Chapter One

Curled in a blanket with cuts and bruises covering my body, I sat in the old armchair in front of the wooden fire while the others debated at the table. I hadn’t spoken a word to any of them since I was stolen back, hell, I hadn't even looked at them. After a few feeble attempts at getting me to speak, they’d finally given up and taken to planning our next move. Our next move, like we’re suddenly a team. I wondered how long they would have kept the truth from me if I hadn’t have been captured and tortured for information that I clearly had no clue about. It was yesterday I was brought back, and I was in no way ready for a conversation.

My silence lasted for half of a day until finally curiosity got the better of me and I slowly made my way towards the table. I was met by concerned glances, some eyeballing the stitched up wounds on my shoulder, others cringing at the pain it took for me to walk. As I drew closer, I saw drawn-up maps and tattered books scattered across the desk, looking aged in the dim light.

“Eden,” Robert greeted me sheepishly, standing up and offering me his seat. Too weak to decline his offer, I lowered myself into the chair and winced in pain as my ribs viciously burned. “You don’t have to be here, you can rest if you want to.” The poor old man looked lost and guilty as I shot him a look of disgust and took a deep breath before I started speaking.

“I need answers,” I croaked. My voice was raw from the days of dehydration, so I took a sip of Shayne’s water from the table, and continued. “The only way you’re going to give me those answers are if I ask directly. I’ve learned that the hard way,” I shot Robert another glance of revulsion as the man I’d once looked up to, I’d learned, had been lying to me all of my life. All of my second life, it now seemed.

“It was better for you if you didn’t know, you understand that, right?” Shayne said. It was the first time I’d paid any real attention to him since I’d gotten here, and I guess it wasn’t just me who’d had it rough over the last few days. Other than his tired blue eyes boring into mine, I noted that his face seemed shrunken and pale, his body weak, and his usual straight-back posture being non-existent.

“So you think the right way to find out was to be tortured for information?"

“No one expected this to happen,” Hayley’s voice piped up. I twisted my head, ready to shoot a response, but whatever I was going to say died on my lips as I saw Hayley’s face.

Her hair... her beautiful long, wavy and blonde hair was gone. In its place was a mousy brown cropped mess. Her new fringe was choppy across her beautiful but badly-beaten face and the bottom of her hair was frayed and messy. Tears in my eyes, I spoke softly to my longest and dearest friend. “W-what happened?”

Hayley looked down to face the table in embarrassment as she spoke again in a mere whisper through her bloody lips. “You’re not the only one who they wanted information from.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my chest tight and jaw clenched. "Why you, though?" I dared to ask her.

Her eyes filled with tears as she said, "now's not a good time to explain."

Robert drew up another chair and sat down next to me. There was a moment of silence, and finally it was broken by Maria, Robert's wife.

"You have to explain yourself, Robert. She's old enough to know."

"I've told her enough," he sighed, rubbing his hands through the small amount of hair he had left. "If I tell her any more, she'll be in terrible danger."

"You don't think she is already? Surely if you just explained everything to her now, at least she'll be able to do something when the time comes." Maria was always the reasonable one; the loving, caring wife and mother-figure. But there was always something that drew me closer to Robert than to her. Perhaps she was too stable, no adventure. Perhaps I didn’t lose my adventurous personality when my memory was erased.

When I was rescued from that dreaded place by Shayne’s men, Robert was waiting for me inside the van. As I lied there weeping into his shoulder, he whispered to me that something was going on that he’d never thought was possible, that he’d made the mistake of revealing himself and it was me who was closest to him that had to suffer.

Through sobs, I questioned him. What did he mean? What mistakes did he make? He said that I was a special person, so special that people wanted me dead, so he wiped my memory and made me as normal a child as possible. A new beginning. A place of safety; but not for long.

He didn’t expect these people to catch on to who he was, but he was relieved when they didn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary about me. His only regret, he said, was taking care of me himself, even though that’s what my mother asked of him to do. Ever since infancy I’d been told that my mother had died giving birth to me due to complications, but before she did she asked Robert, her close friend, to take care of her only daughter. Believable story, wasn’t it? Well, more believable that what he told me in the van. He said that my Mother was a Goddess of some sorts, the woman who people believed to be Mother Nature, and I’d lived as her daughter for thousands of years, working alongside her trying to make the world a better place. So when my mother was destroyed by ‘Demi-Gods’, Robert decided that it was best for us both to be changed into human figures and live on earth for my protection. Of course, I wouldn’t have agreed to go into hiding if I was of sound mind, so Robert wiped my memory and did it anyway.

He wasn’t my father, but a close friend of my mother’s; the only part of the story that hadn’t changed. In that van I’d gone through a mixture of emotions. I’d felt anger, because why would someone joke around at a time like this? Dread, because what if what he was saying was the truth? And finally, acceptance. He was never one to make jokes out of serious things, and after witnessing his adopted daughter undergo torture because of his carelessness, I doubt he’d find an appropriate time to create a supernatural story.

So now we were here, in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. I still didn’t know why my best friend, family gardener and everyone else were here, and frankly, I didn’t want to know. I just needed answers, and I was prepared for anything. There was nothing else these people could have thrown at me; or so I thought.