Chapter 17
seventeen
JULIAN
The bar settled into itself after the last regular left. I sat on the piano bench, the weight of the night pressing against my shoulder blades, and stared at the keys. They looked like teeth in the dim amber light of the single lamp I'd left burning over the register.
The silence felt like a presence waiting for me to fill it.
I traced the ivory of middle C, not pressing down, just feeling the cool, slightly porous texture of the old key.
My hands were steady, which was a lie my body was telling my brain.
Inside, everything was vibrating at a frequency I couldn't tune out.
The melody was there again. It had been circling the perimeter of my consciousness for weeks, a persistent, minor-key ghost that didn't have a name but had a face.
It had become an itch under my skin, a rhythmic pulse in my fingertips that made the act of not playing feel like holding my breath until my lungs burned.
I shouldn't have been here alone. Rowan had been watching me with that heavy, narrowed gaze all evening, the one that meant he was measuring the distance between my sanity and the town's appetite.
He'd left an hour ago, thinking I was right behind him, but the piano had called to me with a gravity I couldn't resist.
I let my index finger sink into the key. A single lonely note rang out. Then another. I stopped fighting it. I let my left hand find the bass chords, those deep, mourning thrums that the melody always started with, the ones that felt like someone else's memory bleeding through the keys.
The music spilled out of me, a floodgate finally giving way. I hadn't practiced this. I hadn't studied the score. But my fingers knew the architecture of it better than I did. They danced over the keys, weaving a sound that felt like it was pulling the shadows out of the corners of the room.
As the melody hit the bridge, the part where the notes climbed and then shattered into a dissonant fall, the temperature in the bar plummeted.
My breath hitched, a small puff of white mist blooming in front of my face, but I didn't stop playing.
I couldn't. It felt like if I let go of the keys, I would disappear into the frost.
The shadows along the far wall moved. They stretched toward the piano, elongated fingers of darkness reaching for the sound. I kept my eyes fixed on my hands, watching them move with a precise autonomy I hadn't authorized. I was a passenger in my own body.
Then I felt it. The air behind me shifted, not with a draft, but with the displacement of something solid.
A weight, a heavy, silent pressure that settled just inches from my back.
I could feel heat radiating from it, a searing contrast to the freezing room, and the sensation of someone standing close enough to press their chest against my spine.
I didn't turn around. The scent hit me then. Sandalwood and bergamot, so thick it felt like I was swallowing it. Oleander's cologne, the one that wasn't his. The dead man's cologne, filling the empty bar like someone had uncapped a bottle right behind my ear.
My fingers finished the final, haunting refrain. The last note lingered, a low, vibrating hum that seemed to go on forever, refusing to die in the frozen air. I sat perfectly still, my hands resting in my lap, staring at the lid of the piano.
"I know you're there," I whispered.
I didn't say his name. To say it would be to give the shadow a mouth, and I wasn't ready to hear what it had to say.
The silence that answered was worse than any sound. There was no sigh, no movement, no cold touch on my neck. Just the awareness of being watched by something that didn't need eyes to see me.
A sharp buzz against my thigh made me jump so hard my knees hit the underside of the keyboard. My phone. The screen was a blinding white rectangle in the gloom. Rowan: Where are you?
I looked back over my shoulder. The dark corner behind the piano where the presence had felt most suffocating was empty. Stacked chairs and an empty mop bucket. But the air still felt occupied, like a room that had just been vacated by a crowd.
I stood up, my legs unsteady. I grabbed my coat and moved toward the door, fumbling with the locks, my hands shaking so badly the keys chimed against the metal. When I stepped out into the night, the fog swallowed me whole.
I walked fast, my boots striking the pavement in a hollow rhythm. I reached up and gripped the pendant around my neck. It was warm, warmer than it should have been.
Rowan was still awake when I got home. He was sitting in the dark of the living room, his shape barely visible against the window. He didn't ask where I'd been. He saw my face and stood up.
"It happened again," I said. I sat on the arm of the sofa because my legs wouldn't carry me any further. "The melody took over. I couldn't stop playing it. And then something was behind me, Rowan. Standing right behind me. I could feel it breathing."
"Did you see it?"
"I didn't look." My hands were still trembling. I pressed them flat against my thighs. "I could smell it. That cologne. The one that follows Oleander. It was in the bar, right behind me, and it was so strong I could taste it."
Rowan crossed the room and crouched in front of me, his hands covering mine. His grip was warm and steady and I held onto it like it was the only real thing left in the world.
"It's getting bolder," he said.
"It's not just getting bolder," I said. "It's learning. The melody changes every time I play it. It's adding notes, Rowan. It's composing through me. Whatever Dominic left in this town, it's not just haunting. It's building something."
Rowan didn't say anything for a long time. He just stayed there, his hands on mine, his eyes on my face, the quiet of our apartment holding us both.
"We need to talk to Oleander," he said finally. "All of us. No more waiting."