The Darkest Colors

by David M. Bachman

  Taking in a breath, daring to speak, Raina croaked at them all, “Why? Why are you doing this?”

  “Just relax. They’re trying to help you,” Loki insisted, encouraged by her opened eyes and ability to speak. “Your body is trying to get rid of the silver in your blood. The silver poisoning almost killed you.”

  “Let it kill me,” she told him. “Let me die. Tell them to let me die.”

  His eyes widened at that. “Don’t say that! Please, your grace…”

  “Tell them to kill me!” Raina insisted weakly. The nurses nearby paused to look at her with almost horrified expressions. “You heard me! Do it! Go on! Kill me!”

  “Please, don’t say that,” Loki pleaded. He looked to a nearby male in a lab coat, presumably a doctor. “Don’t listen to her, please. She doesn’t know what she is saying.”

  The doctor said nothing in reply to him, instead giving one of the nurses a softly-spoken bit of instruction. She nodded and quickly disappeared from sight behind the privacy curtain as the doctor loomed over her with a stethoscope. He kindly warmed the instrument with his palm before pressing it to Raina’s chest, which had been bared (except for her bra) to bandage her wounds and to apply a series of EKG leads.

  “Raina? Can you hear me?” the familiar-faced doctor asked. “Raina, I need for you to relax. I know you’ve been through a lot tonight, but the worst is over now. We’re here to help you. You’re safe now.”

  Raina dimly realized he was the same doctor that had treated her when she had been in the detention wing of the hospital at the end of her Change. The familiarity and her memory of how considerate he had been to her, particularly in comparison to the Sheriff, made her reconsider her initial urge to say something rude or vulgar in response to him. She closed her eyes for a moment and slowly shook her head as he took away the stethoscope.

  “I don’t want to be safe. I want to be dead,” she told him. “Just let me go.”

  “You’ve experienced a lot of emotional and physical trauma, Raina,” he informed her. “I understand that you’re very upset right now, but I really need for you to just try your best to relax. You’re not in any danger now. Your body is already overcoming the effects of silver poisoning, and your wounds are not life-threatening. I assure you that you’re not dying.”

  “Then … why did I pass out? Why do I have all these tubes in me?” Raina persisted.

  “You lost a lot of blood from your wounds, and your silver exposure was rather acute, but you’re stabile now,” he explained. “It’s difficult to treat your wounds because we have to give you Coumadin to keep the IV lines open in your veins, but it makes your wounds continue to bleed. We had to give you a unit of blood, which the Grand Duchess donated to you directly, and we added the oxygen tubes because you were having trouble breathing. You’re not ready to leave, of course, but for right now, you’re stabile. You’ll be fine.”

  “But … how? The silver…”

  “It was not enough to kill you,” he interrupted gently. “You are not completely immune to silver, but it is more of an irritant than a poison to your body. The amount of silver content that is in your body right now would have been lethal to any other vampire. You’ve got a bit of a fever and some swelling, and the tissue around your wounds is inflamed. We’re giving you something to help flush the silver from your system and reduce the swelling. You should be feeling a lot better within the next hour.” He turned to Loki. “Physically, she’ll be just fine.”

  As though on cue, the nurse returned with a syringe and a small vial of some liquid. The doctor thanked her, removed the syringe from its wrapper, and pierced the rubber cap of the vial before carefully drawing out a measure of something from it. He took hold of Raina’s right arm, which she only then realized was handcuffed to the bedrail, and he carefully poked the needle into the port of the IV line.

  “I’m giving you something to help you relax,” he said. “Normally, I would never think of using this for other patients in emotional distress, but I don’t know of any antidepressant drugs that would work on a vampire, especially one with your unique biology. If nothing else, this should at least help with the pain of your injuries as your body metabolizes the silver that has been introduced into your bloodstream.”

  He depressed the plunger slowly and injected the clear fluid into the IV port. Raina saw it slightly thin out the dark red color of the blood being transfused into her from that line, and it felt slightly warmer than the usual chill that had been creeping up her arms and throughout her body. The warmth quickly spread up her arm to her chest, and then quickly throughout her body.

  “What was that?” she asked warily as he clipped the safety cap over the needle of the syringe and dropped it into a nearby biohazard sharps container.

  The doctor gave her an almost pitying look as he replied, “Morphine.”

  The doctor handed the remaining vial to the nurse, who whisked it away, and he took off his glasses to clean them with a tissue from one of his pockets. “I heard about what happened, and I’m very sorry. I hope you understand that I’m only trying to help you. We’re all here to help you. And as you’re learning, you have many unique strengths. You simply need to learn to appreciate them … and, more importantly, to use them. Right now, I need you to focus upon using those strengths to heal.”

  The drug took effect quite quickly, and rather than trying to fight it, Raina accepted it with the dumb hope that it was something far more lethal than what the doctor had indicated. This time, the sleep that overcame her was just that, sleep, and it was by no means dreamless. Actually, her dreams were quite vivid and active, and although she was quite aware that she was dreaming, she nevertheless found herself able to meander about through the world inside her own subconscious mind with relative ease.

