THE MOMENT EMELINE STEPPED inside the house, she found Pa, who stood at the kitchen window. Throwing her arms around his shoulders, she hugged him tight, breathing in his soapy smell and willing his familiar presence to soothe her.
She was safe. The woods and everything in them couldn’t touch her here.
Her arms tightened around her grandfather.
“Now, now,” Pa murmured, rubbing circles into her back. “Everything’s all right.”
Maisie looked up from rolling strudel dough across the kitchen table. Her frizzy gray curls were tied back, and white flour speckled her red apron. “Baby girl.” Those clear hazel eyes scanned down Emeline. The last time they’d seen each other, Emeline had slain a shadow skin in this very kitchen, then disappeared into the woods. “Are you okay?”
Was she okay? She’d just learned that the boy she loved had stolen something precious from her. Pieces of her past. Pieces of herself.
Emeline swallowed, then forced a smile. “I’m fine.”
Wrinkles lined Maisie’s tan face, like rings on a tree. She studied Emeline as if unconvinced, but didn’t press her. “Joel left yesterday.”
Emeline winced. Joel. She’d fled without telling him where she was going.
Not wanting to date Joel didn’t give her license to be a jerk. She would have to make her rudeness up to him somehow.
“He told me to tell you he’ll see you in Montreal. Something about your tour?”
Oh no. “What day is it?”
Maisie wiped her hands on her white frilly apron and moved towards the calendar on the wall in the kitchen. “October sixth.”
The day before her opening night.
Emeline’s blood spiked. “I have to go.”
Maisie reached for her hand, lacing her fingers through Emeline’s. The smell of flour and cooked sugar wafted off her skin.
“When will you be back?”
She and Maisie had discussed Pa’s care while making dinner the other night. While Emeline was on tour Maisie would come twice a day to check in on Pa, and when Emeline was done traveling she’d figure out the best way to keep him in his house.
“Three weeks,” said Emeline. “As soon as my tour is over.”
In her bedroom, she packed up the few things she’d brought with her, then grabbed her phone from where she’d left it charging on the bedside table. If she could make it to Montreal tonight, she’d have all of tomorrow to go over her set.
But in order to drive the seven hours back to the city, adding an extra hour or two sitting in traffic, she needed to leave now.
Never in her life had she longed for normal more. Emeline wanted her apartment full of roommates she barely spoke to. She wanted the lights and the noise and the crowds of the city. She wanted to be up onstage, stringing together chords and turning them into songs, fueled by the audience behind the lights. Their claps and stomps proving that she was, in fact, right where she was supposed to be.
That was her life.
She needed to get back to it.
Forget the woods and the curse and the Wood King. Forget the Vile, who hated the sight of her and wanted her dead. And most of all, forget Hawthorne—who’d betrayed her.
The thought made her want to cry.
After hugging both Maisie and Pa, Emeline slung her bag over her shoulder, grabbed her keys, and got into her car.
She was pulling out of the driveway when Tom wandered up the dirt path from Eshe and Abel’s farm, a bushel of yellow apples hoisted in his arms. Seconds, it looked like, from their bruised surfaces. Likely for Maisie’s apple strudel. At the sight of Emeline, Tom’s brown eyes crinkled, and he lifted his chin in greeting.
Her chest twinged.
I have to tell him about Rose.
It would break his heart.
The thought of it, how it would change things between them, opened a hole in her chest.
It can wait, she decided, not wanting to ruin things yet. Until I finish touring.
She didn’t stop the car. Only waved to Tom, watching him disappear in the rearview mirror as she turned onto the main road, heading towards the highway.
JUST BEFORE CROSSING THE Quebec border, Emeline stopped to fill up on gas. As she stood at the pump, with the nozzle in, something fell out of her back pocket and onto the pavement behind her.
Thinking it was her phone, she turned to pick it up.
It wasn’t her phone; it was the slender book Hawthorne had given her before she left.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
Emeline eyed it warily, then picked it up, still pumping. She’d first noticed this book at his house on the night he made her dinner. Curious despite herself, Emeline thumbed through the pages.
