Chapter 20 Evie
Evie
For a second, my brain tries to pretend this is still a concert.
Lights. Music. The roar of a hometown crowd. Midnight Halo onstage like a myth someone invented to make this town feel important.
Then the emcee points straight at me.
Not vaguely. Not “front row shout-out.” Not cute. His arm snaps up like a puppet string got yanked. And his mouth opens… and the voice that comes out isn’t his.
“Bring her up here.”
The words hit the crowd like a command coded into their bones.
Around me, bodies shift. Not the normal “people pressing forward because the beat is about to drop” kind of shift.
This is coordinated. Immediate. Wrong. Hands turn toward me like sunflowers snapping toward light.
Someone grabs my elbow. Another hand closes around my wrist.
I jerk back, instinct screaming, and my own wrist—my bound wrist—erupts in heat like a brand. Pain spikes up my arm, hot and bright, and the thought arrives as clearly as a slap: The binding is the only reason I’m still me.
Everyone else is half-dreaming.
And I’m the only one awake enough to be terrified.
Because I can see it now.
Not a “bad feeling.” Not static. Not the kind of wrongness you explain away later as panic.
I see the sky moving.
Above the lantern frames and the stage lights, something hangs over Harbor Lights like a second ceiling—thick as fog, restless as a storm.
Faces form and un-form inside it: mouths open mid-song, eyes blank with devotion, expressions stitched together from old joy and old grief.
It’s not one creature. It’s a crowd made into a monster. Songs leak from it.
The Chorus.
And it has tendrils.
Black threads snaking down through the air, slipping between bodies, brushing throats, and people lean into them as if they’re being offered water. The air is full of them. They weave between the lanterns like spider silk and the lanterns sway in unison.
Someone yanks my arm harder.
“Let go,” I snap.
The crowd chant starts again, and this time it isn’t hype.
It’s a machine.
“One more song. One more song. One more song.”
Perfect timing. No lag. No variation. Hundreds of mouths forming the same syllables in unison like they share one throat.
My skull pressures at the base, like a hand is holding my head still. I twist, trying to find Grandma.
She’s beside me—she was beside me—
My hand scrapes empty air.
“Grandma!” I shout.
I see her a few feet away, jostled sideways, shoulders bumped, her face tilted toward the stage with a too-bright smile. Her pupils are wide. Her mouth moves with the chant, slower, as if she’s fighting through mud.
Someone shoves me forward again.
A woman’s shoulder slams into mine.
A teenage girl grabs my sleeve and pulls.
“Bring her up here,” the emcee repeats, smiling like he’s announcing a prize winner.
My wrist burns hotter.
The binding keeps me safe from falling into the chant, but it doesn’t let me speak freely either. Every time I try to yell something that sounds like “run” or “stop,” the heat lashes my nerves like the magic is yanking my tongue back into my mouth.
It’s a leash.
It’s a muzzle.
And it is the only reason I’m not glass-eyed like everyone else.
“No!” I scream anyway, and pain knifes up my arm.
I snarl through it and swing my elbow backward. It connects with someone’s ribs. They grunt and stumble—half-awake, half-not—and the crowd surges like it’s annoyed I’m resisting.
Hands tug my hoodie.
Someone’s nails rake my skin.
I shove with both palms like I’m trying to push back a wave.
“Grandma!” I scream again, voice cracking.
She turns her head, just a fraction, like she hears me through all the noise. For one heartbeat, her eyes clear.
“Evie?” she mouths.
Relief floods me so hard it’s dizzying.
“I’m here!” I yell. “Look at me! Stay with me!”
But the chant rolls over us again, and her face slips like the wind blew out a candle. Her mouth starts moving in time with everyone else, and I’m tugged further away.
“One more—”
“No!” I shove forward, fighting the bodies between us. “Stop chanting. Stop. Please—”
My wrist flares hotter. The binding punishes the plea. The pressure at the base of my skull spikes too, like the Chorus doesn’t like me refusing the script.
A voice tries to bloom in my head, sweet and familiar as warm syrup: This is how it’s always been. Lanterns. Music. Harbor Lights. Stay here.
Images slam into me like waves.
The diner after hours—grease, laughter, fries.
Kaia leaning over the counter with a grin like she could swallow the sun.
The pier. Lantern light. Her mouth almost on mine.
The ache of being sixteen and thinking this town and this girl could be enough to live inside forever.
The nostalgia hits like a drug.
My knees go weak.
I understand, suddenly, with sick clarity: the Chorus doesn’t just scare you.
It seduces you. It offers you a past where nothing hurts yet. It makes you want to be eaten.
