Chapter 8

Silver answered his cell and listened to whoever was talking at the other end of the line. Gabriel waited patiently for him to finish his call. Just how were they going to get to finding out how it was that his 'gift' had deserted him? Silver had said that if he was a Sha'ni, it would have explained why he had been left without it. What was that circumstance? Out of curiosity, Gabriel wanted to know.

The man he was thinking of finally finished his call. When he had been talking into it, Silver had been talking in his own language. Now, he put it away and looked at Gabriel in a perplexing way. "What am I to do with your problem?" Silver said out loud. "I don't think it's common to happen in humans unless you were really stressed out. And from what you were saying, you weren't stressed out."

"Just now," Gabriel said. "What were you saying about that if I were Sha'ni it would explain matters? Why would it?"

Silver sighed. "If you had your sights on someone say. And if he or she is truly your mate, the simple sign of your powers deserting you would be a sign enough to tell you that whoever it was is truly for you. That's how we find our mates. Normally."

"What do you mean normally? You mean there are extreme circumstances that don't lead to your powers deserting you?" Gabriel asked, a bit puzzled.

Silver was staring into the distance, caught in a different time when all was well. Or nearly so. "Yes," Silver said softly. "I had mine when I found Galen because I needed it to save both of us. Without it, I think we both would have died. As it is, I lived, and he died."

"I'm sorry," Gabriel told him, genuinely concerned. "If you don't like answering my questions you can just say so you know. It's not like you have to answer them. Everyone has their own secrets to keep. Even me."

The Protector smiled. "If I hadn't wanted to answer it, you would have known. It's not a problem. It's the memories that are. It's been so long ago now. And I can still see it as if it was today."

Gabriel frowned. There was something… The memory of something dark disappeared as soon as he had gotten his grasp on it. Why couldn't he remember anything before his life here? It was such a huge gap in his memory. No one but he himself knew about it; he was too afraid of the implications behind it. The man sighed.

"What is it?" Silver asked.

"It's nothing," Gabriel told him, "Just a memory that seems to keep eluding me."

Silver exclaimed as if he had hit a jackpot in a casino. Gabriel looked at him sideways.

"What did you do that for?" Gabriel asked a bit warily

"Your memories!" Silver said in an excited voice. "Maybe that will uncover something. You should try meditating and going inside your mind to find the answer. Maybe then you can find the block that's blocking your gift out."

Gabriel was reluctant to try it. But whatever worked. He sighed. "I'll give it a try at home."

"Good!" Silver said. "And then you can tell me how that worked. It's the only thing that I can think of. Being of a different race, it's hard to say what will work."

Gabriel grunted an agreement as Silver opened his car door. "Until then, Cheerio!" The man disappeared to who knows where.

Gabriel did go home and try out the mediation idea. Although he used meditation as a relaxation technique, he never realized that meditation could be used to delve into the mind. Now that he thought of it, he found it obvious. Meditation was supposed to clear the mind of all things and hopefully focus on one thing, besides relaxation. There was a lot of ways meditation could be useful.

He sat down on his favorite mat, sitting cross legged and with his back straight. Gabriel closed his eyes and breathed in deeply through his nose, beginning by counting his breathes in and out by fours. When he felt that he was ready, he moved to a longer time period. Soon, Gabriel decided that it was time to try what Silver had mentioned and he focused in onto his mind.

It was so very different from what he had expected. A bit awed, Gabriel stood there in his mind and gazed into the space that held all of his thoughts and memories. Such a big amount of storage in such a small space. Remembering his task, Gabriel set to it and sifted through his mind, going back into his memories to his earliest memories. The earliest that he had. Ones that weren't blocked from him. But when he came to the last, of them, he found a wall. Frowning, Gabriel pounded on it. But when it did not budge, he tried everything else imaginable.

The photo journalist didn't think that it was unusual that he, a human, was able to think in such a way that he could conjure inhuman objects such as a hammer or a drilling tool into his mind, but summon he did. And still none of them worked. Gabriel felt those blows as if they were blows to his own head, which in technicality, it was. But he didn't give up until he had a bad headache from it. It was frustrating. No matter what he did, he couldn't break that wall within himself.

Gulping down a Tylenol, Gabriel resigned himself to never finding out what the problem was. Maybe he never would. Giving up, he went to bed and slept off his headache. A sensible thing to do since he could do nothing else.

A/N: Okay, long time no updates…So…how do you like this one? Informative any? Or um…I'm getting on it…well, R&R first and foremost?