Uncanny.

Inhumanly swift and graceful.

Faerie-touched.

The realization stings. All the air leaves our lungs, and I can’t get them to fill again.

Isolde.

My twin.

My human half.

Not so human, after all. But not like me, either, with my magic and my eyes that gleam in the dark. What is she?

I’m losing my grip. With every spiral into panic, Gossamer gains more control. Our shaking body steadies as we meet Briar’s eyes with a rebellious flash of our own. “What...do you want...?”

“Shh,” she shushes gently, brushing a finger over the exposed skin of our throat. “I’m in the middle of a conversation.”

I can control this. All I have to do is put aside my emotions, my shock and confusion and all the other, more chaotic feelings that swarm over me. Just until I can fight Gossamer off. I try to imagine squeezing it all into a ball and setting it aside.

“This,” Briar says, sliding her hand under our infuriatingly limp arm, extending it its full length, “is a human body, with a spark of faerie life. The other is a faerie-made body, imbued with human life. Both human. Both faerie. Both equally your mother’s child and not. I was there when your mother played our game, you see. I made the faerie body in which your sister’s human soul returned to the Mortal Realm. Or...was it your soul? I suppose not, since it never actually touched this body, did it?”

She’s musing to herself now, as if with those casual words she hasn’t shattered everything I know to be true. Isolde and I truly are two halves of a whole—or we could have been, once. After seventeen years of different lives, different experiences, we are fully and completely different people. If we were somehow one, we’d be neither of us.

Have I been in the Unseelie Realm too long, or did that actually make sense?

Briar tilts her head, still studying us. “I’ve never seen anything like what your mother did. Yet here you are in our realm anyway. Neither of you could ever be what she hoped of you, because you were both real. Real creatures, I find—” she confides, letting my wrist go and my hand drop back into the mulch “—are so much harder to control than imagined ones.”

I stare helplessly into my sister’s face, tears welling in my eyes. Then, the story is true: our mother did walk through the faerie realm, driven by her love for us.

Or maybe, by her love for the imaginary portrait of us she’d painted in her head. The expectations we could never meet.

Grief floods me, washing away any hold I had on my body. It doesn’t fit into a ball or a box. It’s huge and shapeless and impossible to control.

Gossamer digs our hands into the earth again, smirking even as sweat drenches our brow.

And yet he still chooses not to move.

“What,” he repeats, through gritted teeth, though it comes easier now that I’ve been shoved further into the back of my own mind, “do you want with me?”