Eleven fifty-seven.
On the dot.
I stood outside room two fourteen, glancing around a little before reaching into my pocket to pull out my weapon.
In one fluid motion, I press the button to extend it, flicking the end towards the door so the folding out blade can slice a portal through the door. I step through, into the hotel room.
"Jesus fuck." I mutter to myself as I soak in the state of the hotel room. The sheets are a mess, strewn all over the place, and there's a giant splatter of blood going across the white sheets. A lamp is laying across the room, the lightbulb shattered, and the cord ripped in half. I wonder if someone had used it as a weapon. The TV is knocked off its stand and I can see shards of glass from that scattered around, as well.
Right by the front door was the bathroom which stood with the lights on and the door swung open. I peeked my head in, shaking my head a little at the gruesome scene in the bathtub. There was a young woman in the tub, her throat was slit, and her body was covered in bruises. Judging by the bathroom stuff strewn all over the place, I'd say she fought her attacker, hard. The shower curtains as ripped down and soaked in blood, half covering her body. There was a hairdryer by the bathtub, and I get an image of her smacking her attacker in the head with it, as hard as she could. She grew more and more desperate by the end. I don't know why, but I felt a little proud of her, for putting up a fight until she no longer could. She definitely did not go easy.
Still, she was dead. I look away from her for a moment to try and find her soul. I found more often than not, in a situation like this where a human has died in a confined room, the soul is lingering around somewhere.
I rub at my head a little as images of the woman's life start flashing through my head. Her name was Katie Anne Powell. She was born in Dallas, Texas, but raised in New Mexico by her Aunt. Her dad had been caught sexually abusing her, resulting in her mother killing herself out of shame. Her Aunt was the one who started her on her current path.
Yeah, the soul was definitely near.
Something no one told me about during my Reaper training was the fact that we have to see the core memories of the soul we are Reaping. We see all their deepest, most private thoughts and feelings, their best and worst moments. What they dreamed of, what they regretted not doing. The death's weren't my favorite, because a lot of times, they weren't pleasant. Whether it be from a car accident, an illness, suicide. Death wasn't pretty and was very often messy.
It was very personal, and actually made me feel like I might need to smother York in his sleep. He knew way too much about me. I was just glad he seemed to stick to a no share rule, because he never talked about it, not even with me. I was okay with that.
As I searched around the bottom of the queen bed for her soul, I'm assaulted with an image of her in middle school, getting picked on for being flat chested. It drove her to get plastic surgery as soon as she could, a breast enlargement. I shake my head when the image of sitting in the surgeon's office appears. She was so pretty, strawberry blond hair, gorgeous blue eyes and a pretty, soft smile. When she was nine, she wanted to be a teacher to young children. It was her dream to inspire and mold young minds, to teach them to better than all the other adults she'd ever known. The abusive father, the cowardly mother, the money hungry Aunt who was already planning on selling her body off the second she turned sixteen.
In her later memories, when she's getting screwed by different men to survive life in the real world, her face is drawn and older looking, her eyes are dead and sad.
Her soul might need a few years of recovery after the life it's lived this go around.
My hands stop what they're doing when the newest memory of hers starts rolling through my head.
A woman called her, asking if she could entertain her and a friend for the evening. I can hear the woman's voice on the other end… why does it sound familiar?
Have I heard it before?
Surely not. I've never met this woman before in my life, so why would I know any of the same people she does?
Her memories leap forward to when a pillow is being shoved over her face, and hands are holding her shoulders down. She kicks one of her attackers in the stomach, hard enough to make them fall back and gasp for air. She scrambles off the bed, which I recognize as the totally fucked up one I'm looking at now and grabs the lamp to smash it over the second attacker's head. The lamp shade in the memory covers their face, but I can see long brown hair, so I assume it's a female. What had this woman done to deserve such a brutal death, I wonder as I watch the woman dragging herself into the bathroom, breathing heavily and panting with desperation. My guess was she slept with one of her attacker's partners. Or maybe both. That wasn't really her fault though, if the man was seeking her out and paying her for sex. In that case, shouldn't the husbands be the one's getting murdered in a hotel room?
I can feel the pain on my own legs as fingers nails are digging into the woman's ankles, trying to drag her back.
I shake my head a little. I didn't need to see all this. But the images of a woman with shoulder length black hair forcing her into the bathtub, breaking her wrists against the edge of the tub when she won't go in, still assault my vision.
"Jesus." I mutter, grabbing at my throat as Katie's is sawed open by a not sharp enough steak knife. Blood chokes her, fills her throat and mouth, flows down her chin and chest. Her head rolls over in her last moments, and the face burned into her final image, makes my already dead heart stop all over again.
Jazzy.