It didn’t take long to realize these were exactly what the title described: love poems. Love full of hunger, and sadness, and fire. The words made her temperature rise and her teeth clench.
Emeline slammed the book closed.
She couldn’t keep this. A book of love poems from the boy who stole her memories? It was too much.
I’ll throw it away, she thought, eyeing the trash can next to the pump.
“Excellent choice,” said a deep voice from nearby.
Emeline turned to see a bearded man wearing a black turban pumping gas into his car behind her. He nodded to the book in her hand. “My wife loves Neruda. It’s how I wooed her.”
Emeline glanced up into gentle brown eyes, which were crinkling in a smile. He had a sweet, grandfatherly demeanor, this man.
“Is she here with you?” Emeline asked, trying to steer the subject away from Hawthorne’s book. She glanced to the passenger side of his car, but the seat was empty.
His face fell. “Ah, no.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, realizing her mistake. By the white of his beard and the deep wrinkles of his forehead, he was probably close to Pa’s age.
He tsked gently. “Don’t apologize. I love remembering her.”
So that’s how Emeline passed the next few minutes pumping gas: listening to him tell her about the love of his life, whom he’d lost five years ago to cancer.
As they went to pay, he opened the glass door for her. “Thank you,” he said. “For listening.”
She hugged him.
As she walked back to her car a few minutes later, her phone buzzed with a text from her manager.
Want to meet your tour mates tonight?
Her heart skipped. She texted back: Meet The Perennials? Tonight?
The thought made her break out in a sweat.
They’re grabbing drinks at the Rev. I’ll tell them to reserve a seat for you.
A thousand butterflies fluttered through her. In the terror and madness of the past week, there had been no time to be excited for her tour or think about what it would be like to meet the band she’d idolized for years.
If she met The Perennials tonight, they wouldn’t be strangers in the green room tomorrow. She wondered what they’d be like. After three weeks on the road together, would they all be friends?
I need friends.
A wisp of memory flickered through her: Hot summer day. Dust sticking to her skin. Legs swinging from the barn beams. And a girl, stretched out beside her, listening to her sing.
Sable.
The memory brought a rush of confusion. She tried to think backwards. Tried to gather other, older memories of Sable from before she ever left Edgewood.
But all that came was a fog. A gap. A nothing.
It scared her. She pushed the feeling quickly down, then pocketed her phone. Just before she got into her car, the sight of that same trash can made her pause.
Emeline looked from the trash can to Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair still gripped in her hand. She could throw it out right now.
But as she moved to do it, all she could think about was the man at the pump and his poetry-loving wife. He spoke of her like she was a radiant sun. One that had set but, like the dusk, still lingered on the horizon where he kept his gaze fixed.
Emeline couldn’t help feeling that to throw Neruda’s poems in the garbage was to defile the woman’s memory, somehow. So she opened her car door, shoved the book in her bag, then pulled out onto the highway and kept driving.
LA RÊVERIE WAS LOUD and warm and crowded as Emeline’s leg bounced nervously beneath the table. The members of The Perennials bent their heads close together, making quiet conversation. They were a few years older than her, and since walking in and saying hi, not one band member had attempted to include her in their conversation—despite her several attempts to join.
They had all just flown in from different parts of the country, she told herself. They were obviously a tight-knit group and needed to catch up. Emeline couldn’t begrudge them that.
Still. She felt like a third wheel.
Joel wasn’t helping. He’d given her the cold shoulder since she arrived—not that she could blame him, seeing as she left him high and dry yesterday. He was currently outside taking a call.
Emeline fidgeted with the ring on her finger, spinning it around and around before remembering who gave it to her.
Hawthorne.
Her hand tightened around her drink, then fell loose. She wasn’t going to think about the king’s tithe collector, or anything else in the woods. Hawthorne was a thief. The woods were cursed. And everything in them wanted her dead.
This was where she belonged.
Tomorrow night, she would get up onstage and open for her dream band. It was the culmination of all her hard work. And if she was on her game, Daybreak would sign her. They’d produce her next album. She would have everything she ever wanted before she even turned twenty.
