by Nadine Mutas
She walked as fast as she could without losing contact with the walls, until she was far away enough from the throne room that she wouldn’t arouse suspicion. And then she ran. Because for the first time in twenty-six years, she had hope, real hope of surviving this curse. She just had to find the changeling.
Problem was, she wasn’t the only one looking for him.
Chapter 2
“Ladies first.” Basil Murray bowed and, with a courtly gesture, indicated the dark oak door to his family’s kitchen.
“Cut the crap.” His twin sister Lily—recently turned into a demon by a wacko suitor who then deservedly met a most violent death—shook her head and took a step back. “You go ahead.”
“Don’t be a wuss.”
“You’re the one who’s being a sissy.”
“Am not. You’re—” Basil sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “What are we, ten? This is ridiculous.”
“I agree.” Lily crossed her arms, her black curls sliding over her bare shoulders, her light skin now adorned with her demon markings. He still wasn’t used to it, and he was startled every time he saw the swirling lines, or noticed their color change from dark brown to fading henna, depending on Lily’s energy level.
“Which is why you should just go in and talk first,” Lily added. “After all, you’ve always been so much more mature than me.” She batted her eyelashes at him and gave him an innocent and slightly pouty smile.
Basil shot her a dark look. “That trick only works on your mate, sis.”
She blew a lock of her hair to the side. “Was worth a try.”
He stared at her. She stared back. He gestured toward the closed door, and the daunting task looming behind it. She gestured right back at him, silently telling him no fucking way.
He inhaled through his nose, exhaled through his mouth. “It seems we’re at an impasse. No other choice.”
She nodded sagely. “On three?”
“On three.”
Lily went into fighting position. He mirrored her pose.
“One,” he said.
“Two…”
“Three.”
They both struck at the same time. His outstretched hand, palm down, against Lily’s hand, curled to a fist.
“Yes!” He pumped his fist, then pointed at his sister. “Paper beats rock.”
She rolled her eyes. “All right, all right. I’ll go first and do the talking. But there’s gonna be hell to pay if you don’t back me up, mister.”
“Right here behind you,” he muttered.
Lily took a deep breath, and for a second she looked like she wanted to bolt. He flung open the door and shoved her in the kitchen.
“Ouch, Baz!” She shut her mouth and stopped slapping at him when Hazel turned around. “Oh, hi, Mom. Um, do you have a minute? Baz and I want to talk to you.”
Hazel’s chocolate-colored eyes took them both in, her face ever so radiant, so full of warmth and love and all things cozy that made up a home. Where Aunt Isabel had often been stern, unyielding—a general determined to steel you through the use of rough handling—Hazel had never been anything but the soft comfort of unconditional, maternal love. Even during the years when Father was still alive—which brought Basil back to the present.
He cleared his throat. “Yes. Let’s sit down.”
Hazel frowned a little but nodded. “Sure.”
They settled at the small table in the breakfast nook, in front of the bay window overlooking the expansive backyard of the Murray mansion.
“What do you want to talk about?” Hazel asked.
“Umm…” Lily fidgeted in her seat. “It’s just that recently, I’ve gotten to thinking. After I mated with Alek. There were some things I’d never realized, stuff in my past…in our past… I mean, our family—” She shifted her weight. “Um. Baz?”
He sighed, sent his twin a sideways glance, which of course she understood as if he’d said it out loud, and shot him back a look that clearly said, Nu-uh, I did my part. I did talk first. Now you go. And knowing her, he also knew he had to pick up the convo now.
“What Lil’s trying to say, rather ineloquently—ouch!” He glared at Lily, and rubbed his shin where she had kicked him, hard. “She’s kind of had commitment issues that go back to her childhood. She realized the problem when Alek was courting her, and we talked about it, and we think it’s from seeing…your relationship with our father.”
Hazel went very still.
