Come on, I say, I’ll teach you to hunt Wolves.

He puts his pencil down. He’d follow me anywhere.

Lesson one I say—find a wolf.

I wake up an old man in an old world

I want to call my boy, still young somehow to say I’m sorry I closed his Book of Wolves.

To say I’m sorry I was the only wolf he found.

Lesson one I’d say—don’t be like me.

“Oh my God,” Rafe said. “Dad wrote a poem.” It was his handwriting, his missing commas, his voice. He pictured his father with his carpenter pencil, sharpened with a box cutter, scrawling these words on the back of the electric bill. “My father, Bill Howell, wrote a poem.”

“He wrote me a couple when we were young, and he was trying to get my attention. I thought there’d still be poetry after we got married, but there wasn’t. Maybe he knew he was going to die soon, and he felt like he had to say something to you but didn’t know how.”

She turned the page over to show that the bill was dated the week before he died.

“Wish he’d said all that to your face instead of writing it down.”

“This is better. Can I keep it?”

“He wrote it for you.”

Rafe folded the paper and slipped it into his wallet. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to keep it. Maybe for the same reason he still wore Jeremy’s St. Anthony medal. A reminder that sometimes miracles happen.

“Jeremy’s going to need some help when he gets out of here,” she said. “I’d be happy for him to stay at the house.”

“He’ll stay with me,” Rafe said.

“At the cabin? You only have the one bedroom.”

“I know.” He waited for his mother to say something about that, but whatever she said, nothing would change his mind. Still, he barely breathed, the old fear rising up again. Then his mother gave a little chuckle.

“Your father would spin in his grave,” she said, then rested her head on his shoulder. “Oh, let him spin.”

Chapter Forty-One

Three days later, Jeremy was released from the hospital. A full recovery would take months, but he would heal better at home, they said. They had said the same thing to Rafe’s parents when he was in the hospital after being lost. But this time was different. Better.

This time when they left the hospital, they left together.

Rafe drove slowly down the back roads to Starcross Hill.

“Dude,” Jeremy said, “Grandma was slow but she was old.”

“You’re not funny. And I’m going thirty.”

“The speed limit’s fifty.”

“The limit’s fifty,” Rafe said. “You can go under.”

“I’ll die of old age before we get home.”

Rafe gave in a little and pressed down on the gas, thinking of how often his father had scolded his mother for driving too slowly on the back roads. Precious cargo, she would reply.

They didn’t say much during the rest of the trip. Jeremy was still exhausted from the pain and the painkillers. His color was better, though. He didn’t look like a walking corpse anymore. When he rested his head against the passenger window and nodded off to sleep, Rafe eased his foot off the gas again. He didn’t want to accidentally wake Jeremy when he took a tight corner.

They reached Starcross Hill by lunchtime. When Rafe turned onto the gravel drive, Jeremy woke up, wincing as he stretched.

Rafe pulled right up to the cabin so Jeremy wouldn’t have to walk more than ten feet to the door. Inside, Jeremy eased himself down onto the sofa. Rafe went into the kitchen. He glanced out the window to his sculpture garden. A robin perched on the shoulder of the queen. But that didn’t mean anything, he told himself. The woods were full of robins.

He opened the fridge and returned to the living room with two green glass bottles of Ale-8. The lids twisted off in his hand, and he passed one to Jeremy, kept one for himself. Then he sat on the sofa beside Jeremy and put his feet on the coffee table. Jeremy did the same.

They drank and it tasted like being a kid again.

“Sweet as you remember?” Jeremy asked.

Rafe said, “Sweeter.”

Storyteller CornerOne Last Postcard

As soon as he was feeling well enough to drive, Jeremy went on one final mission for his queen. She’d asked him to send a postcard for her. The postcard was addressed to a retirement community outside Venice, Florida. Luckily, a certain psychic pan-dimensional red crow was watching from a nearby palm tree as Deborah Adler set down her pickleball racket and opened her mailbox. She took out the postcard and smiled at the picture, an old-timey painting of the Shenandoah River. That brought back memories, not all of them sweet. She’d loved living in West Virginia until the horrific kidnapping of one of her favorite former students had broken her heart, and she moved away.

When she read the back, she put her hand on her chest and sank to the ground. Tears fell on the words written in a strange hand. A strange hand but a familiar name.

The postcard read, Shannon Yates asked me to tell you, “Thank you for the unicorn pencil, Mrs. Adler. It really was magical.”

Chapter Forty-Two

Rafe woke from a deep sleep with a sudden start. Immediately alert, he lifted his head and listened, hearing nothing at first but a morning breeze, and Jeremy’s soft steady breaths coming from the pillow next to him.

Slowly, he laid his head down again. Jeremy had gotten in late last night. He’d driven six straight hours from New York, where he’d helped locate a boy who’d wandered away from his family hiking the Appalachian Trail. To hear Jeremy tell it, he carried the boy out of the woods, handed him over to his weeping mother, patted the kid on the head, and got into his car and drove away before anyone could even shake his hand.

“You pulled an Irish goodbye on terrified parents?” Rafe had asked him when he’d dragged himself through the door at midnight, tracking Bellvale Mountain mud all over the floor.

“They got their son back. And I wanted to come home.” A kiss put an end to the discussion.

Rafe would’ve gone with him, but he was halfway through building an addition onto the cabin—an art studio, a master suite, and a screened-in porch that would eventually look out onto the sculpture garden, which Jeremy had taken to calling Little Shanandoah.

He was also supposed to be adding stables so he and Jeremy could get a couple of horses. Starcross had perfect riding trails, and yet something held him back. He knew it was stupid, but he didn’t want any horses other than Sunny and Freddy.

As much as he missed the lads, he missed their girls a thousand times more. Jeremy talked about Emilie almost every day, and Rafe felt like a part of him was missing without Skya. A prince needed a queen to serve, right? He almost wished he could forget again, but even if he could, he wouldn’t. The pleasure of the memories was worth the pain of knowing that was all Shanandoah would ever be to them—a memory.

If only he could’ve brought something back with him. They’d left in such a hurry, they’d forgotten Jeremy’s sword and his own book of memories. But, he comforted himself, he did have a Shanandoah baron sleeping next to him almost every night, and you couldn’t do much better than that for a souvenir.