Chapter Fifteen: Gabe Morelli
Present day
Outskirts of Albemarle, NC
There was enough space in the safe house to keep them all comfortable. There were enough weapons in the safe house to keep them all protected. There was enough food in the safe house to keep them all fed. What there was not enough of in the safe house was bourbon. It was fully stocked, yet given the amount of glasses Stef had just knocked back in a row, it might not last her the night.
"Stef, sit down and eat something," Gabe told her from the dining table.
"I don't eat beef bourguignon, Gabe," she replied, shuffling around the living room to the rhythm and blues record Gabe had decided to play as dinner music.
"This isn't beef, it's mushroom," Gabe corrected. "You forced me to alter a perfectly good recipe and now you're not even eating it."
"Save some for me," she said, her shoulders shimmying into a low backwards bend. Her flexibility was impressing everyone at the table, even if her poorly paced dancing represented 'blues' far better than it did 'rhythm'. "I'm having an aperitif."
"You've had five aperitifs," Gabe said, standing to take his empty plate to the kitchen. As he passed her, he removed the needle from the record, bringing her dancing to an end.
Stef shot Gabe a sour expression and then walked over to the dining table to join the others. She sat next to Phoenix, opposite Raid, placed her drink down and spooned two ladles worth of stew from the pot onto her plate and then picked at it with a fork. "Finally a guaranteed vervain-free meal," Stef commented to Raid and Adam. "By this time tomorrow, it'll be completely out of your system."
"And then what?" Adam asked, placing down his cutlery after his final bite. "You compel us again to leave the country? Compel us to forget everything?"
"Not exactly." Deciding she hadn't yet had enough to drink for this conversation, Stef swallowed what was already in her mouth, put down her fork and picked up her drink. "I plan to place a protection spell on you both."
Phoenix nearly choked on his food, placing a napkin over his mouth as he tried to locate his voice mid-cough. "Stef, are you serious? You remember what that involves, right?"
How could she forget? Her eyes flicked up at Raid; her first and only experience of feeding directly from the vein. Stef tried to keep her face as expressionless as possible. "Maybe it's about time I made some sacrifices too."
This alerted Raid. "Sacrifices? What do you mean, sacrifices?"
"Nothing to worry about," Stef said dismissively, glad that Gabe was now returning from the kitchen so she could direct her attention onto him. "So, Gabe, you mentioned you had an encounter with Gideon? How exactly did you persuade him into Splits?"
Gabe walked to the nearby bar area, deciding to pour himself a bourbon before Stef consumed it all. "I didn't need to persuade him into it. He's not happy about the rivalry between vampires and witches and doesn't consider you to be a threat like Dimitri does." Gabe took a seat at the head of the table and a sip from his drink. "Fact is, you've been a vampire-witch for three and a half years and not once have you attempted to use your powers to the detriment of the witches. Gideon understands the position you are in, divided as you are. It wasn't that long ago that the two supernatural councils were created for this region, and he had to sacrifice his relationship with a vampire in order to take the position of leader of the Witches Council. Then, not only did he lose Zakariah in the hope of healing the rivalry between vampires and witches so they could finally return to one another, but the vampires then turned Zakariah into his own rival, as leader of the Vampire Council. It has taken almost a decade for Gideon to forgive them for that."
"Do you think he could ever have enough influence over Dimitri to convince him I'm not a threat?" Stef asked dubiously.
"Unfortunately not," Gabe sighed. "Sometimes I feel, Stefanie, that the only way you are going to be able to convince the witches that you are not a threat is with a demonstration of how threatening you can be. Show them the powers that you haven't been using. Perhaps tap into some of Raid's powers for that."
"Raid's powers?" Stef laughed, shooting a pitying look towards Raid. "You mean his little party tricks?"
Both of Raid's hands slapped flat upon the table. He leaned towards her, eyebrows raised in disbelief. "Excuse me?"
Gabe continued undeterred, "Stef, your powers are very much like Gideon's, in that you can gift or draw upon magic from others –"
"You think all I can manage is party tricks?" Raid spat slowly, his eyes widening in indignation towards Stef.
Gabe's voice was turning into background noise. "– so perhaps if you drew upon Raid's magic –"
Stef ran her tongue across her top teeth, grinning at Raid. "Don't take it to heart. You wouldn't be the first male witch to be lacking in the magic department."
