Page 3 of The Knucklebone Brothers

I stopped dead. Lacey kept walking for a second before realizing I wasn't beside her anymore. Two women, a few years older than me, were standing by a ring toss game, their heads bent together like they were sharing a prayer.

"Looks like ten miles of bad road," the other one said, her voice dripping with pity. "Shame what happened to her mama. Real shame 'bout her."

The beer bottle in my hand felt cold, then hot. I turned, my voice sharp enough to cut through the carnival music. "You got somethin' to say, you can say it to my face."

The women jumped, their eyes wide. "We... we were just..."

"Yeah, I know what you were just doin'," I snarled, taking a step towards them. "Mind your own damn business before you find out just how unstable I can be."

Lacey grabbed my arm, pulling me back. "Rory, stop it. C'mon, let's go."

I let her drag me away, my heart hammering against my ribs. The rage was a familiar fire, a welcome warmth after a year of feeling nothing at all.

"That was embarrassing," Lacey hissed, but I wasn't listening. We were walking past the Knucklebones' booth again, and the whole vibe had shifted. The sun had gone down, and now their little corner of the festival was lit by a handful of flickering lanterns, casting long, dancing shadows. The light made the jars of embryos glow like sickly jewels and gave the taxidermy animals a lifelike menace.

And Blythe was playing the banjo.

The music wasn't happy. It was a slow, mournful tune, all minor keys and haunting notes that seemed to tell a story of loss and longing. It was the sound of the mountains themselves, of old sorrow and deep-seated pain. And he was staring right at me. His eyes unreadable in the dim light, were locked on mine, and the music he played felt like it was just for me. A shiver traced a path down my spine, and it had nothing to do with the cool night air.

Maverick was leaning against a pole, a weird, knowing grin on his face. He watched me watch Blythe, and then he slowly raised a hand and winked at me. It wasn't a friendly wink. It was a conspiratorial one, a secret shared between two people who knew a joke no one else did. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a deck of cards, fanning them out with a flourish. He plucked one from the deck—the Queen of Hearts—and held it up for me to see before tucking it into his breast pocket, right over his heart.

Lacey saw the whole exchange. "I thought you said they were freaks," she said, her voice low and teasing. "Why are you two lookin' at each other like you're long lost lovers?"

I tore my eyes away from them, my face flushing. "I don't even know them. Nobody does."

"Yeah, but you know their lore," she said, her eyes wide with a mix of fear and fascination. "Everyone does."

I did. Everyone in Mercy Ridge did. Their family was a dead religion, a ghost story whispered around campfires. They were the descendants of an Appalachian carnival, a freakshow that got stranded in these mountains generations ago. Some say it was a flood, others a mudslide, a train derailment, a winter starvation. Whatever it was, it broke them. Some died. Some stayed. Some went feral. The modern world forgot them, but they kept performing, not for crowds much, but for themselves mostly.

And the town had its myths about them. They said the Knucklebones ate people, that they buried bodies under the old rides on their property. They kept dead bodies for their own sick pleasures. They said their masks were made from real skin, that they kept corpses in their trailers, and that they worshipped the dead. They were a part of the town's history, a dark, twisted thread woven into the fabric of Mercy Ridge.

"They're odd," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "Their mom's even crazier. Rumor has it she homeschooled them in a crypt or somethin'."

But even as I said the words, I knew they weren't just rumors. They were the truth, or at least a version of it. And as I looked back at the two brothers, one playing a song of sorrow and the other holding a card to his heart, I felt a pull, a dangerous, undeniable attraction to the darkness they represented. They were the ghosts in the woods, the freaks in the sideshow.

People around here treated the Knucklebones like they were ancient, like they'd crawled out of the mud with the rest of the town's forgotten history. But they weren't. They were my age, somewhere in their twenties, just as lost and stuck as the rest of us, only they wore their strangeness like a second skin.

They weren't even real brothers, not by blood. Maverick was the son of one of the old sideshow girls, a woman the old timers still whispered about.

They said her name was Lilith, and she was the Serpent Girl, born with a forked tongue and eyes the color of a stormy sky. They said she was beautiful in a way that made you ache, a dangerous kind of lovely that drew you in just close enough for the poison to take hold. Maverick had that same look, that same unsettling beauty that felt like a promise and a threat all at once.

Blythe was the one who was truly a Knucklebone by blood, but Maverick… he was something else entirely. A beautiful, venomous thing grafted onto the family name.

She was murdered by some crazed lover she'd picked up in a town two counties over, a man who couldn't handle the poison that came with her beauty.

After she died, Blythe's mom took Maverick in, gave him the Knucklebone name, and raised him like he was her own flesh and blood. But that's where the story gets real twisted. The rumor wasn't just that Blythe was a momma's boy. It was that Maverick was just as obsessed, if not more.

He was the son of a murdered sideshow girl, raised by a woman who was probably just as broken as he was. They were both momma's boys, tied to her by a love that was as suffocating as it was protective, a shared devotion that was the only thing holding their fractured family together.

"Please, Rory, please, please, please let's do the haunted house," Lacey begged, pulling on my arm with the energy of a chihuahua on crank. "It's the 'Slaughterhouse of Souls' this year! They say it's the scariest one they've ever done!"

I sighed, finishing the last of my beer and corndog. "Lace, you know I only go for the bad acting and to see if they got any cool decor. It's always just a bunch of high school kids in masks who couldn't scare a fly off a shit wagon."

"That's the best part!" she squealed, dragging me towards a large, ramshackle structure that looked like it had been built out of old barn wood. A giant sign above the entrance read "SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF SOULS" in letters that looked like they were dripping blood.

The air inside was thick enough to chew on, a humid cocktail of stale popcorn, sugary cotton candy, and the sharp sting of Dr Pepper spilled on the floor. Fog machines hissed from hidden vents, pumping out a low, rolling mist that clung to the floor like wet wool. It smelled like ozone and cheap plastic.

Lacey was already twenty feet ahead, her laughter echoing off the peeling wallpaper as she pushed through a curtain of fake spiderwebs. "Come on, Rory! It’s getting better!"