[Half/Time 01] Half Upon a Time (12 page)

It was pouring as he turned a corner and discovered he’d reached his destination. As it turned out, the Black Forest was, in
fact, just about a day’s travel from where the giant had fallen; Phillip was right, as much as it annoyed Jack to admit it. There wasn’t even any warning—one step, the path was just dark and depressing, but the next brought Jack to a sudden halt.

The trees along the path behind him had all been alive, even green in places. The trees of the Black Forest, though, were gruesomely dead, each and every one of them. This was no gradual change, either: It was as if an arbitrary line had been picked, and from that point on, there were only shivers and chills.

Not a hint of green showed through, just dark and twisted wood. Despite the lack of leaves, the blackened trunks and fingerlike branches filled in all gaps, making the forest a huge ruin of impenetrability. And if light couldn’t fight its way into the forest, it sure couldn’t make it out, either.

As the rain poured over his face and spilled down his neck Jack decided that he should get moving, if only to escape the storm. After all, the floor of the Black Forest looked as dry as a bone.

Instead, he just stared at the entrance, his eyes wide as he started having trouble breathing.

After a few minutes of this, Jack blinked. This was ridiculous! It was only a bunch of dead trees! What was there to be afraid
of, some rumors with no proof to them? Centering his entire will on his foot, he forced himself to take a step forward. Though his leg shook, he finally managed to do it. That was it, one step at a time! But still, why was this so hard?! They were just trees!

Did one of them just
move
?!

Jack’s blood ran cold as his foot paused in midstep, suspended in the air. Suddenly, he realized that he was sweating despite the chilly rain. The stories of this place could
not
be true. Common sense said that if no one made it out alive, then there
couldn’t
be any stories. Who would tell them? So the stories had to be just rumors. Sure, the forest was ugly and intimidating, but that was it. After all, an entire forest couldn’t be cursed.

Despite his logic, Jack’s foot didn’t move, still hanging in midair.

Though the day had been warm back along the trail, now Jack shivered all the way to his toes. The sun from earlier in the day seemed miles away now, like it had abandoned this part of the world, never to come back.

Finally, Jack’s foot came down—in the wrong direction. He took a step backward, then another. Inwardly, he yelled in frustration. He had to beat this! Even if the forest was haunted, cursed, and everything else; even if the forest made it rain and blocked
out any sunlight; even if the trees all moved and killed anything that was stupid enough to go in; even if all that, the princess and Phillip were in there. They must be, or Jack would have passed them on the trail.

If May could go in, then Jack could, simple as that.

And yet, he still couldn’t move.

And then he heard something from deep within the forest. A voice. A girl screaming.

May.

Without a thought, Jack yanked his sword out of its scabbard and took off at a dead run right into the heart of the Black Forest, the sword’s glow lighting his way.

Branches tore at his arms, legs, and head as Jack pushed through the forest, chopping what he could with the sword, plowing through the rest. After May’s scream, the Black Forest had gone dead, not a single sound escaping, not even the pattering of raindrops on the canopy of branches.

“May!”
Jack yelled, not knowing or caring who or what else might hear him.
“May!
Can you hear me?” Whether she did or not, there was no response. Jack barreled on anyway, following the barely visible path straight into the forest. Without any further sound to guide him, all he had was the path, but he comforted himself with the idea that Phillip and the princess would have had to follow the same route.

Although, maybe whatever had made May scream had also pulled her off the path …

“Mayyyyyyy!”
Jack screamed at the top of his lungs. “Yell out if you can hear me!”

A low groan answered him from just a few feet ahead. Jack skidded to a halt, almost tripping over a pair of legs covered in expensive gold fabric. Phillip groaned again, looking like someone had tossed him bodily against one of the dead trees. Jack straddled Phillip’s legs, reached down, and yanked the prince to his feet.

“Phillip!” Jack said. “What happened?!”

