Understanding my vague question, he answered with, "They are not my blood children." His eyes glanced at Starla, attached to his arm, and Jacen and Jordan behind us. "The title is honorific, I suppose." He shrugged and indicated us to keep walking. As we approached a set of marble staircases, leading down into even more levels, he continued with his speech. I was grateful for it. His deep voice was a soothing distraction from the feeling that we were headed towards the dungeons.
"All of my actual children have converted and moved on, to start their own nests around the world. I miss them, but I can sense them through the bloodline, and take comfort in that." He looked down at Starla, fatherly pride on his face. "As for my new family, well, I take in what mixed I can, giving them a home and a safe place to changeover, if they still need to. They are free to come and go as they like, but many have decided to stay here with me. Safety in numbers." He looked back at Teren and me. "They gave me the appellation, out of respect."
Starla grinned back at us, blowing a big bubble. With a slight clearing of his throat, Gabriel held his hand out to her. Pouting like a child being reprimanded unfairly by a parent, she spit her gum in his hand. Jacen behind us laughed softly and Starla shot him a glare. While not technically related, the two sure acted like squabbling siblings.
As we descended to a hallway, deep under the main level we'd started out on, I noticed that the luxuries continued on even down here. Plush carpet replaced the granite flooring from upstairs and I nearly wanted to shuck off my shoes and let my aching toes sink into the fibers. The hallway we were walking down had several closed doors in it, almost like a dorm. I wondered if we'd traveled down into the living area of the mixed. I wondered if the full vampires stayed down her too, but while dark and underground, it wasn't as lightproof as Halina's rooms. Maybe they were the next floor down. As we padded along, Starla still pouting, Teren stepped up to walk beside Gabriel. There was enough room in that hallway that I was able to stay beside him, and the four of us walked along.
With a mixture of wonder and respect in his tone, Teren asked, "If I may, sir, how old are you?" I widened my eyes curiously at that. If Jacen was over one-twenty, and deferred to this man, he must be even older.
Gabriel smiled, a calm wisdom in his emerald eyes that only decades of experience can give you. It was still odd to me to see so much life experience in the eyes of people who looked younger than me. With a shrug he stated, "Six hundred eleven."
Teren's jaw fell open, as did mine. A low whistle escaped my lips before I could stop it. Wow. He'd been around for the actual medieval times. I couldn't even begin to comprehend everything he'd seen.
He smiled softly, and for just a moment, I saw the weariness behind his eyes. Wisdom did come with a price. As Alanna had told me once, immortality wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
"Oh," Teren said softly, looking like was trying to process that as well. Nearly in a whisper he added, "I wasn't even sure if we would live that long." He looked down when he said that, his ignorance on his own kind seemingly embarrassing him.
Gabriel put a hand on his shoulder. "There is much that you don't know." Teren looked up at him as Gabriel sighed, almost regretfully. "I sort of blame myself for that." Teren scrunched his face, confused by that statement. Gabriel sighed again. "Your nest came to my attention a few years ago." My jaw dropped way open at that. My teeth popped out too, before I embarrassingly pulled them back in. Only Starla noticed, giggling at me.
Gabriel continued, looking chagrined at Teren's surprise. "You all looked so peacefully content at your little ranch. A blissfully ignorant little family." He smiled with a corner of his mouth and shook his head. "I didn't want to interfere."
Teren started sputtering and ran a hand through his hair. "We didn't know...we thought we were alone. Why...? How...?" Calming himself, he took a deep breath, exhaling slowly as well. "We would have been honored to meet you. You should have come by."
Gabriel sighed again and looked forward. We approached a 'T' in the hallway and he turned the group to the right. Behind us, I could hear Jacen and Jordan silently following. They listened, but didn't interrupt their master. I had no idea what they felt about the matter. Starla seemed...bored. She had released herself from Gabriel's side and was examining her nails again buffing out a spot with her thumb while we continued down yet another long hallway.
Gabriel glanced over at Teren with the corner of his eye. "Well, you all seemed to have everything under control." His eyes flicked over to me, and then my stomach. "Until you started knocking over every vampire nest you could find." His eyes went back to Teren's, his eyebrows raised. "Annoying our brethren, is not a good way to remain unnoticed, or alive."
Teren looked down at the floor for a second before raising his eyes back to Gabriel, an almost defiant look on his face. "I had no choice. I didn't know how else to find you."
Gabriel smirked at the look on his face and then nodded. We finally approached the end of the hall. Looking behind us, behind Jacen and Jordan, I could see that the hallway we'd been walking down wasn't a straight one, it had angled some, and I could no longer see much of where we'd been. That thought didn't exactly please me.
Twisting back to the front, I took in the set of double doors before us. The handles were gold, with a gold inlay around the trim, highlighting a red octagonal pattern set into each panel. Teren swallowed as Gabriel smiled and pulled down the handle. I wasn't sure what we were walking into, but I was sure it held the answers we were looking for. I clutched Teren's arm, attaching to his side.
