[Half/Time 01] Half Upon a Time (16 page)

“Stories about fairies,” he said.

“Stories where people live happily ever after,” she said, staring at the crown. “Stories that make you think there’s magic in the world. ‘Once upon a time.’ Heroes who do the right thing and villains who never win. The heroes always know they’re right and always know what to do. They never have any doubts.”

“That sounds like a good story,” Jack said. “It’d be nice if the world really worked that way.”

May snorted. “Where I’m from, that’s exactly what’s wrong: It
doesn’t
work that way. Here, though, it’s like … it’s like you’ve got all the parts right. You’ve got princes, monsters, Snow White, all these fairy tales come to life …” She sighed. “But this isn’t once upon a time. It’s like the opposite … half or something.”

“Wouldn’t the opposite be ‘never’?” Jack asked, but the princess ignored him.

“The story’s not right, Jack. This shouldn’t be how things go. Everything’s so mixed up, and we’re barely holding on. We’re not … we’re not winning, are we.”

Jack reached over and took the crown out of her hand. May glanced up at him, letting the necklace fall back against her chest.

“Maybe not now,” Jack said, “but we
will
. We’re the good guys, and
we’re doing the right thing. It
will
be just like your stories. We’ll win in the end.”

“Will we?” she asked. “Look at this, this whole place! Magical things happen here, but other than that, it’s … it’s just the same as where I’m from.” She shook her head in frustration. “In my world, no one is safe, Jack.
Especially
not the good guys.” She nodded toward the wolf. “I thought here, of all places …”

“You said heroes don’t doubt themselves,” Jack said, forcing a smile. “The prince will be back with a healer soon, and the Wolf King will be fine. Meanwhile, we have the Mirror, and—”

“The Mirror?!” she shouted, then blushed and lowered her voice. “The Mirror is broken!” May whispered, pointing at it. “And with it goes any hope I had of finding my grandmother.” She dropped her head into her hands and stared at the floor. “But not only that. We were … we were going to do something
magical
, Jack. We were going to rescue Snow White! How amazing is that? I mean, my grandmother is Snow White! I still can’t wrap my head around that. But don’t worry, real life won’t let me go on too long like this without crashing down. And now, here we are, waiting for the ambulance to pick up one of our friends.” She gritted her teeth, then smacked a hand against the wall hard enough to turn her palm red.

Jack thought about asking what an ambulance was, but decided to keep his question to himself. Instead, he took the princess’s hands in his. “Princess … May,” he said. “Listen to me.” She glared at him for a second, then sighed deeply, the anger draining from her face.

“These are
challenges
,” Jack told her. “That’s it. We
are
going to win. You know why? Because it doesn’t matter if you’re in a fairy tale or here in real life, doing the right thing still counts for something. We’re going to win because we’re good, decent people trying to accomplish something noble.”

She flashed her half smile at him. “You didn’t have to get all melodramatic there,” she said, then bumped him with her shoulder.

He grinned. “Just following your example, Your Highness.”

She gave him an indignant look. “I was
not
being melodramatic!”

“Oh, of
course
not.”

“I wasn’t!”

“Did you listen to yourself? You were half a second away from saying we’re the villains in our story!”

May stuck out her tongue. “Maybe not me, but I’ve got my suspicions about you.”

He laughed out loud. “I’m pretty sure there’s not a villain out there who would put up with you for this long.”

This time she pushed him hard, and he fell to the ground, still laughing. May rolled her eyes, then leaned over and offered him her hand to pull him up, but Jack grabbed her and yanked her down to the floor next to him. Jack then sprang to his feet and put his hands on his hips, striking the classic hero pose. “No princess is a match for Sir Jack!” he said majestically.

“
Sir
Jack?” May said from the floor, raising an eyebrow.

He nodded toward his back. “I’ve got a sword, don’t I?”

She laughed. “If that’s all it takes, I’m going to be Sir May in about two seconds….” She jumped to her feet and launched herself at him. Jack backpedaled away from her, but May was too quick. She threw both her arms around him and grabbed for the sword, even as he backed away, trying to keep her from getting it.

May moved with him, though, so Jack kicked himself backward, laughing the entire time. He kept moving backward until he bumped into the cottage wall, May’s momentum pushing her right into him.

