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Mal was not really expecting service at the bar when he landed there. After his experience at breakfast, he knew better than to hope for the friendly welcome that Shifting Sands had cultivated a reputation for. He was a persona non grata and until he had a chance to explain himself to Scarlet, he didn’t expect that to change.
He wanted to find her and get this conversation out of the way, but he had to admit that he’d been shaken by his findings at Beehag’s compound. A drink to settle him, and then he’d make a plan of attack. He took a beer from the cooler after the bartender’s brush-off and settled into a chair near the railing that looked down over the pool.
Two giggling young women were standing near the top of the steps holding diet sodas and a short man full of attitude was trying to hold a conversation with them.
“That dragon thinks he’s impressive,” he was saying, nodding at the glistening green dragon acting as a lifeguard on the beach. “But pound for pound, I’ve got him beat with my ability to cause pain.” He flexed a muscle at the nearest woman and she looked embarrassed for him. “Can you guess what I am?”
“No?” said one of the women, clearly not wanting to guess.
“Give it a shot,” the man coaxed. “First one’s free.”
“Snake?” the other guessed with a shrug.
“Not even close,” he scoffed.
“Scorpion?” the first one guessed with an ill-concealed eyeroll.
“Closer...” the man teased. When neither woman seemed interested in further speculation, he added, “People are much more terrified of me than either of those.”
The women made non-committal noises and looked around for escape. Mal considered stepping in, but they only looked uncomfortable, not afraid, and now he was curious.
He didn’t have to wait long.
“Fire ant,” the man said smugly. “Most painful sting of any animal in the world.”
The women stared.
“Do you turn into a whole swarm of them?” one asked in morbid curiosity.
The man looked confused. “Er, no.”
The women exchanged amused looks and Mal could not help chuckling. While the man shot him an unappreciative look, the women escaped down the steps to the pool, their whispers and giggles trailing behind them.
Passing them on her way up was Gizelle, her hair in two untidy braids.
The fire ant shifter gave her a speculative look, but when the woman shot him a wary look and skirted along the far railing away from him in a very obvious fashion, he shrugged and went to the bar.
Mal watched Gizelle make a wide circuit of the bar, then creep around behind him. He was keenly aware of her as she circled him and finally came to stand tentatively at the table beside him. Her hands were shaking just a little.
“I remember you from the end,” she said, her silky voice exactly as Mal had imagined it.
The cryptic statement cemented a suspicion that Mal had been nursing, but it didn’t make him feel any better.
“You’re Gizelle,” Mal said gently. He was careful to keep his motions slow as he gestured to the chair. “Would you like to sit with me?”
She considered him so long that Mal was sure she was going to refuse, then, to his delight, slipped into the chair and folded herself cross-legged upon it. He had expected that it would take several tries before she trusted him enough to have a conversation.
“You’re the one who sent the photographs,” she said. “Tex said bad words about you and Scarlet was very angry.”
She was staring hard at him and Mal thoughtfully returned her unsettling regard. “I did send the photographs,” Mal admitted. “And I’ve discovered more about your parents since then.”
Her breath caught in her throat, all of her longing bare upon her face. “Tell me...” she whispered.
Mal broke their gaze to glance around. The bartender who had gone to ‘get ingredients’ from the kitchen was still gone and the fire ant shifter had wandered down to the pool to try his luck with one of the sunbathers. They were, for the moment, alone on the bar deck.
“Your mother...”
“... Janine...” Gizelle sighed. “I read everything you sent. I can read now.”
“Janine,” Mal agreed. “She was a cockatrice shifter.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Gizelle admitted.
“The cockatrice is a great dragon-like creature shaped a little like a bird. It has withering breath in its mythical shape, and in either form it can metaphorically turn a person to stone.”
“Metaphorically?” Gizelle said sharply.
“That’s when something is similar to something else, but not...” Mal started to explain.
“I know what a metaphor is,” Gizelle said dismissively. “How did she turn people to stone?”
Mal found himself re-evaluating the young woman; it would be easy to assume she was simple, especially given the shy way she moved, but her gaze was sharp and knowing, if unnervingly unwavering.
