Blood congealed across her cheek. The plastic rim of a water bottle was pressed to her lips and a stale liquid rolled down her tongue.

Two young boys stood before her. They carried gnarled branches tucked through their belt loops like swords. One of them was a scrawny, fair-skinned boy with many freckles and light eyelashes. His blonde hair that fell an inch above his chin made him look like a girl at first. As Alex came to, she screamed out in terror.

The other boy hushed her cries, whispering softly, "It's okay. We're here to help." He was tall with dark hair and had eyes that put her at ease.

Alex was bound to one of the large oaks with a black rubber cord wrapped multiple times around her and knotted up tight. The sun was setting and the air became as orange as the leaves.

"How do we cut this?" the fair-haired boy whispered.

"Let me use your key," said the dark-haired boy. He took his friend's house key from around his neck and used it to fray the cord until it snapped. Alex's legs couldn't bear weight and she sank to the forest floor immediately. The boys caught her and propped her back up against the tree.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Nathan," said the dark-haired boy, kneeling beside her. He removed the stick from his hip and handed it to the other boy.

"I'm Tom," the other boy said. "You're safe now."

"Where's Hannah?"

"There was someone else with you?"

"Did he get her? Is she--she can't--no." Alex's words gave way to sobbing. Nathan put an arm around her shoulders and she caved into him, shaking with fear. "Am I dying?"

"Tom, go get help. I'll stay with her in case the witches come back."

"You got it!" Tom bolted off, shouting back to them, "I'll get everyone I can find!"

Alex examined the boy called Nathan, anxious in her evaluation of whether or not he could be trusted. He had a kind face, and she couldn't see any reason for him to pretend to be rescuing her. "Witches?" she asked.

"This is where they sacrifice animals."

"Then why aren't we leaving?"

"It isn't safe to move you. You have a head injury. A bad one." Alex reached back and felt that her hair was soaked in blood. "Don't touch it," Nathan said.

"He'll come back!" cried Alex, her heart beating so fast it ached. "He'll get us!"

"Did you see him?"

"Yes."

"All right. Try and remember what he looks like."

Alex bent forward and tears began to drip from her eyes.

"Hey. Don't cry. You have nothing to worry about. Tom and I know this forest through and through, and you're under our protection. Nobody can beat us. You know why?"

Alex shook her head, choking on her sobs.

"'Cause we're the good guys. You're okay now. You're safe with me."

Alex's weeping subsided and she looked into Nathan's eyes. He was telling her a fairytale to calm her down, but in this moment, she needed to believe it.

"We're gonna find your parents and get you home. What's your name?"

"Alexandria Stockton. I prefer Alex."

The boy bowed his head. "You live in the big house made of stone."

People in Neptune Township knew her parents well. Her father ran the local fencing club and her mother was always hosting fancy fundraising parties for the town's elite.

"It's not that big," she said.

"Tom and I used to call your house Ghost Castle. We pretended a troll lived there."

"There's no troll, except maybe my brother."

Nathan laughed and for a second this made Alex smile and forget the boy who threw rocks at her, until the lupine winds howled through the trees and shook the branches. Alex searched the shadows for that awful boy's face.

"How did you find me?" she asked.

"We do a regular patrol of Ghost Woods before sunset. The witches use this spot for their rituals, so we check it out every few days to see if we can find any of the pets that have gone missing. We've found some in these woods before; they're not always alive."

The sky darkened and turned deep blue. Alex closed her eyes and started to fall asleep, but suddenly she remembered the rocks speeding at her head and sat upright, looking around. It was too dark to see anything. Even the boy was being absorbed by the shadows. "Maybe we should get out of here, before the witches--" Nathan stopped abruptly. "I don't want to scare you."

"You mean the Satanists?"

"Yeah. How old are you?"

"Eight."

"And you know about Satanists?"

"Of course I do. How old are you, anyway?"

"Eleven," Nathan replied. He wrapped her up in his windbreaker and rubbed her arms through the material, shivering in silence.

