"It's not up. I'm not taking pictures."
"The one in your head is," he said. "The one you use to filter everything so it doesn't hurt. The one that makes me a subject instead of a person. Turn it off."
He was right. I'd spent my entire life looking through a viewfinder because it was safe. Because you can't get hurt by a composition. You can't be betrayed by a focal length. If I could just frame the world correctly, I could control the narrative of my own loneliness.
"What do you see?" Oleander asked, his hand still resting over my heart. "When you're not looking through a lens, Theo. When you're just standing here in the dark with me. What do you see?"
I looked at him. Not as a study in light and shadow, not as a point of interest in a decaying town, but as the man who had ruined my ability to be detached.
"You," I said. "I just see you. And that's the scariest thing in this room."
Oleander's expression softened. He moved closer, his fingers curling into the fabric of my shirt. The smell of him was overwhelming, salt and rain and a desperate, beautiful life.
"The notebook," he whispered, his forehead coming to rest against mine. "Dominic's. It's full of the symbols he used. If it's a blueprint, it might show us how the door was built."
I felt the old obsession, the need to see, to document, to solve. "Show me. If it's a blueprint, I can map it. I can find the source."
Oleander pulled back just enough to look me in the eye. There was a resolve there that made my conspiracy walls look like the scribblings of a child.
The temperature in the room plunged. Oleander went rigid, his hand still on my chest, his eyes snapping toward the hallway behind me.
I turned around.
He was standing at the end of the hall, everything my camera had been catching for months, except now he was three-dimensional and standing six feet away. His mouth was pulled into something that wasn't quite a smile, and his eyes were empty.
I'd spent months photographing this shape without ever seeing it in the room. And here he was, looking past me at Oleander like I wasn't even there.
Oleander didn't move. He just whispered, "Don't look at his eyes."
The shape held for five seconds. Then it dissolved backward into the shadows, folding into the dark like smoke being pulled through a vent. The cold lifted. The scent of sandalwood hung in the air for another minute before it faded.
"That's him," I said.
"That's what's left of him," Oleander said.
The silence stretched between us. I could feel my pulse in my fingertips, my whole body running hot with something that wasn't fear exactly but lived in the same neighborhood.
"I need to talk to Rowan," Oleander said. "He needs to know what we're up against."
I nodded, though letting him walk back into the fog felt like a bad idea. "Go. But come back. Don't let the fog swallow you before I can get the notebook."
Oleander walked to the door before he looked at me one last time, and then he was gone. The door clicked shut, leaving me in the middle of my living room, surrounded by a thousand frozen moments of decay.
twenty-seven
ROWAN
I heard him before I saw him. I was standing at the edge of town where the pavement gave way to mud and the fog turned into something solid. The woods were a black wall in front of me, and I'd been staring at them for the better part of an hour, trying to figure out which of my demons lived in there and which ones I'd brought with me.
"I know it's you," I said. "You walk like you're apologizing to the ground for taking up space."
He stopped a few feet behind me. I could feel the cold he carried, that specific chill that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with what was attached to him.The silence between us was thick, and I let it sit because I wasn't ready to turn around yet.
"I need to tell you something," Oleander said. "Not the version I gave you at the apartment. The real one."
I turned then. He looked like he hadn't slept in days, his dark curls flattened on one side, his coat pulled tight around him. But his eyes were different. The fog that usually lived behind them had cleared, replaced by something hard and focused. He looked like a man who had finally decided to stop running.
"Then say it," I said.