Basil pushed forward before he lost the nerve. “Thing is, we—that is, you, and both of us—never actually discussed it. But it’s always been this huge, taboo subject hanging over our heads, and we think it’s time we tackle it. Talk it through. So we can let it go.”
He’d grabbed an apple from the crystal fruit bowl, and was peeling off the sticker label on it, his attention meticulously on the tangible, practical task that was easy to accomplish, not on the mess of emotions so difficult to untangle.
Hazel cleared her throat. Her voice was measured when she spoke. “What, exactly, do you want to talk about?”
Lily was fidgeting again. “The way Dad treated you…”
Dad. Yeah, Robert had been a dad to Lily, all right. To Basil, though… And that was part of it, wasn’t it?
“He was an abusive asshole to you, Mom.” He couldn’t suppress the gruff edge to his voice, from the too-long-buried hurt and anger now rising to the surface. If his father hadn’t died when Baz was still a meager, weak fifteen-year-old who was only slowly growing into his gangly long limbs…if Basil had been stronger, or had more power…all that hurt and anger and righteous protectiveness would have erupted one day, and his father might have died by Basil’s hand instead of Aunt Isabel’s.
“Language,” Hazel snapped.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “But it’s true. He had control issues, and was a jealous freak who treated you like shi—like garbage. Did you think we didn’t notice? He didn’t even try to be subtle about it.”
And while Father never laid a hand on Hazel, he intimidated and manipulated and verbally abused her until she became a cowering little mouse in his presence, until she wouldn’t even leave the house without his express permission. The change in Hazel after Robert died was astonishing. She was a new woman, a glowing, vibrant version of the meek mother they’d known all their lives.
“Mom,” Lily said gently, leaning forward to stroke her shoulder before straightening again. “I found you crying so many times. You’d always say it wasn’t his fault, and you’d make excuses for him, but the way he spoke to you… He hurt you. And yet you always defended him, told us that love requires compromise and concessions. And I…I started thinking, that’s what love is. That it makes you just take everything, no matter how bad, without complaining. That it robs you of your will to stand up for yourself.”
She paused, looked down at her hands on the table. “It almost cost me the love of my life. I would have missed out on Alek if I hadn’t realized how twisted my perception of love was.”
Hazel made a small noise, took Lily’s hand in hers, and squeezed.
“It wasn’t right.” Basil knew his voice was hard, his anger about the past too great for him to even pretend to be diplomatic. “His behavior, the way he talked to you, shamed you in front of us—how you let him treat you like a…like a despised slave…”
“Let?” Hazel narrowed her eyes at him, eyes the exact same color as his own, seemingly the only link he had to his family in terms of appearance.
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
“Baz.” Lily kicked his shin again.
“No. I want answers.” He focused on his mom. “You know what I mean. Aunt Isabel said the same thing. You never stood up to him. You never—”
“How dare you.” Quiet, so quiet, but Hazel’s voice carried thunderous anger. “How dare you imply it was my fault. I’ll not have you speak to me like that.”
She rose, her chair screeching on the parquet.
Lily reached out, took her hand
. “Mom, please. That’s not what we—of course it wasn’t your fault. He was the one being shitty toward you.” A sharp glance from Hazel had her adding, “Sorry. Wrong, his behavior was wrong. You didn’t deserve that.”
Something flickered over Hazel’s face, a shadow darkening her features for a second.
“Wait.” Basil leaned forward. “Wait. Mom—did you think you deserved his treatment?”
“Of course not.” But she looked down, to the side—a lie. She bristled at the implication that she was partly at fault for allowing Robert’s behavior, but somehow, somewhere in her heart, her mind, she did believe it…or maybe she believed she had triggered it? Believed she’d done something to make him start treating her like crap?
Lily saw it too. Her demon senses allowed her to read auras exceptionally well—something he envied her, his own perception as dull as any human’s, born without magic as he was—and whatever she read in Hazel’s energy pattern made her gasp.