Gabriel swung open the door and we looked into a room that was set up like...well, a laboratory. Confused, Teren and I entered the odd-for-a-mansion room. It was straight out of a horror movie and I even found myself looking around for the mad scientist. All I found was Gabriel, walking up to some steaming beakers and sniffing them. Smiling, he turned down a burner under one. Jordan walked into the room and joined Gabriel's side, examining a batch of some pinkish fluid resting in vials under a heat lamp. He seemed to eye the room with the casual air of someone who came down here a lot. Jordan probably assisted the ancient mixed...in whatever they were doing down here.
Jacen stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. Instantly, I felt the difference. Teren and I glanced at each other and I could tell he sensed it to - this room was soundproof. And not just any sort of soundproof, this room was vampire-soundproof. That was saying something. As the background noise of people rustling, low conversations, objects moving, and keyboards clacking, instantly silenced, my nerves spiked a bit. The smell of chemicals, steam, propane, and the faint sweetness of blood in the air, suddenly seemed cloying.
Gabriel looked up from a pot of liquid to look at me, hearing my reaction. "Don't fret, child. I find that the silence helps me think." He smiled, looking tired again. "Sometimes, a little quiet is nice."
I nodded and tried to relax my body, exhaling slowly. Jacen looked around the room after closing the door. He did not look like he came down here very often, and his eyes were interested, but obviously confused. He didn't know what this stuff was, anymore than I did. Starla seemed to have a better idea.
She walked up to Gabriel and sat on a stool in front of him. Lifting her arm, she exposed the inside of her elbow to him. Teren and I walked up to them, still confused. Gabriel held his hand out to Jordan, who handed him a pink vial. The stuff vaguely looked familiar to me, but I wasn't sure why. We watched in silent awe as Gabriel stuck a syringe in the vial, extracted a small amount, and then injected it into Starla's arm. She flinched a little, but didn't seem overly concerned about the matter.
My mouth dropped open again, but it was Teren who spoke. "What was that?" There was a strange edge of apprehension to his voice.
Gabriel handed the empty syringe to Jordan, patting Starla's arm as she hopped off the stool. Not directly answering Teren, he said, "When my heart was still beating, my human wife and I had three children." He smiled, looking at the floor for a moment. "The two girls grew up, had children of their own, converted, and then left my care." His reminiscent smile evaporated and he raised his eyes to Teren's. "My son..." He swallowed and I could clearly see the ancient sadness bubbling in him. "He didn't survive the conversion. The hunger consumed him..."
He sighed and looked down. I swallowed and clutched Teren's arm tighter. I peeked up as Teren looked back at me, his jaw tight. He'd nearly been consumed by that hunger too. Picking up a full vial, Gabriel began shifting it back and forth in his hand, the liquid inside sloshing from one side to the other. "After my wife passed, I spent the next five hundred years, trying to find a way to stop the conversion."
His eyes left the liquid to look back to Teren. "To stop the human side of our kind from prematurely dying. To let the vampire have a choice in when and where, they go through their conversion. I want them to have children when they want to, to have a heartbeat as long as they want to, to enjoy humanity as long as they want to. I want to give our kind a choice - to be reborn as an undead creature, or live and die a purely human life. A choice my son...never had."
Teren took an excited step forward, and I could tell he was itching with the restraint to not scream questions at this man. Gabriel held the vial up to him as he took another step forward. Teren released my hand and grabbed the vial, holding it like it was somehow sacred. Gabriel continued, while Teren and I looked confused. "I concocted this. It's a derivative of our mixed blood." In a whisper, he said, "Among other things, it slows the vampiric blood inside us, eases the strain placed on the human heart, allowing it to beat for much longer than normal."
Teren's eyes snapped up. "Does it work?"
Gabriel glanced over at Starla, now standing beside him. "I haven't been able to test it on as many living-mixed as I'd like, but Starla here has been taking it for the past six months or so." She grinned at Gabriel's affectionate look and leaned back on her hip.
I frowned. "But she's only twenty two. You won't really know if it works on her for years." Starla frowned at me bursting her prideful bubble.
Gabriel smiled, but didn't answer me. He turned to Jordan and in a not audible for human level, said, "Bring Samuel here."
Jordan nodded and blurred from the room. Teren and I watched him leave, our brows still scrunched. Finally Teren shook his head. "This...may save her?" His eyes were watering; there was so much hope in them.
Gabriel sighed. "To be honest, I don't know. The treatment doesn't take for everyone." He raised an eyebrow at me as my shoulders slumped. "But, then again, you lived through a vampire attack." He smiled widely, pointing at the telltale scar on my neck. "The fact that you are not dead and gone is quite astounding, my dear."
I smiled wryly as Teren and I exchanged a brief glance. Teren smiled softly just as the door to the lab opened again. Amid the rush of noises reentering the room, I heard a definite heartbeat adding to mine and Starla's. Curious, I looked over. My jaw dropped straight down to the floor. Tall and dark Jordan was walking into the room with a man who was clearly older, approaching his forties, if not already there. The smell of the man, foreign, yet with a familiar note that I was coming to associate with partial vampires, filled me, and I stared at him in awe.