Her biggest, oldest dream was coming true.
“You ready for tomorrow?”
Emeline glanced up to find Edwin McCormick, drummer for The Perennials, watching her. Colorful sleeve tattoos decorated his pale arms and his dark hair was slick, as if he hadn’t washed it yet this week.
She smiled. “Of course. I can’t wait!” She immediately winced at the sound of her voice—it was too bright and fake. To hide her embarrassment, Emeline took a sip of her root beer. The carbonation fizzed on her tongue.
“Ever played a fourteen-city tour before?”
Edwin’s arm was slung casually around the neck of the young woman beside him: Ashley Granger, lead singer. Her bleached-blond bangs were cut straight and short across her forehead, and the rest of her hair was pulled up in a bun, showing off a steep undercut.
“This is my first,” said Emeline, her stomach pinching.
“I’m sure you’ll do great,” said Ashley, studying Emeline from beneath Edwin’s arm.
A sudden, cheerful voice interrupted them.
“Emeline Lark!”
The entire table turned to find a curvy blonde with a heart-shaped face and a lipstick-bright smile standing over them. Her dark blue jeans were ripped at the knees and tucked into a pair of cowboy boots.
Chloe Demarche.
Emeline relaxed at the sight of her songwriter, her stomach unpinching.
“I haven’t heard from you in weeks!! Where have you been?”
Emeline’s thoughts raced, searching for an answer that didn’t sound completely bonkers. “I was … taking care of my grandfather.”
It was somewhat true.
The light caught in Chloe’s bobbing golden curls as she dropped into Joel’s empty seat, looking genuinely distressed. “Is he okay?”
“Hey, Chlo?” said Ashley, leaning across the table, her index finger pointing to the chair. “That seat is taken.”
“Oh!” Chloe darted to her feet. “Sorry. My friends are over there, anyway.” She waved casually across the room, where a group of people were rounding up chairs and taking over an empty table. Chloe turned her attention back to Emeline. “Did you get a chance to listen to those new songs I uploaded to Elegy?”
Emeline had hundreds of unchecked notifications on her phone, all of which she’d accumulated while in the King’s City. She shook her head. “Not all of them. But I will tonight. I promise.”
“No rush. When you do, let me know what you think.” Chloe’s cheeks dimpled. “Have fun on your tour!” She lifted her hand in a wave, returning to her friends.
When she was out of hearing distance, Ashley leaned in and said, “Did you hear she’s recording an album?”
“What?” said Heidi, their bass player.
“With who?” asked Edwin.
“Daybreak.” Ashley snorted, derisively. “Apparently, she signed with them last week.”
Emeline shifted uneasily. She scanned the pub, looking for Joel.
Heidi smirked. “Well, that’s fitting.”
Ashley nodded, glancing across the room and wrinkling her nose. “God, she’s so plastic. Just like her songs.”
The words turned Emeline’s stomach. Chloe’s songs were her songs too. She sank deeper into her chair.
Across the room, Chloe and her friends chatted happily. I wish I was over there, Emeline realized, watching The Perennials lean in towards each other, gossip dripping like jewels from their mouths.
This was one of the things she’d learned to adjust to when she first broke into the scene.
Emeline remembered her first music festival and its after- party. How excited she’d been as she stepped into the bar after a hot day of stage hopping, hoping to befriend some like-minded newbie.
She’d ended up at a booth, sandwiched between four established musicians, with several more across the table. She’d asked how their sets went, how far they’d traveled, where they were staying. But the conversation quickly dissolved into petty gossip. How much so-and-so had signed their most recent deal for. Whose upcoming album was expected to flop. Who deserved to be on the Polaris short list—and who didn’t.
Here, gossip was currency. The more you had, the more power you accrued.
That day, Emeline was a little baby deer thinking she was wandering into a meadow, excited to befriend all the other woodland creatures, when instead she was wandering into oncoming traffic.
Her whole body had hummed with the need to escape that day. But in order to get out of that booth, she would have had to crawl under the table and make a run for it.
She had the same instinct now.