Raid stood up sharply from his seat, his chair scraping back along the floor, his eyes not straying from Stef as she also rose to her feet.
"– you could really prove yourself to the witches." Gabe felt Phoenix's hand pat sympathetically on his arm, a clear indication that he should give up the speech.
Raid pointed a finger accusingly at Stef. "You haven't seen what I can do."
"Raid, don't start." Adam propped his elbows on the table, resting his forehead in his hands, having heard Raid's claims a hundred times before.
"Oh, I'm going to start," Raid insisted, starting to pace around the dining table towards Stef.
Stef rounded the table in the opposite direction, avoiding him but still mocking him. "Oh good, finally your magic is going to start, is it? Just tell me when it does, I might miss it."
One lap around the table accomplished, Raid continued to follow her until he paused at the far end of the table, opposite Gabe. He glared at her standing beside his chair, suddenly angry, realizing how attractive they would look as a couple. That fucking prophecy. "Oh, believe me, Stef, you're not going to know what hit you."
Stef suddenly ran towards Raid at vampire speed, edging between him and the table, her arm flinging out protectively in front of him. Two thumps against her skin and she bit her bottom lip, absorbing the sharp pain. She lowered her arm and yanked the two cutlery knives out from her triceps as Raid regarded her in horror at what he had done. "That was dangerously literal," she whispered to him, her wince turning into a smile as her wounds started to heal. "A good start, but maybe you can try impressing me with something I can't do."
Raid looked into Stef's eyes, a glimmer of pride within them, and he realized she had only rattled him in order to provoke his powers. She was incredibly sneaky and he couldn't help but love her more for it. She wanted to be impressed? That he could do. "Then look behind you," he whispered back, not taking his eyes from her.
Her lips twitched into a curious smile as she slowly turned around to face the table, then immediately gasped. Every water glass on the table had fire dancing from it, each flame varying in colour. The glass carafe in the centre was flickering with a rainbow of colours; colours which not only stayed afloat on top of the water, but dipped and dived beneath the liquid in round, colourful balls of flame. Raid had not just generated fire, he'd set water on fire. Stef's gasp turned into an amazed laugh. "That's something I can't do," she confirmed.
Raid lowered his face until her hair brushed against his cheek. "Are you impressed?" he breathed closely into her ear.
Stef turned back towards him, her wide smile turning into giddy excitement, causing her to bounce eagerly on the spot before charging into the hall. "Wait right there!" she called back to Raid.
Silence remained at the table. Gabe was just as impressed at Raid's magic as Stef was. Adam simply looked shocked. Phoenix was enchanted by the water glass in front of him, watching the different shades of blue glide together as he swiped his fingers quickly through the flames.
"Anyone dare me to drink this?" Phoenix enquired, half-serious.
To Phoenix's disappointment, Raid used his magic to extinguish the flames upon Stef's return. She was carrying a pile of papers wrapped loosely in a leather binder tied together with string. Pages were already beginning to fall out as she pushed plates and cutlery aside in order to dump the papers on the table. She opened the binder, releasing even more pages, which were filled with writing and diagrams. She sighed in satisfaction at the sight of them in front of her, then emitted an "Oh! Oh!" and then quickly dashed upstairs. She was back downstairs before Raid even had time to look through the papers. Stef placed a few gun cartridges on the table and then clapped her hands together in glee, everything she needed now in front of her.
"What is all this?" Raid asked.
With overly-expressive arm movements, and a rapid voice that couldn't hide her excitement, Stef declared, "It's my project – our project now, hopefully. You see, I'd always hoped to do something good with my magic, but could never quite achieve the type of magic I needed. So I tried to make do. I started off by creating a barrier that would stop a gun cartridge passing through it. I'll show you – wait, I need a frame of some kind." She took hold of Raid's hands and placed them a few inches apart, palms facing each other. "Between your hands I've now created an invisible barrier." She took a cartridge from the table, holding it over the barrier, and dropped it. It stopped, suspended in the air between Raid's palms. "It can't pass through, but everything else can." She reached over, took a fork, and dropped the fork from the same location. The fork passed through the barrier and hit the table. After a few seconds, the cartridge did the same. "Okay, I've disabled the barrier, you can remove your hands."
"You planning on making something bullet-proof?" Adam asked, fascinated but confused by her demonstration.
