My feet tangle as I stagger backward, and then I’m crashing to the forest floor. I reach out desperately, and he stops. For a wild moment, I think he’s shaken off the glamour.

Then I notice the unnatural posture, the stiffness, like an abandoned toy.

My fingers dig in the dirt as I surge back to my feet, a little off-balance. I start to stumble after him—

“You can drop the act now.”

I freeze at the sound of the voice, a voice more familiar than Gossamer’s. Recognition hits me like an arrow to the chest, and I forget how to breathe.

I turn slowly to face the speaker, and for a moment I forget Raze, forget the path, forget the distant singing. Forget everything except her.

She stands in a spot of golden light, holding up a blazing lantern that fights back the shadows. It illuminates a face almost as familiar as Isolde’s or my own. In fact, it’s strikingly similar to ours, with the exception of lighter, tawny skin and delicate, arched brows. Her hazel eyes light up with gold in the lantern’s light when they meet mine.

The singing fades away as silence wraps around me, smothering and cold and dark. The only sound left is the blood rushing in my ears.

My heart sticks in my throat, and my hands ball into fists. I can’t believe what I’m seeing, but I can’t stop the trembling word from escaping my lips.

“Mami?”

chapter thirty-six

My hand flies to my throat, closing around empty air where my necklace used to be. I can’t understand it. The harder I try to piece together what’s wrong here, the fuzzier my head feels. How could my mother be here?

Then her face twists. She props her hand on her hip and studies me with a mix of triumph and disgust. “Gossamer. You have some nerve showing your face around here. Or...whatever face this is.”

Just like that, my head clears. The faerie standing in front of me still has my mother’s face, my mother’s voice, her faint laugh lines, even her herbal smell. I ache to fold myself into her spindly arms, to feel her calloused hands rub my back with soothing, gentle strokes.

But she isn’t my mother.

Anger and sadness and hurt and maybe just a hint of disappointment almost knock me over. The last thing I truly want is for my mother to be here of all places, but for the space of a heartbeat, I had the foolish, childish hope that she was here to make everything okay. She tilts her head to the light, and her eyes flash as crimson as poppies, just like they did on Revelnox. Red eyes, a cruel, knowing smile: this is the same faerie who winked at me from across the crowd, who turned the guard into a donkey.

How long has she been following us? I try to focus on the question, but I can’t think clearly. It feels like being drunk. No—it feels like being glamoured. In the Seelie forest, I didn’t know I was under a spell. The second I realized it, it broke.