Phillip’s eyes fluttered open. “Jack?” the prince asked, his eyes slowly focusing on the face in front of him. “Jack? But I thought you left …”

Jack gritted his teeth at the delay. “I changed my mind and followed you two here,” he said, barely holding himself back from shaking the prince for answers. “I
knew
I couldn’t leave her with you. I knew something like this would happen!”

“Leave her … the princess?” Phillip said, then took a deep breath. “Where is the princess?”

This time Jack didn’t hold himself back. He banged the prince hard into a tree trunk, then jerked him back to his feet.
“Listen to me, Phillip,” Jack growled. “I don’t
know
what happened to her. That’s why I’m asking
you
. You were supposed to protect her.
Now tell me where she is!
”

“Something attacked us from the side,” Phillip said, shaking his head in confusion. “I did not see it.”

Jack wanted to scream in frustration, but contented himself with dropping the prince. “You’re beyond useless. I should have known.”

Phillip shook his head again. “No. I just … need a moment. My head aches like nothing I have ever felt!”

Jack bent down to look the prince right in the eye. “If you got the princess killed, a headache will be the least of your worries,
believe
me.”

Phillip narrowed his eyes. “Threats are not necessary, Jack. I—” The prince stopped, frowning as he glanced at the glowing sword in Jack’s hand.

Jack stood up quickly, torn between hiding the sword and just ignoring the prince’s look. “Get up, Phillip,” Jack said, going with the latter. “We need to go after her.”

“Where did you get that sword?” Phillip asked, rising to his feet gracefully. Did the prince have to do everything well?

“I told you before, I found it,” Jack said, the explanation
sounding pathetic even to his own ears. “Can we focus on one thing at a time here? Right now, all I care is that the sword’s giving us light, which we’re going to need to find May.”

Phillip nodded toward the woods. “There,” he said. “The branches are displaced. Whatever took her, it must have carried her through there.”

Jack swung the sword around to light up a small hole between the trees. Unfortunately, the sword’s glow didn’t illuminate much beyond the hole itself.
“May!”
Jack screamed into the trees.
“May!
Answer me if you can!”

“I do not think she is able to,” Phillip said, then laid a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Now, please, silence may be the wiser choice. We do not wish to warn whatever took her that we are hunting it.”

Jack shut his mouth, then threw himself through the small hole and into the dead trees without another word, leaving Phillip behind. Branches clawed him as he ran, scratching with every surge forward, while the roots under his feet seemed to be trying to trip him on purpose, succeeding far too often.

After crashing to the ground for the third time, Jack shook off the pain and started to pick himself up, only for something to hit him in the back, shoving him face-first into the dirt. The
air whooshed from his lungs with the force of the hit, and claws sharp as needles cut into the skin on his back.

“Well, well,” growled a voice more animal than human from on top of him. “It takes a bit of thrill out of the hunt when the prey comes to you.”

Jack gritted his teeth and tried to throw the creature off his back, but his struggling only pushed the thing’s claws deeper into his back. Jack shouted in pain, and the air around him began popping as he gasped for even the tiniest breath. Was this how he was going to die? Crushed by some creature in the Black Forest?

Apparently he really
did
fail at princess rescues.

And then out of nowhere, the pressure on his back lifted. Without stopping to wonder why, Jack breathed deeply, the air never having tasted quite so good. He managed to push himself a bit off the ground, though his vision still wavered alarmingly in front of him. Whatever it was that had held him down must have stepped off his back. Stepped off, or—

Phillip extended a hand down to Jack, even while staring off into the dark woods. “Get up, Jack,” the prince hissed. “That creature has not gone far, and we will have to catch it if we are going to find May.”

“Did you … hurt it?” Jack asked.

The prince shook his head. “It ran as I came up, not that I had much to hit it with. I could barely follow you as it is. If I had not been able to see the light of your sword …”

Phillip glanced down at the sword lying on the ground, then back up at Jack, and Jack could see it in his eyes: Phillip knew what the sword was. He
had
to know. “Are you hurt?” the prince asked. If he did suspect about the sword, apparently he was keeping it to himself.

