Chapter 20 #2
“I don’t know what I want,” she admitted, staring at him.
“This may sound silly, but I’ve heard some of this before, and it’s resonating, though I’m not sure exactly how.
I accept the fact that I’ve been influenced by all kinds of trauma in my childhood, primarily surrounding my mother’s illness and the way she died.
However, I also had the negative influence of my grandmother, who was a little bit of a … I don’t want to say, nutcase—”
“Oh, do say nutcase,” he urged, with a laugh. “Let’s call it what it is.”
She snorted. “But I’m the one who spent time in a mental institution.”
“It was probably easier on her if you were there. Then she didn’t have to deal with you.”
“Maybe,” she acknowledged, staring at him. “I never got to go to my mother’s funeral either.” When he frowned at her, she shrugged. “I got locked up, remember? They decided it would be far too traumatizing for somebody so sensitive as me.”
Staring off in the distance, he shook his head. “I don’t quite know how that works.”
“I don’t think anybody knows how any of this shit works,” she muttered as she glanced around.
She stood to grab her sweater and stated, “So, do we need a powwow with Stefan, or do we just go out there, open up this Origin, and have a battle of worlds?” Looking back at him, a smile curled up her lips.
“I hope somebody videotapes it. It would make a hell of a thing to have coffee over afterward.”
He stared at her, not sure that he understood the odd mood she was in.
She shrugged. “Sorry. Let’s just say, as I keep opening up these memory banks, I’m getting more and more of an idea of what may have happened over the years,” she shared.
“I presume somebody at that center shut down the memories, put in a block, or did something. I don’t know.
I should probably thank them. Yet, right now, the removal has been a bit of a shock. ”
Again, not sure quite how to take it, he suggested, “There is something to be said for someone making a decision for you to wait until you were old enough to handle some of this.”
“Maybe,” she conceded, “maybe that’s what they were doing. I don’t know. In the end I guess it doesn’t really matter. This is my reality today, and this is the state I’m in right now. If I can do something to confirm my friend wasn’t murdered for nothing, I’m happy to do it.”
“Look. I shouldn’t have mentioned that,” he muttered, looking miserable.
“No, you shouldn’t have,” she agreed, turning on him with a speed that surprised him.
“But you did, and now I have to consider that possibility. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that somebody would pull such a selfish stunt to get me in their grasp. I can’t even fathom it.
Yet I also know that, if that someone were anything like my grandmother, they would have done exactly that without a thought for my life, as my grandmother would have done the same. ”
He was nonplussed to hear that, and she shrugged.
“We really don’t understand what people are willing to do, particularly for the ones they love, until something goes wrong.
In my grandmother’s case, she was trying to stop the natural order of things and was willing to do whatever it took, no matter the cost, … even to an otherwise innocent child.”
At he continued to stare at her in silence, she just shook her head. “My mother was everything in my grandmother’s world, and I mean everything. I was never a part of my grandmother’s world as far as she was concerned, unless she had a particular need.”
“Meaning?” he asked.
“Meaning, I wasn’t good enough for my grandmother,” she snapped, glaring at him.
“Easy now, take a deep breath,” Eric suggested. “There are bound to be a lot of things you don’t know, and you’ll likely find out a lot of them through this process, so it could be really disruptive and difficult for you.”
She gave a broken laugh. “It doesn’t matter at this point, and I’m really hoping you were wrong about Debbie because that’s …” She shook her head. “You just have to be wrong about that.”
“I hope I am.”
“What you’re not wrong about is that this thing will continue to feed, will continue to look for more people until we stop it. If there’s nobody else to contain it, then it’ll have to be me,” she stated, with a fatalistic shrug. “C’est la vie. I didn’t really want to live any longer anyway.”
Alarmed, Eric bellowed, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop that. You dying is not what’s happening.”
She glared at him. “You don’t know that. You can’t promise me that.”
“No, but I’ve been a cop for a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of bad things happen to people. You don’t have a clue what some of them will do to not die.”
“That was something I had to deal with as a very young child. God help my grandmother, but she would have fed me to the wolves if it meant bringing her own daughter back,” she declared, with a brittle laugh.
“You can’t promise that something won’t happen to me, and you can’t in any way proclaim that I’ll be safe. ”
“But your grandmother isn’t around anymore.”
