by Zoe Chant
Scarlet didn’t look particularly angry when Gizelle let her in. Her face was carefully neutral and her smile for Gizelle was gentle. But Gizelle could feel the cold little prickles everywhere and every potted plant in the cottage seemed to shiver.
“I have something for you,” Scarlet said.
To Gizelle’s surprise, she was not speaking to Conall, but to her.
The resort’s owner put a manilla envelope in her eager hands. “Your name is Jessica Ambler. You were born twenty-eight years ago on August third.”
Gizelle froze, her fingers just holding the envelope.
Conall rose and walked swiftly to her side.
“What is this?” he asked when Gizelle couldn’t. He put his hand on her shoulder and shuddered.
“I received it in the last mail run,” Scarlet said, still looking at Gizelle. “A New York postmark, but no return address. Some of the documents are copies of confidential forms from Tony’s agency, but he swears he didn’t send it.”
“Who is Tony?” Conall demanded. “What agency?”
That earned him an appraising look from Scarlet while Gizelle continued to stare at the envelope that her life had narrowed down to.
“Shifter Affairs,” Scarlet told him. “It’s a quiet branch of the US government. Tony was a guest here, working undercover. He’s the one who brought Beehag’s zoo to light and helped shut it down.”
“I... had a name?” Gizelle shivered, and was glad for the weight of Conall’s hand on her shoulder.
“Let’s sit,” Scarlet suggested, waving a hand towards the deck, where a round table had a handful of chairs around it.
They spread the papers out, and Gizelle stared at the pictures, curled up on her chair with her knees up tight to her chest.
They were photos of a family; a curly-haired toddler being held by a dark-haired man, then standing proudly holding the hands of a smiling woman. The next photo showed a splay-legged gazelle fawn shaking off a diaper.
“Your parents,” Scarlet explained. “Your father was a gazelle shifter like you are. Your mother is noted as possibly a mythical shifter, but nothing was officially known.”
“I... had a mother.” Gizelle felt dizzy and distant. “A mother of my own.” Conall offered a hand. She stared at it a moment, then put her own into it, weaving her fingers into his.
“They died in a car accident. No one could ever prove it wasn’t an accident, but you were never found afterwards.” Scarlet moved another paper over the photos. “Then there was this.”
Conall frowned at it. Then he squeezed Gizelle’s fingers until she squeaked.
“What is it?” she asked anxiously.
“A copy of a bill of sale,” Conall said reluctantly. “For exotic livestock. I presume that is Beehag’s signature.”
Scarlet had clearly read through the material previously, familiar enough with it that she could show Conall and Gizelle the relevant parts of a sea of pages full of careful handwriting on grid paper.
“Subject Seven, in particular, is mentioned as a gazelle shifter, and the date on her entry to the system matches the bill of sale,” she said calmly. “It appears that Beehag was researching the key to shifting. He appears to have been looking for a serum to keep shifters in animal form, to suppress their human instincts and make them... biddable. In most of the subjects, this backfired, turning them human instead.”
“I thought Beehag was just a collector,” Conall growled.
“I think that was his primary purpose,” Scarlet agreed with deceptive serenity. “There is mention of a client or possibly a friend with ‘mutual interests’ who was driving some of this research. The name Corbin is mentioned in a few private letters.” She shuffled through and indicated them.
“Who could even have access to all these documents?”
“I had a... number?” Gizelle asked quietly.
“It appears so,” Scarlet said, ignoring Conall. “You puzzled the scientists. They tested you quite extensively. Their final diagnosis is that you went feral at some point. There are a few notes that they may have started with too young a subject, and a few that you had unexpected blood chemistry. Maybe it was the drugs they gave you, maybe it was something from your mother’s side; there’s a note that they were looking for basilisk blood. One of the scientists mentioned you came in with a head injury, and the brain can do amazing things to compensate if it has to. The special things you can do—it’s probably a combination of all these things. I don’t know if we’ll ever know for sure.”
