Bonepetal

by Nova Kane

For the knife. For the blood. For the fuck that feels like resurrection.

Who kissed me in the candlelight like I was both the sacrifice and the priestess.

And I was content to let her. To let her live the life I bled to give her. Until him.

Devil’s Night.

The cemetery is a cold parish—crooked teeth of stone, dead grass chewed to nub, and a ring of skeletal maples chattering in the wind. Houses glow on the hill beyond, yellow squares of counterfeit safety.

The crows string themselves across the night, wing to wing, a black ribbon pulling through the dark. They don’t wait for me, they move. A living arrow. A command in feathers and beaks. Each beat of their wings stitches a path through the fog, and I move in their wake, hunting, because my body only knows one command when she’s near, take.

“I’m not the god who takes prayers,” I whisper as his body starts to fold. “I’m the fucking thing that answers them.”

The teeth of the mask glint in the moonlight. Something about the curve of the bone, the shape of the jaw, it hits me like a punch. My stomach twists. My knees threaten to buckle. Nathan. The skull on his face isn’t just some relic. It’s Nathan’s.

“You forgot who you belong to,” he whispers. “You forgot who bled for you. Who died for you.”

“Don’t act surprised, bonepetal. While you were giving away the parts of yourself that were mine, I was rotting in hell. Burning. Suffering. Watching. Every scream, every flame, every fucking second they tore me apart I saw you. And I promised myself when I came back, you’d remember exactly who owns you.”

“You broke the vow, Salem. Now you’ll learn what a broken vow costs.”

“Don’t you dare close your eyes,” he snarls, voice sharp as the grip at my throat. “You fucking look at me when I ruin you, bonepetal. Look through Nathan’s empty fucking eyes. Through his skull. Through the grave you fucking made me crawl out of.”

Crows burst overhead, their wings a black tide blotting out the sliver of moon as I sprint toward the line of trees, toward the forest we grew up in.

Above, the crows split the sky for me, black wings carving the moon to ribbons, their cries a chorus dragged straight out of hell. They’ve always been my eyes. My hounds. My fucking choir. She thinks she’s running away. But she’s running home. To me.

The cemetery yawns open, rows of stones like crooked teeth. She stumbles right where I knew she would, straight to the marker carved with my name. A neat little lie for the town to mourn, a stone to make them think I ever rested. My body rotted here, sure. But my soul? My soul never fucking touched it. The devil dragged that down the second I stopped breathing.

“What came back isn’t Finn. Not the boy you loved. What came back is a monster, a man who burned and rotted, who screamed through fire while you let another put his hands where only I ever should’ve been. A man who clawed his way out of the grave to drag you back where you belong—under me.”

“You give me your blood, your breath, your yes, and I take the rest. Every curse, every chain, every shadow meant for you? It burns through me instead. I carry it.” My laugh cuts rough, humorless. “And you already know, bonepetal—I don’t burn easy. All you have to do, is give me everything, and never fucking take it back.”

“Why the wax?” she breathes, voice cracked thin. “Because heat loosens hooks,” I growl, watching another droplet cling, quiver, and harden. “We melt the devil out of you. Burn him the fuck away. Every mark” —I smear my thumb through a cooling stripe, rough against her— “is mine now.”

“Scream for me, bonepetal. I want every corpse in this dirt to know who owns you.”