Chapter 16 #2
“Left,” Skully says, and I follow his voice like a compass that swears a lot.
He appears too close, his smirk almost touching mine on the glass, then he pivots, one finger on the mirror where my mouth just was, playful and just a little mean.
He draws a heart in the condensation with the pad of his thumb. “There you are.”
Bonehead stomps around with zero patience for optical illusions, his shoulder nearly taking out a corner pillar. “These are fake,” he informs me, offended, and I kiss his bicep because he is correct…and huge. And I like that.
Marrow appears with impossible grace, offering his hand like a Victorian demon in a funhouse. “Allow me.”
We spill out of the maze into a butcher room.
It always comes back to meat in these places.
Hooks dangle from the ceiling with foam ribs, latex tongues, slabs of red that glisten like jellied candles.
The air smells like latex and cherry syrup.
I inhale it like perfume. “Why am I hungry?” I whisper.
“Because you skipped dinner,” Skully says, then points his chin at an actor in an apron who is menacing a group of teens with a plastic cleaver. “Also because your brain is a raccoon with culinary curiosity.”
The butcher lurches toward us, roaring. Bonehead roars back, louder, and the actor actually startles. “Hey hey hey,” I say, tucking myself under Bonehead’s arm like a holster. “No fighting the staff, big guy. We tip with money, not broken drywall.”
Bonehead’s chest heaves. He settles when I pat him, vibrating like a motorcycle that loves me. “Okay,” he says, eyes still hot.
The butcher swings his foam cleaver and hisses, “No touching!”
“Tell that to your meat,” Skully deadpans. The butcher snorts—just a flicker—and I give him a covert thumbs-up for not breaking character.
Next is the fog room with the bridge: a metal walkway through a spinning tunnel painted in spirals.
The world tilts; my stomach does a cartwheel; Bonehead grabs the railing and laughs like he’s surfing.
Skully fake-stumbles into me on purpose and pretends it was the tunnel.
I elbow him back. Marrow walks as steadily as a ship’s captain through stormlight, quoting something under his breath that sounds like a sonnet rewritten by a serial killer, which is to say: comforting.
Then the strobe room. They always save it to strip you down to just your nerve endings.
Fog devours the floor, the walls, the air itself—thick enough to chew, heavy enough to drown in.
Stutter lights crack the dark into slices.
A scare actor crawling spider-fast. A door that’s not a door.
I clutch the front of Bonehead’s T-shirt and let myself giggle-scream, loud enough to make the crawling guy hesitate—just a tick—like he likes my sound.
In the stutter flashes, the world jumps frames.
My boys flicker. Skully’s hands are bone for a blink when he pushes hair off his forehead; Marrow’s grin is skull-stark behind his lips; Bonehead’s silhouette goes skeleton-wide then man again.
The whisper in my ear is a metronome with a knife. Tick. Tock. Tick.
I push my face into Bonehead’s chest, into the smell of him—warm, dust, faint detergent, something like sun baked into cotton. I am suddenly, ferociously present. This second. This breath. This dumb, perfect haunted room that’s doing its best to be scary when my real fear is time.
Marrow’s palm covers the back of my neck with that courtly possessiveness that makes people call him a red flag and me call him home. “Breathe,” he says, low. “Little death’s-head. Breathe.”
And I do. I breathe the fog like I’m kissing the air and the air is kissing me back.
The crawling actor scuttles past and pops up behind us with a hiss.
I blow him a kiss too. It throws him so hard he trips and laughs—out of character, delighted—and I laugh back because sometimes we have to break the bit to be people.
Room after room we go, stealing kisses, amusing the workers with commentary, until we finally hit the chainsaw finale.
The garage door slams up, the motor coughs, and the smell of gasoline fakes rips through the sweetness.
Teenagers shriek and sprint. Skully glares at the chainsaw guy like they’re coworkers.
“Please don’t punch him,” I tell Bonehead, who is vibrating with gladiator joy.
“Run with you?” he asks, almost shy.
“Yes, you can run with me.” I catch his hand and we bolt together, Skully on my other side, Marrow just behind like a shadow with manners.
Our feet thump the plywood; the chainsaw guy revs and lunges; Bonehead throws his head back and lets loose a laugh that splits the air like thunder.
I scream like a cheerleader who just realized she summoned the devil—by accident—and he’s hot.
We burst through the last curtain, into the quiet cool of the exit hallway where the soundtrack is only a thin heartbeat under the fluorescent buzz.
The sudden normal hurts. It’s like getting thrown out of a dream.
The sign says EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP because of course it does.
I grab Bonehead’s shirt and yank him down for a kiss because the rules said no touching inside and we made it outside and I am very into technicalities. Even if I also break the rules.
It’s not obscene—someone’s grandmother is within line of sight buying a magnet that says I Got Slaughtered at the Haunted Mansion—but it’s not exactly chaste either.