Her gazelle was there at her back, nuzzling protectively. Gizelle didn’t have to be here, she didn’t have to remember, she could run from this.
Her gazelle had always been there, Gizelle thought fondly. Then it occurred to her: those years in the cage that she had no memory of. Her gazelle had been there.
But not with her.
Instead of her.
You remember, she told her gazelle. You remember everything. So I don’t have to.
Spiral horns dipped in gentle acknowledgment.
There were no memories buried in her head, waiting to spring out and surprise her. There were no terrible revelations lurking in her mind to dread. She had been asleep through all of it, sheltered and protected.
Like Jenny’s otter had been, before Jenny could shift.
Gizelle felt like a band around her chest had been released.
Everyone’s stories of the zoo had been so harrowing, and everyone looked at her so nervously when they spoke of it, that Gizelle had unknowingly been bracing herself for all the awful things to someday come flooding back.
Now she knew they never would.
Was it terrible? she had to ask her gazelle.
The gazelle’s response was almost a shrug and Gizelle’s relief was complete. Animals lived now, not in their memories. Everything had happened long ago, and she didn’t have to worry about it bubbling up someday and drowning her.
Gizelle let her legs unfold before her and drew all of the paper into a tidy pile in front of her. “Thank you,” she said to Scarlet sincerely.
Some of Scarlet’s icy anger thawed into sorrow. Sorrow for Gizelle. “I’m sorry I didn’t have better news for you. More answers. Happier answers. Especially at Christmas.”
Gizelle smiled slowly, looking between Conall, who was clearly holding his elk back from a useless trampling rampage in her defense, and Scarlet. “You don’t have to feel bad for me,” she said reassuringly. “I’m glad. I know now. I know my parents loved me.”
“You don’t feel cheated?” Conall asked, clearly feeling cheated for her. “You spent your childhood in a cage.”
“I didn’t,” Gizelle insisted. “I wasn’t really Gizelle then; I didn’t have to be. I was only a gazelle.” She shared her wordless gratitude for that with her gazelle, and closed her eyes to share a soft nosebump in her mind.
Gizelle opened her eyes and looked at Conall. “I wouldn’t trade having some sort of normal childhood to possibly not have you, to not have this place, and this life.”
Conall made a little indecipherable noise and squeezed her hand more tightly than ever. Gizelle could hear his elk snort, but it was a settled sort of snort. They are ours forever forward, the elk told Conall, calming. They are ours now.
“Wait,” Gizelle said, suddenly recognizing something else. “Wait, you said when I was born.”
“August third,” Scarlet said with a nod. “You’re twenty-eight years old.”
Gizelle slowly grinned. “I have a birthday! It will be like Christmas twice but just for me!”
Conall laughed at that, a relieved laugh, and Scarlet smiled and even gave a little chuckle.
“Do you want us to call you Jessica?” Scarlet offered, standing and brushing imaginary wrinkles from her skirt.
Gizelle shook her head. “Jessica and I started the same,” she tried to explain. “Just like our names start with the same sound. But we’re different people now. I’m Gizelle. There’s... not a lot of me if you count thi
ngs by linear memory, but this is the me that I am. She would have been someone very different.”
Scarlet nodded her acceptance briskly, but her eyes were soft and kind. “Very well.” With a nod, she turned to leave, then paused.
Her gaze was all for Conall then, and it was much less soft and kind. “I need a moment of your time, please. Privately.”
Conall looked at Gizelle, who met his gaze steadily. “I want to look at the pictures,” she said, giving him a smile.
He wanted to hover, Gizelle could tell, but he glanced at Scarlet’s complicated face and nodded. “I’ll be right back,” he promised, laying a kiss on her head.
Then Gizelle was alone on the porch, with photographs of her family.
She didn’t care about the papers from the zoo, shuffling at once to the pictures of her parents.