"Yes," Stef confirmed. "Schools."
"Schools?" Raid sought to clarify.
"To prevent school shootings," Stef explained before immediately launching into another hasty description of the process. "I can ward schools so ammunition can never be taken into a school, but there's a problem. I can't ward schools from the carrier of the ammunition as well. So anyone attempting to enter a school carrying ammunition that isn't loose – say they have it strapped to their chest – the moment they enter, the carrier will pass through the doors, but the ammunition won't, causing the ammunition to rip through their body, killing them instantly."
"That's a problem? Or a solution?" Raid asked, intrigued. "Because to me it sounds like a solution."
Stef gave him a stern look. "I'm not going to create a spell that's responsible for any deaths, Raid."
Raid took her in, nodding, recognizing a level of kindness and compassion within her that didn't match his own. Casting his eyes downwards, he swept his hands across the papers. Notes, research, theories, spells, designs, diagrams; all work that had accumulated over many months, possibly years. "This is really important to you, isn't it?"
"Yes," she admitted. "It became even more important when I learned that the young girl who lives with me was affected by this as a child. She hasn't seen the best of humanity. So much faith lost in so many, by the few who took it."
"You really think I can help with this?"
Stef nodded eagerly. "Fire's a chemical reaction, Raid. It might take a long time to find out if we can simply disable the reaction that occurs in a cartridge, but we can start from there."
Raid looked up towards Adam, Phoenix and Gabe, an authoritative tone building. "Then let's clear the table and the two of us can get started." Whatever was important to Stef was important to him. If she needed his help, he wasn't wasting any time.
It didn't take long for the five of them to clear everything away and for Stef and Raid to settle down at the table, her paperwork now taking up most of the space in front of them. At first Gabe joined them, ready to provide them with any additional knowledge they needed. However, the moment he confessed to having a laptop and internet connection, suddenly his role was made redundant; not that he protested too much given how late it was becoming.
Phoenix was the first to retire to his bedroom, with Gabe and Adam soon following behind. When Gabe reached the mezzanine, he looked down at the table where Stef and Raid sat, Stef laughing and teasingly pulling up Raid's eyelids as he pretended he couldn't keep them open any longer. Adam stopped beside him, following Gabe's gaze.
"This prophecy, Adam," Gabe pondered, "have you ever had romantic feelings for Stef?"
"Can't say I have," Adam replied.
"Interesting," Gabe commented to himself, continuing to stare down at the couple. "One less contender."
"I'm sorry, what?" Adam exclaimed incredulously. "Are you saying you have feelings for her?"
Gabe raised his head, reflecting quickly on his words, realizing how they must have sounded. "Oh, heavens, no! Not in that way, never."
Adam studied Gabe for a moment; he appeared genuine. "So how did you get involved in all of this?"
Gabe took a moment to answer. "My blood was in Stefanie's system."
"How?" Adam continued to pry.
Gabe was starting to feel uncomfortable. It was a peculiar feeling for him. "Once when Stefanie was young – too young to remember – she had an accident. She caught her hand in a drawer, I believe, bent one finger terribly out of shape that even if it were to heal naturally she would have been left with scar tissue and potential future complications. Her screams were so loud, she was in so much pain. Her father asked me if I would heal her with my blood. She wasn't in any danger and the blood would have been out of her system in no time." Gabe looked back down at Stef as he struggled to find the words to continue. "Well, it did heal her. Briefly. Then it made her extremely sick. We discovered that she was allergic to vampire blood. I guess it has something to do with having two parents cured of vampirism. As she grew older – became more independent, took more risks – I made the very poor decision to secretly provide her with regular tiny doses of vampire blood. Not enough to make her sick, but enough to hopefully build up a tolerance so that, one day, if she needed more blood to heal, it wouldn't endanger her."
Adam exhaled heavily in sympathy. "Did she ever forgive you for that?"
"Not entirely," Gabe admitted. "But she's trying."
A cheer came from Stefanie below as Raid managed to generate small colourful fireworks within his cupped hands. She jumped from her seat, squeezing him around the shoulders in excitement.
"If she's going to fall in love with anyone as part of the prophecy, it's going to be him," Gabe observed.
Adam shook his head, feeling all the disappointment that Raid himself was no doubt feeling. "Not possible," he told Gabe before turning and heading towards his assigned bedroom. "Raid was never part of the ritual."