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“I love you, too, Mom.” Basil blinked to clear his eyes, inhaled on a shudder, and turned to the sobbing mess of a sister sitting next to him. “Want me to fetch you the entire roll of tissues from the counter? We have ten more in the garage. You look like you might need them all.”
Lily uttered a keening wail of unintelligible sounds, smacked him upside the head, then lunged for him and sobbed against his shoulder. He hugged her, patted her back, and laughed until the tightness in his chest eased and Lily started pinching him in the side.
“Mom,” he said when Lily eventually went to get the roll of tissues. “There’s something else I’ve been thinking about. You said you think the fae magic changed Robert, that it poisoned his mind somehow, and made him turn on you like that.”
Hazel stiffened.
“I don’t think it’s true,” he went on. “I mean, it’s possible, sure, but what if he was just an assh—a narcissistic jerk all along?”
“But he wasn’t like that in the beginning.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean he changed because of magic. He could well have been a narcissist all his life and simply managed to charm you for a while. That’s what abusers do.”
Hazel opened her mouth, closed it again. Basil could see her mind working behind her warm brown eyes.
Before she could say anything, he added, “Think about it. For years now, you’ve been beating yourself up because you believed the whole thing with the changeling swap and the spell being put on him was the reason he treated you like shit.”
“Language,” Hazel said, but her rebuke was mild instead of sharp this time, her expression thoughtful.
“What if he just managed to hide his dark side from you until after the delivery? If you look at it this way, it means you don’t have to feel guilty about anything. There’s literally nothing you could have done. He would have shown his true colors sooner or later anyway, with or without anything ‘triggering’ him.” He met Hazel’s eyes as she focused on him again. “It really wasn’t your fault, Mom.”
Her voice was barely audible when she whispered, “Thank you, baby.”
“So,” Lily said as she plopped down next to him and sniffed in a most dignified Lily kind of way, “what’s the status quo with your demonic father? Oh, and by the way, knowing you’re half-demon explains so many things—” She dodged his mock swing and grinned.
“Well.” He grasped the nape of his neck. “We’re sort of…friends? It’s a bit weird, to be honest. We talked on the way here from Faerie. We both missed out on so much time we could have spent together, and he never saw me growing up. I think it eats at him that he didn’t get to have the experience of being around me while I was a kid. And it’s strange for both of us to meet as adults.” He shrugged. “I mean, I have a hard time relating to him as my father.”
“Yeah.” Lily frowned. “He looks like he’s your age.”
Basil grimaced. “Apparently, hæmingr demons live pretty long, and can stay young for most of their lives.”
Lily raised a brow. “Good for you. Plus, there’s that nice shapeshifting power y’all got. Have you tried it yet? Can you do it?”
He gave her a slow smile, leaned back in his seat—and morphed. Power rippled over his skin, through his cells, and with a feeling of being folded and turned over in a million tiny ways, he changed his shape.
Lily shrieked and jumped back from the table. “Oy!” She pointed a finger at him. “Stop that. It’s weird enough seeing just one other version of me walking around.”
He laughed and let go of Lily’s form, shifting back to his own appearance.
Hazel smiled. “Impressive. Although without having absorbed the magic of the person you’re changing into, you can’t imitate their aura, can you?”
“Right. Which means this kind of power is only good for fooling beings with dull senses, like humans.”
“Or for shocking unsuspecting relatives,” Lily muttered.
Basil grinned and winked at her.
“I still think,” Hazel interjected, crossing her arms, “that Tallak should be punished for slaughtering the fae court.”
“Mom…”
“It wasn’t right.” She shook her head. “No matter how nasty some of them supposedly were.”
Basil exhaled through his nose. “He spent twenty-six years in their dungeon. I think that was punishment enough, even if it was before the fact.”
“And what about the fae he killed before he was imprisoned? The ones whose powers he stole to conceal himself in Faerie. He’s a murderer.”
“He’s changed.”