My fingers loosen on the air. My mind blurs at the edges.
I inhale hard and dig my nails into my palm until pain sparks me awake.
“No,” I whisper, fiercer. “No. Not like this.”
It doesn’t matter. Hands keep closing on me anyway—wrists, sleeves, elbows—gentle the way sleepwalkers are gentle when they’re dragging you somewhere you don’t want to go.
“Bring her up here,” the emcee says again.
The chant swallows everything else.
“One more song. One more song.”
My wrist ignites under the binding. Not a warning tingle—full, scorching heat, like the magic is trying to weld my bones into place while the crowd does the opposite.
I twist, trying to wrench free. I slam an elbow into someone’s ribs. A shoulder. A hip. It’s ugly and desperate and it barely slows the tide.
“Grandma!” I scream over my shoulder.
I see her only in flashes between bodies and lantern light—her small frame jostled; her face tilted toward the stage, that too-wide, half-beat-late smile. Then I lose her in the crowd. Something in my chest tears.
“No—Move—” I try to shout, but the binding flares so hot it steals my breath. Pain lances up my arm like a hand clamped on my throat.
I choke on my screams. The crowd hauls me forward anyway. I fight, clawing at sleeves, shoving faces, swinging on shoulders, but they don’t react like people. They react like one organism adjusting around a rock in its path.
And I’m the rock.
I get yanked closer to the stage. The lights swallow the fog. The bass becomes pressure in my teeth. The closer I get, the worse the air feels—thick, sticky, hungry. Like the space itself has turned into a mouth.
People start to kneel.
Not everyone at once. Not dramatically.
One drops like their strings got cut. Then another. Then a cluster.
Knees hit the ground. Hands go slack. Faces tilt up toward the stage, eyes glassy, mouths still moving with the chant like prayer.
It’s feeding on them.
Not biting, not tearing, drinking. Siphoning the heat out of their bodies through sound and attention and nostalgia.
And I’m being offered like a fresh cup.
“Bring her up here,” the emcee purrs.
I’m close enough now to see the stage clearly, and that’s when my brain makes one last pathetic attempt to pretend.
Lights. Smoke. A show.
Then the truth hits. Midnight Halo is onstage, still moving in formation, but the choreography is wrong in the way a smile can be wrong.
Jules is moving like she’s fighting a current, her blade flashing too bright, too hot.
Remy’s runes hang in the air like torn sentences.
Mina’s stance is braced—shielding, anchoring—like she’s trying to hold the stage together with her body.
And Kaia—
Kaia drops to her knees too.
Not a planned dramatic moment. Not a performance choice.
Her knees hit the stage like something inside her gave out. Her head lifts slowly, and her gaze… isn’t there. Her eyes are that electric purple and this time it sticks, unsteady, too bright, like her magic is bleeding through faster than the glamour can seal it.
Her mouth opens, smile still on her face as she looks up at the Chorus.
My stomach turns to ice.
Because I have seen Kaia owned before.
By contracts.
By schedules.
By a company that turned her into a product and called it destiny.
And now the Chorus is trying to do the same thing, only it’s not asking for a signature. It’s killing her.
The crowd jerks me forward again, and I stumble. Someone’s hand clamps around my upper arm hard enough to bruise.
I’m almost at the front barricade now. Almost close enough that the stage feels like a cliff over my head.
I can’t get to Grandma.
I can’t even see her anymore.
All I can see is Kaia’s empty gaze and the mouths in the sky and people folding to their knees like the town is bowing to be eaten.
And something inside me goes terrifyingly calm.
If I stay and fight the crowd, the crowd wins.
If I scream, the binding burns me silent.
And if this loop continues, everyone kneeling becomes everyone dead.
The Chorus’s weapon isn’t claws.
It’s the sound, the chanting, the speakers turning emotion into a pipeline.
So I need to break the loop.
I need to kill the sound. A final shove pitches me forward, and for one blessed second, the grip on my arm slips. Someone’s hand loses purchase on my sleeve.
I twist hard, duck low, and slam my shoulder into the barricade gap where the staff move in and out.
I’m smaller than the bodies trying to drag me.
I use it.
I slide through the opening, panic threatening to drown me, skin scraping metal, lungs burning.
Someone reaches for me—fingertips snag my hoodie—but I rip free and stumble into the narrow space beside the stage where cables snake like veins.
I don’t stop. I don’t look back.
Instead, I look at the festival grounds the way I’ve always looked at them: as a map.
Power junction near the sound tower. Generator trailer behind the souvenir tents.
A service corridor between the kettle corn stand and the PTA booth that only locals know because we’ve been sneaking through it since we were kids.