Nothing But Bones

31: Tiff Eats Some Paint

Its fingers curl around hers. Cold seeps up her hand and into her shoulder; it rests deep in her bones. Tendrils of darkness swirl around her wrist; the pointed tips move to pierce her skin, writhing jello against humid basement summer air. She tries to take it into her— tries to make it less of a threat, tries to take it off the playing field so everyone else is a little safer— but it doesn't seem interested in entering her body to warp her mind like its siblings. It seems more interested in taking what it can.

Bones clatter behind her, somewhere at the top of the stairs. Frederick leaps from the top step and onto the Other One like this is some sort of pay-per-view wrestling match. Mid-leap, he cries, "I shall not have such evil in my house nor harming my guests."

Bone meets shadow, ripping the being away from the demigod on the third stair from the bottom. Only one of the tendrils remains on her; it slithers under her skin and burrows like an earthworm in soil until she can't see it anymore.

The skeleton and the shadow crash into Dingus, who has Kepler riding on his back. Kepler jumps off at the last second, leaping toward Boris. The necromancer screams and throws his hands up as if to cast some sort of spell, but nothing comes to him. Perhaps he's drained from summoning the Other One. Kepler squeaks a terrifying warrior's squeak before he clamps down. Teeth latch onto the dick and balls of the necromancer through his sweat-soaked dress pants. Kepler rips, disconnecting both as the fabric rips with such a satisfying sound— more so than his blood-curdling scream, anyway.

Bleeding profusely, Boris stumbles back into the boxes, arms flailing like they'll help him keep his balance when Kepler lets go. Almost comically, he slips and falls on his back into the box of Christmas ornaments under the window. The glass shatters on impact.

Tiff takes the final few stairs down into the basement. disentangles herself from the bone-and-dog pile. After giving Kepler a quick kiss on the forehead, she looks down at the man in the glittering glass.

On the one hand, this is the only thing she can think of to fix herself with. Even with a portion of the shadows in her arm, infecting her like they did last year, it's the only thing she can think of to put the ribs back together. She isn't sure why. It's a repeating peal of bells in her head, a chiming alarm on her bedside table: end it, end it, end it. She has the rolling pin in her hands. She could hit him until it stops.

But fuck. She can't let him die.

Tiff drops to her knees. It's anticlimactic, she knows, but she has to try. She may not have her bag with her, but she does have a source of heat and she does have a piece of metal in her back pocket.

"Dingus!" she calls, over her shoulder. "Come here! I need your help real quick!"

The hellhound leaps over to her in several bounds. Blood hisses on the ground when it drips from his body. Dark, burning eyes stare down at her, far above her eye level when she's kneeling.

Elton moves past Frederick and the Other One, both of which have now made their way to their feet, to stand and watch what she's doing. The skeleton looks relatively fine, minus missing one arm entirely and a chunk of his skull. They're on the ground somewhere, she's sure. Tiff can see the occipital bone fragment by the clown statue.

Fred slaps the shadow creature, but yells over his shoulder to Tiff. "Whatever you plan to do to rid us of this Hellspawn, I'd suggest you do it now rather than any other point in the future."

Frederick gets a claw to his skull for his troubles. How kind.

"The shadow is not from Hell! It's from between planes! Just— just give me a minute, Fred!" It comes out more like a hysterical shriek than a coherent sentence. She takes a deep breath, trying to figure out what she's going to have to do.

Fuck. She has to take off this old man's pants, isn't she? Goddammit.

Boris is on the glass ornaments, groaning when he visibly clocks exactly what she's thinking about. He coughs. "Just kill me."

"No. Not this time. Help me get your pants off so I can cauterize it."

He spits at her, but ends up spitting in his own face. She spits on him, too.

With Boris's assistance, Tiff works them off and turns on the medical brain rather than the Tiff-Sheridan-disgust one. She wrenches her palette knife, now bent out of shape, from her back pocket, and sticks it between her teeth to scrape off the built-up layers of acrylic and oil. She spits them to the side, on a headless ceramic snowman near Boris's arm. Some of it stays in her mouth; she swallows it down bruised pipes. It's hard to care about the way it scrapes her throat right now.

She holds up the palette knife to Dingus. "I need you to heat this."

He snorts, like he's sniffing the saliva there.

"Dingus. Please. Come on," she begs. The glass digs into her knees; the plastic-coated hooks are caught in her jeans; and Dingus clamps his mouth and long, yellow teeth gently around the palette knife long enough to heat it.

Grinning through shaky breaths, she scratches under his chin gently. Coarse fur scratches her in turn. "Go help Freddie, bud. I've got this."

She holds the glowing metal and, playing the part of so many people before her, takes it to the wound. The scent of burning flesh is bearable. It's typical of this house, isn't it? The haunting is hereditary; the haunting is passed from person to person; the haunting exists in the mirrors and foils, and what are they if they are not the same? If she does not resemble the man on her impromptu operating table? If she does not resemble the teenage boy standing watch? Molar stars and stewed faces; men made of bones and broken ornaments; cockroaches crawling up and down the walls; blood like the strawberry jam at the bottom of a glass. The flesh burns to fix what's broken. This is what it is to be haunted, and responsible, and human.

Isn't it? She wants to yell it into his face as she works, wishing she had a needle and thread, wishing she had the pencil case. Isn't it? Isn't this the brutality of personhood? Aren't the pain of loss and the consequences of poor decisions the essence of what they are? Isn't it the thing that connects them, through science and magic and humanity? Her chest is open, weeping shadows; she wishes she had bandages to wrap around him.

That's it, though. The metal of the knife burns her fingertips until it cools enough to return to her pocket. She leaves him in the glass.

Wiping imaginary sweat from under her nose, Tiff turns around on the ceramic shards under her knees to face the rest of them.