstick looks like I’ve already eaten someone. Perfect.
Life lately has been…busy. Busy in that I live with three monsters and treat Halloween like it’s a religion way.
Mornings are pumpkin guts in the blender because Bonehead swears it’s protein.
Afternoons are Skully critiquing my movie marathons like he’s Siskel and Ebert’s undead lovechild.
Evenings are Marrow reading me love poems about arterial spray while I paint my nails blacker than his soul.
Domestic bliss, but with fog machines and suspicious stains on the carpet.
So yeah, standing here in line with them at my sides—Bonehead vibrating like he wants to punch the house open, Skully rolling his eyes hard enough to sprain something, Marrow gazing at the fake cobwebs like they’re cathedral lace—this feels like date night.
Normal, if your definition of normal includes eldritch boyfriends and a personality cult built around candy corn.
Fog machines billow out the front door every time it opens, coughing up shrieks and strobe flashes like the house itself is chain-smoking demons.
There’s a guy in a cheap vampire cape doing crowd control, his plastic fangs slipping every time he tries to hiss.
I want to kiss him just for the effort. Or maybe bite him back. Either way, festive.
I lace my arm through Skully’s and Marrow’s while Bonehead guards my back, like I’m leading my own monster parade float. People stare. Of course they do.
Bonehead looks like he walked straight out of some cursed fall catalogue—thick knit sweater in pumpkin orange, dark jeans cuffed at the ankle, boots that make him look like he should be holding a latte and talking about leaf-peeping.
The fact that he’s six-foot-a-lot and built like a siege engine makes it even funnier.
He’s autumn boyfriend bait with murder in his grin.
Skully, naturally, refused anything with color.
All black, every layer. Dark-wash denim, boots sharp enough to break curbs, and a soft leather jacket that creaks when he flicks his lighter open-shut-open-shut.
He looks like he should be smoking backstage at a concert and mocking your music taste, and he’s somehow hotter for it.
Marrow? Marrow dressed like the devil’s lawyer, but make it sexy.
Tailored black slacks, blood-red silk shirt undone just low enough to ruin me, long coat that flares when he moves like a villain about to win his case.
He gazes up at the flickering neon Haunted Mansion of Terror sign as though it’s an altar, eyes hungry, reverent.
“Reminder,” I tell my boys, linking all three of them again because I am the world’s cutest hydra. “They say no touching. I say that’s a suggestion made by cowards who have never been kissed in a strobe light.”
Bonehead beams. Skully groans. Marrow bows.
The line shuffles like a zombie conga and I bounce on my toes like a kid who’s had six Pixy Stix and a prophecy.
Fog keeps burping out of the double doors—sweet, plasticky, humid—like the house is vaping a raspberry ghost. Every time it exhales, the neon sign above it flickers and the crowd does that excited herd-murmur that makes me want to climb someone like a cat up a tree.
Bonehead’s grin is a sunrise over a junkyard. “So…smash?”
“Not the props,” I warn, patting his forearm like a fire extinguisher I intend to spray later. “If you rip a fake wall off its hinges, we have to marry the building for tax purposes.”
Skully flicks his lighter—open, shut, open—studying the queue like he’s grading it. “We’re about to pay to be chased by minimum-wage chainsaw guys with community-college eyeliner.”
“Hot,” I say.
He smirks. “On you? Obviously.”
Marrow tips an invisible hat to the sign, as if the house itself is a delicate widow in black. “A theater of fear. May it bleed artfully.”
We inch forward past a rope barrier guarded by a vampire in a cape so cheap it shines like a trash bag. He slips a paper wristband over my arm, the kind you’d get at a carnival beer tent, only this one has a cartoon bat on it baring its teeth. His fingers brush my skin for half a second too long.
Bonehead immediately growls, low and warning, like he’s about to bite the man’s hand off at the wrist. Marrow’s eyes flash dark, Skully mutters, “Hands off the merchandise.” The poor vampire nearly swallows his plastic fangs.
