Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The cemetery.
The place where my drunken, candy-fueled séance spilled over into the impossible.
Where I dragged three skeletons up out of the dirt and said, “Hey, new friends,” instead of running like a sane person.
The black iron gate looms ahead, twisted bars glinting under the moon.
Beyond it, rows of tombstones slouch in fog, pale and patient as teeth.
Bonehead squints, rubbing yolk off his chin with his forearm. “Huh. Déjà vu.”
“Not déjà vu,” I whisper, my throat gone tight. “Full circle.”
Skully flicks his lighter open-shut-open, flame catching on his smirk. “Guess the fourth act needs a callback.”
Marrow steps up beside me, his hand slipping into mine like it was meant to be there from the first night. His voice is a velvet toll. “All stories crave an ending. And every ending begins where it was born.”
The gate creaks in the wind, beckoning.
My coffin purse digs into my hip, stuffed with stolen candy and chaos, but it suddenly feels stupidly small, like a trick-or-treat bag in the face of eternity. My heart hammers—too fast, too loud, too alive. Except…not alive. Not really.
I stare past the bars, into the fog curling over the grass like it’s waiting to swallow us whole.
The iron gate groans like it hasn’t moved since the last funeral, but Bonehead just grins and shoves it open with a single massive palm. Metal screams against metal, sparks of rust falling like dying fireflies. The sound slices straight down my spine.
We cross the threshold together.
Fog thickens around our ankles, swallowing the streetlight glow behind us.
The houses, the kids, the chaos—it all vanishes like a dream at dawn.
Ahead: rows of crooked stones, marble angels weeping in shadow, jack-o’-lantern moonlight spilling silver across the grass.
The cemetery smells like wet leaves and damp stone and something older, deeper, like the embodiment of the earth itself.
My heels sink into the dirt. Bonehead steadies me by the waist, then doesn’t let go. His thumb traces circles against my hipbone like he’s trying to memorize me in braille.
Skully falls into step at my other side, his lighter flicking, flame tiny and fragile in the dark. “Goddamn,” he mutters, and it’s not sarcastic. His voice is raw. “Feels like the set of every horror flick I never got a sequel for.”
Marrow drapes his coat over my shoulders though I don’t feel cold. His fingers linger at my throat, pulse point to pulse point, and when he bends to whisper it’s a prayer disguised as a vow: “We return to the cradle of our bones.”
I laugh, too sharp, too wet. “Jesus, Marrow.”
Bonehead stops us in the middle of the main path, right under a towering oak with roots that look like clutching hands.
He spins me toward him, paint-smeared grin wide and desperate.
“Pretty October,” he rumbles, forehead pressing to mine.
“Don’t cry. Tonight’s for smash. For fun.
” His big hands frame my face like he can hold me together by sheer force.
“I’m not crying,” I lie, lips brushing his. Then I kiss him hard enough to taste the lie, egg yolk, chocolate, and paint all at once.
Skully growls low, pulls me back, crashes his mouth onto mine like he’s stealing the taste before it’s gone. His hand tangles in my hair, holding me there even as the fog curls higher, licking around our knees.
Marrow doesn’t fight for space. He waits. When I turn to him, it’s slow, deliberate. His lips meet mine with aching reverence, tongue parting me like a psalm. “Beloved,” he breathes into me, “if we vanish, let us vanish in your touch.”
I’m trembling, laughing, sobbing—all the same thing now. My skeleton paint cracks with sweat and tears, smudged across all their faces. We look like monsters, like war paint, like everything Halloween ever promised me.
And then I see them.
Three stones in a row, half-sunk, names carved like curses: their names. Bonehead’s clumsy little epitaph. Skully’s scrawled rocker scrawl. Marrow’s tragic poetry etched in granite. The markers of where they rotted before I pulled them up and said, come play with me.
I stumble toward them like I’m drunk, heels digging into the dirt. The fog curls higher, swallowing my calves. My breath hitches, but I start wagging a finger at the stones like they’re naughty puppies.
“Nope. Nope, not happening. You don’t get to keep them. You hear me?” My voice comes out high, manic, a carnival barker at the end of the world. “They’re mine now. Mine. Lease revoked. Eviction notice served.”
Bonehead tries to steady me, but I whirl on him, giggling through the tears. “Don’t worry, big guy. I’ve got a plan. I always have a plan. Even when I don’t. Which is most of the time. But this time? I really—really—really do.”