"Tell me about the witches," Alex said. Nathan exhaled slowly. Though barely visible, she could see his jaw tensing.

"A few years back, Tom and I camped out here with my cousin. We didn't see their faces, but there were two of them, singing and carrying lanterns. We turned off our flashlights and kept quiet 'til they passed."

Alex feared the worst suddenly. Maybe Tom never made it out of the woods. Clearly, Hannah had not, or help would have already been on the way. Maybe the witches and that evil boy with the rocks were heading back to the clearing now, trailing their bloody corpses in tow.

"Let me tell you a story," Nathan said, as though Alex had been thinking out loud. "My mom used to tell me stories about knights when I got scared at night. I think I know one you'll like."

"Okay."

"There was a knight called Guigemar who loved to hunt. One day, while hunting a doe, he was badly injured. The doe cursed him that his wound would never heal unless he found true love. Guigemar crawled to a nearby river to die, but when he got there, a boat was waiting for him."

Alex forgot about the wincing pain in her head. She closed her eyes and let the story absorb her.

"He used his last bit of strength to pull himself onboard. The boat carried him away and drifted a long time until it came ashore in a royal garden. There, a queen found him bleeding to death on the shore. She brought him into her tower and tended to his injuries. Guigemar came to love this queen and so the curse was broken and his wound healed. But sadly, this queen was already married. And when the king discovered Guigemar in his queen's chambers, he had him banished."

Ambulance lights flickered in the distance. They illuminated the clearing so Alex could see everything all around. No witches or torturer lurked. It was just her and the boy, and soon she would be going home.

"He did it," Nathan assured her. "Tom got help."

"What happened to Guigemar?"

"He returned to his homeland, but he wasn't the same. All he could think about was the queen who had saved his life." A sea of flashlights appeared at the top of the incline.

"Did he go back for her?"

"Many years later, in another kingdom, he found her again."

The crowd of faces became visible in the artificial light. Shortly after followed the sounds of shock at the sight of Alex's condition, horrible gasping and sobs that echoed through the forest. EMTs secured her to a stretcher and carried her out.

She struggled through the pain to smile when she saw her mother. "Don't cry, Mom. My knight in shining armor came for me," she said. And this statement would be heavily repeated by reporters in reference to the incident. Headlines read: Knights of Ghost Woods. Heroic Boys Rescue Little Girl. Alex asked about Hannah many times in the hospital, but her friend never came to visit. In fact, after that day, Hannah began to drift away from Alex. Alex understood it as Hannah's guilt for abandoning her, and for not finding help.

Police canvassed the neighborhood to find the boy who threw the rocks at her head. When they had some suspects, they showed Alex some photographs and she was able to identify a boy called Jacob Serrell as her attacker. He was sent to a therapist and periodically would go into treatment for his psychosis.

Alex received six staples in her head. For weeks, she was not allowed to leave her bed or read or watch television. Nathan and Tom visited her every day on their way home from school. Those two knew how to entertain a bedridden child. They would tease each other relentlessly to the point at which one would challenge the other to a duel. Then they would charge at each other with sticks, staging a thrilling swordfight that ended in one of the boys acting out a long and dramatic death. Alex's mother would eventually break up the commotion and tell them it was time to go home, but the boys would always return the next day to do it all over again.

As the years passed, Alex became enamored with medieval fantasy, reading every legend and epic she could get her hands on. Her mother teased that if she didn't find a more serious hobby, she would end up married to a renny selling turkey legs and funnel cake. But Alex already knew who she would marry. The very reason she came to love those fantasy books so passionately was because whenever she read them, the narrator in her head had Nathan's voice. He was .her destiny.

But Nathan grew out of playing in Ghost Woods, and while that boy in the forest remained an ever-present fixture in Alex's heart, the boy Nathan became a man and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. The Corps took him far, far away from Alex.

Nothing had turned out as she had hoped. The fairytale ruptured and faded into a colorless reality, where men carve their own paths and distance whittles away at young love.

______________________

Music: "Follow Me" Muse

End prologue. The story gets very dark from here. Proceed with caution.