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 pr
otect 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.