It took him all of a second to realize that she had her arms around him, he had his arms around her, and their faces were only inches apart.

Suddenly, Jack had no clue what to do. What had just happened? The wolf was hurt, and they were playing around? Plus, May was a princess, and Jack hated royalty … didn’t he? Okay, maybe right now he had a hard time remembering why, but still….

May seemed as surprised as he was to find herself in this position. Still, she recovered quickly and started to say something, but stopped and looked down toward his mouth. She looked back up at him, and her eyes softened.

A low growl from the bed interrupted whatever May’s eyes were about to say. “If … you’re not too busy,” the wolf said.

May instantly blushed and jumped backward, slamming Jack hard against the wall. As Jack slid down to the floor, grunting in pain, she literally leapt to the wolf’s side.

“Yes!”
May shouted. “We’re here! Not doing anything, just waiting! For a doctor! A healer, whatever! What can we do? Want some water? Something to eat? Are you all right?” She stopped to take a breath, giving the wolf a chance to jump in.

“No,” he growled, “I need nothing … I will be fine. I heal … quickly. Just tell me what happened.”

Jack pushed himself to his feet and walked over to the bed. “Not to disagree, but it doesn’t really look like you’ll be fine,” he
told the wolf. “You’re barely able to move, and you’ve lost a lot of blood, but I think we’ve got it covered. Phillip went to get a healer.”

The animal picked up his head to stare at them. “Leaving you two … here to do what, watch over me?” He started to chuckle, but the laughter turned into a coughing fit.

“Calm down!” May said, pushing the wolf’s head back down onto the bed. “We’re here to take care of you. And we will. We’ll make sure nothing happens to you until the doctor gets here.”

“Doctor?” Jack said. “You keep saying that. What’s a—”

“You really gotta do that every time?” May interrupted without looking at him.

“I must know
now
,” the wolf said, his eyes dark with pain, but also filled with determination. “Tell me what occurred here. Where is the Red Hood?! What happened to the Mirror?!”

“The Red Hood escaped,” Jack said. “The Huntsman—this guy who’s been chasing us down—he threw you in here and then helped her get away.”

“What!”
The wolf shouted, then struggled to push himself up, but quickly fell back to the bed and into another coughing fit.

“That’s not all, either,” May said in a voice tinged with anger.
“They broke the Mirror.” She pointed to the wall. “More than it already was, I mean.”

The wolf sat up enough to see what she was pointing at, then dropped back to the bed with a sigh. “Clearly, you do
not
take after your grandmother, Princess. She never would have let this happen.”

May’s mouth dropped open, the wolf’s comment leaving her at a loss for words. Jack found himself filling in for her, though, far more passionately then he would have thought. “May did everything she could!” Jack shouted. “We all did! Maybe if we hadn’t been surprised by the Huntsman, we’d have the Red Hood and the Mirror right now!”

The wolf’s paw flew up and grabbed Jack’s head, then yanked it down to within an inch of the animal’s teeth. “And what, pray tell, are you implying?” the wolf growled softly.

“I’m implying,” Jack said, ignoring the animal’s heavy breathing, “that
you
were supposed to be watching our backs!”

The wolf glared at him for a moment, then released him. “You speak the truth,” he said, lying back down on the bed, looking paler than ever. “I … I failed. I was not aware of the Huntsman’s approach. I sought to hide my presence from the Red Hood, cloaked as a man. But in man form, I cannot use
as many of my senses as I can as a wolf. I was taken unawares, and reverted to my regular form when I lost conscious control over my aspect.” The wolf winced, though in pain or just at the memory of his failure, Jack couldn’t tell.

“Well, it’s not really your fault either,” Jack said, much more eager to forgive now that the wolf had apologized. “None of us knew he was there, and we’re all dealing with it now. So just get some rest, and try not to move until the healer gets here.”

May nodded in agreement, and the wolf settled back into the soft bed, closing his eyes. They let him rest for a minute, then moved back to the wall.

As Jack slid down the wall to the floor a little laugh escaped the wolf’s lips. “One more thing,” he growled. “I hardly care what you do, but
try
not to wake me with your courting rituals again.”

