What she did know was that she was booked to play at a music festival the following week. If she didn’t head back soon and prepare, she wouldn’t be ready in time.
So, the next morning, she threw her suitcase into the trunk, kissed Pa good-bye, and drove back to the city.
Where her life was.
BENEATH THE BRIGHT LIGHTSof the stage, Emeline’s fingers stopped strumming. As her song ended, the crowd behind the lights clapped and cheered.
Ever since she was a child, Emeline dreamed of singing her songs onstage. But not long after she moved to Montreal, something changed.Your songs aren’t marketable,her manager told her.And you won’t be young forever.If she wanted to pay her bills,if she wanted a rising career instead of a tanking one, she needed to sing different songs and she needed to do it immediately—before her youth ceased to be a selling point and the industry grew bored with her.
So, trusting her manager, she locked her songs away, using poetry for a password.
And then Hawthorne made me forget.
Emeline glanced down at her set list. The music she’d prepared lay right at her feet. The Daybreak reps were in the crowd somewhere. All she had to do was start and keep going. All she had to do was show them what she was capable of.
This was her biggest, oldest dream.
Wasn’t it?
This was what she’d realized two years ago, right before Hawthorne took her memories:This—playing someone else’s songs, touring with jaded musicians, living so far from what she loved most—was a twisted version of her dream.
It was what the woods had been trying to tell her when they stalked into her performances over the past year, demanding true songs. Nineteen years ago, her grandfather had asked the woods to protect Emeline, and the woods took that responsibility seriously. Theywereprotecting her—by reminding her of who she was, and what was important.
You were going to abandon your dreams. You were going to stay. Here. For me.
She understood why Hawthorne did what he did—not that this excused him. He was trying to save her from herself, believing that giving up on her dream would make her miserable in the long run, because he knew how desperately she had wanted a music career.
I still want it.
There was nothing else Emeline would rather be doing thansinging on brightly lit stages or in darkened bars—she simply wanted to do it on her terms. She wanted to sing her own songs.
Maybe I still can.
She’d recovered her old songs. She could sing them right here. Right now. Her manager would be furious, but so what?
The question lifted an invisible weight from her. One she’d been carrying for too long.
Emeline looked out over the silhouetted crowd behind the lights, emboldened. But as she chose her next song—one she’d written for Sable all those years ago—and started to play it, the atmosphere changed. The air thickened, dampening her skin, and the putrid smell of mold seeped up from somewhere nearby. Emeline wrinkled her nose and squinted into the lights, scanning the darkness beyond.
It smelled like …
Jagged silver thorns began to sprout from the microphone as something rasped across the stage floor. She looked down to see the floorboards buckle and burst as thick gray roots sprouted up from below, slithering towards her. With them came dozens of leaves, blown by an unnatural breeze, gathering in a pile around her feet. They weren’t the vibrant green of healthy leaves. Nor were they the crisp golds and reds of freshly fallen ones.
These were sickly and ashy and gray. Diseased.
The woods had come.
Emeline,they rasped, reaching for her.
She stared in horror at the lethal-looking thorns growing out of the mic, at the snakelike roots headed straight for her. One thick root rose to her full height and, before she could flinch away, brushed across her cheek like a parting caress.
We came to say good-bye.
Good-bye?
Emeline thought of the curse, slowly consuming the forest,creeping closer and closer to the King’s City. She thought of the shadow skins breaching the walls. Thought of Sable and Rooke, forced to resume their true forms, unable to ever change back.
The curse grows more powerful every day,Grace’s voice chimed through her.You need to escape this place before it devours us.