“Mom…why would you feel guilty? Why would—”
“Because,” Basil interrupted her quietly, “I’m not his son.”
Hazel flinched. Lily whipped her head around, stared at him slack-jawed. True, they’d entertained the theory some years ago, but they dropped it when Hazel yelled at them for even considering it. It hadn’t come up in the years since, which explained Lily’s surprise.
Basil, however, never let it go. His looks were just so different from the rest of the family, and he didn’t really resemble Hazel’s husband, or his relatives. Black hair, creamy white skin, and blue eyes ran in the Murray family, and Lily was the perfect example, was almost the spitting image of her late Aunt Isabel. Hazel’s brown eyes were due to her own father’s, and one could argue that Basil had inherited his eye color from her.
But his blond hair had no precedent in either family. Hazel’s husband had light brown hair, and all his relatives’ hair was even darker. Basil’s skin glowed with a light tan, as if he sunbathed regularly, when both Hazel and her husband had very light skin. It made sense to Basil that he must be the product of an affair.
The fact that he and Lily were twins made the biological explanation a bit trickier, but not impossible. Basil read up on it, back when he and Lily first started joking about not sharing the same father.
A twin pair of a boy and girl was always fraternal, meaning they didn’t develop from one egg, but from two separate ones, each fertilized by a different sperm cell. And since during ovulation eggs were fertile for up to twelve hours, and since sperm was able to survive for up to seven days in the uterus and fallopian tubes, if a woman had a twin-egg ovulation, and slept with two men within the couple of days leading up to her ovulation, each of the men could father one of the twins.
Yep, Basil sure had been thorough with his research. Doubts about your parentage could do that to you.
He’d just never scrounged up the courage to outright ask his mom about it. Not until now.
“Am I right?” His voice wavered just a little bit. He swallowed. When she didn’t say anything right away, he carefully put all the apples he’d divested of their label stickers back in the crystal bowl, one by one.
His mom opened her mouth, closed it. “How can you ask me that?”
“Just tell me. Robert’s dead, so he doesn’t care anymore.”
“Basil.”
“Mom.”
She cringed, turned to look out the window into the dark backyard.
“Please,” he said through gritted teeth, shedding his pride, desperate, so desperate for a final answer to the burning question that—
Something popped around him. Like a bubble surrounding him had burst, or that strange opening of your ears when adjusting to pressure. A wave of sensations flooded him, and his senses sharpened, attuned to his surroundings with so much detail, so much input, that his brain short-circuited for a moment.
Hazel gasped, swiveled around, and her eyes widened when she looked at him. “Yes,” she blurted out, almost as if she thought she had to say it fast to say it at all. “You’re not his son.”
She exhaled on another gasp, her face lost all color, and she sank down on the chair again, her hands covering her mouth. “Dear gods above and beyond…”
Basil was still reeling from whatever the hell had just happened to him, but—he could think about it in a minute. Right now, he forced himself to take a deep breath and said, “Thank you. I mean, I think I always knew, but to hear you—”
Hazel met his gaze and shook her head, her dark eyes glistening with unshed tears. “And I’m not your mother.”
Chapter 3
Stunned silence.
Basil’s heart could have stopped beating, and he wouldn’t have noticed. He was that numb.
“The what with the who and the how?” Lily asked, her voice squeaky high.
His mom sobbed.
No, not his mom. The thought echoed around his brain, so clinical, so rational, seemingly unattached to any emotion. Not my mother.
When he recovered the ability to speak, he could only utter a single word. “How?”
Hazel inhaled on a shudder, sniffed, blew her nose on the tissue Lily handed her. “You’re a changeling. A fae changeling. Exchanged after birth.” She closed her eyes and whispered, “Oh, gods, I can finally say it.”
“You couldn’t before?”
She shook her head. “A spell. She put a silence spell on me. It remained in place all these years, and I could never tell a soul…”
Basil’s ears pounded. He rubbed his temples, trying to alleviate the pressure building in his skull. A skulking, yet-unnamable sensation crept along his bones, made his heart race and his skin crawl. “She?”