I glance down at the wristband and for a beat it looks…wrong. Not the band, me. The neon catches on my wrist strange, like light’s shining through instead of over. Then I blink, and it’s just me again—sturdy, painted nails, tiny bat charm bracelet clinking underneath.
I glance up, grinning, and blow the vampire a kiss. He almost trips over the rope stand trying to get out of Bonehead’s line of sight when he starts growling again.
Inside, the temperature drops into perfect goosebump weather.
A soundtrack of creaking and distant screams worms under my skin.
The entrance hallway squeezes narrow, painted to look like old brick with mildew freckles.
Rubber bats dangle from nylon threads, tickling my hair.
One kisses my forehead. I kiss it back. “Consent is key, little guy,” I tell it, and it swings approvingly.
Bonehead ducks to avoid decapitating the bats with his sheer width and accidentally shoulder-checks the drywall. The wall wobbles. I step on his foot. He beams at me like a chastened golden-retriever.
“See?” Skully says, gesturing. “This is what I meant. We’re in a plywood intestine.”
“Shh,” I whisper. “We’ll hurt its feelings.”
The first actor lurches out: a nurse in blood-spattered scrubs carrying a rubber organ that might once have been a heart but has since retired into a red stress ball.
She shrieks in my face with admirable lung capacity.
I shriek back on principle, then curtsy.
“Ten out of ten. Love the splatter pattern.”
Marrow bows to her, courtly as murder. “Exquisite spume.”
She blinks, stays in character like a champ, and hisses, “No touching,” before flapping away.
“Cowards who have never been kissed in a strobe light,” I remind my wristband, which is now definitely a permanent part of my soul.
We turn a corner into a long room lit by the saddest green bulbs known to lighting design.
The floor is sticky. The walls breathe. No, they actually breathe—a pneumatic thing makes them swell in and out like the whole room is an inhaler.
“Claustrophobia tunnel!” I squeal, delighted. Two huge latex cushions squeeze together, forming a throat we have to push through. “Everybody pretend we’re being born wrong.”
Bonehead laughs so loud the room laughs back.
He plunges in first, vanishing into blue-black squeeze, and I follow, swallowed, pressed from every angle.
It’s like getting hugged by a pair of angry bouncy castles.
Hands brush my waist—Skully’s quick, sharp touch; Marrow’s gloved fingers reverent at the small of my back; Bonehead’s palm waiting to haul me out the second I pop free.
I push, gasp, giggle and curse before emerging on the other side with hair like a mad scientist who specializes in candy floss.
Skully squirts out behind me and shakes himself like a wet cat while Marrow steps out like a sexy, non-sparkley vampire emerging from the shadows in a dark alley. “If this place charged extra for therapy, they’d make a killing.”
We hit the mirror maze next: a bright, mean flower of silver and glare.
Fog curls along the floor, and a million Octobers grin back at me with feral teeth.
I wiggle my eyebrows. We wiggle. I blow a kiss.
A thousand kisses boomerang back. It makes my chest ache in a weird, silly way.
I love her. I love all of me. Even the me that overthinks, even the me that collects grocery-store skeleton plushies like talismans against the boring parts of the world. Especially her.
“Great,” Skully mutters from somewhere to my left, his voice bouncing around like a rubber bullet. “Now there are thirty of you telling me to hydrate.”
“Drink water!” a chorus of me shrieks. We cackle.
“Follow my voice,” Marrow says from the right, velvet threaded through with smoke. “I am the North Star, little hellmouth.”
I step, then step again, almost smack into a mirror because I am a human crow: easily distracted by my own shine.
In the strobe burst, just for a knifed instant, Bonehead’s reflection loses its skin.
He’s white architecture, a cathedral scaffolding that exudes a grin with no lips.
Another strobe and he’s back—tanned shoulders, coyote smile. The back of my neck prickles.
Tick, goes the whisper in my brain. Tick, tock. Not a clock so much as an egg timer with teeth.
I stick my tongue out at the mirror until the anxiety skitters under a rug. “Not today,” I tell the glass. “Today is for fun.”