We moved around the perimeter for the next hour. He pointed out things I would have walked past, the way the ivy seemed to be pulling the bricks down rather than climbing them, a shattered window that looked like a row of teeth. He had an editor's eye for detail, precise and structural, and the way he described decay sounded like someone diagnosing a sentence that had gone wrong. I found myself shooting faster, trying to keep up with the observations he was feeding me.
The cold eventually got to him. I could see the shiver working through his shoulders before he tried to hide it. I gestured to the stone wall across the street.
"Break time. Sit."
He sat, our shoulders briefly touching, the warmth from his coat seeping into me. I wanted to photograph him. I'd been wanting to since the church, the way you'd photograph something you were afraid of losing. The light was hitting the side of his face at exactly the right angle, catching the curl of his hair and the sharp line of his jaw against the grey blur of the East Side behind him.
"Don't move," I said, lifting the camera with my free hand.
He tensed. "Theo."
"You don't have to look at me. Just stay where you are."
He let out a breath and turned his face toward the sinking building. I took the shot. Then two more, adjusting the focus, pulling him sharp against the soft ruin of the background. Through the viewfinder he looked like the only solid thing in a dissolving world, and I felt something tighten in my chest that had nothing to do with composition.
I lowered the camera and checked the display.
The first frame was clean. The second frame was clean. The third frame was not.
Behind Oleander, standing in the blurred background where there had been nothing but empty sidewalk and buckling brick, was a shape. Tall, broad-shouldered, hands at its sides. It wasn't a smear of light or a compression artifact. It had weight. It had posture. And it was standing close enough to Oleander that if it had been a living person, its hand would have been resting on the back of his neck.
My fingers tightened on the camera. I didn't show him the screen. I swiped past the frame and put the lens cap on.
"Get anything good?" he asked.
"Maybe," I said. "The light's changing. We should go."
I stood up and pulled him with me. We walked back to the car and I could feel the shape of what I'd seen pressing againstthe inside of my skull, demanding to be examined. It wasn't just in the town anymore. It wasn't just in the alleys and the abandoned buildings and the dark corners of the bar. It was behind him. Specifically, deliberately, possessively behind him. Whatever was haunting Hollow Vale had chosen a favorite, and I'd just caught it on camera standing close enough to touch.
I drove us back toward the center of town in silence, still thinking about the diner, about the way Oleander's face had crumbled when I showed him that photo. He'd lied to me then. He'd recognized the shape and he'd lied, and I'd let him, because pushing wasn't how I worked.
But this was different. This wasn't a shadow in an alley that could be explained away. This was a figure standing behind a specific person in a specific frame, and the person in question was sitting three feet away from me pretending he didn't know why.
I saved the photo to a separate folder on my camera, one I'd started a week ago. I'd labeled it simply:Oleander.It was getting full.
fourteen
ROWAN
The air in the bar was heavier than usual, the kind of pressurized stillness that comes right before a storm breaks. I watched the door. I'd been watching it since Julian started his first set, my hand wrapped around a glass of rye I hadn't touched.
When Oleander finally appeared, he looked tired. He carried himself the way he always did, like he was trying to take up as little space as possible. He saw me and hesitated. I kicked out the stool beside me.
He sat down without a word. He still smelled like that apartment. Like dust and cologne that didn't belong to him.
"You're quiet tonight," I said.
"I'm always quiet, Rowan," he replied. "You're just usually the one doing the talking. Or the... other things."
"We aren't talking about the other things tonight. Not yet. We're talking about this place. You look like you've been seeing things you can't explain."
Oleander leaned his elbows on the bar, his fingers tracing the wood-grain. "Theo took me to the East Side today. To the sinking building near the old church. He said the decay is intentional. That it follows a pattern."
I took a slow sip of the rye, letting the burn ground me. "Theo likes to put pretty names on ugly things. It's a defense mechanism. He thinks if he can frame the rot, he can control it. But the town doesn't care about his framing. It's alive, Oleander, like a wound. It breathes, it festers, and it remembers."
"Is that why the fog behaves like it's hunting?" he asked. "I watched it this morning. It avoided the street with the hardware store entirely, but it sat on my doorstep for three hours."
"It knows where the guilt is thickest," I said, turning my head to look at him. "The fog avoids Main Street because there's too much noise, too much ordinary life. But it loves the abandoned churches. It loves the houses where people sit alone with their secrets."
