It flew into the door in the tree. It didn’t come back out.

“We have to go in together,” Jeremy said.

“Jay, are you sure about this?” Rafe asked.

“Surer than I’ve ever been in my life.”

“All right,” Emilie said.

And Rafe said, “Okay.”

Jeremy said, “Ready? Steady? Go.”

Holding hands because that’s what you do when you’re scared and don’t want to be alone in a strange, dark place, the three of them stepped out of the world and into another.

Storyteller CornerWonderland

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” said the White Queen to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass.

Fair warning: If you’ve never believed any impossible things before, now is a good time to start.

Chapter Sixteen

Rafe woke facedown in soft leaves. He groaned, then pushed onto his back. He felt like he’d slept for days and dreamed a thousand dreams. Waking was a long, slow climb out of the bottom of a deep well.

He blinked his eyes open. Something seemed off with his vision. The forest looked wrong. In his mind, he crawled back to the last thing he remembered. The hill. The top of the hill in Red Crow. Emilie, Jeremy, and him.

And a red crow.

A red crow in Red Crow.

A red crow like the one he’d painted so many years ago.

A dream? Did he have a head injury? These were not West Virginia trees. If he could trust his eyes, then these trees soared a thousand feet too tall, the trunks a hundred feet too thick. But they weren’t like the pictures he’d seen of the sequoias in California. Those were ancient and massive evergreens. These trees had leaves every color of Easter—pink and green and blue and yellow and white. They looked like the trees he might have scribbled as a child, five different fat Crayola markers to color one tree. Yes, these were a child’s imaginary trees made real somehow.

And it wasn’t raining. Only a wisp of white cloud danced across an electric-blue sky.

Overhead, something flew from one tree branch to another. Enormous wings, like a small airplane. It landed on a tree branch a hundred feet in the air and perched like a bird. Golden wings. Black beak and legs. Ten feet tall or more. A condor? There were no condors in West Virginia.

So either he was still dreaming…

Or this wasn’t West Virginia.

The great golden condor leaped from the branch, and the flapping of its enormous wings set a breeze blowing through his hair.

“Holy…” Rafe scrambled to his feet and watched the bird disappear into the sky.

The forest was real. But how could it be real?

Rafe took a deep breath and inhaled something extraordinary, a scent like dew or some sweet perfume he’d never breathed before. It smelled pure, unpolluted. Whatever this place was, there were no factories, no cars spewing exhaust, no coal mines or coal plants. He was, he knew, smelling air the way it was supposed to smell.

He took a step toward one of the enormous tree trunks and touched it. It felt gritty and real, like pine bark. He turned a circle. A giant loomed above him, but it was only a stone statue of an old man half-hidden by sea-green moss.

Maybe he laughed. Maybe he cried. Maybe both. He found a rock outcropping, ran up the side, and stood atop it to see deeper into the forest. A gentle mist rolled across the ground. Overhead, the red crow sat on a branch and cawed.

“Did you do this?” he asked the crow.

“Shh…” Jeremy’s quiet voice came from behind him. “You’ll wake the unicorn.”

Rafe spun around and saw a small white unicorn asleep, its head resting in Jeremy’s lap.

A unicorn.

In Jeremy’s lap.

He sat with his back against one of the enormous trees, and the unicorn, which was no bigger than a Shetland pony, let out a soft breath as Jeremy stroked its white mane and graceful neck. Its single horn shimmered like pearl.

In a low voice, Jeremy said, “I have your bow and quiver, but I think we dropped a backpack outside the tree. Emilie’s over there. She hasn’t woken up yet.” Rafe glanced over, saw her small form curled under Jeremy’s coat. “She will soon. You were asleep over an hour.”

Asleep. Rafe’s mind latched onto the word. Asleep and dreaming? It looked like his dreams—the trees, the stone statue, and Jeremy—but he never remembered his dreams like this, only the most fleeting images. No, not a dream. He’d been dreaming for fifteen years. Now he was finally awake.

Something hooted above him. A brown owl with a black face gazed at him placidly. The black feathers formed a perfect circle, making it look like a bird with one enormous eye.

“Cyclops owl,” Jeremy said.

Rafe covered his mouth with his hand and breathed through his fingers.

“Rafe? You all right?”

Cyclops owl. Condor. Unicorn.

“Jay.” Rafe got one word out. It was all he could manage.

“They’re lazy as house cats,” Jeremy said. “We might be here all day. I don’t mind. I’ve missed this.” He smiled and twined his fingers into the unicorn’s white mane. “When I was a kid and Mum and I flew on planes, I would look out the window and see the clouds under us. I wanted to touch them. Mum said you wouldn’t feel anything but water vapor, but I didn’t believe her. They had to feel like something.” He stroked the unicorn’s long neck again. “This is what clouds are supposed to feel like.”

Rafe couldn’t stop gazing all around him, drinking in the beauty like a man who’s crossed the desert on his knees drinks water from an oasis.

“I painted all this. I carved it,” he said to himself. He spun, looked at Jeremy.

“I wasn’t painting my dreams. I was painting my—”

“Memories.” Jeremy nodded.

“This is what you wouldn’t tell me?”

“Couldn’t tell you.”