Chapter 20
Eden woke up slowly and stared around her, somewhat surprised but not completely, to see Eric sitting on the chair, staring at her. She blinked several times, glanced around, then settled back into the bed. “Hey.”
“Hey. How are you feeling?”
“Maybe a little better.” She motioned toward the door and asked, “How’s the meditation seminar going?”
He stared at her blankly and then snorted. “I have no idea. Do you really think we’re going down there?”
“I don’t know, but I came here because of him.”
“You came here because of your friend,” he corrected.
“Debbie.” She frowned and then slowly nodded. “You’re right. I did. And obviously I’m not getting very far on that.”
“That’s because you also came here with a bit of a closed mind, looking to prove that Richard was guilty.”
She didn’t have anything to say to that because he was right. She’d been so sure that he’d had something to do with it that she wanted proof that would secure some vindication for her friend. “But, if he didn’t have anything to do with it,” she whispered, “who did?”
“I hate to say it,” Eric began, shaking his head, “but maybe nobody.”
She looked at him strangely.
He shrugged. “With this whole Origin thing, it’s hard for me to even think that somebody could have hurt Debbie, unless it was the Origin itself.”
She stared at him with narrowed eyes.
“And I don’t know if that’s a thing or not,” he admitted. “We need to talk to Stefan as to whether that’s an option or not.”
“I’m not sure Stefan even wants to talk to me,” she noted, with a choked laugh. “I may have been a bit harsh on him.”
“That’s not so hard to understand. I mean, you’re feeling out of your depths to begin with, and you’re caught up in something inherently frightening, something triggering past traumas,” he explained. “So, that makes sense.”
“It doesn’t matter if it makes sense or not,” she declared. “This just feels like my childhood all over again.”
He stared at her and nodded. “This could be your chance to put all that to rest … permanently.”
“You say that, and I know you mean it,” she clarified, “but it’s not that simple.”
He shuffled over to sit down beside her. “I just want you to know that, whatever it was, however it works out, I’m not leaving you alone.”
Instantly tears filled her eyes, as she realized she hadn’t really known quite how alone she’d been feeling. She muttered, “But you have to go back to work. You have a job to do.”
“So do you, and I do have a job to do,” he noted, “and I’m not sure if you have anything to tell me about that job because you’re the one who mentioned that the rapist is connected to here.”
“Maybe,” she muttered. “I don’t really understand what I said either.”
“Right, and that’s the frustrating part for me because it would be nice if you could say, Hey, he’s over here. However, if you can’t, I certainly won’t hold it against you.”
She stared at him, feeling slightly better for the first time in several hours, and a quirky smile twisted her lips. “Maybe that will happen,” she noted, “but, for the moment, I do not have any insight as to that situation.”
“That’s good to know,” he replied, “because I need to stay around, just in case you find out exactly what’s going on. And that would certainly give my boss more incentive for letting me stay here.”
“You do know that staying here is the last thing on my list.”
“I do,” he confirmed, with a smile. “It is also one of the last places I want to be. However, that doesn’t change the fact that I feel the Origin needs to be closed.”
She sank back into her bed, her eyes closing as she thought about what he was saying. “I’m not against it being closed,” she clarified, “but I am against having anything to do with the closing of it. I think it’s dangerous—very, very dangerous.”
“You’re right. I just don’t know very many people who can close it,” he pointed out.
Her eyes flew open, and she stared at him. Then she narrowed her gaze suspiciously. “You think I’m part of it, don’t you?”
“I think you are part of the process, yes,” he clarified.
She closed her eyes again and just drifted, letting the thoughts about everything that had happened go on. “It almost seems as if it’s calling me,” she shared.
“Yes, I think it probably is.”
Her eyes flew open again, and she stared at him.
Eric nodded. “Stefan was wondering if part of the reason why Debbie is dead is because this thing was calling for you.”
She bolted up out of her bed, even as he tried to calm her down, and she stared at him in horror. “Please don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no, no, no,” she wailed. “I can’t have somebody killing my friend in order to drag my sorry ass over here.”
