Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

—C. S. Lewis

PROLOGUE

Fifteen Years Before Our Story Begins

Once upon a time in West Virginia, two boys went missing.

They’d been missing since May, vanished during an end-of-school field trip to Red Crow State Forest.

They were gone long enough that people had stopped referring to them as “missing,” which implied a temporary state of being, and now simply called them “lost.” You looked for missing children. You mourned lost ones.

By that November, the boys’ missing posters on the signboard at Red Crow had faded and wrinkled behind the protective plexiglass. When Maggie and Tom noticed the posters while looking for the trail map, they remembered that they’d forgotten all about the lost boys. Because that’s how it worked. First you were missing. Then you were lost.

Then you were forgotten.

Maggie hadn’t paid much attention to the story even when it was fresh news. That morning, standing at the signboard while Tom retied his boots, she really looked at the two boys for the first time. One was a blond who seemed incapable of smiling, the other a redhead wearing a shit-eating grin. The class clown and his quiet sidekick, she assumed.

Ralph Stanley Howell, d.o.b. 6/15/92, 5'4, 118 lbs. Caucasian. Blond hair. Blue eyes.

Jeremy Andrew Cox, d.o.b. 5/28/92, 5'6, 129 lbs. Caucasian. Red hair. Hazel eyes.

“They never found those boys?” Tom asked.

“Nope. Probably never will.” Maggie was a nurse, and because she’d seen the worst, she knew to assume the worst. If the boys went missing in the Crow, odds were they’d died the first or second night. If they weren’t missing but kidnapped as some had theorized…they probably wished they were dead. She didn’t say that part out loud to Tom. It was only their fourth date, and she didn’t want to spoil the mood.

Holding hands, Maggie and Tom strolled the main trail to a scenic overlook. Below and before them lay the still autumn-lovely woods. Trees upon trees upon trees rising and falling in endless waves, an ocean of forest, and two boys drowned in it.

Before leaving the scenic overlook, Tom took pictures with his digital camera. It was the last day he would have that camera. The police would take it from him, and he’d never get it back.

Two hours and a bucket of sweat later, they reached the Goblin Falls, a small waterfall in a hidden ravine deep in the woods where the air always smelled like moss and cold rain, and the rock formations looked like little men with strangely twisted faces. Maggie squatted next to one of the goblins and made a face while Tom took her picture.

“Nice.” He laughed.

“Was I hideous enough?” she asked as she stood up.

“Disgusting.”

As he helped her down, a few stones at the top of the ravine skittered over the falls, hitting the water behind her with a sudden slap. Maggie jumped at the sound.

“Damn,” Tom said, holding her tight as he looked up and around. “You all right?”

“Yeah. Fine. Can I see the pictures?”

He gave her the camera, and she clicked through the photos. The first was a close-up of her and the rock goblin. The second was a wider shot of the falls. And the third was…

Maggie narrowed her eyes at the display screen.

“What?” Tom asked.

She showed him the picture on the camera’s display screen. The falls behind her. The rocky cliff rising ten feet above her. And something else.

The shadow of a man.

They scanned the cliff again but saw nothing. The Goblin Falls were off-trail, but people knew about them and hiked to them all the time. Just another hiker. That was all.

Still, when Tom said they should head back, Maggie said she was ready. She put her jacket back on, then her backpack. She bent to pick up her water bottle, and that’s when she saw them coming down the hill.

She stood up at once and froze in place, hand up to warn Tom not to speak or move.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered. She pointed.

Under her breath, Maggie said, “It’s them.”

And it was them, the lost boys.

One boy stood upright, mostly. The other boy was slung over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. They were shirtless, wearing pants six inches too short but no socks or shoes. Bare feet in the forest in November?

The standing boy struggled under the weight of the other boy. Sweat-damp red hair hung across his face. The boy on his shoulders had blond hair that hung loose and long.

Tom started forward, but Maggie grabbed his arm to stop him. Why? She didn’t know. Instinct. Fear. The uncanny feeling that they’d crossed the border into a story they didn’t belong in…

The one with the red hair met her eyes. Serious eyes. Older-than-his-years eyes. Carefully, he made his way down the narrow game trail, then walked right past them as if they weren’t there, carrying the other boy to the bank of the falls. He went down on one knee and gently eased the other boy onto the soft earth in the lone patch of sunlight.

When Tom opened his mouth, Maggie shook her head. The boy with red hair had an animal’s quiet readiness about him. One wrong word, and he might bolt like a deer, take flight like an eagle, vanish like a ghost.

The eyes of the other boy were open, but he was clearly confused, dazed. Head injury?

They stood a few feet away from the boys, watching them warily.

“Can you get a signal on your cell?” she whispered.

He opened his flip phone, then shook his head no.

The blond one on the ground let out a groan. Before she could stop him, Tom rushed to them, knelt, and reached out toward the boy on the ground.

It happened so fast, fast as a cobra striking. The red-haired boy struck out with his arm and caught Tom by the wrist.

Tom froze. Maggie gasped. Her heart hammered in her chest so hard she thought she might faint. She ran to Tom’s side.

“Jeremy.” She said it sharply, trying to break the spell.

Because it was Jeremy, of course. Jeremy Cox, whose name or face she would never forget again. And if he was Jeremy, the other boy was Ralph Howell.