Except this was The Perennials. The band she was spending the next three weeks on tour with. And here they were, the night before their tour started, calling Emeline’s songwriter a sellout.
What do they think of me?
With that upsetting thought, Emeline rose from her chair and made for the washroom. As the door shut behind her, the loud chatter of the Rev’s patrons hushed, leaving her in near silence amid the faint smell of cigarette smoke. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead. Band stickers littered the walls and stall doors.
The familiarity of it made her chest loosen.
She let out a breath.
Okay, she thought, standing at the sinks. Your tour mates are pretentious dicks. So what? You’ve dealt with dozens of others just like them.
Was this why people weren’t supposed to meet their heroes?
She ran a faucet, splashing cold water on her face. Someone had put out their cigarette in the ceramic bowl, and the butt lay soggy on the bottom.
Planting her palms at the edge of the sink, Emeline stared at her reflection.
It’s only three weeks. You’ll survive.
And at the end of those three weeks, she would—she hoped—have a whole lot of EP sales, a whole lot more exposure, and a contract with Daybreak, who would want her to start recording an album ASAP.
Remember why you love this, she told herself.
It was the music she loved. The way the world went quiet and still the moment she started strumming. How she forgot everything she was running from when there was a song in her throat.
I knew a girl once, Hawthorne’s voice flickered through her. Singing was like breathing for her. When she sang, she went somewhere no one could touch her.
Emeline’s throat tightened. She clutched the sink harder, wanting to purge his rough-soft voice and his leather-pine smell and his river-rock eyes from her memory.
Once she got up onstage tomorrow, it would be a whirlwind of catching flights and checking into hotels and recovering from jet lag—not to mention performing—for weeks. She would have no time to think about Hawthorne Fell, or anything else. Not the cursed forest or its cruel king. Not the monstrous mother who wanted her dead. And especially not the dark power lurking in her depths.
Good riddance, she thought. To all of it.
Pushing away from the sinks, she headed out of the washroom.
As she was on her way back to the table, The Perennials clustered even closer together. Joel was still absent, as was Edwin. When she drew nearer, she heard Ashley say, “I give her a year before she drops off the map.”
Emeline gritted her teeth. Still? What was it about Chloe that irked them so much?
“I dunno, Ash. I mean, she’s touring with us.”
Emeline slowed.
“Are you kidding me?” Ashley raised a thin, skeptical brow. “The only reason she’s touring with us is because she’s screwing Joel. And Joel is best buds with Edwin.”
Emeline halted, her mouth going dry as cotton. The words were ugly and cruel.
They were also about her.
“Joel called in a favor. You know how obsessed he is with her. Emeline Lark has no talent, and everyone knows it. She uses a writer, for Christ’s sake.”
Emeline stood frozen, several steps away. She told herself to keep walking. To head for the bar and order another root beer, then come back and pretend she hadn’t heard.
But Ashley’s words had burrowed deep, immobilizing her.
Emeline felt like the one wrong note in the middle of all the right ones. Discordant. Unaligned. As if she was in the wrong song entirely.
No, she told herself sternly. You belong here.
She needed to stay strong and get through this.
You’ve survived worse.
Suddenly, someone bumped her shoulder. A rush of something wet and cold swept up her shirt, stunning her.
“Oh no!” Clutching her now mostly empty glass, Chloe stared at the beer drenching Emeline. “Em, I’m so sorry.”
The conversation at the table abruptly halted as the members of The Perennials turned towards them.
Fighting down the lump in her throat, Emeline smiled at Chloe. “Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.” And because they were listening, she touched Chloe’s elbow and added, “Congrats on signing with Daybreak, by the way. I’m really proud of you.”
Emeline excused herself and walked outside, gulping in the cool evening air, waving her shirt in an effort to dry it. The parking lot was silent except for some smokers huddled on the curb and Joel leaning against the trunk of his car, still on a call. Pressing her back to the brick wall, she slid down to the sidewalk and dialed a number on her phone.
“Hello?”
Emeline closed her eyes at the sound of his voice.
“Hi,” she breathed.
“Who is this?”
“Emeline. Your granddaughter. I just … I needed to hear your voice.”