Page 39 of Petrified

“Then explain all that time.”

He circles the desk slowly, keeping enough distance that Rowan doesn't move between us. “Chameleons have been misunderstood for generations because concealment is the most obvious expression of the designation. We hide. We imitate. We survive by becoming difficult to identify, but the old records suggested that mimicry was only one response to danger.”

I fold my arms. “And you couldn’t prove it with yourself.”

“My abilities plateaued decades ago.”

Amand’s attention sharpens. “So you needed another one.”

Gerald looks at him, then back at me. “I needed a Chameleon whose designation was still developing.” He keeps speaking before I can answer. “You didn't merely inherit camouflage. When ordinary camouflage became insufficient, you progressed into complete visual displacement. When scent recognition was insufficient in the unicorn investigation, you learned to reproduce a foreign designation and eventually its physical presentation. When the gargoyle used environmental stone adaptation to defeat your usual tracking method, your designation responded by reproducing the limestone closely enough for you to understand how his concealment worked.”

“And when Rowan was dying, I learned how to break petrification.”

“You learned how to counter hostile magic affecting your bonded unit.”

Rowan goes rigid beside me as Gerald looks between the three of us. “That is what makes the bond significant. Basilisk venom should have remained toxic. Your body incorporated it instead. Continued exposure changed the threshold your designation could tolerate, while separation destabilized you because your physiology had begun treating their magic as necessary. Proximity restores that stability, and contact with both of them strengthens it further.”

I feel Amand’s fingers brush mine and deliberately close my hand around his before Gerald can keep talking about us like a chemical formula.

“So that’s what you want,” I say, looking at him until the shape of it finally settles into something I can understand. “You want to know how far I can go as long as Rowan and Amand keep me stable enough to survive whatever you put in front of me.”

Gerald’s expression barely changes. “I want to know whether a fully developed Chameleon can adapt to any magical threat it encounters. Not simply mimic it, but develop whatever response survival requires.”

“Meaning what?” I shift closer to Rowan without taking my eyes off Gerald. “I copy something if copying gets me through it, block it if that works better, neutralize it if one of them is dying?”

“In some circumstances, yes.” Gerald folds his hands loosely in front of him, still maddeningly calm. “Your responses have not been identical because the threats have not been identical. Your designation appears to choose the adaptation most useful to the problem in front of it.”

I laugh without humor and shake my head. “So your dream project is a Chameleon who can eventually walk into almost any designation and come out with an answer to it.”

“My interest is survival, Leviathan.”

“My interest is not being repeatedly almost killed so you can redefine survival afterward.” I tighten my fingers around Rowan’s hand when Gerald’s mouth hardens. “And Rowan is alive because I got lucky enough to develop the right fucking thing before his lungs finished turning to stone. You can call that adaptation all you want. I call it getting there before Rowan died.”

“You adapted because the threat required it.”

“That is the same sentence with nicer shoes.” Rowan’s thumb moves once across the back of my hand, and I hold on harder than I mean to because another thought has been sitting underneath everything Gerald said about studying me before Essence. The more I look at him, the less I want to ask it, which is exactly why I do.

“How far back did you go when you started digging into me?” I ask. “Because you keep talking like Ginny was when I became interesting, not when you first found something.”

Gerald doesn't answer immediately. His silence is small, but it changes something in my chest before he ever opens his mouth.

“Far enough to find your father.”

For a second, the room loses every other sound.

My father died when I was fifteen, and I spent years knowing something about the story everyone gave me was wrong. The man they called a rogue werewolf had amber eyes, blood on his clothes, and a magical signature I could not name, but I knew what a wolf smelled like because my father had been one. Whatever killed him had not been.

I stare at Gerald until my throat starts feeling too tight. “What does my father have to do with any of this?”

Instead of answering immediately, Gerald crosses back to his desk and opens the locked drawer Rowan and Amand searched earlier. Rowan shifts beside me, ready before I even register the movement, but Gerald only removes an older folder and places it on the desk between us.

I recognize my father’s name before I get close enough to touch it.

“You had a file on him.” The words come out flatter than I expect, and that is probably the only reason I manage the next question without raising my voice. “Tell me what the man who killed him actually was.”

Gerald opens the folder and turns one of the reports toward us. “A Veilborn. Extremely rare, predatory, and capable of masking its natural magical signature while carrying a false designation after prolonged exposure to another supernatural. The man arrested for your father’s murder had been presenting as a werewolf long enough that everyone around him accepted the false signature as genuine.”

My attention drops to the report, but I'm seeing a precinct instead. Amber eyes. Blood. Adults speaking over me because I was fifteen and grieving and therefore apparently incapable of knowing what I smelled.