Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Morning is a bruise I wear on the inside.
Not a hangover—Skully would be offended if I blamed him for common aches.
Not even a shame thing. Just…color pooled where last night pressed too hard.
If I tilt my head, I swear I can still hear aerosol hissing and metal humming—the ghost yard’s lullaby—like the train yard climbed into my skull and decided to airbrush my brain neon.
Half my hair still smells like spray paint; there’s a smear of dried glow stick on my thigh that didn’t come off in the shower, a lightning bolt the color of toxic candy.
I like it. Trophy stripe. Souvenir of sin.
The kitchen is dim and orange, because I forgot to turn off the jack-o’-lantern string lights before I crawled into bed, and now everything looks like it’s steeped in cider.
The coffeemaker grumbles like a zombie. Bonehead is hunched over the counter, elbows too careful, holding a mug like it might faint if he squeezes.
Skully sprawls on the stool opposite him, fake-innocent in sunglasses he absolutely does not need indoors, and Marrow is at the stove doing gentleman sorcery to eggs like each one died nobly and deserves a eulogy.
Domestic bliss, if domestic bliss wore eyeliner and came with a fog machine that coughs every twelve minutes like it has emphysema.
“You’ve all eaten breakfast. Good,” I announce, pitching my voice into perky to see if it breaks. “Halloween-fuel. All champions eat protein.”
“Protein,” Bonehead repeats, reverent, like I just said a prayer. He sniffs the eggs. “Protein smells like birds.”
“That is correct,” I say, patting his shoulder, then patting it again because touching him once never feels like enough.
My hand fits the jut of muscle like I was carved for it.
Do not get sentimental, I tell myself. Sentiment is a trapdoor.
Look at the skillet. Look at the toaster.
Look anywhere but the animal you want to climb.
Skully flicks his lighter on and off without lighting anything, the click a heartbeat in the room.
He slants his head toward me. The sunglasses tilt, and I catch his eyes underneath—half-lidded and dark, the exact look he wore when he had me pressed against cold steel while our paint dripped like we’d bled neon.
But then…skin thins, bones appear. Flash, then gone.
My stomach drops like a ride I didn’t pay the ticket for.
“Morning, Baby,” he says, and it’s normal except for how it isn’t.
I hear last night in it, hear the scrape of metal, the way his teeth made a promise on my mouth he pretended was a joke.
I pour coffee and miss the mug by a little.
Marrow slides it under in time, like he’s been standing here for centuries learning people’s mistakes.
He doesn’t say anything about the mess, just: “You tremble with vitality.” He plates eggs like art. “It’s very beautiful.”
“You’re very beautiful,” I chirp too fast, then swallow and grin wider, because widening a grin always works if you don’t mind your face cracking a little. “Speaking of beauty. Plans. I have them.”
Skully’s mouth twitches like he’s about to tell a joke and then thinks better of it. Bonehead inhales two forkfuls of eggs at once and looks at me with gooey hero-worship, yolk lacquer on his lip. Marrow folds himself into a chair, polite and attentive like my madness is a salon.
“Costumes,” I declare. “We need them. Today.”
A trio of identical, mismatched reactions:
Bonehead: immediate joy, fists balling because any plan that sounds like a quest is his kink. “Battle clothes.”
Skully: a groan he meows on purpose. “Oh good, retail foreplay.”
Marrow: a flicker of pleased surprise, like I handed him a sealed letter he’s been hoping for. “Accoutrements to announce our true natures.”
“Precisely.” I stab a finger at the ceiling like I’m summoning lightning. “Halloween is the Super Bowl of my soul and we are not showing up in plain clothes. I’m the queen. You’re my kings. Later I’m painting you dead—but first we need the bones to hold it.”
I almost choke on the word bones.
Skully’s smile goes lazy and obscene. “You’re painting me dead? Kinky.”
“I’ll need volunteers willing to hold very still while I draw on their faces for hours,” I say loftily. “With my thighs.”
Bonehead looks like I just handed him Santa. “I hold still with face between thighs.”
“Not yet,” I scold, kissing the top of his head because I can. Because I must. “First: shopping trip.”
There’s a little pause. Not a bad one. Just the kind where sound rearranges itself into a new shape.
Skully’s lighter clicks, then stops. He takes the sunglasses off, studies me.
It’s not suspicion—God no, he thinks suspicion is an ugly shirt and refuses to wear it—it’s curiosity with teeth.
The kind that wants to taste my next move.
He remembers the yard. I can see it in the hitch of his lower lip.
