"I'm going back," I said. My voice was wrecked, but the hesitation was gone. "They have a plan. And I'm done running from this."
"Good," she said, and for the first time, I heard the tremor in her own voice. "Don't you dare let him win twice, Oleander. You hear me? Don't you dare."
I hung up and looked back toward the center of the Vale. The town looked like a debt that had finally come due. I got into the car, turned it around, and drove back into the white.
The apartment was freezing when I walked in, but the scent of cologne didn't make me flinch this time. It just made me angry. I went straight to the kitchen table where the notebook sat, its leather cover looking like bruised skin under the dim light. I sat down and opened it to the page Julian had identified, the one where the musical notes started to look like teeth.
I'd spent my whole life waiting for someone to give me permission to be loud. Dominic had taught me that my value was in my stillness, in my ability to be the quiet center of his storm. The others didn't want my stillness. They wanted my participation. They wanted me to be as dangerous as the things I was afraid of.
I touched the paper, tracing the frantic ink. My hand didn't shake. The silence in the room was absolute, but it wasn't thesilence of an empty space. It was the silence of a breath being held.
I looked at the dark corner of the living room, where the shadows always seemed a little too thick.
"I see you," I whispered into the cold. "I'm done pretending I don't."
thirty
JULIAN
The music didn't start at the piano. It started in the plumbing. I was standing behind the bar, wiping down a glass that was already clean, when the first vibration hummed through the soles of my boots. A low-frequency thrum that made the liquid in the bottles behind me shiver.
Then the pipes began to whistle, a perfect, sustained G-flat that resonated through the floorboards and up into my teeth. My hand stilled on the glass. I knew that note. I'd spent the last week trying to drown it in cheap bourbon and better melodies, but it was back, and it was louder than it had ever been in my head.
"Julian?" the bartender asked, pausing with a lime wedge halfway to a glass. "You okay? You look like you just saw someone die."
I couldn't answer. The whistle in the pipes was joined by a rhythmic tapping from the walls, the sound of wood expanding, or maybe the sound of something knocking from the other side. It was a beat, a tempo. Three-four time. A waltz. Dominic's waltz. It was bleeding through the plaster, humming through the brass rail, vibrating in the air I was trying to breathe.
I set the glass down. My fingers were shaking so hard I had to grip the edge of the mahogany to keep from falling. It wasn't just in the bar. I could feel it coming from the street, from the foundation of the town itself. I pulled my phone from my pocket and called Oleander.
"It's everywhere," I said, and my voice came out wrong. "Oleander, the music. It's in the walls. It's in the floor. I can't make it stop."
"Julian, stay there," Oleander whispered, and I could hear the terror in his voice. "I'm coming. Just stay where there are people. Don't go into the dark."
But the people were already blurring. The regulars at the bar looked like charcoal sketches, their faces smudged by the grey light filtering in from the street. The only thing that felt solid was the melody. It was a physical presence now, a thick, cloying sweetness like rotting lilies that filled my mouth. I couldn't stay in that room while the architecture itself sang a dead man's ghost back into existence.
I retreated to the apartment, my feet moving in time with a rhythm I couldn't escape. By the time I burst through the door, Rowan was already there. He was pacing the length of the living room, his movements jagged and predatory, his hands fisted tight.
"You hear it too," I said, leaning against the doorframe as the apartment groaned around us. The floorboards were humming the bridge of the song.
Rowan stopped and looked at me, and for the first time since I'd known him, I saw genuine fear in those pale eyes. He reached out, his hand trembling as he touched the wall, his fingers splayed against the wallpaper as if he could hold the building together by force of will.
"It's louder," he rasped. "It's not just the music anymore, Julian. It's talking. It's telling me to do things. It's pointing at the shadows and telling me they're the ones who took everything from me. I don't know how much longer I can not listen."
I moved toward him, reaching out to catch his hand, but the air between us felt like static, a sharp, biting cold that pushed us apart. We were standing in our own home, the place where we'd built something worth protecting, and the silence was dead. The room was a cacophony of phantom notes.
The door swung open and Theo stumbled in. His face was drawn, his skin the color of ash, and he was clutching his camera to his chest. He walked straight to the center of the room and held out the device.
"Look," he whispered. "Look at what I caught."
Rowan and I leaned in. The small screen showed a sequence of shots Theo had taken on his way over. The church, the diner, the narrow alleyway behind the bookshop. But there were no buildings. There was no light. Every single frame was a solid block of black. Pure dark. It wasn't a malfunction. You could see the grain of the image, the digital noise of a camera trying to find a single photon in a void.
"The camera works," Theo said, his voice cracking. "I tested it on the lamp in the hallway. It sees the light just fine. But when I point it at the town, it's like the town isn't there anymore. Orlike something is standing between us and the world, swallowing every bit of light before it can reach the lens."
The ambient humming of the walls snapped into a sharp, clear chord, and the piano in the corner began to play. The lid was open. The keys moved with a precise, mechanical grace, sinking and rising as if pressed by invisible fingers. The instrument was being played, and the hands doing it weren't mine. Dominic's melody, bright and brittle and terrifyingly loud in the small room.
I watched my own instrument betray me. I felt a surge of something that wasn't fear. It was a hot, sharp blade of anger. I'd spent my whole life being a conduit for things I couldn't control.
I walked to the piano. The air around the bench was so cold it burned my lungs, but I didn't stop. I sat down, my thighs pressing against the wood that was vibrating with a dead man's intent.
