Coming back home was never easy. He’d learned to keep his head down, to mumble his name so no one would put two and two together and ask, “Wait, are you the Ralph Howell? The kid who got lost?”

Because that’s who he would always be to this town—one of the lost boys. Lost and left behind. After they were found, Jeremy’s mother spirited him away to England, where she had family, and Rafe went back to high school alone. He’d never gotten started on his future. He hadn’t been able to picture one without Jeremy in it. Sometimes, he thought he was still waiting for his life to begin.

And maybe that’s why he hung a left and went up to 436 Park Street. Because it felt like this might be his last chance to start again.

Rafe pulled in front of the house, the Big Blue Monster, as Jeremy called it. Good name. Three stories. Sky-blue paint. Gray stone chimney. Five bedrooms for two people—Jeremy and his mother, Dr. Mary Cox, classical pianist and professor of musicology at WVU.

It was a beautiful old house, and Rafe had been dazzled by it as a kid. Even their mailbox had impressed him back then. A black pedestal box with a man riding a horse on the front and the word Letters in brass above. And he’d only ever seen windows like that in Catholic churches. He’d had to ask Dr. Cox what those odd windows were called. Lancet windows. Named for lances. Like swords. Sword windows.

The sword windows were all dark. A few years ago, someone had tried turning Jeremy’s old house into a B and B, but now the Big Blue Monster was up for sale again. A realtor’s lockbox hung on the front door. Rafe peered through a window and saw it was empty of furniture, empty of everything except for a card table covered in flyers and business cards in the music room. It looked wrong. No piano where Jeremy had practiced every day at his mother’s command. No sofa nearby where Rafe would sketch or do homework while listening.

And there was no Jeremy here either.

Maybe Rafe had been crazy to expect him to be waiting on the front porch, but he was disappointed anyway. Rafe tried to ignore all the news stories about Jeremy’s near-miraculous ability to find missing girls, but deep down he’d almost believed that he could find anyone anytime. And if Jeremy really had that power, then he’d know Rafe was there and waiting for him.

His dad had tried to warn him. Years ago, his father had said being friends with someone like Jeremy was a bad idea. They came from different worlds. Too different. Rafe was a coyote. Jeremy was a purebred poodle. You didn’t see coyotes and poodles running around together, did you? Coyotes didn’t belong in fancy houses. Poodles wouldn’t survive a night in the woods. Poodles did tricks. Coyotes survived. A cruel thing to say, but the fact was…Jeremy and his mom did own a poodle. Her name was Martha, and Rafe had loved that dog as much as she’d loved him. He’d loved this house. After school, he’d walk over every day with Jeremy to do their homework together. Dr. Cox served them scones with clotted cream and hot tea with milk. Thanks to her, he knew hot tea should be made in a kettle and teapot, never the microwave. He knew the difference between a concerto and a sonata. And he knew he’d rather be a poodle in a warm house than a coyote in the cold, dark woods.

But maybe his dad was right. After all, he wasn’t in a warm house. He was outside and alone with no Jeremy in sight.

Just in case, he rang the doorbell. No answer. Of course not. When he turned to leave, he saw someone had left a package on the porch, hidden so no one would see it from the street. A large flat rectangle wrapped in brown paper and twine. Rafe’s initials were scrawled across the paper in black Sharpie.

Jeremy had been here.

Immediately, Rafe knew it was a painting. Nothing else came in that shape. A gift? A peace offering? He thought he knew what it was. Jeremy’s mother had owned a print of Franz Marc’s The Foxes, and Rafe had been enamored of it as a kid. Two red foxes, geometric, almost cubist, filled the canvas. The artist had used the same red for both foxes, so there was no telling where one began and the other ended. He remembered Dr. Cox saying, “You could do that someday.” Jeremy had rolled his eyes and said, “Someday? He can already do better than that now.”

Rafe had never forgotten that, because a fourteen-year-old kid doesn’t forget something like that.

Even now, his own art was heavily influenced by Marc’s bright colors, his strange animals, his wild lines. With his pocketknife, he cut the twine and carefully peeled back the paper.

It wasn’t The Foxes.

It was one of Rafe’s own paintings, made years ago in art therapy. The therapist told him to draw or paint the dreams he had on the nights he went into his fugue states. This had been one of them.

An expressionist painting of Jeremy, age fourteen, sitting at his mother’s piano in this very house. An ordinary enough scene but for the red crow perched on the edge of the piano’s open lid. In the dream, the red crow would listen to the piece until it was over. Then it would fly out the window. Jeremy would then turn to him and say, “Time to go.”

But how did Jeremy get this painting? Rafe had tossed all his old therapy art years ago. And why give it back to him now?

To get his attention, obviously. It worked.

He could almost hear Jeremy’s voice in his head, the voice from the dream…

Time to go.

Rafe grabbed the painting and carried it back to his truck. He drove straight to his cabin.

When he arrived, a white Prius covered in bumper stickers that said things like Adopt Don’t Shop and Who Rescued Who? sat in his driveway. Not Jeremy’s car. From the size of her footprints, he guessed a girl.

He followed her tracks—she’d stomped right through the brush—into his fenced-off backyard, and there she was, a young woman with long blond hair dyed pink at the ends. She wore boots and leggings, a sweater, and a jacket like she was about to hike for days. He didn’t want to scare her if she was just lost.

He walked up to her, but she kept her back to him.

“Hey, you need help?” Either she didn’t hear him or didn’t care that she wasn’t alone anymore. Her gaze was transfixed on his wood carving of the girl with the crown of antlers.

“Are you Rafe?”

“Yeah, who are—”

She turned and looked at him. Then he looked at the carving of the girl.

She pointed at the sculpture. “My name’s Emilie. And that’s my sister.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. She held out her phone to him, displaying a photograph of a girl wearing the same clothes with the same eyes and the same Greek nose.

“She’s sure,” Jeremy said.

Rafe turned around, and there was Jeremy, who must have been right behind him on the road.

“You got the painting,” Jeremy said. A statement, not a question. He walked over to them.

“I got it.”

“You can still punch me if you want,” Jeremy said. “If it’ll make you feel better.”

“It would,” Rafe said. Fifteen years of loneliness, anger, helplessness…it came out in one punch to Jeremy’s ribs. A good punch. All knuckle.

Jeremy stumbled forward, and Rafe caught him and lowered them both to the ground. Behind him Emilie gasped.

“Tell me one thing,” Rafe said into his ear. “One thing about when we were gone. One thing I can believe.”

After a labored breath, Jeremy said, “We were gone so long because you didn’t want to come back.”

Yes, he could believe that. He stood back and held out his hand. Jeremy took it, and Rafe pulled him to his feet.

“All right, come in,” Rafe said. He looked at Emilie, staring at him in shock. “You too.”

Storyteller CornerElsewhere

Your Storyteller has it on excellent authority that while all this was going on, a queen in a faraway kingdom—as far away as And they lived happily ever after is from Once upon a time—knelt on the floor of her library surrounded by splintered wood and shattered glass. A red crow landed on a purple velvet cushion where, for fifteen years, a book had rested inside a locked treasure box, but now the box was empty.

“What news, my spy?” the queen asked.

The crow sang the queen her secrets.

“Oh, not him. Anyone but him. I was afraid of that.” She sighed heavily, wearily. “But who else would want to steal it but him?”

The crow sang another song full of secrets, for in this world, crows didn’t simply caw. They saw. They saw, and they sang of what they saw. And the song the crow sang was one that said the world was about to change. Lost ones were coming home, but before they could feast in celebration, they must fight.