His head fell back and he laughed. He laughed like he’d won the lottery, or better, like he’d won the heart of his true love. Or even better than that, he laughed like the doctor had said they’d made a mistake, and he would live a good long life after all. She’d never heard a more beautiful laugh.

In a flash, so fast she gasped, he grabbed her hand, looked up, and met her eyes.

“Thank you,” he said. He wasn’t laughing anymore.

“For what?”

“For finding me,” he said.

“Okay, you’re scaring me again.”

“Good.”

“Good. What does that even mean?”

“I mean, there’s no bringing her here. We go to her.”

“So she is alive? Can you tell me that much?”

“Yes. I believe so. And I tend to be right about these things.”

Emilie sat back in her chair. “She’s alive. She’s really alive.”

He nodded.

“In the woods? Is that where she is? Red Crow State Forest?” she asked.

“That’s where we’ll find her.”

“Okay…okay…” She stood up and paced around the dining room table. “I can, um…I can handle this. I think. Maybe…”

“You can.”

She needed to hear that. “What now?”

“I need to go home,” Jeremy said.

“Home? Oxford?”

“Home. West Virginia. Rafe. We can’t find her without Rafe.”

“Rafe? Who’s Rafe?”

“Ralph Howell.” He said the name “Ralph” like it caused him physical pain.

“You call him Rafe?”

“Old joke. Posh Brits pronounce it like Rafe.”

“Okay, so does Rafe know where Shannon’s hiding?”

“First, she’s not hiding. And no, Rafe doesn’t know where she is. He doesn’t remember anything about when we were missing.”

Emilie raised her voice in exasperation. “Then how precisely is he going to help us?”

“Because he’s Rafe, and that’s what he does.” Jeremy was already up and walking to the front door. She trailed behind him. “I need to go and—”

“Okay. Let’s go get Rafe and find my sister.”

He leaned back against the doorway, arms crossed over his chest.

“Not that simple. I’m not his favorite person. Safe to say he hates me a little. Admittedly, I can’t fault his reasoning, though I do argue with the conclusion he’s drawn.”

“I’ll talk to him then.”

“No, absolutely not.” He shook his head no, no, no. “Rafe is not safe for human consumption.”

“I want to meet him, not eat him. If he hates you, maybe I’d have better luck talking to him. Think about it.”

He jabbed his thumb toward the stack of library books on the mantel. “Your courage books are working, Princess. You should renew them.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“Look, things are very complicated and delicate between Rafe and me. Let me handle him.”

“I’m just trying to find my sister. I don’t need you to protect me—”

“I’m not trying to protect you. I’m trying to protect him.”

“Jeremy, she’s my sister.”

Finally, that got through to him.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll talk to him alone first. If I can’t get through to him, you can try.”

She exhaled heavily. “Thank you.”

“Fair warning. Things are about to get very weird.”

Emilie scoffed. “About to?”

Storyteller CornerThe Holy Grail

Time to meet our hero. Well, meet him again, I mean. The last time we saw Rafe, he was fifteen and mostly unconscious. He probably didn’t make much of an impression. But he is our hero and per the recipe, a bit of an unlikely one.

Regarding heroes, a famous professor named Joseph Campbell, who studied the world’s fairy tales and folktales, once wrote, The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know.