“Uh, yeah. It’s just a hobby.”
“Oh my gosh! I was just out looking at places to take Gary for his birthday, and there you were. I didn’t know you were a singer.”
I snort. “Well, you know…” I don’t mention that there was a time that I thought I could be the next Taylor Swift. That dream has died a slow, painful death. Only a few venues in the area will schedule me since my personal implosion and fall from grace, and, again, the pay barely covers transportation to the venue. Singing, truly, is something I do only for personal fulfillment these days.
“Exciting, though!” Emily says. “Maybe I’ll head down there tonight with Gary. Have a few drinks. Cheer you on.”
“Oh, don’t put yourself out.” I would never invite anyone from work to one of my shows. It’s awkward, especially considering the one area of magic that hasn’t left me is my voice. Things always seem to get out of hand when people who have heard me sing see me in real life. And I need this job. If things go wrong here, it could mean trouble for me.
“I’d like to watch you perform, and I know Gary would too,” she says sweetly.
I frown. “Here’s the thing, Emily,” I start, digging for a good lie. “I’m not very good as it is, and if you were there, I’d be really nervous. I know you want to be supportive, but honestly, you’d make it ten times harder for me.”
“Oh.” She tucks her chin and extends her lower lip as if she can’t believe I’ve just suggested that her presence might not be welcome. “Well, okay. I guess being an amateur is hard. I get it. I was once in a play in high school, and every time I was supposed to go onstage, I suffered major anxiety.”
“Right. So… Tell you how it goes on Monday?”
She looks completely deflated. “Sure. Of course.” She holds up a finger as a call comes through, and she turns back to her computer to answer.
Bullet dodged.
I may have burned all my bridges in the music industry, but I intend to sing until the day I die. My big dreams may be dead, but my talent isn’t. And I will protect this tiny niche of happiness with everything I’ve got.
I glance at the clock. Two hours, fifty minutes until I can log out.
Chapter Four
SEB
As far as I can tell, Raven’s Wish dropped off the map after Full Throttle rejected them. Off the fucking planet, it seems. Crew has been trying to run them down all day, and I’ve done my share of Googling too. No one has updated their website in eighteen months. No one has posted about them on social media in over a year. I’ve searched for each of the members separately. The drummer, Alex, made a go of it for about six months with a band called Marxigram, but even he is a ghost these days.
“Are you sure you even want to find this girl?” Crew asks. “I’m not questioning your judgment?—”
“I literally pay you to question my judgment. I just…have a friend who remembers her and was interested in hiring her for a private event.”
“Tell your friend to reconsider. Gregg and I thought she was the most tragic case we’d ever seen in this business, and we’ve seen a lot of addicts.”
“That bad, huh?”
“So bad we had to call an ambulance. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were still in rehab or the psych ward.”
I cringe. Magic shares a razor’s edge with mental illness. Hell, I’ve been in my alignment less than twenty-four hours and I already question my sanity. My skin feels too tight, and my body feels pressurized like a champagne bottle ready to pop. I’m not crazy, though, and I’m willing to bet she isn’t either.
Undeniably, something had its teeth in her back then. It might have been drugs. It might have been booze. Witches are human, after all, a human capable of magic, and unlike dragons, they can become addicted to drugs and alcohol. They can overdose. Their magic only complicates things.
I knew this was a bad idea.
“Thanks, Crew. I’ll consider her a lost cause.”
“Probably for the best.”
He leaves my office, and I stare at the picture of Raven’s Wish on their website. Even the photo makes her look strung out, like she’s there but not there. She’s too thin, the type of thin you see when someone is skipping meals to do drugs. I can make out the outline of her ribs where the neck of her dress falls off her shoulder. Bleached white hair falls in a harsh, asymmetrical line across her prominent cheekbone. It’s too hard and cold of a look for a girl who probably still has a prom dress in her closet. But it’s her eyes that unsettle me the most. Unfocused and glazed, she stands on that stage, but she’s not really there.
“Where are you, Zoe Willow?” I mumble, and then an idea comes to me. I screenshot her photo and do a reverse image search. Dozens of photos pop up. I zoom in on each of them until one is too close a resemblance for me to dismiss. “Well, I’ll be damned. Looks like you didn’t fall off the map after all, Aimee Oliver.”
I jot down the details of her next show. If all goes well tonight, Zoe Willow is about to have the opportunity of a lifetime.
The Barrel Room is a dive in Hollywood that does not live up to its name. It looks neither like a storage room for whiskey barrels nor like a place for fermenting wine. If, instead, you picture a family of rats building a bar inside a barrel, you might get closer. The place has the vibe of a basement decorated by frat boys on spring break. The decor has a decidedly yard-sale feel, and what counts as a stage is just an elevated circular platform at the center of a room of velvet sofas and thrift-store chairs. This is the type of place where you thank fuck for the poor lighting because you don’t want to know about the overall cleanliness.
