Lara thought the room had been disgustingly clean. The bed on which he had lied only a few hours earlier now sported new sheets and pillow cases. It was clean, as clean as a hospital could be, looking like no one had ever inhabited it. Like Kurtis had simply been erased from its memory.
But she couldn't really blame the hospital staff about it. No one could demand them to have genuine interest and concern toward each and every of their patients. When one died or got sent home there was always another one to take the bed. No matter what you did there was always someone sick, someone in need of aid. And it was very possible that during the long years working as a nurse or a doctor drained out the part of your soul that cried out for every hurt human being. In the endless hurry you didn't have time to concider the possible souls of the mass of cells lying on the bed.
Lara found it strange that the profession one usually started from a want to help fellow humans ended up being about money.
She had sat in the waiting room of the hospital for hours hoping the officers would find a mark, a fingerprint that wouldn't belong in the room but there was nothing. Either no one had ever entered it or the person who had, had been really careful. In addition to fingerprints there should've been hair, dead skin, dandruff - something that didn't belong in a hospital.
But the room had been void of signs. There was no evidence to speak for kidnapping. He had just vanished.
Later in the evening Lara left the hospital and checked in a hotel nearby. It was nothing grand but she hadn't gotten used to living in a suite of a 5-starred hotel. As long as it had a lock on the door it qualified. She laid her backpack on a chair and sat on the light yellow comforter only one thought running through her head: How could she feel this empty? Was it Kurtis' disappearance or the fact that no one had noticed that affected her like this? The fact he had been alone when it happend wasn't the way it was supposed to go.
She couldn't tell why she cared - she had only known him for less than a week. She had sacrificed the Obscura painting for him, to make sure he'd live for a few moments more. She had practically handed Karel the opportunity to revive the race of Nephilim. She hadn't even given it a second thought. As soon as she saw him being captured she acted, like out of a reflex.
Kurtis would've probably been a person who had stayed in her life for a short while and then disappeared. Just another passer-by. And Lara had thought she had grown hard enough of a shell to shield herself from caring about people who meant nothing to her. But had she? Had she really? Perhaps it had always been there and took this one event to show.
What made him so much different from the countless of others she had met on her journeys?
As she thought she lay down on the bed not noticing the lumps in the mattress and somehow she knew insomnia would get a totally different meaning during the coming night.
