CHAPTER 6
The jazz was real.
Not a dream. Not a trick of the ventilation system or the old pipes groaning in the walls. Actual music—Billie Holiday, I realized, her voice curling through the floorboards like smoke, singing about fruit hanging on a tree and a man who didn't love her yet.
I sat up in bed. The sheet pooled at my waist. Cole slept on beside me, his breathing slow and even, one arm still flung across the space where my body had been.
The fern's grow light cast its ghostly blue glow across his face, softening the scar through his eyebrow, making him look younger than he was.
Two minutes. I'd been awake for two minutes, staring at the ceiling, trying to convince myself the music was a dream-fragment bleeding into consciousness.
But dreams didn't last this long. Dreams didn't follow the melody so precisely—the piano's melancholy descent, the saxophone's mournful reply, Billie's voice cracking on the word strange.
Strange fruit.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. The concrete floor was cold against my bare feet. The t-shirt I'd pulled on after our shower rode up my thighs, and I didn't bother tugging it down.
"Cole." My voice came out hoarse. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Cole, wake up."
Nothing. He was dead to the world—the sleep of a man who'd spent the day wrestling drywall and the night making love in a shower stall. The tincture he'd given me had pulled me under too, but the music had cut through it like a scalpel.
I stood. The panic room was exactly as we'd left it: towels from our shower crumpled on the bathroom floor, my scrubs draped over the back of the chair, the empty water glass on the nightstand with three drops of chamomile residue dried at the bottom. Nothing out of place. Nothing unusual.
Except the music.
I crossed to the intercom panel beside the door. The speaker was silent—no static, no feedback, no indication that the system was even on. I pressed the talk button anyway.
"Hello?"
My voice echoed back at me from the bar above, tinny and distorted through the cheap speaker. The jazz kept playing. Billie kept singing. The piano kept its mournful pace.
I released the button and stared at the panel.
The intercom was off. It had been off since we'd come downstairs—Cole had switched it off himself, muttering something about not wanting to hear Marcus's drywall hammering at six in the morning.
There was no way the music was filtering through the system.
But I could hear it. Clear as a bell. Clear as if I were standing in the bar itself, beside the turntable, watching the vinyl spin.
Cole's keypad. The one he'd used to lock the panic room door. The one I'd watched him punch the code into a dozen times now.
I didn't know the code. He hadn't given it to me—not because he didn't trust me, I thought, but because he hadn't thought to. The panic room was his domain, his refuge, and I was a guest who'd overstayed her welcome into something more permanent.
I could wake him. I should wake him. The music was wrong, and the woman I'd seen—the woman with my face who'd vanished when he'd entered the room—was still an open wound neither of us had figured out how to close.
He'd promised to pull the fire department records.
He'd promised to help me make sense of what I'd seen.
But he was exhausted. And something in me—some stubborn, contrary part of my brain that had spent five years avoiding the gaps in my memory—didn't want to wake him yet.
I wanted to see.
I pressed my palm against the panic room door. The steel was cool, vibrating faintly with the building's ambient hum. Through the door, up the stairs, past the bar, the jazz played on.
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees...
The song looped. Not the record—the song. Billie's voice hit the final note and started again, the same phrase, the same inflection, the same ache. A broken record, stuck in a groove. A mechanical loop, not a performance.
That was what made my blood run cold.
A jazz record left playing was strange. A jazz record skipping the same phrase over and over was wrong.
Cole's turntable was a vintage Thorens he'd restored himself; he'd told me about it once, the pride in his voice unmistakable.
A Thorens didn't skip. Not unless someone had knocked the tonearm. Not unless someone had—
Someone is in the bar.
I reached for the intercom again, then stopped myself.
My hand drifted instead to the keypad beside the door.
I didn't know the code. But Cole, half-asleep and murmuring reassurances, had told me once that the panic room had a failsafe.
Something about the fern—the plant he'd put on the nightstand, the one thing in the room that was alive besides us.
He'd joked that if anything ever happened to him, the fern would save me.
A joke. Probably a joke.
I crossed to the nightstand and lifted the fern's pot. It was heavier than it looked, the ceramic cool and slightly damp. Underneath, carved into the wood of the nightstand's surface, were four numbers.
4-2-1-7.
