They reached Starcross Hill by lunchtime. When Rafe turned onto the gravel drive, Jeremy woke up, wincing as he stretched.
Rafe pulled right up to the cabin so Jeremy wouldn’t have to walk more than ten feet to the door. Inside, Jeremy eased himself down onto the sofa. Rafe went into the kitchen. He glanced out the window to his sculpture garden. A robin perched on the shoulder of the queen. But that didn’t mean anything, he told himself. The woods were full of robins.
He opened the fridge and returned to the living room with two green glass bottles of Ale-8. The lids twisted off in his hand, and he passed one to Jeremy, kept one for himself. Then he sat on the sofa beside Jeremy and put his feet on the coffee table. Jeremy did the same.
They drank and it tasted like being a kid again.
“Sweet as you remember?” Jeremy asked.
Rafe said, “Sweeter.”
Storyteller CornerOne Last Postcard
As soon as he was feeling well enough to drive, Jeremy went on one final mission for his queen. She’d asked him to send a postcard for her. The postcard was addressed to a retirement community outside Venice, Florida. Luckily, a certain psychic pan-dimensional red crow was watching from a nearby palm tree as Deborah Adler set down her pickleball racket and opened her mailbox. She took out the postcard and smiled at the picture, an old-timey painting of the Shenandoah River. That brought back memories, not all of them sweet. She’d loved living in West Virginia until the horrific kidnapping of one of her favorite former students had broken her heart, and she moved away.
When she read the back, she put her hand on her chest and sank to the ground. Tears fell on the words written in a strange hand. A strange hand but a familiar name.
The postcard read, Shannon Yates asked me to tell you, “Thank you for the unicorn pencil, Mrs. Adler. It really was magical.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Rafe woke from a deep sleep with a sudden start. Immediately alert, he lifted his head and listened, hearing nothing at first but a morning breeze, and Jeremy’s soft steady breaths coming from the pillow next to him.
Slowly, he laid his head down again. Jeremy had gotten in late last night. He’d driven six straight hours from New York, where he’d helped locate a boy who’d wandered away from his family hiking the Appalachian Trail. To hear Jeremy tell it, he carried the boy out of the woods, handed him over to his weeping mother, patted the kid on the head, and got into his car and drove away before anyone could even shake his hand.
“You pulled an Irish goodbye on terrified parents?” Rafe had asked him when he’d dragged himself through the door at midnight, tracking Bellvale Mountain mud all over the floor.
“They got their son back. And I wanted to come home.” A kiss put an end to the discussion.
Rafe would’ve gone with him, but he was halfway through building an addition onto the cabin—an art studio, a master suite, and a screened-in porch that would eventually look out onto the sculpture garden, which Jeremy had taken to calling Little Shanandoah.
He was also supposed to be adding stables so he and Jeremy could get a couple of horses. Starcross had perfect riding trails, and yet something held him back. He knew it was stupid, but he didn’t want any horses other than Sunny and Freddy.
As much as he missed the lads, he missed their girls a thousand times more. Jeremy talked about Emilie almost every day, and Rafe felt like a part of him was missing without Skya. A prince needed a queen to serve, right? He almost wished he could forget again, but even if he could, he wouldn’t. The pleasure of the memories was worth the pain of knowing that was all Shanandoah would ever be to them—a memory.
If only he could’ve brought something back with him. They’d left in such a hurry, they’d forgotten Jeremy’s sword and his own book of memories. But, he comforted himself, he did have a Shanandoah baron sleeping next to him almost every night, and you couldn’t do much better than that for a souvenir.
Something tapped on the window. Three soft taptaptaps, then silence, then taptaptap again. Tree branch? Polite woodpecker? Whatever it was would wake Jeremy any minute now if Rafe didn’t put a stop to it. Jeremy had already stirred in his sleep and dropped his arm across Rafe’s chest. Luckily, he’d had plenty of practice escaping from Jeremy’s arm trap. He eased sideways and put Jeremy’s arm down onto the pillow. Worked like a charm. He found his jeans and T-shirt from yesterday and pulled them on.
Quietly, he slipped down the stairs and out the back door. Spring was finally coming to Starcross. A carpet of wild ginger damp with morning dew tickled his bare feet as he walked the garden looking for whatever had woken him.
The sun rose over the trees. As the long shadows stretched and danced in a breeze, for a moment no longer than the span between two heartbeats, the garden came alive. The unicorn raised her head high and the silver tiger opened its mouth to roar, and the red crow spread her wings, and Queen Skya turned her head and winked at him.
Then it was over. Had he imagined it? Were the remnants of a dream still swirling through his brain?
A single red feather wafted down on the wind and landed at his feet. He picked it up.
“What is it?” Jeremy asked. He stood in the doorway half-dressed and wide awake.
Rafe walked over to him and held up the feather. Jeremy took it from him and then looked up and around.
“Aurora. Did you see her?”
“No,” Rafe said. “She just left her calling card. What do you think it means?”
Jeremy didn’t answer at first, only stared at the feather in his hand.
“I dreamed we went back to the Crow last night. Emilie was there with a gift for us.”
“What gift?”
“I don’t know. I woke up before we opened the box.”
They looked at each other without speaking. They hadn’t been back to the Crow since their return. They’d talked about going to see—just in case—but kept putting it off like a visit to the doctor when you know it’ll be bad news.
“Wouldn’t hurt to look,” Jeremy finally said.
Rafe said, “I’ll drive.”
When he got behind the wheel and turned the key, the radio came on playing “Landslide” by Stevie Nicks.
“All right, Emilie,” Rafe muttered. “We’re coming.”
The song played on. Jeremy said, “It’s not my favorite. Too sentimental.”
“You’re getting a message from another world, and you’re complaining about the song choice?”
