Chapter 28
twenty-eight
THEO
The four of us stood around Oleander's kitchen table like we were performing an autopsy. The notebook sat open between us, its pages dense with symbols that looked less like writing and more like something scratching to get out. The apartment was cold. It was always cold now.
Rowan leaned over the table, his massive frame blocking the light from the window.
Julian stood beside him, his fingers hovering above the pages without touching, the way he'd been doing since he figured out the symbols were musical notation.
Oleander was across from me, arms crossed, looking at the notebook like it was a confession he'd already read but couldn't stop rereading.
We knew the broad strokes. Oleander had told Julian about the melody being part of the mechanism.
He'd told Rowan about the anchor, about his grief being the fuel.
We'd all seen the shadow in my apartment, standing at the end of the hall with that wrong smile.
The pieces had been laid out across separate conversations over the past week.
This was the first time all four of us were looking at them together.
"The first section is the ritual preparation," Oleander said, flipping to a page near the front.
His voice was flat, the voice of a man who'd spent enough time with this material to stop flinching at it.
"Symbols, ingredients, locations. The middle section is what Julian identified.
The melody, transcribed into this notation.
It's not just music. It's an instruction set. "
"For the door," Julian said quietly.
"For the door," Oleander confirmed.
He turned to the back of the notebook. The pages here were different. The handwriting was larger, messier, the ink pressed so hard into the paper it had torn through in places. Dominic had been losing control by this point, or gaining too much of it.
"I haven't shown you this part," Oleander said.
He turned to a page near the end and the room changed. It wasn't the temperature this time. It was the quality of the silence, like the air had suddenly become aware of us.
The drawing took up the entire page. It was an archway made of what looked like bone and twisted vine, standing in the middle of a forest with no leaves.
The detail was obsessive, every joint and curve rendered with a precision that didn't match the frantic handwriting around it.
Beneath the drawing, in small, careful print, were coordinates. And a date.
"That's the date he died," Oleander said.
Rowan went pale. I watched the blood drain from his face in real time, leaving him grey under the beard. He gripped the edge of the table.
"He didn't just open a door," Rowan said. "He built a permanent structure. This isn't a crack in the wall. This is architecture."
"The coordinates," I said, pulling out my phone.
My hands were steadier than they should have been.
Muscle memory from years of staying calm behind a lens while the world fell apart in front of it.
I typed them in and the map resolved to a point at the edge of Hollow Vale.
The East Side. Deep in the woods past where the buildings stopped pretending to stand.
"That's near the church," Rowan said. His voice had gone flat. "The one where I..."
He didn't finish. He didn't have to. We all knew.
Julian sat down slowly, his hands pressed between his knees. "If the structure is physical, if it's actually built somewhere in those woods, then the anchor isn't just emotional. It's tethered to a place. Oleander's grief keeps it powered, but the door itself has a location."
"Which means it can be found," I said.
"Which means it can be destroyed," Rowan said.
The word hung in the room. Destroyed. It sounded simple. It was the opposite of simple.
"There's a problem," Oleander said. He was looking at the bottom of the page, at a line of text I hadn't noticed.
Small, precise, written in a different ink than the rest, as if Dominic had come back to add it later.
"The anchor can't approach the door. If the anchor gets too close, the door opens wider. It feeds on proximity."
"So you can't be the one to close it," Julian said.
"I can't even be in the woods when you try," Oleander said. "If I go near that thing, I make it stronger."
The room went quiet. I looked at the three of them.
Rowan, who had killed a man near that church and still didn't know if it was the right call.
Julian, whose hands had been hijacked by a dead man's melody for weeks.
Oleander, who was literally the battery powering the nightmare and couldn't even be present for the solution.
And me. The one with the camera and no supernatural connection to any of it.
"So the three of us go," I said. "Rowan, Julian, and me. We find the structure, we destroy it. Oleander stays in town."
"Alone," Oleander said. "With whatever Dominic sends to keep me in place."
"Not alone," Rowan said. He looked at Oleander and the hardness in his face cracked just enough to show what was underneath. "Liliana. Call your sister. Have her on the phone the entire time. A voice from outside the fog. Something real to hold onto."
Oleander's jaw tightened. I could see him calculating the cost of it. Sitting in this apartment while the three people he loved walked into the woods to fight something none of us fully understood. Trusting us to come back. Trusting himself to survive the waiting.
"And if it doesn't work?" Oleander asked. "If you destroy the structure and the door stays open? If the anchor is permanent?"
Nobody answered. The question sat in the middle of the table next to the notebook, heavy and unanswerable.
"Then we figure out the next thing," Julian said. "But we don't figure it out by standing in this kitchen staring at a book."
"He's right," Rowan said. He straightened up, and some of the color returned to his face. The protector was coming back online, the man who stood in doorways because someone had to. "We go tomorrow. First light. Before the fog gets thick."
I picked up my camera from the counter. I turned it over in my hands, feeling the weight of it. Then I raised it and took one photo of the notebook open on the table, the doorway drawing visible, the four coffee mugs arranged around it like compass points.
"Is there a setting on that thing for impending doom?" Oleander asked.
"Only in black and white," I said. "Makes the apocalypse look more aesthetic."
Nobody laughed, but Oleander's mouth twitched. It was enough.
Rowan closed the notebook, the leather cover making a soft sound against the wood. He looked at each of us in turn, his grey eyes steady. "We stay," he said. "We fight. And we come back."
It was the only prayer we had left.