The first thing I did was thank God, and the Angel, and any other benevolent spirits, that I hadn't touched any faerie food. Because I know if I had, the kiss I would have required would not have belonged to Meliorn, or even Simon, or anybody whose lips I'd ever kissed. It would have been the boy with black hair and blue eyes that was standing beside me, eyes smiling down at me with familial affection. My brother. Alec.

It was wrong, I knew. Yet, I wanted it. The Seelie Queen had just phrased it minutes earlier: "Desire is not always lessened by disgust." How sick, twisted is that? I desired more than I was disgusted. Although the disgust was there, evident in every thought my brain formulated. Isabelle, it told me, he's your brother. But when I looked at him, I didn't see my brother, but someone who I needed. I needed to feel his caress, needed to hear his voice whispered in my ear promising me truths and lies that nobody would be able to keep track of, needed to smell the cloying, musky, intoxicating scent of his skin, needed to taste his skin and his lips all over me, needed to know his eyes would only see me.

Isabelle, he's your brother! More urgent now. I closed my eyes, hoping to rid myself of his face, but it had the opposite effect. It was all Alec, his face, his body, every curve and twist and line of his shape dancing in bizarre, beautiful ways, just for me. I didn't dare open my eyes. Even though every part of me was screaming how wrong it was to feel the way I was feeling, I didn't dare open them. Because inside my mind was a hideaway, where I could think freely.

I felt a sudden elbow in my arm. "Izzy," someone hissed. And I thought it was my thoughts providing me with his voice. I sighed in appreciation, willing my beautiful imagery to say something more to me. "Izzy, come on." The moment when I realized that it was something outside of me speaking, my eyes involuntarily opened and I was back in the present. My shoulders slumped minutely. But when I saw Alec standing beside me, I straightened up with a pounding heart. Maybe, if I was lucky, the boy next to me would merge with the dancing boy in my head.