When Lucy stopped breathing and they knew she was gone, Gabriel and Embry just sat there, watching her inert body. They were both used to death, and they had watched this woman die many times, but seeing it was always hard. It didn’t help that Lucy was younger than all the others. Too young. They couldn’t process the scene in front of them.
It wasn’t until Embry gently closed her eyelids that Gabriel found his voice. “What do we need to do?” he asked, the emotion making it raw.
They split the list in half and went around the property, as well as through their own bag, to find everything they needed to perform the ritual that would grant one of them the terrible power they needed to save her.
Most of the items from the list were scattered around Henry’s office, his ego preventing him from properly hiding them. Vervain was one of the few plants still growing in the garden, but the True Cross proved to be a challenge.
“If he knew we didn’t have it, it can’t just be lying around somewhere. It has to be in the safe or a secure location…” Embry scanned the room for something they might have missed. The safe opened on Margaret’s birthday, which was only the third combination they tried, but it only held passports, money and paperwork.
“How could he know we didn’t find it somewhere else? There are pieces of it all over,” Gabriel tried to control his breathing, but the longer they left Lucy lying there, the less convinced he was that they could bring her back.
“Unless most of them are fake. If you added up all the fragments known as the True Cross you could rebuild a dozen of them,” Embry pointed out.
“If I had something like that, I would never let it out of my sight,” Gabriel got the words out before a flash went off in his head. It was less of a flash and more of a panicked rush to the pile of ash that Henry had become. Sifting his hands through the cursed remnants, he quickly found what he was looking for; a tungsten vial.
“He put it inside himself,” Embry swallowed hard.
“No one knew the cup existed, so he hid it in plain sight, but the coveted True Cross he kept with him at all times,” Gabriel subconsciously brought his hand to the scar from when Embry dug inside him to take out a similar object.
They brought everything back to Lucy and set it up, following the instructions down to the letter, with no room for mistakes.
“Are you ready to do this?” Embry asked once they got down to the final element, the one neither of them was ready to retrieve.
“No, but I’m not ready to lose her either,” Gabriel pointed out.
They turned to Lucy, with Embry holding the encrusted dagger they were supposed to use to cut out her heart. As soon as he got close enough to see her, to feel her skin that was growing cold, but still felt like she was there, he froze. She looked like she was playing her trick on them, pretending to sleep so she could wake up and surprise them.
“I can’t,” Embry said, dropping the knife.
“The one who cuts out her heart is the one who gets the power. It has to be you,” Gabriel argued, not trusting himself with all of that power. It wasn’t something he coveted or was worried he would abuse, but Embry seemed so much more inherently good than he was. The power probably wouldn’t have any altering effects on him.
“Then it has to be you, Gabriel. I can’t,” Embry handed over the knife.
Gabriel looked at the dagger in his hand, then to Lucy, lying so peaceful in front of him, and couldn’t reconcile the two, couldn’t accept what he had to do. You would have to be a heartless monster to cut into her, even if she was dead. He had to remind himself that this was the only way to save her, before closing his eyes, mentally preparing himself to make his incision.
Gabriel opened his eyes and brought the dagger to Lucy’s chest just as Sam woke up and rushed at him, crying “Stop!”
“Keep him back,” Gabriel warned, taking a deep breath. It was hard enough to do this without someone begging him not to.
“The coalescence isn’t a ritual to summon magic, it binds two people together so they can share the magic she already has,” Sam explained what Lucy had told him earlier.
“But her heart…” Embry argued.
“Is not an ingredient. It’s where the magic comes from. To complete the ritual, her heart needs to choose you.”
“You don’t need to cut it out of her chest because it’s already yours,” Embry understood, turning to his oldest friend.
“What do I do?” Gabriel asked, relieved he didn’t need to cause more damage, but terrified they were wrong, that this wouldn’t work.
“Read this and mean it,” Embry said, passing him the paper with Lucy and Annabelle’s birthmark on it. Gabriel didn’t have trouble meaning it, he didn’t even have to pretend that he believed every word, because if this didn’t work, then he had lost her.
“You are the beat of my heart and the air in my lungs. You are the light in my life and the song in my soul,” he began, looking to Embry for confirmation before looking down at Lucy. This was a confession of love, not a summoning of power. “I take you for the love you hold in your heart, and the goodness in your soul. I vow to spend my life caring for you and being true. You are my priority, giving me strength through hard times and sharing my joy in good times. I promise you honesty and patience, to spend each day becoming a better version of myself, and helping you to do the same. From the kindling of Emmanuel’s Betrayal burns the soul of his untouched child. Let the tears of Isis fuel the flames in the arms of Yggdrasil,” Gabriel added the vervain, then took the dagger and used it to cut into his hand so his blood could pour into the cup. “As the blood of the incumbent quells the fire, may the heart of the Bearer of the Crescent Moon originate the Coalescence.”
“I don’t think it worked.” Gabriel said once he said all the words on the paper, thus completing the ritual. He had expected it to wash over him, maybe see a flash of light or fireworks.