“The fae who exchanged you. She never told me her name.”
“Okay, whoa,” Lily said, holding up her hands. “Let’s take a step back here and start from the top. Mom, please tell us—wait, you are my mom, right?”
Hazel swallowed, smiled. “Yes, baby.”
The tightness in Lily’s shoulders eased, she leaned back in her chair, and waved one hand. “From the top, please.”
A deep breath, then Hazel said, “Well, the beginning isn’t much different from what you’ve both been told about how you were born.”
Like most children, they wanted to hear the story at one point, and because it was so adventurous, they wanted to keep hearing it again and again for several years. The suspenseful tale featured a broken-down car on the side of a country road late at night, and a miraculously accident-free twin birth in the back of said car.
Unlike most other deliveries in the witch community, Hazel didn’t have the support of her fellow witches, didn’t even have doctors or nurses there in the event of an emergency. It had always seemed incredibly lucky that Hazel was able to deliver healthy twins out on the road with only the help of her husband.
Evidently it had, in fact, been more than “luck.”
“And at which point does the thrilling tale of our birth deviate from what actually happened?” He couldn’t help the reproach seeping into his tone. He rationally knew if Hazel had been spelled into silence, that she literally had no choice, hadn’t been able to tell him. And yet…betrayal was a niggling, uncomfortable feeling festering in his bones.
Hazel touched her neck, avoided his gaze. “After the car broke down and the labor pains got worse, a female fae appeared. She carried a bundle in her arms, proclaimed she didn’t mean us harm. I was in so much pain, I couldn’t have used my magic against her if I wanted to. I was worried about the delivery—a twin birth, without help… Back then we didn’t have cell phones, couldn’t call for an ambulance, and we didn’t know if anyone would come down this stretch of road. We hadn’t seen another car in an hour.
“The fae offered help with the delivery. Scared as I was, I accepted. With her assistance, I delivered two healthy baby girls. Robert was overjoyed. But what he didn’t know, what I feared, was that with faeries, help always comes at a price. When a fae does you a favor, and you accept
it, be prepared for it to cost you. And as soon as I took my baby girls in my arms, the fae claimed her favor.
“She picked up the bundle which she’d left on the front passenger seat while she helped me with the delivery. It turned out to be another baby, a newborn male fae. She had smuggled him out of Faerie in order to save his life. Or at least it’s what she told me. And what better place to hide him outside of Faerie than in the middle of a witch family? She said it would provide him with the best protection—from whatever enemies he might have. She never told us that much, only that both parents were dead and the child was in danger. Her favor was as simple as it was heartbreaking. She asked me to take in the newborn male fae and raise him as my own son, in exchange for one of the twin girls I had carried next to my heart for nine months.”
Hazel rubbed the heel of her palm against her chest, and her chin trembled.
“I pleaded with her. I begged her. I told her I would take him in, I would raise him as my son, but please, please don’t take one of my baby girls. I told her I was more than willing to comply, to repay her favor, but without giving up one of my girls.
“She didn't listen. She insisted on taking one of my daughters back with her into Faerie, as a hostage. She said it was to make sure I would take good care of the male changeling, and as long as I kept him safe, my daughter in Faerie would be safe as well. No matter how much I pleaded with her, she wouldn’t budge. She made me…”
Hazel's voice broke. Her shoulders shook, and she stifled a sob.
Lily grasped her mom’s hand again, tears shimmering in her eyes as well. “Mom…”
Hazel shuddered. “She made me choose. She made me pick which one of the girls to give her to take back into Faerie. How could I make that decision? How can anyone make that kind of decision? That agony, that heartbreak, I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. No matter how much I hate Juneau, I would not want her to have to make such a decision. Not a day goes by that I don’t relive that awful, impossible choice.”
