In other words, a hero on a quest for the Holy Grail isn’t looking for the Holy Grail. The hero is trying to find himself, and the only way he can find his true self is by going on a journey, being tried and tested until he knows if he is a hero in name only or a hero in truth.
And that’s why the world has Holy Grails—not because the world needs Holy Grails but because the world needs heroes.
Oh, and Jeremy was right. Things are about to get weird. Ready?
Chapter Four
Half an hour before sunrise on Starcross Hill, Rafe was already in the woods, hunting.
The sky was only beginning to turn from black to pink, but he knew these woods by heart and didn’t need much light to make his way up the hill. Intruders were in the forest, and it was them he hunted.
The shortest route up the hill was also the steepest, so steep it was like climbing a wall in some places. In the cool dawn damp, Rafe sweat through his gray T-shirt. He paused to rest under a spruce tree and catch his breath.
In a nearby rhododendron, a robin woke and started a song. Rafe spotted him on a low branch. He had a bright red breast and one oddball white feather in his wing. Rafe always paid attention to birds. It was the birds who’d warned him about the intruders. Rafe had gone on his usual hike yesterday, climbing to the Queen’s Tower Rock, where he could survey all of Starcross Hill. He made the trek daily, and the animals had long ago accepted him as part of the landscape. He could sit in the shade by the silver creek that wound down his hill. Deer would stand five feet away from him to drink, barely blinking at his presence. Coyotes jogged past him on the game trails. Birds kept singing when he passed under their branches.
Except yesterday, the birds had been suspiciously silent. High on Queen’s Tower Rock, he’d peered through his binoculars and spotted tire tracks on the neighbor’s logging road. Poachers. And they were back again.
When his breathing eased, he started off again. The robin’s song suddenly changed into a loud whinny. Rafe froze, then heard a soft rustle of leaves. His eyes, now accustomed to the low light, spotted a fat black rat snake, nearly six feet long, darting across the trail, disappearing under leaves. He’d almost stepped on it.
He glanced at the robin and whispered, “Thanks, buddy.” Then he hiked on, telling himself “further up and further in,” which was something Jeremy used to say when they were hiking, though he didn’t remember what he’d gotten it from.
The first tendrils of bloodred sunlight were streaking over the summit as Rafe reached the western boundary of Starcross Hill. A shiny black Dodge Ram, so new it still bore dealer plates, sat parked at a bend in the logging road, only twenty feet from one of the hundred No Trespassing—Private Property signs. The driver of the truck was nowhere to be seen. Inside the truck bed, he found a few boxes of ammunition. Bear load.
Rafe pulled an arrow from his quiver, tempted to slash the tires. But then he had a better idea.
Three sets of footprints disappeared into the woods. Rafe followed them until he didn’t need the prints anymore to find his way. The stench led him to the poachers’ bait pit—stale donuts and fish guts. He stayed in the shadows, but even thirty feet away, he nearly vomited from the smell of rotting meat.
He made a wide circle, scanning the woods until he spotted two hunting blinds behind a fallen oak, the trunk green and furry with moss. Three men in camo, head to toe, stood outside the blinds, loading their rifles. They entered the blinds. Black rifle barrels glinted in the first light of morning.
Quietly as he could, Rafe eased two smoke bombs from his pocket. As he crept closer to the blinds, a black bear lumbered toward the bait pit. Two cubs trotted at her side, each about eight months old.
With a flick of a cigarette lighter, Rafe lit the fuses on the smoke bombs. He tossed one in each blind, then ran.
A shot rang out, but the bullet went wide of the mark, hitting a limestone boulder, sending powder flying and the bears roaring and racing into the woods. The three poachers tore from the blinds, coughing and gagging. Tears streamed down their faces.
“What the hell?” one screamed, then again. Another poacher tripped and fell into the blind, tearing it down. The third man dropped his rifle on a rock, and it fired. The chaos was going to get one of them killed. Rafe stepped out of the shadows, pulled an arrow from his quiver, and quickly fired toward the ground at their feet.
The first man jumped back, spun around wildly. In a low voice, he hissed, “Someone’s out there. Go, go, go, go.”
The three poachers tore through the woods toward their truck. Rafe trailed them from a safe distance. Swearing and panicking, they tossed their guns into the bed, then climbed over one another, trying to get into the cab.
One screamed when he found the enormous vinyl No Trespassing sign crammed behind the steering wheel, blocking them from getting into the cab. Rafe smirked.
The man yanked it out, tossed it on the ground, and got inside. The truck whipped around so hard it nearly hit a tree. Rafe pulled another arrow and shot it into the passenger-side door. A second arrow into the bed. A third arrow lodged deep in the bumper, right in the middle of the paper dealer plate, through the hole in the capital letter D.
With the woods his and his alone again, Rafe turned and headed back to the abandoned hunting blinds. With his bow and quiver strung over his back, he picked up the smoke bombs and dropped them in a bottle of water one of the poachers had left behind.
The smoke made his eyes water, and the scent was so acrid he had to retreat into the woods. From out of nowhere, the mother black bear appeared. She rose on her back legs, raised her front legs, and roared.
Instinct screamed at him to run, but something more ancient than instinct, a memory of a time before fear, held Rafe in place. He raised his arms over his head, made himself large, and roared even louder. A primal cry meant to save them both. A bear that mauled a human would be hunted down and killed, and her cubs would be left motherless before winter.
She went quiet and dropped down onto four paws again.
He waited for her to turn, to run away, but she remained. She stared at him with dark and shining eyes.
Then she bowed her noble head to him, bowed like a commoner to a king. What could he do but nod at her, accepting the bow, though he didn’t know why, only that he knew he must.
The bear turned and trotted away to join her cubs.
Rafe watched her go, terror still gripping his heart. He ran back down the hill, through the tangle of trees, roots, and rocks…sliding on his back down a quick, hard drop, down a ravine into the muck of a muddy creek bed, and up the other side…
Finally, he reached the red spruces at the bend and collapsed by the rhododendron where he’d rested before.
He panted to catch his breath. Maybe he just needed to sleep. Sleep deprivation made people see things. That’s all it was. Bears didn’t bow, and if they did bow, they wouldn’t bow down to him.
Rest. Just rest, he ordered himself, as he sat down on the ground with his back to the tree trunk. A few feet away, his little robin with the odd white feather in his wing pecked at the leaves, seeking out his breakfast. Rafe could bring him some mealworms or seeds later, a thank-you for the warning about the rat snake in his path. He’d always liked birds, and they seemed to like him, never flying off even when he passed too close to their nests.
The robin shook his feathers out, giving himself a dust bath. Rafe started back down the path to his cabin.
A hawk dropped out of the sky like a falling bomb.
“Shit!”
At the sound of Rafe’s cry, the hawk flew off, talons empty.
Panicked and in pain, the robin spun in circles, unable to fly. His right wing with the white feather was bent in two, clearly broken.
Rafe knew what he had to do, what he should do. Grab the bird and twist its neck. The end. But he couldn’t.
