“His own people are the ones who cursed him. He knows not to go back to Faerie,” Hazel said, watching the seesaw of the wipers. The familiar thrill woke in her: the hunt, the planning, the discovery of a faerie lair, and the tracking of a monster. Hazel thought she’d given up her dreams of knighthood years ago, but maybe she hadn’t given them up quite as completely as she’d supposed.

Ben shrugged. “Okay. But then where?”

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself in the place of the horned boy, rousing from long dreams, not remembering where she was at first. He’d panic, slapping his hands against the inside of the glass case. Relief would flood him as he realized jagged pieces of it were missing, the glass smashed. Blinking into the leafy dark and with whatever memories he had from before the curse pounding in his head. But after that…

“I’d want food,” she said. “I’d be super hungry, not eating for decades. Even if I didn’t need it, I’d want it.”

“He’s not like us.”

“Jack’s like us,” Hazel said, hoping it was true. “And he’s like Jack.”

Ben blew out a long breath. “Yeah, okay. But you’re not going to go through the McDonald’s drive-through. You don’t have any cash. So what do you eat?”

“I’d forage for chestnuts.” Hazel had bought a book identifying edible plants years ago during the library’s get-rid-of-everything-ancient-or-tattered-or-oddly-sticky sale for twenty-five cents. With it, she and Ben had managed not to poison each other while gathering up a whole lot of dandelion leaves and wild onions and other edible plants. “But he’d have to roast them. Bird eggs would be good eating, although they’d be hard to come by this late in the year.”

Ben nodded, clearly deep in thought. He steered the car toward the part of the wood where the horned boy had slept. “Or he could look for a hazelnut tree. You know, your namesake nut.”

Hazel snorted, but there was a place she’d gathered hazelnuts before the worms could eat them. She remembered leaving them on a rock to dry in the sun. “I have an idea.”

They parked by Wight Lake and walked from there. A hazelnut tree grew not far from the remains of an old stone building, now overgrown with vines. It was about a quarter mile into the woods, two miles from the glass coffin, and such a perfect place to hole up that her skin shivered with the possibility that she might be right.

The rain was still coming down hard, although the canopy of leaves stemmed the worst of it. Hazel was glad of her wellies while stomping through the mud and slick moss. She and Ben climbed over fallen and desiccated trunks of trees, past brambles and branches that snagged on their clothes. Past buckthorn and privet; past trout lily, closed up tight, and clumps of moonseed, its wide green leaves collecting water; past carrion flower, with Sputnik-shaped blooms bowed by the wind; past wisteria and bee balm; past jewelweed and milkweed and tufted knotweed; past dame’s rocket and creeping jenny and maidenhair ferns in profusion. She used her umbrella as much to knock vines out of her way as to keep dry.

Then the stone building came into view, covered with ivy. Its roof had caved in years ago, and although rusted-out hinges held a strip of weather-beaten wood along one edge of the frame, the rest of the door was gone. Ben ran ahead of Hazel, and as he did, she slowed her step.

Her hand went to her side automatically.

Ben looked back at her, frowning. “What are you doing?”

Hazel shrugged. She’d been reaching for something—her belt? her pocket?—but there was nothing there.

“Going for your sidearm?” Ben asked, laughed, and kept on going.

Hazel had no more known what it was, exactly, that made her pause than she’d known what she’d been reaching for. But she thought about Jack telling them to be careful, about that curdled milk slopping into the bowl, about the note in the pocket of Ben’s jacket, and about the memory of hunting faeries. With all that in her head, she closed her umbrella carefully.

Ben ducked through the doorway and then darted back out a minute later, a wondrous smile on his face. “You were right. I think you were right!”

Hazel followed her brother into the house. She’d been in the old stone building before with Ben, many years ago, when they’d been pretending to be witches and wizards just out of Hogwarts, cooking up cauldrons of weeds with a pail and some water. Rain drizzled through the remains of the roof. A weather-beaten table, gray and termite-eaten, was pressed against one of the stone walls.

On top of it were the skins of three persimmons, ripped open and scraped clean, the heady, spicy smell of them heavy in the air. A handful of bruised herbs rested nearby, of which Hazel recognized only mint. Tiny black elderberries and several chanterelles were scattered over the wood, like beads dropped from a necklace.

And beside all that was a knife, one with a handle of bone and a twisting blade of some golden metal. It reminded her of the sword she’d found when she was a kid.

“Shit,” Hazel said, reaching toward it, stopping before her fingers touched the knife. She looked at Ben. He was grinning in a crazy, awed way.

“He was really here,” she said.

“Well, he’s got to come back for that, right?” Ben said. “If we wait, we’ll catch him when he does.”

Hazel nodded, feeling giddy. She found an area by the remains of the hearth and perched there while Ben leaned against a wall. After a few minutes the cold stone had numbed her butt. She watched water drizzling into a growing puddle near the empty hole of a window and tried to calm her nerves.

“You know how they say that once you eat faerie food, nothing else will satisfy you?” Ben asked suddenly.

“Sure,” Hazel said, thinking of the pile of berries on the table.

“I wonder if Fairfold is like that. I wonder if I’d ever be happy somewhere else. Or if you would. I wonder if we’re ruined for other places.”

Her heart skipped a beat. He never talked about college, hadn’t gotten any brochures in the mail. Hazel had no idea where he was headed after he graduated next year. “If you go away and don’t like it, you can always come back,” she said. “Mom and Dad did.”

He made a face. “I’d really rather not turn into our parents. I keep hoping I’ll meet someone with an awesome life so I can just slip into it.”

Hazel remembered how a trick of the light had made it seem like she could see through him the night he came back from his last date. She wondered if that was more true than she’d imagined.

“The city’s a lot like the deep, dark fairy-tale woods of Fairfold, right?” Ben went on. “In the movies, the city’s where all the stories happen. It’s the place people go to be transformed. Where people go to start over. I figure I can be anyone there. Maybe even someone normal.”

Hazel thought of what her parents said about normal. And she thought about the fact that he was telling her this while out in the middle of the forest, looking for a lost elf prince. If normal was what he was trying for, he was going to have to try a lot harder.

Outside, the wind whipped against the trees. Hazel heard faint strains of music.

“Do you hear that?” she asked him.

Ben peered out in the direction she was looking. “Full moon tomorrow night.”