Jack shook his head and got back to his feet. The forest swam in front of him for a brief moment, and he found himself leaning against the prince for support, but the dizziness soon passed. Jack pushed himself away from the prince a bit too hard, then led the way after the thing that had attacked him, slicing with his sword in every direction as he pushed through the brambles and branches.

The sword cut through the growth as easily as it swung through air, a fact that Jack hadn’t really noticed during his mad dash through the woods, but both of them noticed it now.

“You curse us all, using that thing,” Phillip said quietly from behind Jack, but Jack ignored him. Right now, they needed to find May.

Every so often, Phillip would stop Jack, look around, then
point them in a new direction. Jack had no idea how the prince could possibly be tracking the monster or the princess, but that didn’t matter as long as the prince knew what he was doing.

The slashing quickly grew tedious, taking all of Jack’s attention just to clear their way, and he soon lost track of how far they had come. His world narrowed down to cutting the branches away, moving forward, then cutting again; that was all he could think about. His sword cut this way and that, taking out a gnarled limb here, a large branch there …

And suddenly a pair of red eyes floated in the darkness directly in front of him. Jack heard the same growl as before, except this time, the growl came from behind teeth of pure white that glowed eerily in the light of the sword, each as big as one of Jack’s fingers.

With a great roar that shook the forest, the teeth came flying right toward Jack’s throat.

Just before the monster bit into him, something yanked Jack backward. The teeth, head, and entire body of a gargantuan wolf passed within an inch of Jack’s face as Phillip pulled both himself and Jack to the ground and out of harm’s way.

Even before Jack hit the ground, Phillip had bounded back to his feet, almost faster than Jack could see. Jack followed suit as soon as he could, standing with much less grace than the prince had, though at least he had his sword ready.

The wolf creature, if that’s really what it was, stood almost completely still in front of them, the only movement coming from its chest as the creature breathed. The wolf was
enormous
, its
size so unnatural that the creature couldn’t possibly be anything but magical.

The wolf’s head came up to Jack’s chest, and its body was at least as long as Jack was tall. Yet the creature had moved silently, without even a whisper of wind. Its fur almost glowed in the light of the sword, black as a starless night. In fact, the only color on the wolf were its eyes, which burned a fiery red as they stared at Jack’s sword. For some reason, the wolf actually seemed to shy away from the sword’s light, baring its teeth as its eyes locked on Jack’s weapon.

“You have that sword,” the animal growled, its voice like gravel scraping over rock. “And you kidnap the princess! Betrayers! Villains! Neither of you will live to boast of your deeds!”

Jack glanced in surprise at Phillip, who looked at least as confused as Jack felt. A talking wolf? Hadn’t all the intelligent animals been put to death in the Black Forest decades ago? But even more odd was what it had said.

“Kidnappers?” Jack asked, keeping the sword between him and the wolf at all times. “Us?
You’re
the one who stole the princess.”

The wolf growled again, his voice even lower. “You took the girl from her
home
. Little did you know that this child is under
my
protection!”
It took a step toward them, forcing Jack to swing the sword in a large arc, just to remind the creature of the weapon. The wolf still seemed wary of it, though less so than it had been; the monster’s anger was giving it courage.

That wasn’t good. It looked like they didn’t have long before it attacked, sword or not.

“You wish to protect her?” Phillip asked. “But how do you
know
her?”

“I do not explain myself to such as you,” the wolf snarled. “Do not seek to confuse me. You must know me from my time with the Snow Queen. That should tell you that I mean to protect this girl with my life!”

Phillip gasped. “So
that
is who you are!” he said. “The Wolf King!”

The wolf’s only response was a growl.

“The Wolf King?” Jack said, looking from Phillip to the wolf and back again. “Are you sure?”

“How many other intelligent wolves survived the purge?” Phillip said. “It
must
be him. And the time he served with the Snow Queen … I mean, Snow White …”

Jack took another quick look in Phillip’s direction. “I don’t hear him confirming it.”

“The fact that you can hear him at all should confirm it,” Phillip said. “Is the Wolf King not the last of the animals gifted with speech?”