I remember too. The way he said “Don’t ever run where I can’t catch you” and meant it like a promise and a problem.
I aim my grin at his mouth like a weapon and blow a kiss across the countertop. “You coming?”
“Always,” he says, because he can’t not, and Bonehead cackles and then looks thoughtful, like he’s cataloging which jokes are food.
Marrow slides my coffee closer. He’s watching me in that way he does that makes me want to both crawl into his lap and throw a curtain over him to keep civilians from seeing. “Where do queens shop, little terror?”
“Not Spirit,” I say immediately. “We’re doing boutique blasphemy. The Halloween Emporium of Doom.”
Bonehead pumps a fist. “Doom Emporium.”
“Doom Emporium,” I echo, and the syllables fit my mouth like candy, like a ward I can pretend is stronger than what’s chewing holes in me. I take a scalding sip of coffee to burn the quiet. “Finish up. We’re pillaging.”
By the time we hit the driveway, the sky is way too bright for my mood and the air tastes like wet leaves and car exhaust and the kind of afternoon that could go soft if I let it. I don’t. I specialize in hard edges.
The boys are rocking some of their more casual new clothes.
So I’m wearing distraction enough for all of us: ripped tights under a micro dress that looks like a funeral veil decided to learn pole, the largest, darkest sunglasses I have, and boots that put me on eye level with Bonehead’s sternum if I stand on his feet.
Slutty Halloween is not a phase. It’s a religion.
We head for my convertible that currently has the top up.
Bonehead calls shotgun. Skully calls the playlist and punishes us with an eight-minute track of industrial noise that, okay, fine, slaps.
Marrow opens my door and bows like we’re at a hotel with bellhops and I’m not on my way to purchase six pounds of latex and shame.
Traffic is a parade of beige sedans and middle-aged men who all look like they’re chewing their own taxes.
Whenever we stop, I catch our reflection in the glass of roadside stores: my pale sunglasses covered face, Skully’s slouch, Bonehead’s alert grin, Marrow’s profile like something carved by a love-struck angel.
I stare until the light turns and then keep staring anyway, as if I can memorize us into a place that photographs can’t lose.
Skully taps the window twice with his lighter. He doesn’t look at me when he says, soft enough that a human wouldn’t hear over the engine, “You’re buzzing.”
“I’m electric,” I sing, strapping my grin on tight enough it creaks.
“Obviously.” He smiles. Drops it. Puts the sunglasses back on like they can keep me from seeing him seeing me. He’s not suspicious; he’s smitten, which is worse. Smitten men write songs or ruin lives or both, and I’m greedy enough to want every version.
The Emporium crouches in a strip mall between a shuttered tanning salon and a dollar store that has never once sold anything for a dollar.
From the outside it looks like a Halloween store designed by an insurance adjuster—black paper over the windows, a vinyl banner with a crack in the O’s of DOOM—but the second the doors puff open it exhales adrenaline and fake cobwebs, and my heart does a little skip like it recognizes family.
“Welcome to your ascension,” I tell my men, sweeping my arm grandly at the chaos: racks of costumes slouched against each other like passed-out frat boys, a wall of cheap crowns that still sparkle like they mean it, masks with eyeholes that will never line up with any human face.
The ceiling hums with bad fluorescent light and string bats that twirl when the AC kicks on.
The carpet is sticky enough to be a moral failing.
A pair of teenagers trying on matching cat ears sees us as the room dissolves into breathless quiet. The cashier freezes mid-scan, red laser painting the barcode like he’s trying to cauterize it. A mom drags a toddler away from the weapon aisle; the toddler fighting like a drunk raccoon.
“Eyes front,” I tell the room, cheerful as arsenic. “Court business.”
Bonehead tips his chin up like he’s sniffing the air for prey. “Where king things.”
“Over there,” I say, pointing toward a display the Emporium has labeled MEN’S ROYAL—BUT SEXY.
The mannequins are wearing brocade jackets so shiny they look wet and pants so tight they would squeak if you thought about God.
Shoulder pieces. Collars. A vaguely medieval crown crusted with rhinestones that might cut if you kissed too hard. Perfect. Horrible. Ours.
Skully drifts sideways to a rack that says PRINCE OF DARKNESS. He holds up a velvet tailcoat and gives me a look over the sleeve, eyes promising crimes. “If I wear this and behave badly enough, is it treason or just foreplay?”
“Both,” I tell him, because I love a man who makes everything a multiple choice test he intends to fail.