Grim

Chapter 4 - Mariella Lentine

The black smoke evaporates to reveal a large semi heading straight for me. It's headlights announcing impending doom if I were in the physical world. The truck passes through me. I see the back trailer is filled with filthy young girls. Slave traders. I don't really care. None of them are my assignment. I've seen worse done to the souls in the afterlife. When you spend as much time as I have doing this job, you hear about and see what the demons and angels alike do to souls that are left untended. The reapers are supposed to prevent that, and protect the souls that are meant to go elsewhere.

A drunk driver swerves around the far corner in front of me. Here she comes. All too often it's the passenger or person in another car that dies in an accident like this. This is no different. The car drifts to my right, half way into the other lane. The driver overcorrects and swerves straight into the ditch on the other side. The sudden stop launches a girl from the back seat through the front windshield. She rolls to a stop in the woods to my left. Her name is Mariella Lentine according to my list. She would be a pretty, young, slim figured brunette if she weren't covered in glass with her white tanktop and jeans splattered with blood.

I head towards the girl. Her head is turned the other way, but I can see her desperately trying to breathe as her lungs are filling with blood. When I can see her face, I also see the large chunk of glass stuck in her neck along with a jagged piece of metal stuck through her ribcage. It won't be long now. I lean close to her face. The horror on her face tells me that she doesn't feel ready for my embrace, but it is still something that must happen.

Her life begins to flash before our eyes. I see a happy family with a girl dressed in white and pink dresses playing. Then something happens. In her teens she starts rebelling against her parents. She wears black more often than not now and she refuses to go to church with them. Then she meets a guy.

He has a girlfriend, but tells her that he isn't happy.  He spends more and more time with her. He convinces her to have sex with him. It hurts but also feels really good. It feels better each time after that. He then teaches her about Satan.

She thinks they are going out on a date one night, but instead he takes her to a satanic ritual. It becomes a more frequent occurance, and she begins to participate thinking it will bring the two closer. She kills a goat and drinks it's blood. She draws pentagrams on herself and others using animal and human blood drained from their own veins. They do everything short of human sacrifice. The guy tries to convince her of the next step. He gives her the task of finding a virgin. At first she refuses. She is afraid that he would stop having sex with her if they find someone else.

The next few weeks he mixes cocaine into her drinks. She becomes hooked, and he gradually moves her on to heroine. That is how she dies. High as a kite while coughing up blood. I suck her soul out of her body. It tries to struggle against the flow, but I have experienced this many times before. Younger people always feel as if they aren't ready to move on even though their time has come. Some older people feel the same, but are more accepting of their end. I use one of my bony fingers to sever the connection to the body that this young soul is trying to cling to. I project her soul down to hell and watch as the flames reach out to consume the fresh meat. I hope she enjoys pain. The demons will ensure there is plenty of that where she is headed.