“It definitely worked,” Embry assured him, as Lucy’s chest glowed bright, before everything around them was bathed in light.
It seemed like Sam and Embry could no longer see or hear him, as they looked around, trying to find him.
“She said there was a test of worthiness,” he heard Sam telling Embry. That would have been good to know before they wasted their only chance of saving her on him.
Gabriel wondered if he had to prove that Lucy was worthy of being saved, which would be easy, or that he was worthy of saving her, which might be slightly harder. He waited for the test, or some kind of instructions, but there were none. He looked to see if Lucy was waking up, but she was still on the ground a few feet away, not moving.
All of a sudden, Gabriel found himself in a white room he could only describe as soft. He looked around, wondering how he could prove that Lucy deserved to be saved. Or that he was worthy of saving her. Then he heard it.
“Gabriel…” she said it softly from behind him, but he knew that when he turned around, it would be Annabelle. All the girls’ voices were the same. It wasn’t even the accent that gave it away, but no one said his name the way she did.
“Belle,” he turned around slowly, afraid she would disappear if he made any sudden movements. She was as beautiful as he remembered, her eyes looking at him like they always had, like she loved him more than anything in the world, and in her eyes, he could do no wrong.
“My love,” she moved close and put her hand on his cheek. He closed his eyes, thinking he could die now and be happy, but thinking of dying reminded him of Lucy, who was counting on him to save her.
“I came here to save Lucy. She’s dying and I need to bring her back,” he explained. The woman in front of him had died centuries ago, but he believed in the afterlife, that Annabelle had been up there watching him all those years.
“You have the power to bring her back,” Annabelle agreed in a way that told him there was a catch. “But you can only bring back one of us.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, not sure if he understood what she was suggesting.
“You can bring back whichever one you choose. But only one. The spell cannot be redone, so… this is your chance.”
“That means…”
“That we can be together again, my love,” she smiled at him.
“This is how you were going to come back to me?” he asked, taking her face in his hands.
“I hadn’t expected it to take this long,” she looked up at him apologetically. “I had hoped it would be before there were any others, but I knew you would find a way. Now you can bring me back, so we can be together.”
“But Lucy…”
“Lucy is a shadow of the woman you love. I know she was something to look at and I don’t fault you for pretending she was me sometimes, but now you can have the real thing. We can be together forever, Gabriel, isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?” she looked up at him expectantly.
“Yes,” he agreed. “For centuries, all I have wanted was to be with you,” he said, tucking the loose hairs behind her ear so he could look into her eyes. “I never wanted any of the others, not even the one who loved me. She had your face, but she wasn’t you,” he said, as if not using Rosalind’s name would make it less of a betrayal, or make him feel less guilty for all the pain he caused her.
“I’m right here, Gabriel, we can be together, forever, live the life we have always dreamed of.”
“I promised Lucy… I need to save her,” he argued.
“And I promised you I would be back. You promised me you would love me forever,” she was getting upset, which wasn’t like her.
“And I will, Belle, I will love you with my very last breath, but I lost you. You died in front of my eyes and I have spent centuries trying to get over it, but Lucy doesn’t deserve to die. She is kind and sweet and thoughtful and so much stronger than she realizes. She hasn’t lived the life you got to live, finding love and having a beautiful daughter. She was taken long before her time, because I couldn’t save her then, but I am going to save her now.”
“You think you love her?” she sounded surprised and jealous. “You just love the fact that she looks like me. That’s it. That’s all you’re feeling. We can be together forever. All you have to do is let her go.”
“I can’t,” he argued. “I love her, but it is not because she looks like you, it is in spite of it. It breaks my heart to look into her eyes and see yours, but I love Lucy. And although I will always love Annabelle, you can’t be her, because she would never even consider letting me save her over a young girl who has her entire life ahead of her... one of her descendants.”
“If you loved Annabelle, it wouldn’t have even been a dilemma. You would have chosen her without a second thought,” Annabelle said, but she no longer looked like the woman he had spent his entire life loving. Her features got distorted and her anger turned her into a vile version of the woman she pretended to be.
As the Annabelle imposter steamed and grew red, Gabriel said, “I choose to save Lucy.” Knowing not only that it was the right decision, but that he never would have been able to live with himself without her. Annabelle, the real one, would have agreed.
The white room disappeared, and Gabriel found himself back outside the house, with Embry calling after him.
“What is it?” he asked, rushing over.
“She’s alive,” Embry shared.
The wounds were gone, though her clothes were still bloody. Sam’s fingers were at her throat, finding a pulse as they both watched her chest go up and down. Gabriel heard her heart beating and thought it was the loveliest sound he’d ever heard. He looked up to thank God or whatever deity would take credit for it, but all he saw was Annabelle. The real one this time. He was sure of it, because she smiled sadly, as if she was proud of him. Realizing it wasn’t really her and choosing Lucy must have been how he passed the test. Annabelle blew him one last kiss, smiled at him, and then she was gone.