“The reality is, you don’t know that, and neither do I. Either way, we do need to do this,” she stated, as she stared off in the distance. “So, if you won’t phone Stefan, I will.”
“He’s on Speaker right now,” Eric noted, holding up his phone.
She stared at it, chagrined that Stefan would have heard the last little bit. Then she realized it didn’t matter. Stefan seemed to know more about her than she did anyway. “Did you do any research into my grandmother?”
“We’re on it right now,” he replied. “And your mother.”
“That’s good. My mother was a beautiful angel,” she stated, a smile on her face. “And my grandmother would say that she deserved the best of everything in the world and didn’t deserve me as her daughter. I never really understood what that was all about, but my grandmother was adamant about it.”
Stefan added, “Your grandmother was also traumatized herself, facing the loss of her child. So I’m not sure we can give any credence to anything she had to say.”
“Maybe not,” Eden conceded, “but it’s amazing how shit like that stays with you.”
“It stays with you because it was stuck in the annals of your mind,” Stefan noted, “but it’s up to you now to let it go, to get rid of it. Is your grandmother deceased?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve always assumed so. I certainly haven’t heard from her, and I was told she was dead, but I was in the mental hospital at the time. So, yeah, I don’t really know.”
“Wouldn’t that be something?”
There was a moment of silence while everybody contemplated that possibility, then Stefan continued.
“We’ll go on the assumption that she is deceased, and, if she pops up somewhere, we’ll know that she isn’t.
” Then he asked Eden, “Would she have tried literally anything to avert your mother’s death? ”
“Absolutely anything,” she stated. “To be honest, she would have cheerfully sold her soul to Lucifer himself. And I get it. It was her daughter, and she absolutely adored her and rightly so. My grandmother felt that, without my mother, she couldn’t go on herself.
So when they told me that my grandmother had passed on, I just accepted that as the truth.
It wasn’t hard at all to envision that she wouldn’t have had the strength to carry on without my mother. ”
“Was your mother a powerful healer, psychic, medium, or something?”
“No clue,” she said cheerfully. “She certainly didn’t talk to me about it if she was, and I never saw any evidence of it. Of course I didn’t really realize what she had me doing either. Anyway, if that’s something she was doing, she kept it to herself.”
“Interesting,” he murmured.
“Yeah, very.” She snorted. “Look. I just want to go out there and deal with this, and I want to do it now.”
“It’s almost dark outside,” Stefan noted.
Eric stood up. “So, the witching hour has begun. Thus, if you want to make good on that desire, I guess the time is now.” He looked around a bit and added, “I don’t suppose we have a backup plan, do we?”
“We do,” Stefan interjected, “and that would mean me, but I’m not sure what I can do when you guys are caught up in there.”
“What about Dr. Maddy?” Eric asked.
“Dr. Maddy will come if I’m in trouble, as will a few others,” he shared. “We do have quite a few who work in this field, even though most have no experience with something like this.”
“Then bring them in,” Eden suggested. “God knows this is definitely a case of the more, the merrier.”
Stefan gave a bark of laughter. “Whenever you guys are ready, I will contact my people.”
“You don’t want to contact them ahead of time?” Eden asked.
“No need,” he said. “They’re around and will come as needed at the time.”
She had to be satisfied with that. She looked over at Eric and asked, “Are you ready to go?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.” As they were about to walk out, he had the phone in his hand, and an odd look crossed his face. “Stefan, do you think anybody here at the center is connected with Origin?”
“It’s hard to say. You’ve certainly got a few people who could be involved, but this is old energy, very old,” he stated.
“So, short of somebody being here since forever, and I mean forever,” he added, “chances are no. They may suspect something is going on, but that doesn’t mean they have any actual idea of what is happening there.
You can’t judge everybody for not being able to see or to do something with this. ”
“Are you sure?” Eden quipped, as she walked over and opened the door that Eric had closed while talking to Stefan. “Because I really want to blame somebody.”
“I know,” Stefan noted, “and that’s a common issue. But the blame just drops your energy and takes you down to a lower vibration, and that would not be good right now. You need to keep your energy elevated. You need to keep your focus strong, and you need to keep your frequency up.”