He kisses me like the world’s most enthusiastic sledgehammer: whole-body, careful because I asked, but also not, because my body demands him in other ways.
Skully leans in and steals my mouth between breaths just because he can, smiling against me like theft is foreplay.
Marrow kisses my wrist, then the inside of my palm, like he’s swearing fealty to my fingerprints.
I make a sound that probably gets us written up on a clipboard somewhere as Problem Patrons: Display of Affection (Intense).
“Souvenir?” Skully asks, eyebrows waggling toward a display of glow-in-the-dark lollipops shaped like eyeballs.
“Two,” I say. “One for me, one for the little ghoul I keep in my ribcage.” I point at my sternum. “She’s very hungry.”
Marrow plucks a pack of vampire fangs off a rack and turns them in his hands like jewelry. “Gaudy,” he says, approving. “Like joy.”
“Mmm,” I say, pretending not to preen when I catch Bonehead looking at a tacky crop top that says I SURVIVED, then looking at me, then looking at it again. “You’re thinking of me in that shirt, aren’t you?”
“Uh-huh,” he says, his honesty as strong as gravity. He looks at me like a hopeful Labrador. “October pretty,” he says, as if he’s just discovered oxygen.
I consider the shirt, then consider how much I like the way he’s looking at me. “Bag it,” I tell the cashier, who smiles like she’s seen this exact scene a hundred times and still finds the magic in it.
We spill out into the parking lot with our loot, and the autumn night hits me like a cold kiss.
The lot is a grid of cars under a sky full of onyx velvet.
The fog machines have followed us out somehow, their tendrils sneaking under the streetlights.
Someone is crying-laughing two rows over.
Someone is making a TikTok with fake blood.
A security guard sips coffee and pretends not to notice a couple eating each other against the hood of a dusty sedan.
“Aftercare,” I announce, like a camp counselor for depravity. “Decompressing is important. Hydration. Praise. Light making-out.”
“Light,” Skully repeats, deadpan, and then kisses my neck in a way that is neither light nor legal in some states.
I catch his jaw in my hand and bite very gently because I am festive and also possessive and also a raccoon with culinary curiosity.
He hisses, delighted. Bonehead crowds in, hands careful at my hips, buzzing with all the things he wants and all the restraint I make him wear like a collar he’s proud of.
Marrow brackets my shoulders with his hands and rests his forehead against mine, an old ritual borrowed from somewhere with stained glass, whispering, “Sweet morbidity, I adore the proof that you live.”
“I live,” I agree, fiercely. The whisper in my head has opinions about clocks, but I pin it under my heel for now. “I am so obnoxiously, gloriously alive.”
We lean against our car like a little altar to bad decisions.
Skully tucks a glow stick into my hair. Bonehead puts the vampire fangs in and looks so stupid-hot I consider calling the vampire at the door to come witness this miracle.
Marrow opens the bag and slides my sweater off while the other two block me from view, before pulling the new crop top over my head, careful not to smudge my lipstick.
I pose. The boys applaud like I just cured boredom.
The security guard ambles past and says, “Get a room,” without stopping.
Skully calls after him, “We had one! It was full of fog and screams and a nurse who told us not to touch!” The guard snorts into his coffee and keeps walking.
Bonehead toys with the hem of my new shirt, eyes big. “Get fries now?” he asks, his voice all crushed-velvet and hopeful.
“Fries,” I declare. “Curly ones. And a milkshake so thick it needs power tools.”
Marrow offers me his arm like we’re about to waltz across the asphalt.
I take it, dramatic as a duchess. Skully jangles the bag of candy like a bell.
Bonehead opens the car door and nearly rips it off by being enthusiastic; he catches himself, sheepish, and kisses my temple like he thinks that will put the hinge back on. It kind of does.
Before I duck into the car, I glance back at the haunted house.
The neon flickers. The fog spills. A bat on the sign looks like it’s winking at me.
For half a heartbeat, the entire building is a ribcage and the parking lot is a lung and the night inhales me.
I feel the timer again, low in my bones, patient as the morning tide. Tick. Tock.
“Hey,” Skully says softly from the driver’s side, dangerous tenderness sneaking up on him. “You good, Final Girl?”
I bare my teeth at him—my pretty, not at all scary, human teeth. “I’m phenomenal.”
I climb in and slam the door like I’m sealing a pact.
The car smells like us—salt, leather, heat, and sugar from the bag of spilled lollipops under the seat.
Bonehead buckles my belt with hands that could—almost did—break a door in half.
Marrow smooths my hair like he’s cataloging every strand.
Skully starts fucking with the radio, making it blare mid–Halloween playlist. We take off into the black ribbon of road, the haunted house shrinking in the rearview like a ghost who waves politely before dissolving.
“Fries,” Bonehead reminds the night.
“Fries,” we all promise back, like it’s a spell.