The Killing

ONE

“It’s true

We’re all a little insane, but it’s so clear now that I’m unchained,

Fear is only in our minds

Taking over all the time”

Evanescence - Sweet Sacrifice

~~

Blonde hair. Brown eyes. Light skin. Average height. Slim build. Owned a small business in town.

Hannah Everett was a popular, well-liked, and obviously beautiful girl. Some would say she was one of the prettiest that the lovely town of Rayne had to offer. Others would be bold enough to say that she was the best-looking in California (though most believed that that was a bit of an over exaggeration -- Hannah herself would agree that it was). She was friends with just about everyone in town, stunning beauty, and had obvious talent when it came to running and maintaining a business.

It wasn’t glamorous. Nor was it very popular with anyone outside of the specific niche that it catered to. Hannah ran a small, hole in the wall music store. She carried mainly classic CDs and records, but had a decently wide variety when it came to what was offered at her store, and if she didn’t carry something that you wanted, she was more than happy to order it for you and mail it directly to your house -- shipping was free of charge. Hannah was very well-liked by almost everyone in town and almost everyone in town knew her name at the least if they didn't know her personally.

That was, until December 25th of last year. When her life was taken.

As soon as the police received the call, they knew who it was: The Christmas Killer, or C.K. as he was beginning to be called. She had been dead for three hours before the 911 phone call was made -- by a neighbor who had heard a noise in her condo. When the police arrived at the scene and saw the brutal cross on her chest, it merely confirmed the assumptions they had made when they received the call. C.K. decided to make Hannah her next target.

There was no discernible connections between Hannah and any of the previous victims. No familial ties, no close friendships, no co-workers or colleagues. never in the same age range consecutively, physical and psychological profiles were different for every kill except for a handful of traits that didn’t apply to every victim, nor did they apply to the same victims consecutively. At first the police believed it to be a random killing. There was no conceivable way to connect the first victim, Joyce Mitchell in 1925 to Hannah Everett in 2013. No amount of elaborate Six Degrees of Separation could possibly connect Joyce and Hannah in any way other than the fact that they lived in the same town their entire lives.

But everyone knew that that wasn’t enough to realistically connect any of the murders. Everyone looked for some way to connect them together. Genealogy, ancestry, income, social status, anything. Some lived in Rayne their whole life, some moved to the city the past month, some the past year, decade, century... Nothing linked every together victim. Somehow, this one person managed to kill certain select people with some attachment without making it known to the city what the attachment was. The only thing they had in common was that they were women that lived in Rayne.

But that was last Christmas. This year is different. Because this year, there’s Guinevere.