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.”

Hazel sniffed, her throat working as she swallowed, and she fell silent for a long, heavy moment. Neither Lily nor Basil prodded her to continue with her story.

“After I made the choice,” Hazel finally began again, “the fae took the girl I gave her and handed me the male fae baby instead. Robert was furious. He was as distraught as I am. I told the fae it would be hard for me to pass off a male baby in the witch community. I explained that, naturally, witches always have female offspring. She just looked at me and said, ‘You will find a way to make it work.’ Before she left, she laid a spell on both me and Robert. On Robert, she placed an oblivion charm. She thought it better to erase his memories of what had happened instead of putting a silence spell on him as well.

“I pleaded with her again. But again, she didn’t listen. Her spell on him would ensure he wouldn’t remember the exchange had taken place. He would only remember helping me deliver the babies in the car. Maybe she thought it would be harder on him if he knew the male baby wasn’t his. By making him forget, she might have figured he would fully accept the baby as his own son.

“Then she laid another spell on me. It was powerful magic. For twenty-six years, I have been unable to tell a single soul about what had actually happened that night. I couldn’t even tell Robert. I wanted to, so many times. Especially after he started…” Her brows drew together, and she looked down on the table.

“He suspected, didn’t he?” Basil asked quietly. “That’s why he was so insanely jealous?”

Hazel gave a shaky nod. “At first, the oblivion spell seemed to be working well. But over time…I think the fae’s magic poisoned his mind. You know, he wasn’t that way…before.”

She looked up then, met Basil’s eyes, then Lily’s, so much pain carved into her gentle features. “We were happy. He’d always treated me like his queen, and he was a decent, good man. The spell changed him. Made him suspicious. He started having doubts about you, started looking at me differently. He even asked me directly once, but when I denied having had an affair, he only got angrier. He didn’t believe me. He sensed I was hiding something from him, and I literally could not tell him the truth. The fae magic corrupted his mind, and he got worse and worse. All those things he said…it wasn’t like him. He would never have treated me like that.”

“And you still loved him, didn’t you?” Lily’s voice was soft.

Hazel gave a bitter laugh. “Love is a stubborn thing. It can cling to you even when you know it’s wrong, twisted.”

“Did you try to break the spell the fae put on him?” Basil asked. “So he’d understand what happened?”

“I thought about it, yes. I researched as much as I could, but fae magic is very different from witch magic. Everything I found describing how to break fae spells said I could possibly do just as much damage as good. And those passages referred to simple fae magic, not one as intricate as an oblivion spell on a human mind. There was a very real risk of me scrambling his brain into madness.”

She paused, her mouth pressing into a thin line. “You’ve seen what Maeve’s magic did to her father. That’s the kind of damage we’re talking about.”

Basil cringed. Maeve MacKenna’s powers kicked in when she was eight years old, in an explosion of unmitigated magic so unfettered, so destructive, that it killed both her older sister Moira and her mother—and psychically maimed her father, irrevocably damaging his mind to the point he remained catatonic to this day.

“Okay,” Lily said, rubbing her hands over her face. “How is it that we never realized Basil is a fae? He has a human energy pattern—”

She stopped, looked at him, her brows knitting together. “Used to have. It’s…changed. Your aura is…fae now. How…?”

“Glamour,” Hazel said quietly. “The fae put a glamour on him to mask his identity. She hid his innate magic signature, and made him look more human.”

“Kind of clumsy,” Basil murmured. When both Lily and Hazel looked at him in question, he explained, “Well, if she had the means to change my appearance, why didn’t she make sure I looked more like Robert?” He gestured toward his blond hair.

“Ah.” Hazel’s expression vacillated between wry amusement and regret. “At the time the fae met us to do the exchange, Robert’s hair was blond. He’d been dyeing it for a couple of weeks. He was going through a phase…” She sighed. “Well, the fae apparently didn’t know it wasn’t his real hair color, and I guess she figured she could leave your hair naturally blond.”

Lily kept squinting at him with narrowed eyes. “If he’s fae…” she said, “why aren’t his ears pointed?”

“What?” Basil touched his ears, felt the usual roundness at the edge. “Hey, you’re right. These are still human.”

Hazel frowned. “I’m not sure. They should be… Maybe the glamour hasn’t yet lifted all the way.”

“Hm.” Lily tilted her head, then shook it. “Okay, that’s something we can figure out later. Let’s get back to the basics. Baz is not my brother—not even half?”

“Not by blood, no.”

The sting in his chest was the first emotion he felt since the revelation began. It was finally starting to sink in. Lily wasn’t his sister. They weren’t actually twins. The girl he grew up with, the person closest to him, the one who always understood him intuitively—because he thought they shared this special twin bond. It was all a lie.

And his mom—he glanced at Hazel again—wasn’t actually his mom. The hurt in his chest spread, a crawling sensation of loss and betrayal that tainted every memory of his childhood with doubt and alienation. Was everything a lie? Had she ever truly loved him? Or had she acted out of obligation, to keep protecting the daughter she’d lost—her real child?

His pulse sped up. His breath came faster and faster, until he was light-headed.

“Baz…” Hazel reached for him.

He shot to his feet, so fast the chair screeched in protest, and turned to the French doors to look out at the dark backyard.

Lily, always so perceptive, so attuned to his feelings, so good at understanding what he needed, muttered something soothing and reassuring to Hazel to keep her from approaching him.

He watched their reflections in the glass of the doors, how Hazel nodded, took Lily’s hand.

It hurt all the more.