“What plan?” Skully asks, voice tight, like he’s not sure if he wants the answer.
“The keep-them plan!” I shout, arms flinging wide, nearly losing my purse to the mud. “The fuck-you-grim-reaper plan. Step one: don’t let go. Step two: don’t let go. Step three—guess what? Don’t. Let. Go.” I’m gasping, giggling, spinning in the fog.
“So I won’t.” I say, but the words smear.
I don’t want to be the kind of person who lets go.
I never have been. I’m a collector of things that can’t be returned: plushies, spray paint tags, three hot boys who look better dismantled.
So maybe the logic is terrible, maybe it’s nonsense, but it’s mine and it’s loud and it smells faintly of cinnamon. “See? Foolproof!”
Marrow’s hand touches my elbow, careful as silk. “Beloved-”
“It’ll work!” I cut him off, stumbling away. “I’m a genius, see? It has to!”
I choke on a laugh. My purse clatters open when I dig inside, candy spilling like guts. My fingers close around something colder, sharper.
I pull it out.
A knife. Small, silver, ridiculous in my glitter-painted hand. Not ceremonial. Not occult. Just the one I’d used earlier to carve smiley faces into sugar cookies.
But under the moon, it gleams like it could cut through anything. Even death.
The boys freeze.
Bonehead’s face is broken, no easy smile to be found. “October,” he says, low, like he’s trying to be the adult in a horror movie that already went wrong.
Skully is, for once, completely still. A statue of misery. “Baby,” he says, but it’s softer than his sarcasm, like the word could be a cape we both hide under.
If only that were true.
Marrow’s voice is shaky, lost. “My love, don’t,” he says, like a command wrapped in silk.
“Guys, it’s okay,” I giggle, the sound cracked, tears falling. “I’m not letting go. It’s not sad. I can just come with you.”
The knife catches the moonlight. My hand shakes, but I hold it tighter, grinning at the stones like I can scare the graveyard into surrender as I position it right over my heart.
And somewhere beyond the fog, a bell tolls.
Midnight.
I strike.
The world condenses to the tip of the knife and the thump in my ears and the stupid, stupid courage of someone who thinks theatrics can muscle fate. The metal kisses my skin. I want the heat. I want the gasp. I want everything to be messy and final and real.
It doesn’t happen.
The blade sails clean through like I’m made of fog and light and bad glitter.
For a beat—one gorgeous, horrible, eternal beat—I feel the cold on the other side of me, and then nothing.
No heat. No red river. No dramatic collapse.
Just the ridiculous sound of the knife clattering to dead leaves, clinking like a tiny bell.
Silence snaps down. The bell stops mid-toll. The fog holds its breath.
The world splits me open.
Not flesh. Not blood. Memory.
It slams in like drumbeats, each one a blow I can’t block.
Thud. Me on the cemetery ground that first night.
Thud. The Ouija board glowing faintly in candlelight, my heart broken.
Thud. The whispers started, asking what I wanted.
Thud. My plea for love. For acceptance.
Thud. A bargain struck.
Thud. The price of a heartbeat: a glimpse of love on Earth.
Thud. Shoved back into my body.
And then—just the thin electric hum of the veil tearing.
The skeletons rose, bones clattering, hollow sockets catching firelight, and I thought: Oh good. New friends. But the truth is—I was already on their side. Already crossed over. I hadn’t summoned them to me.
We’d met in the middle.
My knees hit the grass in front of their graves. I want to laugh, to scream, to argue, but the cemetery holds me like a throat clasped shut. The boys are shouting—Bonehead’s roar, Skully’s cracked rasp, Marrow’s velvet plea—but their voices are far away, muffled, like I’m under glass.
The memories keep pounding, merciless.
We’ve been on borrowed time. Every kiss, every prank, every stupid cookie, all of it parceled out like candy in a rigged game. Not life. Never life. Just afterlife’s little joke. A gift. A tease. A taste.
And now the bell tolls again, final and low, and the earth itself seems to exhale.
I stagger, fingers curling in the dirt, looking up at their faces—paint cracked, eyes wild, desperate. My monsters. My boys. My beautiful curse.
I was dead the whole time. What kind of twisted Sixth Sense bullshit is that?!
“Fuck. I really thought I was the new and improved slutty Final Girl.” I whisper, the words ripped out like confession. “I was supposed to stay alive till Act Four.”
And the fog closes in.