“But you’re very strong,” Eric told her. “Not only strong but powerful and untapped, full of energy, and that would probably feed the Origin for a very long time.”
Her eyes welled with tears. “No, no, no, and no.”
He sighed. “I hear you.”
“No, you’re not hearing me,” she snapped. “No, absolutely not.” And then she threw herself back down onto the bed and burst into tears.
*
Eric wasn’t sure how to help Eden get past this. When she finally stopped crying, she got up, went into her bathroom, and he heard water running. Eden presumably was washing her face or prepping for a shower, he wasn’t sure.
When she opened her bathroom door a few minutes later, she looked over at him, her face red and puffy from the tears, and she announced, “We need to deal with it. We have to deal with it. Tonight.”
He winced. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”
She shrugged. “We have to because I’m leaving tomorrow morning, and then I’m leaving all this behind.
The idea that whatever is going on had something to do with Debbie’s death is something I refuse to carry with me for the rest of my life.
” She shook her head, over and over. “I’ve already got so much guilt about my mother’s death, so it’s doubly important that I sort out whatever I can and leave it behind here. ”
Eric sighed. “So here we are.”
“Maybe contact Stefan, see what we need to do to put an end to this.” She looked at him and repeated, “So go ahead and call him.”
He frowned as he thought about it but didn’t pull out his phone.
“It has to be tonight because you know it’s hunting already. If we don’t become its victims, then it will go after someone else here.”
“I had to wonder,” he began, “if anybody from here knows anything about it. … I think Samuel knows.”
She stared at him and then shrugged. “It’s certainly possible, but I highly doubt he understands the implications.”
“No, that’s true,” he agreed. “I’m not even sure we understand those.”
“Right,” she agreed. “I don’t think this is even understandable. I think it’s something you just work through, accepting that this horror exists, and, if we’re lucky, we’ll never see it again in our lifetimes.”
“And hopefully 90 percent of the world doesn’t even know about it.”
“I am a little concerned that there might be a bunch more of these around the world,” she shared, staring off in the distance.
“Why would you even say that?” he asked her.
She shrugged. “Snippets of conversations from a long time ago. I don’t know that the word Origin was ever used or that I ever heard about anything connected to this, but it seems my grandmother had an awful lot of things in her world that weren’t quite kosher,” she admitted, frowning. “She was a very strange woman.”
“What was her relationship like with your mother?”
“My mother was a very soft, gentle woman. My grandmother, on the other hand, was much less so,” she shared. “Things had to be her way all the time, and that made it very difficult for my mother.”
“And your father?”
“Who knows?” she replied, with a shrug. “I never met him, didn’t know who he was, still don’t know.”
Eric didn’t say anything for a long moment.
She shook her head. “It happens, you know?”
“Way too much actually,” he replied, with a shrug. “I’m just a little concerned about him popping out of the woodwork somewhere.”
She stared at him and laughed. “He hasn’t yet, so I highly doubt he has anything to do with what’s going on.”
“And what about a grandfather?”
“No clue,” she said. “I don’t know anything about either of them. My grandmother would say men are the devil. So, yeah, she wouldn’t have liked you either. As I told you, she wasn’t a terribly nice woman.”
“No, not the kind of person you go around introducing as your family.”
Eden smirked. “No, but she was the only family we had. Even after my mother died, my grandmother just ditched me. I don’t even know exactly what happened after that.
” She raised a hand. “Before you ask, I didn’t go looking.
I was more than traumatized by everything that had happened, so chasing down my grandmother wasn’t anything I wanted to get into. ”
“Of course not,” he agreed. “And you don’t have to feel guilty about it.”
She stared at him, “Up until you mentioned that, I didn’t think I was feeling guilty, and now it seems as if I can’t think of anything else.”
He started to laugh, and she responded with a quirky smile. She nodded, adding. “We are fools, aren’t we?”
“You’re no fool,” he declared. “However, you certainly didn’t have an easy upbringing, and I think Stefan would say part of that upbringing is because of who you are on the inside.”
“Which is?” she challenged.
“A very powerful energy worker and a medium, as we have just seen.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure that anything can be done about it, whether you want to develop it more or whether you just want it all to fade away.”