“Her glance would make people afraid,” Mal told her. “And with a gaze, she could trap them in their own mind, lock them away in a single memory of her choosing. Their hair would turn white and they would be like a statue, lost forever in a moment of time.”
Gizelle drew in a breath, and reached for her temple, twisting her finger into one of the ivory-streaked locks.
“What was she like?” she asked plaintively.
Mal wanted to be honest with her. He wished he could reward her desperate desire for the memory of a mother to love with stories of goodness and heroism.
He thought about the lab reports he’d uncovered, the dozens of people she had destroyed in her escape, the trail of victims she’d left behind. “She was kept a long time in a laboratory, where they studied her.”
“In a cage?” Gizelle said in alarm. “Like me?”
“It might as well have been a cage,” Mal said carefully. “She escaped, but they chased her. And when you were young, she knew they were going to catch you.”
She hadn’t blinked in a long while, her brown eyes wide. “The car accident,” she guessed.
“Yes. She wanted to protect you, but she wasn’t able to, so she did the best thing she could for you.”
“My place,” Gizelle said knowingly, making the leap that had taken Mal months of research and dozens of spy reports to put together.
“She built a fold of time for you, so that you wouldn’t have to be in a cage... even if she couldn’t keep them from capturing you.”
“Why am I not stone? Metaphorically.”
Mal shrugged, and she startled back in her chair because he moved too abruptly. “I don’t know how you work,” he said soothingly. “I... might learn more if you showed it to me.”
Gizelle knit her eyebrows together and regarded him, if possible, more intensely than before.
Was Gizelle the reason that things beneath the island were in such disrepair? Mal didn’t want to believe it and certainly didn’t want to think it was deliberate. But something was working at cross-purposes to him and it was possible that Gizelle’s fractured magic was to blame.
He could force her to take him to that place in her mind, a few words of power and she would have to do what he told her. She was strong-willed and smart, but he was older, stronger... and wise enough to know that overpowering her would shatter the amazing progress she had made since her rescue.
Even if she was the cause of the damage he had discovered, that damage was done. Breaking her further would have only been heaping indignity on top of tragedy. Mal didn’t consider the option more than the time it took to occur to him.
“I’ll show you,” Gizelle said at last. Before Mal could brace himself, he was falling into her eyes.
Descriptions had not prepared him.
A field of tall grass stretched in every direction, thigh-high and moving gently in a wind he couldn’t feel on his skin. Everything was bright and beautiful, every blade of grass was brilliant and whispered in songs against its neighbor. Mal felt like he was bathed in sunlight, but when he looked up, squinting automatically, there was no sun and the sky was velvet black above him.
At his side, fractured from him like beams of color through a prism, was his dragon.
How curious, his dragon said, sitting up and spreading wings that cast no shadows.
Gizelle was standing before them, her hair in long, loose curls. “I made this,” she said proudly. Her gazelle pranced at her side.
“Your mother made this,” Mal corrected absently. “But it is from your memory.” A child’s memory. Incomplete.
Gizelle didn’t take offense. “It is safe here, always,” she said. “And I can run forever.”
Mal didn’t have to run for a horizon to know it would never come.
“How much time will pass, outside of here?” he asked, bending to run his fingers through the grass. He could feel each blade, but it was somehow different than physical touch.
“It depends on how wide the door is open.”
“Ah...” Mal stared up at the sky. He felt like he had the pieces to several different puzzles in his hands. Puzzles with no boxes or pictures. “The door was never meant to be left open.” Time was something even he didn’t trifle with.
Gizelle stared. “But if the door isn’t open, I can’t get out.”
“Your mother did that for you,” Mal said, feeling as if he was on the verge of understanding something profound. “I don’t know how. She wanted you to have a chance at a life outside. But time isn’t meant to be wedged open like that. It could have... consequences.”
“The rain of blood...” Gizelle murmured. “The storm... This is all my fault.”
Mal scowled up at the featureless blackness above. He didn’t know how things fit together yet.
“It doesn’t feel right,” he said, frustrated.
“I never meant to be trouble,” Gizelle said as she raised her tearful gaze to Mal. She was trembling. They were sitting at the table by the bar again as all the noises of the world returned and Mal’s dragon had only a moment to hiss in warning before a fist was connecting to Mal’s jaw.