Page 8 of Bonepetal
Nathan’s car glides to the curb, headlights cutting through the fog in pale, silvery spears.
I let the curtain slip from my fingers, shutting out the sight of him, and the street beyond. My heartbeat feels like it’s trying to crawl up my throat.
The candle on the counter flickers once before I snuff it, plunging the room into shadow.
Bag over my shoulder. Keys in hand.
The lock clicks home behind me.
Time to walk straight into whatever the night’s waiting to feed me to.
CHAPTER 2
FINN
Broadicea - Enya
The dirt tastes like pennies and old rain.
It cakes my tongue, wedges deep under my nails, grinds into my eyelids like the earth itself tried to blindfold me with rot. I open my mouth to breathe and choke on grave. Grit saws my throat raw on the way down; when I cough, it blasts back in my face—dust of me choking on the same earth that fucking buried me. The coffin roof bows against my ribs with each breath, an old wood lung I never asked for.
I don’t panic.
I push.
The first shove splits something in my shoulder. The second splits the wood. Nails shriek. Iron screams. A seam tears open above me and night stabs through—thin, mean, and stinking of leaf rot and chimney smoke. I tilt my head to the crack like it’s a priest’s hand blessing me back to life, and I grin in the dark where nobody can see how wrong it looks. Then I jam my fingers into the splinter and start clawing the world apart.
Boards peel like scabs. The packed earth is worse. It fights me like it remembers taking me and doesn’t want to let go.
Tough fucking luck.
My knuckles grind into soil until skin splits. I wedge my forearms into the wound of my grave and heave. Earth avalanches across my face, into my hair, over my teeth. Worms, rust, the old tang of my own dried blood. For a second, when the weight above won’t budge, I get the taste of it again—the press of heat, chains hooked behind my ribs, fire teaching me pain is a language and eternity is just a long sick joke you can’t walk away from.
I snarl into the dark and shove harder.
A black slab collapses. The sky rips open like a slit throat, bleeding purple twilight. I drag myself out—shoulders first, then ribs, then waist. My hips catch on the lip of the coffin and wrench free with a pop that would’ve dropped me when I was still soft, still mortal. I sprawl on the wet grass and breathe like I’ve made drowning a fucking hobby.
For a long minute, there’s only the sound of me un-dying.
I sit up. The headstone behind me is split down the middle like it tried to claw its way out too. My name is still carved there—the one she spoke like a vow, like a curse, like a goddamn home. The dates are wrong. Doesn’t fucking matter. My hands are raw and black-lined; my mouth is torn at the corner. None of it matters. Pain’s just pocket change. I shove it down and stand.
Crows boil out of the trees like spilled ink, screaming a hundred scratchy voices into the dusk. One drops from a bare limb, lands a pace from my boots, and fixes me with a glass bead eye, kinder than anything heaven ever spat out.
“Come on then,” I growl, voice sandpaper and grave rot. “We’ve got shit to do.”
The crow hops without fear. Smart bird. Knows exactly who the fuck I belong to, and who belongs to me.
The veil is thin. I feel it like pressure in my temples, or the prickle behind a migraine. Like whispering through a keyhole. I lower my hand until my knuckles brush the crow’s head. The world folds.
For a breath, I am looking at me from below—a mud-painted man, a funeral marionette kneeling in wet grass. I blink with that second set of lids, a thin, milky sweep that isn’t mine, and the vision snaps back. The crow’s heart hammers against my finger bones, fast and wild, like it knows it beats for me now.
A year in hell teaches you what you can ride. Chains, for a while. Fire, always. Crows—forever.
When the devil took me, he didn’t gloat. He didn’t need to. A palm on my sternum, a black-hot silence, and in that silence I learned I could see through eyes that aren’t mine if I let the feral part of me scratch to the front. I watched her that way. Every damn day. Rooftops, rain gutters. Tree limbs. Power lines. I watched her sleep curled around my hoodie on rainy nights, pencil smudges on her fingers, sketches of me scattered across the table. I watched her build a life out of the scraps I left her. Watched her breathe, eat, exist—mine, even when she thought she was free.
And I was content to let her. To let her live the life I bled to give her.
Until him.
