Page 57 of Origins
“Here you go, beautiful.” A half-hour later, Titus led me to the living room—his arm wrapped around my waist for support—toward one of two office chairs. Chairs that definitely had not been there before.
A laptop and monitors had also been arranged on top of the previously-empty table. Damen had been busy, but the basement had taken longer to set up than originally thought. However, things were now beginning to resemble how I imagined a ghost-hunting base to look.
Titus gestured over to one of the empty chairs. “Sit your pretty butt here,” he commanded.
I obeyed.
He pushed my chair under the table and continued speaking as he took a seat of his own. “One of your jobs will be to watch these monitors. Even though we don’t normally take on cases, we have done this before. But not with this type of advanced equipment. I’ll help you get acclimated while we go over some of the new features together.”
He brought my attention to the monitors, which showed a multiple split-screen of various rooms in the house. I noticed that each split-screen had been labeled with a different section of the basement, one for every room in the house. Right now, there was nothing on the screens.
“We’ve installed regular and thermal cameras in each room,” Titus said as he began to type.
The screens flickered to life, and instantly a multitude of colors displayed within each box.
“This is the view of the rooms using thermal technology,” Titus answered my unspoken question. “Using thermal recordings to see a spirit is not an exact technology. But if we find areas of intense cold, we can look into that location further. We also have a secondary monitoring system.” Titus typed something else, and the screens changed. This time, the rooms appeared to be tinted green. “This view is from the night-vision cameras. We can alternate and record scenes between the two views as needed.”
I nodded along as he spoke, finding this all to be fascinating.
“We have something even better though,” Titus said, shooting me a glance.
“What’s that?” I whispered back, awed. I couldn’t believe that they had done all of this. What could be better than all of this ridiculously expensive technology?
“You, of course.” Titus suddenly looked shy. “You being here makes this job so much easier. A medium is always more sensitive than any type of technology. Nevertheless, we put these systems in place to enable us to record areas for physical proof. If this job is not completed before your professor returns, we will be able to provide her with evidence that there’s a haunting at this house. Then we can finish the project.”
I was stunned. They had never planned on leaving this uncompleted. They were going to see it through. I had been worried for nothing. “What do we do once we’ve seen the spirits?”
Titus frowned. “It depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“What kind of spirit it is,” Damen responded as he strolled into the room, holding two cups of coffee.
He handed me one, and I glanced in the cup and noticed the contents were light in color. I hadn’t told him how I took my coffee… I glanced at Titus—was this his?
“I don’t drink coffee,” Titus responded.
“It’s light and sweet,” Damen replied as he sat on the couch with a smirk on his face. “I assumed that since you were drinking that fake coffee earlier in the library, and from the way that you prepared your tea, that you took your coffee the same way.”
“A mocha latte isn’t a fake coffee…” My heart thundered in my chest even as I weakly argued my point. I sipped at the proffered mug, wondering why Damen would have paid that much attention to my drink the day before. Clearly, he wasn’t interested in me. But then again, Damen seemed to want to know everything and never be wrong. It was probably a part of his nature. “Thank you.”
Damen grinned in response, but then a more serious expression took over. “To answer your question—if the spirits are ‘evil’, which we know they are, and if we can locate them again, then I might have to perform an exorcism. The other girl spirit? I am not sure. We need more answers. The most we might be able to do would be to make her more comfortable in her resting place. She might be having difficulties with more negative spirits around.”
“But I thought you said that exorcisms were bad?”
“They are.” Damen set his coffee aside and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Only the truly evil deserve to be exorcised—and human souls are different than most. Humans, they can live forever in some manner or other. But to be exorcised removes all traces of their existence from both the natural and the spiritual realms. There are some debates on whether or not it’s ethical to exorcise a human, or if those who have become evil are redeemable or not.”
“Oh… I didn’t know that.” Now I was glad that I hadn’t looked up how to exorcise the spirit girl. I could have done something irreparable.
“Don’t worry.” Damen met my eyes. “That’s why we are here, to help.”
“I—” I started to speak, to thank him, when my phone vibrated, startling the three of us.
Both of my phones were at the other end of the table—Damen must have brought them in from the kitchen. The alert had come from one of them.
A surge of panic momentarily blinded me—was Finn calling me again? I was not ready to deal with him tonight, even though I knew that things were far from over. But then I recalled that my first phone was rarely set on vibrate.
I reached out for the pink device, but Titus beat me to it—sliding it to me with a wink. Was it obvious that my blood was rushing excitedly through me? But I couldn’t help myself—which of my new friends had texted me, and why?