Her parents.
It was a dizzying idea.
She’d had a father. She’d had a mother.
Neither of them was well-framed in the photographs; the focus had been on Gizelle. Only half of her mother’s smiling face showed in the picture, and her father was looking away.
Gizelle gathered them up close to herself and hugged them gently. Scarlet had given her the best Christmas present of all, she was sure.
Then she thought about the shining piles of wrapping and bows waiting inside, and she wasn’t sure after all.
Christmas was amazing.
Chapter 56
Conall grinned at Scarlet as they closed the porch door. “I presume they came through safely?” His last gift for Gizelle would explain Scarlet’s secrecy, and her obvious irritation.
“Quite,” Scarlet said tightly.
“I’ll pay any damages or expenses,” Conall said carelessly.
“Believe me, I’ve already got a list in progress,” Scarlet agreed. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.” She handed him a letter, and a brochure.
Conall looked at the brochure first, his eyebrows knitting in confusion. “A mental institution for shifters?” He looked up at Scarlet suspiciously. “Did my mother give you this?” he asked, anger already rising in his chest.
But Scarlet shook her head. “It was in the envelope with the rest of Gizelle’s information,” she said.
Conall gave her a thoughtful look. “My mother does have connections,” he suggested.
Scarlet tapped the letter, and let Conall read it without trying to make conversation he wouldn’t be able to follow.
It was from the director of the mental institution, and it was a compelling argument for Gizelle’s treatment at the facility. It was addressed to Scarlet specifically, and diplomatically questioned her capability for Gizelle’s care and the danger that she posed. But it somehow didn’t sound like his mother’s handiwork.
“This doesn’t mention me,” he finally realized.
“I don’t think they know about you,” Scarlet agreed, with a thoughtful nod. “And to be frank, if I had gotten this a few weeks earlier...”
She didn’t have to finish. The wording in the letter was very clever, complimenting Scarlet and acknowledging her care at the same time it cast just enough doubt on her capacity for truly helping Gizelle.
“A hostile takeover,” Conall said thoughtfully, looking over it again.
He looked up in time to see Scarlet’s brow furrow in confusion, but not in time to catch her words. “Sorry, what?”
“What do you mean, a hostile takeover?”
Conall considered for only a moment, before admitting, “Your staff, they’ve been getting offers. Good offers, amazing even. Like someone’s trying to poach everyone away from you. Even Gizelle, apparently.”
Scarlet’s face went dark with anger and her green eyes snapped. If she had been holding something, Conall was sure it would have been broken and he wondered if the change of pressure around them was his imagination.
“Beehag,” she said. Her clenched teeth made lipreading difficult. “He’s dying to have our contract canceled. And he’d have access to his father’s records, even if they’d been classified. That bastard is smarter than I’ve given him credit for.”
“If it’s any consolation, none of your staff are accepting the offers,” Conall told her, a little fearfully.
That did seem to settle her. The pressure eased and Scarlet seemed to soften slightly. “I appreciate you telling me,” she said gravely.
For a moment so brief that Conall doubted his own eyes, she looked vulnerable, tired, and lonely—then she was drawing herself up, face serene again. “The other matter...” she said coolly.
Conall had to smile despite himself, remembering. “I will make it worth your while.”
“Indeed.” Scarlet raised an eyebrow at her. “I will bring them by on Christmas morning.”
Conall was almost as excited for Christmas as Gizelle was.
Epilogue
The cottage was littered with wrapping paper and filled with laughter.
Gizelle was lying on the bed, surrounded by gifts. New dresses were draped across her feet, and an array of hairbrushes and jeweled combs and candies in silk boxes were scattered across the comforter. The bedside table was completely covered in bottles of every kind of hair conditioner Conall had been able to find online that would ship internationally, and several kinds of spray-in detangler.