Jack’s face turned bright red as he slipped and fell the rest of the way to the floor.

Jack didn’t plan on falling asleep; too much was happening, and happening much too fast when it did. Still, he hadn’t slept in a while, what with finding the Black Forest, riding on the wolf’s back, and breaking the Mirror. After all that, the quiet comfort of the cottage was just too hard to resist.

Jack propped himself up against the wall with some bed pillows, then leaned back to settle in. On his right, May was doing the same, only she’d already closed her eyes. Jack smiled slightly as he marveled for the hundredth time that her hair could really be blue like that. How had she done that? Was there magic involved?

And then Jack opened his eyes, not exactly sure when he’d
closed them. When he fell asleep, his mind always seemed to wander to the oddest places. Places where magic didn’t work, and there wasn’t any royalty … places where everyone was equal, no one was better than anyone else just because of who their parents were. That’d be nice, a place like that. That’d be some kind of dream world….

And maybe it’d look something like the place Jack saw when he opened his eyes. Somehow, surrounding him on all sides was a wide field with tall, golden grasses blowing gently in multiple directions from the slightly chilly wind. The meadow seemed empty, at least from where he was sitting. As he turned to take it all in, though, he noticed an oak tree behind him. In fact, he was leaning against it. How odd … Had that been there a minute ago? Hadn’t he just been in sunlight, whereas now he sat in the tree’s shade? Jack thought so, but didn’t really put too much effort into worrying about it. The tree was here now—that was the important thing.

He snuggled against the tree’s trunk, sighing with contentment as his back fit into the wood just right. The gentle breeze still managed to find him under the tree’s canopy, and the air blew his hair almost playfully. Jack smiled. This was actually really nice!

“It
is
quite nice,” said a man at his side, a man who Jack could have sworn wasn’t there a minute ago, a man whose voice was familiar.

A man who was also dressed entirely in black armor, covered by a blue cloak.

Somewhere deep in Jack’s head, a small voice cried out that this was the Wicked Queen’s Eye, that Jack was in danger, but the voice was too small to listen to, so Jack just ignored it and smiled. “I agree, it is nice,” he said. For some reason, his voice sounded dazed, even to him, but Jack didn’t let that bother him.

The knight returned Jack’s smile. “Sometimes I sit here for days, you know,” the man said, leaning his head back against the tree. “It’s very peaceful. Also, I must admit, it’s quite pleasant to think, to hear your breath moving in and out without the distractions of the outside world.”

Jack nodded in agreement. “I haven’t had much chance to sit still in a few days,” he said. “It’s been pretty strange.”

The knight leaned over. “It’s going to get stranger,” he whispered. At that, the knight waved his hand, and an image appeared in midair. It was of a girl with both blond and blue hair, checking to make sure the boy next to her was asleep before standing up and removing a chain from around her neck.

“You’re in for quite an adventure, actually,” the knight said to him as Jack dreamily watched the scene unfold in midair. “You really have no idea how deep you’ll be going.”

“Well,” Jack said thoughtfully, “we
are
going to rescue Snow White. That much I know.”

The knight’s eyes twinkled. “Are you now, Jack? That
would
be a grand adventure, and certainly a worthy one.”

In the image, the girl snuck quietly over to a nearby wall upon which hung a mirror.

A thought occurred to Jack, one that seemed to penetrate the fog currently filling his mind. “But you … the Eyes serve the Wicked Queen….”

The knight sighed and leaned back against the tree. “I think that you will find that much of what you previously believed, young Jack, may not be as true as you thought.”

That answer didn’t seem to help at all. “But you
do
serve the Wicked Queen, right?”

The knight paused as if trying to word his answer carefully. “I served the Queen in the past, yes,” he said finally. “However, unlike many in my order, I pledged my allegiance to another. My allegiance … and more.”

“More?” Jack said, looking closely at the knight next to him.
He realized with a start, though a gentle one, that the knight wasn’t wearing his hood, as he had been in the giant’s mouth. The hood had been hiding a rather pleasant face, wrinkled with worry lines, but also quite a few lines from wide smiles. The knight’s hair was almost a bronzed brown, a color that accented his green eyes. For some reason, the man’s face looked familiar, as if Jack had seen him in paintings or something.