Vampiric Encounters

7. Horris

"One moment she was there, and the next... she was still there. I could not control the immense feeling of hate that hung in my heart like a dreamcatcher. Even looking at her fresh corpse, I couldn't find an ounce of forgiveness in my entire being," he spoke blank faced, fidgeting, as though recounting a rehearsed speech.
He turned to me, no longer fidgeting and with eyes glazed over, to ask, "why didn't she just listen?" He'd asked me this time. It was always a question he'd asked himself in reflection before; I listened intently knowing that watching the instant death of a loved one was more than enough to break a person. He hadn't even allowed to grieve, he'd built up thin walls as a means to protect himself from himself and the truth of how he felt, he was lying to himself. I had listened to his story day after day. I didn't know whether is be able to help him.
All I knew was that the way in which he told his story was the very essence of fiction; unless he could tell himself the truth he would never recover.
Only seventeen small hours before the time of his sister's death they had been watching television. Four round, watery eyes were focused on a small, grainy, electric cube. Scared, brave and vicious voices had blared from from the muffling speakers.
She had left halfway through the film: "I'll be back soon; we've run out of snacks," she had explained. He'd told her to be careful. He'd told her not to talk to anyone.
She hadn't come home until the early hours of the morning after that; she'd told him she'd met someone. He'd seen his sister arrive home; he'd seen what it was that she'd met.
She'd thought that she might just have fallen in love, that she may have found the most perfect man in all existence but she was wrong. My patient had seen this perfect being himself ; Horris had seen the what he thought to be the most beautiful woman in existence from the curl of her hair, to the curve of her nose, to her laughter as light as a summer's breeze.
She had been drawn in by a companion of Lucifer: a creature whom feeds off the vulnerabilities and souls of tbeir victims using their shape shifting assets to hunt down their prey and, more and more often, information.
He had told me about his sister; they had been close. She had always been gullible; she wouldn't have doubted a person's words no matter who they were. The perfect man was was only a kind stranger and she couldn't have foreseen his true intentions; the person before her now was her trusted younger brother and he had told her the truth as clearly and surely as he always did. She had made a deal with the devil.
Just like that, a sweet young girl becomes tarnished and shadowed with blame, crime and evil.
She broke; she told her brother everything, as she always did, unknowingly implementing him into her unforgivable crime. Within a few words he knew what danger she had put her species in he had no option but to exile her, and to avoid persecution himself, hate the exiled.
The law suggests that, as a male, he, even if he was only fifteen at the time should've acted as the guardian and protector of every maiden in his household no matter if he lived in the realm of the humans or of magical beings. The blame could just as easily fall upon him as it would her.
There was no point in any of that now, though he wouldn't realise, he'd imprisoned himself in a cage of his own disbelief.
She was killed within the blink of an eye with not even one witness of her death.
I believe that the only thing he ever wants to say is that, "one moment she was there, and the next... she had been stolen from me unjustly."
One day after many years had passed he would look at me with eyes weary beyond their time and say exactly that the progress would be for nothing but his wish would be granted, "I want to be with her now; I think I'm ready," were Horris' last words.