I carried the numbers back to the keypad and punched them in. The lock clicked open.
The door swung inward, revealing the dark stairwell, the emergency exit signs casting their red glow on the metal treads. At the top of the stairs, the bar was dim—the pendant lights were still on, but barely, glowing at half-brightness like embers dying in a hearth.
I climbed.
The stairwell was colder than it should have been. The ventilation system was silent. The building's ambient hum had stopped, replaced by the skipping jazz and the sound of my own bare feet on the metal stairs.
When I reached the top and pushed open the door to the bar, I froze.
The stools were still stacked on the bartop. The floors were still mopped. The register was closed, the bottles lined up on the back bar, the alley door locked and bolted from the inside. Everything was exactly as I'd left it hours ago.
Except for the turntable.
It sat on the back bar, its dust cover raised, the tonearm bobbing gently as the vinyl spun. The record wasn't a record—it was a test pressing, a white label with no markings, the kind of thing Cole collected from estate sales and used record shops. I'd never seen it before.
And Billie Holiday's voice was still skipping. Strange fruit—strange fruit—strange fruit—
I crossed to the turntable. My hand hovered over the tonearm, trembling. The song wasn't just skipping. It was looping—the same half-second of audio, trapped in a groove, playing over and over with the mechanical precision of something that wasn't mechanical at all.
There was no dust on the record. No scratch. No visible flaw in the vinyl.
I lifted the tonearm.
The music stopped.
The silence that rushed in was absolute—no hum, no ventilation, no distant traffic from Lancaster Avenue. Just my own breathing, ragged and too loud, and the faint pulse of blood in my ears.
Then the lights went out.
I didn't scream. Screaming was for people who hadn't spent five years in an ER, learning to clamp down on panic, to breathe through the adrenaline, to keep their hands steady even when the world was crumbling around them. Instead, I stood very still in the darkness and counted to ten.
One. The turntable was cool under my fingertips. Two. The alley door was still locked—I'd checked. Three. Cole was downstairs, asleep, and the panic room door was open. Four. If someone was in the bar with me, they'd been there for hours. Five. They'd waited until I was alone.
My eyes adjusted. The alley door's window let in a sliver of streetlight, enough to outline the shape of the bar, the stools, the back office door. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
Six. I was wearing nothing but Cole's t-shirt. Seven. My phone was downstairs. Eight. The emergency flashlight Cole kept under the bar was three steps to my left—I'd watched him stash it there after the power outage last month. Nine. The gun in the panic room was too far. Ten.
I moved.
My hip bumped the bar as I groped for the flashlight, my fingers finding the cold metal casing of the cash register, then the smooth wood of the bar's edge, then the plastic grip of the Maglite. I clicked it on, and the beam cut through the darkness like a blade.
Empty. The bar was empty. The stools, the bottles, the back office door—all exactly where they should have been. The turntable sat silent, its tonearm still raised, the white-label vinyl motionless beneath it.
But the dust cover was down.
I knew I'd left it up. I knew I'd lifted the tonearm and stepped back, and the dust cover had been propped open on its hinges. Now it was closed. Now the turntable was dark and quiet and innocent, like it had never been playing at all.
"Hello," I said.
The word hung in the air, unanswered. The flashlight beam trembled—my hand, not the light—and I steadied it with my other hand.
I wasn't scared. I wasn't. Scared was the moment before a car crash, the split second when you realized the world was about to shatter and there was nothing you could do to stop it. This wasn't that. This was—
"Hello, Mara."
I spun.
She stood in the doorway of the back office, wearing the same t-shirt I'd seen her in last night—Cole's shirt, the one with the faded fire department logo, the one that had gone missing from my drawer a week ago. Her hair was damp. Her feet were bare. Her face was mine.
But her eyes were different. Softer. Sadder. The eyes of someone who'd been waiting a long time for something that hadn't arrived yet.
"You're real," I said.
"As real as you are." She stepped forward, and the flashlight's beam passed through her left shoulder—not through like a ghost, but through like a reflection, a shimmer of light that bent and warped around her body. "Just different."
"Different how?" I didn't lower the flashlight. I didn't back away. If she was a hallucination, if she was a ghost, if she was some fragment of my fractured memory made manifest—I wasn't going to run from her. Not again.