Kestrel was already seated in his spot in the corner of the nook when I sat across from him. Without doing anything more than sitting down to eat with the family, he looked at me and told me he hated me. They were the first words he’d directly spoken to me in months, and they were the last he would ever say to me.
Mom scolded him and told him that it wasn’t true, but he looked me in the eye, a promise lingering inside their icy depths that said it was. I never even figured out what prompted it – if anything did. Kestrel didn’t need a reason to hate me. He just did. And that was that.
For my part, I didn’t hate Kestrel. I didn’t understand him, but I knew the moment I saw him lying lifeless on the ground that I loved him.
I would’ve taken his place if I could have, but that wasn’t the hand we were dealt.
Things were drastically different after Kes came home, wearing my brother’s skin. The passionate hatred Kestrel held for me evaporated like water on the road after a summer afternoon storm. I began calling him Kes, aloud and in my mind. He wasn’t Kestrel, no matter how often our mother said his name. No matter how closely the impostor looked like him.
The day he was released from the hospital, Dad helped him over the threshold into our home as if he were impossibly fragile, but I saw the strength he possessed, a strength my brother had never possessed.
The thing that lived in him after that? For hours that evening, it watched me just as carefully as Kestrel always had, but with no hatred flaring in its icy eyes.
It was observant. Curious. Quiet.
I watched him just as guardedly.
Mom checked on Kes every ten minutes, but as the night wore on, she fell asleep, completely exhausted. Dad told me and Kes we didn’t have to worry about going to school the next day. He sat on the couch and was soon softly snoring, his head folded onto his chest. I left him there to rest and headed to my own bed, stopping when I found it hovering in front of the refrigerator with both doors pulled open, frosty air washing over him. Before I chickened out, I slipped a butcher knife from the block and held it to his throat.
“You are not my brother. What are you?”
My hands shook like mad, but I gripped the handle and held the blade to his skin, threatening to press down and drag it across, effectively ruining his plans to slip so easily into my brother’s life.
I expected him to lie, but instead, he surprised me with the truth.
“A changeling,” he whispered.
“Why should I let you live?”
“Because if I leave, your brother’s body will perish. Kestrel died this afternoon and his soul can’t be brought back. Your mother would be bereft, doubly so if you kill me because she will lose you both in an instant. It would be more than she can handle.”
He was right. This thing – this changeling – was so, so right.
If that day taught me anything it was that if something happened to me or Kes, Mom would have fallen into a pit of depression and despair so deep, she wouldn’t have the will to climb out of it again. She was barely treading water now, clinging to the belief that Kestrel had survived.
I’d seen her agony, heard her cries, and saw the uncontrollable tremors of her hands. I watched her look around the room at me and Dad like she wasn’t sure where she was, what she was doing, or what direction to look next. She just looked lost.
He was right. She wouldn’t survive such a loss.
And that left us at an impasse.
He gently stepped backward and closed the refrigerator doors, turning fully to face me. I kept the knife between us, just in case. “If you allow me to stay, you cannot tell anyone what I am. If you do, I will be forced to leave.” Which meant Kestrel’s body would die. That could not happen. “But if you could find peace with me, Larken, the two of us can coexist. Your mother will believe her child was spared, and I give you my word that I will never harm you or your parents as long as I draw breath in this body. I need a home and a body in which to exist and carry out my purpose.”
While his voice sounded like a ten-year-old boy, his words were far older. I lowered the knife, still clutching it in case he was lying.
I didn’t know what to do. I had heard a story about changelings once and it scared me. But what was the alternative?
In the end, I decided there was no harm in trying. I couldn’t change what happened, but if he meant what he said, if he wanted peace, maybe this was what was best for Mom. For Dad. For all of us.
He refused to tell me exactly what his purpose in our house was when I prodded, but repeated that he meant us no harm. I walked back to my room, slipped the butcher knife between two of my favorite books, and spent the rest of the night staring at the stars from my window seat.
Dad was to blame for my obsession with the night sky. He’d taught me every constellation, shown me every planet, and together we marveled at the smooth way they slid across the night sky. We spent many nights sitting on the balcony with the telescope he helped me make and watched meteor showers. We even watched the passing of a comet once.
I fell in love with the heavens instantly, charting every lunar and solar eclipse, every predicted occurrence that could be seen from our little slice of earth on a small calendar that hung on a nail in my bedroom wall.
The stars were my constant when everything changed, a comfort when nothing was comfortable.
I watched them and listened…
I listened so that if the thing living in my brother’s body went after Mom and Dad, I’d be there to stop him.
I spent many nights like that. Sleepless. Worried. Terrified, if I was being honest.
But after a while, things settled. It turned out that Kes wasn’t lying. Life really did become peaceful after that.
Kes wore sleeves and slept in the dark, and on the bus on the way home from school, he would sit with me and ask how my day was. We helped each other with homework and even played outside together. Kes and I became friends.
We’d lived together as brother and sister for eight years now. I knew this Kes like the back of my hand. This Kes loved me. He also loved Mom and Dad.
It was wrong to think it, but I couldn’t help what popped into my mind as I walked back to my room, steam from my shower wafting from the bathroom and into the hall.
I liked this version of Kes much better than I had my own flesh and blood sibling, and the feeling was mutual.
So maybe in the end this was meant to be, and it was better this way for all of us. My fraternal twin brother was dead – yet lived.
All was well in the world – most of the time.
2
By the next day, things had simmered down. Mom was rested, and though she was still upset, she wasn’t angry cross-stitching or on the verge of tears. Dad kissed my head before he grabbed his lunch and left for work, his hands stained with the grease from all the engines he’d repaired during this insanely long week. “So, you’re going to prom with the girls, right?”