Rafe closed his eyes and exhaled. “God. Jay…”

“But I wanted to tell you. A thousand times a day, I wanted to tell you. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to lie to you, and I couldn’t tell the truth, so the only other option was to stay away from you.” The unicorn lifted her head for a chin scratch. “They love having their chins tickled. On the worst days, the days I wanted to tell you the most, I told myself if we ever wanted to scratch unicorn chins again, I needed to keep my big mouth shut. Right, milady?”

She bleated softly, just like a toy trumpet.

“I know,” Jeremy said to the unicorn, talking the way everyone does when addressing a small animal or a baby. “You’re exactly right.”

“What did she say?” Rafe asked.

“She said you should pet her.”

“I don’t want to scare her.”

“You won’t scare her.”

Rafe held out his hand to the unicorn and waited.

She turned her regal head and pushed her velvet nose into his outstretched palm. His fingertips brushed the shimmering horn, and he felt a laugh bubble up in his soul, but he kept it inside. He stroked her silky jaw and her ears and neck and yes, yes, it did feel like holding a cloud in his hand.

Jeremy said, “Welcome home, Rafe.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jay.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“Yes, I do.”

All his anger at Jeremy, all the bitterness, which was simply another name for loneliness, fled like shadows at the touch of the sunlight.

“Is there more?” Rafe asked.

“A little more,” he said. “It’s all in your book of memories.”

“Then let’s go find—”

Suddenly, a hundred or more unicorns appeared in the clearing. White unicorns, silver-gray unicorns, black unicorns with golden eyes…Rafe inhaled and froze in fear and wonder and awe. The unicorn in Jeremy’s lap raised her head and blinked. One large unicorn stepped forward and snorted his mild displeasure.

“Better run along, milady,” he said. “Don’t get us into trouble with your father.”

The unicorn pushed her snout once more into Rafe’s palm. One last pet. One last scratch behind the flickering ear. With a light and sprightly leap, she rejoined her family. At some secret signal, the herd ran off together deep into the woods.

Jeremy stood up and handed Rafe his bow, his quiver. A few white strands of the unicorn’s mane dusted his shirt.

“How did you survive fifteen years without…” Rafe waved his hand at the world, the impossibly beautiful world. “This?”

Jeremy gave him a little rueful smile.

“You don’t want to know.”

Storyteller CornerJeremy

If you actually do want to know how Jeremy survived those fifteen years, read chapter seventeen. If you don’t, you can skip it, and we’ll meet again after, in chapter eighteen. But I would read it if I were you.

P.S. If you noticed Emilie suddenly seemed to disappear from the last chapter…good eye.

Chapter Seventeen

A year and a half before he found Emilie—or, more accurately, before Emilie found him—Jeremy was on a flight: LAX to Sydney. A teenage surfer had disappeared from the beach, and Jeremy knew she’d fallen asleep on her board and was drifting farther and farther out to sea with every passing minute. The Australian Navy was looking for her and would, he prayed, find her before his plane landed.

Fifteen-hour flight. He needed distracting. Outdoorsman magazine had asked him to write a piece for them—“Top Ten Tips for Surviving if You Get Lost in the Wild.”

If only he’d had a list like that for surviving the real world after having gone to another world. As the plane flew across the Pacific, Jeremy came up with the list he wished someone had given to him… Jeremy Cox’s Top Ten Survival Tips for Those Who Have Gone to Other Worlds and Come Home Again

1. Learn how to lie.

Two days after they came back, Jeremy was still in the hospital, although he wasn’t sick. That was the problem, actually. Everyone expected him to be sick. He’d been missing six months in the woods. He should’ve had any number of illnesses and/or conditions. Malnourishment for starters. Injuries. Lyme disease (the woods were full of ticks, after all). Tooth decay. Dysentery. Scurvy.

But Jeremy and Rafe were in perfect health. More perfect than when they left. Taller, stronger, bright eyes and clear skin, Jeremy was the picture of youth and vigor. Rafe, too, though everyone thought he had a head injury, since he remembered nothing about the past six months. When the police asked Jeremy how Rafe got the scars on his back, he told them, “I don’t know. We passed out and when we woke up, something had attacked Rafe. Bobcat, maybe.” The “something” made it feel less dishonest. But if he said, “Monsters in the form of boys ambushed us in a magical kingdom,” they would never have let him out of the hospital.

Still, it became clear the doctors were not convinced Jeremy and Rafe had been lost in the woods for six months. Kidnapped then? Except what kidnapper ever returned a child in better condition than he took him? Jeremy said quite plainly to all who would listen that they were lost in the woods but had survived on their own. No one kidnapped them. No one harmed them.

“As many churches as you have in this bloody state, you’d think you all would know a miracle when you saw one,” Jeremy’s mother told them. “Stop asking why and let me take my son home.”

The doctors and police finally gave up. They didn’t know how to investigate or diagnose miracles.

So Jeremy was to be released the next morning, which gave him one last chance to see Rafe alone. He pretended to sleep until he knew from the deep quiet on his ward that everyone else was sleeping. He snuck out of bed and into Rafe’s room across the hall. Lucky break. Bill wasn’t there, only Bobbi, dead asleep in the chair by her son’s bed.

Rafe wasn’t sleeping either. His eyes opened as Jeremy slipped into the room. Without a word, he moved over, making room for Jeremy in the narrow hospital bed. In the quiet, they whispered so softly they were almost communicating telepathically.

Mum’s taking me out of here at dawn. We’re going to hide out with my grandparents in Oxfordshire for a few weeks.

Then you’re coming back?

Soon.

Jeremy saw something glinting silver around Rafe’s neck. He held it up to the little shaft of light in the room that seeped in from the streetlights in the parking lot.

Some priest gave this to Mom. She gave it to me.

Mum gave me hers too. Yours is better. It has a stag on it.

Want to trade? I’ve actually heard of your guy.

Quietly, in the dark, they traded heavenly protectors. Jeremy sent his heart with St. Anthony to watch over Rafe.

Bobbi stirred a little in her sleep. They were running out of time.