She broke off abruptly, on the verge of revealing too much. Too wounded, too uncertain of herself, of him, to go on.
Inhaled. Puffed her bangs from her face with an angry breath.
Long moments unfurled and he said nothing.
Gutting the words slowly, she said, "Why didn't Morganna take the elixir of immortality? I need you to answer this."
The silence stretched. She refused to look at him.
"Because immortality," he said finally, slowly, as if each word were being forcibly pried from his mouth and was paining him more deeply than she could possibly know, "and the immortal soul are incompatible. You can't have both."
Gabby jerked and looked at him, horrified.
He slammed his fist into the glove box. Plastic exploded as his hand went right through it. Half the little door dangled for a moment on one hinge, then fell to the floor. His lips curved in a bitter smile. "Not what you expected to hear, eh?"
"You mean, if Morganna had taken it, she would have lost her immortal soul?" Gabby gasped.
"And Darroc thinks humans aren't very bright." Dark sarcasm dripped from his voice.
"So, er... but... I don't get it. How? Does a person, like, have to hand it over or something?"
"Humans have an aura surrounding them that my kind can see," he said flatly. "The immortal soul lights than from within, makes than glow golden. Once a human takes the elixir of life, that soul begins to bum out, until there is nothing of it left."
Gabby blinked. "I glow golden? You mean, right now, as I'm sitting here?"
He gave a bitter little laugh. "More intensely than most."
"Oh." A pause while she tried to collect her thoughts. "So, do they change, the humans who take it?"
"Ah, yes. They change."
"I see." The utter lack of inflection in his reply made her deeply uneasy. She suddenly had no desire to know how they changed. Suspected she wouldn't like it at all. "So then, that means our Books were right about the Tuatha Dé not having souls, doesn't it?"
"Your Books were right about many things," he said coldly. "You know that. You knew it when you took me as your lover. You took me anyway."
"You really don't have a soul?" Of all he'd just told her, she found that the most unfathomable. How could it be? She couldn't get her brain around it, not now that she knew him. Things that didn't have souls were... well, evil, weren't they? Adam wasn't evil. He was a good man. Better than most, if not all, she'd ever met.
"Nope. No soul, Gabrielle. That's me, Adam Black, iridescent-eyed, soulless, deadly fairy."
Ouch, she'd said that to him once. Seemed a lifetime ago.
She stated into the fog for a time, driving on autopilot.
And she tried not to ask it, but she'd just begun to believe that maybe the Tuatha Dé weren't quite so different from humans, only to find out that they were, and she couldn't stop herself. She had to know how different. Precisely what she was dealing with. "Hearts? Do the Tuatha Dé have hearts?"
"No physiological equivalent." Bored-now voice.
"Oh." Upon discovering how erroneous so much of the O'Callaghan lore was, she'd pretty much ejected the bulk of it from her mind, tossed it out with her many preconceptions. But pails of it had been right after all. Big parts.
More driving. More silence.
You're not falling for me, are you, Irish? he'd said.
And she'd had a minor meltdown because that was precisely the problem. She wasn't falling. She'd fallen. As in, past tense. Way past tense. She was hopelessly in love with him. She'd been building a dream future for them inside her head, embellishing it with the tiniest and most tender of details.
Gwen and Chloe had been absolutely right, and Gabby'd known it herself, even then. Just hadn't wanted to admit it. Just as she hadn't wanted to admit that the reason she'd wanted so desperately to know why Morganna had refused the elixir was because Gabby had been secretly hoping that he would fall in love with her, too, she could become immortal, and they could love each other forever. They could have an eternal Happily-Ever-After.
But she wasn't stupid. Ever since he'd told her about Morganna refusing the chance to live forever, she'd known there had to be a catch. Just hadn't known what a whopper of a catch it was.
Immortality and the immortal soul are incompatible.
Though she'd never considered herself a particularly religious person, she was deeply spiritual, and the soul was, well... the sacred essence of a person, the imprint of self, the source of one's capacity for goodness, for love. It was what was reborn again and again on one's journey to evolve. A soul was the inner divine, the very breath of God.
And his elixir of life reeked of Faustian overtones: Here, take this and you can live forever, for the small price of your immortal soul. She could almost smell the acrid brimstone of hellfire. Hear the rustle of unholy contracts scribed on thick, yellowed parchments, signed in blood. Feel the breeze from the leathery flapping of winged Hunters coming to collect.