The Bone Collector’s Daughter – III: The Ravenous Dark

Don't forget to read the first two!

• The Bone Collector’s Daughter – I: The Inheritance of Shadows
• The Bone Collector’s Daughter – II: Whispers from the Crypt

V: The Ravenous Dark

The cellar was no longer a cellar.

Shadows stretched like tar, twisting the room into something vast and cavernous. The air thickened with the scent of wet soil and burning copper. Vera’s pulse hammered in her throat as the prince—no, not a prince anymore—pressed her into the altar’s edge, his grip a vise.

"You wanted me whole," he rasped, his voice layered with something deeper, older. "But you didn’t ask what I’d be when the pieces came back together."

His teeth glinted in the dark—too many, too sharp.

The Thing Beneath the Skin

Vera had seen corpses before. She’d held skulls in her palms, traced the delicate sutures where bone met bone. But this—

This was wrong.

The prince’s flesh rippled, patches of it sloughing away to reveal the gleam of bone beneath, only to knit itself back together moments later. His breath rattled like wind through dead branches.

"The curse isn’t just on me," he gasped, his fingers spasming against her wrist. "It’s in the blood that woke me. Your blood."

A realization, cold and slick as a knife between ribs:

She hadn’t just resurrected him, she’d tied herself to him.

The First Feeding

He lunged.

Not for her throat, but for the wound on her finger—the one from the glass. His mouth sealed over the cut, and Vera felt it—the pull, the dizzying rush as something vital left her.

The prince shuddered, his form stabilizing, his edges becoming more real.

When he pulled back, his lips were stained crimson.

"I can stop," he lied, his pupils swallowing the ember-light whole. "If you tell me to."

Vera’s vision swam.

She should have recoiled.

Should have screamed.

Instead, she bared her wrist.

The Bargain Sealed

The house groaned around them, the bones in the walls singing a dirge only they could hear.

The prince cradled her arm like a sacred text, his breath hot against her skin. "Say my name," he urged. "The one they erased."

Vera’s mouth filled with the taste of old blood and older magic.

"Valac," she whispered—and the world split.

VI: The House Awakens

The walls of Blackthorn Hall breathed.

Vera felt it the moment Valac’s true name left her lips—a shudder through the foundation, like the house itself had been waiting. The bones embedded in the plaster shifted, jaws creaking open in silent screams. A low, wet groan echoed through the halls, as if the wood were remembering it had once been alive.

Valac laughed—a sound like cracking ice. "You didn’t think the collection was just for show, did you?" His newly formed fingers traced the doorframe, where a child’s tiny rib cage had been mortared between the beams. "Every Locke has fed this place. Now it’s your turn."

The Hungry Halls

Vera stumbled into the corridor, her head still swimming from blood loss. The hallway stretched longer than it should have, doors warping into crooked grins. Behind one, something scratched insistently.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

"Don’t," Valac warned, but she was already turning the knob.

The nursery was a gutted carcass of a room, its crib filled with yellowed teeth. Above it, the mobile spun lazily—not wooden animals, but finger bones strung on wire. The scratching came from the closet.

Vera reached for it.

A skeletal hand shot out, clamping around her wrist.

"Sister," it hissed with her father’s voice.

The First Lie

Valac tore the thing off her, snapping its radius with a wet crunch. The bone fragments wriggled like maggots before stilling.

"Ghosts are just memories with teeth," he said, kicking the closet shut. "This house chews them up but never swallows." His newly solid form blocked the doorway, the candlelight carving hollows beneath his cheekbones. "You asked why your father really died?" A grim smile. "He tried to leave."

Vera’s reflection in the nursery mirror flickered. For a heartbeat, she saw her own skeleton grinning back.

The Tether

Her cut finger throbbed.

Valac’s gaze dropped to it, his tongue darting over his lips. The bond between them pulsed like a second heartbeat, sickly sweet and rotting at the edges.

"You’re mine now," he murmured. "But the house will try to keep us both."

Outside, the wind screamed through the trees.

Inside, the walls leaned closer.

Vera pressed her bleeding finger to Valac’s chest, where his stolen heart should be.

"Then let’s make it regret that," she said.

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Volume IV soon to come!