Something had heard me. Here was my chance to see her again. I didn’t care how. I didn’t care why. I absorbed every detail.

There was the mole high on her left cheek. I touched it. There were the freckles on her nose that drove her crazy, the tiny scar on her lower lip from where I’d accidentally bashed her in the mouth with a guitar when we were kids. There were those sunny green eyes, like mine but with more gold flecks. There was the long blond hair, so much like mine used to be.

She was wearing the tiny sterling silver heart earrings I’d saved for six months to buy her from Tiffany’s for her twenty-first birthday.

This was Alina, right down to her toenails painted her favorite summer shade, Cajun Shrimp. It clashed horribly with her lime bikini and I told her so.

She laughed and took off across the sand. “Come on, Junior, let’s play.”

I sat, frozen for a long moment.

I can’t tell you all the thoughts that went through my head then: This isn’t real, it can’t be. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s dangerous. Could this be my sister in another dimension, another version of her, but Alina all the same? Hurry up and ask her questions about her journal and the Lord Master and what happened in Dublin. Don’t ask her questions; she might disappear. All those thoughts passed swiftly and left a single directive in their wake: Play with your sister right here, right now. Take it for what it is.

I stood and ran across the sand, kicking up white powder with my heels. My legs were long, my body strong, my heart complete.

I played volleyball with my sister. We drank Coronas in the sun. I hadn’t brought the limes, of course, but we found a margarine bowl of them in the cooler, and squeezed them into the bottles, pulp slipping down the frosty sides. A beer would never taste so good again as it did that day with Alina in Faery.

Eventually, we sprawled on the sand and soaked up the sun, toes teasing the edge of the surf. We talked about Mom and Dad, we talked about school, we talked about the hot guys that walked by and tried to coax us into another game of volleyball.

We talked about her idea of moving to Atlanta, and how I would quit my job and go with her. We talked about me getting serious about life finally.

It was that thought that sobered me. I’d always been planning to get serious about life and here I was, being exactly who I’d been back then, taking the path of least resistance, the easy way out, doing what made me feel good right now, consequences be damned.

I rolled over and looked at her. “Is this a dream, Alina?”

She turned toward me and smiled. “No.”

“Is it real?”

She smiled again, sadly. “No.”

“Then what is this?”

She bit her lip. “Don’t ask me, just enjoy the day.”

“I need to know.”

“It’s a gift from V’lane. A day on the beach with me.”

“An illusion,” I said. Water to a man stranded for two and a half days in the desert without a drink. Beyond refusing, even if it was poisoned. I knew better but it didn’t stop me from trying: “So if I were to ask how you met the Lord Master, or where to find the Sinsar Dubh?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know those things.”

I wasn’t surprised. V’lane must have lifted her from my memories, which meant she would know only what I knew, and made questions about anything other than experiences I recalled, or my current situation, pointless. “How long have I been here?” As V’lane’s creation, she should know that.

She shrugged again.

“Longer than a human hour?”

“Yes.”

“Can I leave?”

“Yes.”

“Could I choose to stay?”

“And have anything you wanted, MacKayla. Forever.”

Alina never called me MacKayla. In fact, neither did my parents or any of my friends. Only V’lane did. Was he behind those sunny eyes? And still, I wanted to stay here, lose myself on this beach, in this sun, live this day over and over again for the rest of my life. Forget the rain and the fear, the pain and my uncertain future. I could die happily on a hammock in the sun, seventy years from now, surrounded by lost dreams.

“I love you, Alina,” I whispered.

“I love you, too, Mac,” she whispered back.

“I’m sorry I failed you. I’m sorry I missed your call. I’m sorry I didn’t figure out something was wrong.”

“You never failed me, Mac. You never will.”

Tears filled my eyes. Where had those words of absolution come from? Did the icy Fae prince understand more about human emotion than he let on?

I hugged Alina, inhaled deeply, and memorized every sensory detail I could greedily gather.

Then I squeezed my eyes shut and went to that place in my head that was so alien, and I fed the foreign fire. When I’d stoked it hot enough and high enough, I murmured, “Show me what is true,” and opened my eyes.

My arms were empty. Alina was gone.

V’lane knelt in the sand before me.

“Never do that to me again,” I said in a low voice.

“You did not enjoy your time with her?”

“It wasn’t her.”

“Tell me you did not enjoy it.”

I couldn’t.

“Then thank me for it.”

I couldn’t do that either. “How much time has passed?”

“I would have retrieved you but I was loath to disrupt your pleasure. You have had so little of it lately.”