There were leaning piles of books in a range of difficulties: lush, illustrated volumes of classics, adult-learning writing workbooks, and several instruction guides to braiding and styling long hair. There were two kits of art supplies, open to show a dazzling array of colors and mediums, and a selection of sketchbooks and canvases.
Gizelle was hugging a tablet to her chest and wearing a pair of studio-quality earphones.
“Books that read to you,” she crowed in delight. “Hundreds of them.”
“I had your friends help me pick them,” Conall told her, leaning over a precarious pile of presents to show her how to navigate. “There are folders for each person with the books they chose for you.”
“I’m going to listen to every one of them,” Gizelle sighed rapturously.
“You aren’t even going to miss me when I go to Boston,” Conall teased.
Gizelle sat up, pulling the headphones off. “Of course I will,” she said in sudden seriousness. “A thousand books wouldn’t fill that emptiness. Every second will try to be forever and I will have to remember how to run without legs.”
Realizing that his teasing had missed its mark, Conall cleared a spot next to her to sit and took her hands. Someone barely in range of hearing was singing a Christmas carol loudly and off-key, but he couldn’t bring himself to be irritated about their lack of pitch.
“I will come back,” he reminded her. “You have a phone now, and anyone will help you text me whenever you want. I will video call you every evening that the Shifting Sands connection is good enough to make it work and I will think of you every moment that I’m gone and I will come back as soon as I can.”
“And then you’ll stay forever?” she asked plaintively, dark eyes like pools to eternity.
“Forever is an arbitrary point in time,” Conall reminded her. “And you’ve already been there. But next time you go, I will be at your side.”
Gizelle looked at him skeptically, eyes narrow. “Don’t be weird,” she told him, with a slow smile blooming on her expressive mouth. “That’s my job here.” She lay back among the gifts again. “I love everything about Christmas,” she said with satisfaction. “Everything except the figgy pudding, which was as awful as Breck said it would be.”
“I like it,” Conall protested. “It’s rich.”
“You like coffee, too,” Gizelle reminded him. Then she sat bolt upright. “Your Christmas present!” she said in alarm. “I still have to give you yours!”
She somehow managed to navigate the heaps of gifts and untangle herself from the earphones without toppling any of the piles, and she returned around the bed to drop her gift into Conall’s waiting hands.
Gizelle had wrapped it thoroughly, in several layers of clashing color, and she watched him peel through them and bounced on her toes. The weight and density of the package made him guess what it would be before the final layer came off and he opened the box.
“This is the lock from Neal’s cage,” he said, turning it over in his hands. “Are you sure you want to give me this? It is the heart of your hoard.”
“You are the heart of my hoard,” Gizelle said, giving it a reverent caress and then closing his fingers around it. “I don’t need it to anchor me anymore.”
“I will carry it everywhere with me,” Conall promised, only belatedly wondering what airport security was going to think of the lump of metal; it had enough heft to be a serious weapon. He smiled at Gizelle. “I love it,” he assured her. “I love you.”
Gizelle let him draw her into his arms as he put the lock down on the bed beside them. “I love you,” she breathed.
Then her mouth was on his and her hands were cradling his face. He put arms around her and wondered where on the bed it would be safe to lay her down.
He had just decided to take her to the second bedroom when a knock on the door reminded him. “There’s more!” he said, breaking the kiss.
“More than love?” Gizelle asked in confusion, drawing away to look at him.
“More Christmas presents,” Conall said, grinning.
“More than this?” Gizelle exclaimed in wonder, gesturing around the crowded room. “What more could there be?”
Conall stood, lifting Gizelle and setting her on feet away from him. “Come see,” he said.
She scampered to the door with him. “It’s Scarlet,” she told him. “But she feels confusing.”
Conall opened the door, and true to Gizelle’s prediction, it was Scarlet.
She had company.
“Take them,” the resort manager said through clenched teeth. “Just take them.”
“Kittens!” squealed Gizelle. “Conall, you got me kittens!”