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.
Chapter 8
Scarlet was beginning to suspect that the guest had a financial interest in the soaps they were trying to convince her to stock when she heard a wordless roar of rage, the sound of a punch, and then there was the crashing music of toppling chairs and tables and breaking glass.
“You must excuse me!” she called back to the guest, fleeing for the stairs.
She knew that Mal was in the thick of it, but there were people all along the way and she was concentrating so hard on getting there swiftly using her feet that she was utterly unprepared for the scene she found.
Mal was lying in the middle of a tumble of chairs and tables and broken glasses, one arm flung up over his bloodied face. Conall was holding a hysterically crying Gizelle in his arms, snarling defensively at everyone nearby. Tex was looming over Mal with a baseball bat, demanding, “What did you do to her?!” Graham, hands curled into fists, was at the far side blocking any escape and Travis was sprinting up the stairs from the pool deck.
Scarlet waded in with a snarl, flinging Tex aside with more force than she meant to. “Did I not just finish instructing you not to harass him? Now what the hell is going on here?”
“He wasn’t hurting me,” Gizelle sobbed. “He was explaining me.”
Conall, arms wrapped firmly around her, glared at Scarlet. “She was crying,” he growled without apology.
Tex, rubbing the arm that Scarlet had grabbed, sheepishly lowered his baseball bat. “I got here as Conall was landing a punch, I just assumed that Gizelle had been hassled...”
Scarlet turned to where Mal was lowering his arm. The bloody lip did not make him any less handsome, to her irritation. “Were you bothering Gizelle?”