By the time they got to Fairfold High, she’d managed to mostly convince herself that she wasn’t about to be stolen away by the Folk at any moment. And if they were messing with her, like a particularly cruel cat with a mouse, then getting upset wasn’t going to help anything. It was with that resolve that she stepped through the entrance of the school. Jack and Carter were walking down the hallway, mirror images of each other at that distance, except one of Carter’s arms was slung over the shoulders of a smug-looking Amanda Watkins. Apparently, Amanda had finally gotten Carter. No more shadows; somehow she’d managed to score the real thing.

Hazel’s first thought was that Carter was a hypocrite for hassling her about breaking hearts when he was going to help Amanda break his brother’s.

Her second thought was that maybe Carter didn’t know that Amanda had called Jack his shadow. Hazel glanced at the careful blankness of Jack’s face as he walked beside them and was willing to bet he’d never told his brother.

It made her furious to think of Jack pining away for Amanda while Amanda was right there, fluttering her eyelashes at Carter. It made her want to channel her feelings of helplessness about her own situation into punching Amanda in the stomach. It made her want to kiss Jack again—kiss him so hard that the power of that kiss drove Amanda right out of his head, kiss him so wildly that all the other guys, even Carter, would be impressed by Jack’s powers of attraction.

But when she imagined crossing the hall and actually doing it, she thought of the odd, pained expression Jack had worn when he pulled back from their kiss at the party. She didn’t want him ever looking at her like that again.

“What’s going on up there?” Ben asked, drawing her attention toward a knot of church youth-group kids gathered in front of the auditorium doors, a crowd forming around them.

“He just wasn’t there anymore,” Charlize Potts was saying, her arms folded over the giant slouchy Hollister sweatshirt she wore with pink jeggings, white-blond hair spilling down her back.

“We were out in the woods this morning before school, trying to pick up a little, you know, so the tourists don’t trip over all the bottles you losers leave out there. Pastor Kevin doesn’t want the town to be embarrassed. The coffin was empty. Smashed. Somebody finally broke into it, I guess.”

Hazel froze. All her other thoughts washed away.

“He can’t just be gone!” someone said.

“Someone must have stolen the body.”

“It’s got to be a prank.”

“What happened Saturday night?”

“Tom’s in the hospital with two broken legs. He fell down some steps, so he couldn’t have gone back out there.”

Hazel’s heart sped. They couldn’t be talking about what she thought they were talking about. They couldn’t be. She took a slow step closer, feeling as though she were moving through something far more solid than air. Ben’s long legs took him past her into the crowd.

A few moments later he glanced back at Hazel, eyes shining. She didn’t need to hear him say it, but he did, grabbing her shoulder and whispering in her ear as if he were confiding a secret, even though everyone was talking about it.

“He’s awake,” he said, breath ruffling her hair, his voice low and intense. “The horned boy—the prince—is free. He’s loose and he could be anywhere. We have to find him before anyone else does.”

“I don’t know,” Hazel said. “We don’t really do that anymore.”

“It’ll be like old times,” Ben said, a grin pulling at his mouth. His eyes hadn’t been that bright in years. “The lone gunfighter coming out of retirement for one last battle, trusty sidekick at the ready. And do you know why?”

“Because he’s our prince,” Hazel said, and felt the truth of it. They were supposed to be the ones to save him. She was supposed to be the one to save him. And maybe she and Ben would have one last adventure along the way.

“Because he’s our prince,” Ben echoed, the way another person might have responded to a familiar prayer with “amen.”

CHAPTER 5

Once upon a time, a little girl found a corpse in the woods.

Her parents had raised the girl and her brother with the same benign neglect with which they’d taken care of the three cats and dachshund named Whiskey that already roamed around the little house. They’d have their long-haired, alt-rock friends over, drink wine, jam on their guitars, and talk about art late into the night, letting the girl and boy run around without diapers. They’d paint for hours, stopping only to fix bottles and wash the occasional load of laundry, which even clean managed to smell faintly of turpentine. The kids ate food off everyone’s plates, played elaborate games in the mud outside by the garden, and took baths only when someone snatched them up and dumped them in a basin.

When the little girl looked back on it, her childhood seemed like a glorious blur of chasing her brother and her dog through the woods wearing hand-me-down clothes and daisy-chain crowns. Of running all the way to where the horned boy slept, singing songs and making up stories about him all afternoon, and coming home only at night, exhausted, wild animals returning to a den.

They saw themselves as children of the forest, creeping around pools and hiding in the hollows of dead trees. They glimpsed the Folk sometimes, movements out of the corners of their eyes or laughter that seemed to come from every direction and nowhere at once. And they knew to wear the charms, to keep a bit of grave dirt in their pockets, and to be both cautious of and polite to strangers who might not be human. But knowing the Folk were dangerous was one thing, and finding the remains of Adam Hicks was another.

That particular day, Hazel had been dressed up like a knight, a blue dishrag tied around her neck for a cloak and a scarf for a sash around her waist. Her red hair whipped behind her as she ran, shining with gold in the lazy, late-afternoon sun.

Ben had been sword fighting with her all day. He had a plastic He-Man sword that their mother had brought home from the secondhand store, along with a book on King Arthur’s knights with stories about Sir Pellinore, who’d supposedly been one of the Folk himself before he joined Arthur’s court, the story of Sir Gawain breaking a curse on a loathly lady, and a list of the virtues knights had—strength, valor, loyalty, courtesy, compassion, and devotion.

Hazel had received a baby doll that, if you filled it with water, you could squeeze and make it pee, even though she’d wanted a sword like her brother’s. Ben, delighted to have the better present, chased her around, knocking sticks out of her hands with the plastic blade. Finally, frustrated, Hazel went into their dad’s toolshed and found a rusty old machete in the back. Then she smacked Ben’s plastic sword so hard that it cracked. He stomped back to the house for glue while she danced around in nine-year-old triumph.

She spent a while whacking at a patch of dried-out ferns while pretending they were the terrible monster of legend, the one that lurked in the heart of the forest. She intoned a few lines of the rhyme under her breath, feeling quite daring.

After a while, she got bored and went looking for blackberries, sheathing her machete in her sash and skipping through the tall weeds. Whiskey followed her at first, but then wandered off. A few moments later he started barking.