  Brenna was there, smiling, happy, unharmed, and alive. The duel-to-the-death experience she had survived was, in itself, just a dream, and she dared to allow herself to believe as much as she embraced Brenna and lay with her upon the cozy bed of her own home, relishing in the relief that illusion brought her. For awhile, she was content again, even happy, and she cared nothing at all about her obligations to Duvessa or anyone else of the High Court. For that brief while, she was kissing and holding Brenna, hearing her speak softly as she held her close, though the words initially did not make any sense to her. Soon, though, the words became clearer to her as Brenna got up from the bed, her voice changing slightly – somewhat lighter, and with a foreign accent. Brenna was wearing a black silk robe, which she opened and shrugged off with a smile. With her robe came off all of her skin and hair, shedding as soundlessly and easily as the robe she had allowed gravity to pull off like a full-body mask, and in her place stood Duvessa, dressed in a white gown with her vibrant, fiery red hair replacing Brenna’s black robe and equally black mane.

  “Can you hear me, dear?” Duvessa asked as the rest of the room gradually came into focus. “Raina, please. It’s me … Duvessa. Please … just say something.”

  Raina blinked the sleep from her eyes and focused more sharply upon Duvessa’s eyes. She had never truly noticed until then how similar her eye color was to that of Brenna’s, although the effect was not as striking on her as it had been for her departed lover, Maker, and friend. She did not even attempt to mask the disappointment she felt as she frowned at the Grand Duchess.

  “Something,” she replied with a hoarse whisper, turning away and attempting to roll onto her side. She found herself unable to do so, as her wrists were bound with handcuffs secured to the rails of the bed.

  Great, she thought to herself, not only have I managed to find myself in the same hospital, and handcuffed to my bed in the same way as before, but now I’m trapped here with the Grand Duchess, too. She was rather surprised by how quickly the effects of her drugged sleep wore off, and how quickly she seemed to be sobering up with every passing second. She felt no pain at all, not the least bit uncomfortable in any physical sense, aside from the pinch of the handcuffs that restr
ained her. Although she felt lazy and utterly lethargic, she was strangely clear-minded in her thoughts. Her first and only experience with morphine had been brief and weird, and already it was over.

  She could understand, even as a vampire with a ravenous metabolism, how someone could easily become hooked upon this sort of thing. It was a chemical escape, completely and totally. For that brief period of time, she hadn’t given a damn about anything at all; now, however, reality came rushing back at her with a lot of unpleasantness, but more so because she realized that drug-induced happiness and contentedness was a lie, that the truth of life was absolute misery. The crash was just as swift for her as the high had been.

  Alas, she realized with swelling sorrow, the “crash” did not simply go away, but rather it would stay forever until she could be sent high once more. The only thing to which it could compare was something she had only just recently learned to appreciate, and something she would probably adopt as valid non-narcotic substitute: blood.

  Duvessa was tugging gently at her hand, trying to interlace their fingers in a show of support as she spoke. Raina refused to look at her, instead choosing to close her eyes.

  “Oh, I was so worried about you, dear!” she cried with what seemed like genuine concern. “I’m so glad you’ve pulled through this. You’re going to be just fine now, Raina. I promise you, everything from this point on will be better.”

  Raina swallowed with a bit of difficulty, her throat dry and her tongue coated with an unpleasant taste. Her breath surely was rank, and she felt less than clean from head to toe. The IV needles in both of her arms were not helping things much, either. It took her a moment to find her voice to speak properly, if at all intelligibly.

  “Don’t make promises … that you can’t keep,” Raina finally replied.

  She did not need to look to know the surprise of Duvessa’s reaction. She could feel it in her grip, as well as in the emotional empathy she felt within herself. Duvessa hesitated for a moment, drawing closer to her.

  “I owe everything to you, Raina. Everything,” the Grand Duchess insisted softly. “You have vanquished our greatest enemy. The House of Fallamhain is safe now. There is no one left to threaten us.”

  “That’s because everyone’s dead,” she said, still refusing to open her eyes.

  Duvessa again hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “We have suffered a great deal of loss, yes. But I assure you, their lives were not lost in vain.”

  Raina said nothing to that, merely shaking her head sadly. She was tempted to again test her ability to will herself to die. She would much rather see, hear, and feel nothing than be forced to be allied with (and at the mercy of) this wicked individual.

  “I know exactly what you are feeling, Raina,” Duvessa informed her in a low voice. “You wish to blame me for Brenna’s death. You feel that I am responsible for what happened to her.”

  That was not quite what she felt, but she would not deny her claim. She opened her eyes narrowly to look at Duvessa, who was now leaning slightly over the rail of the hospital bed.

  “You’re responsible for everything,” Raina said flatly. “All of this, everything that’s happened … it’s all you. This was all your mess.”

  “Raina…”

  “You used me,” she continued. “You suckered me into doing your dirty work.”

  Duvessa removed her hand from Raina’s and gripped the rail of the bed firmly as she stood upright, looking down her nose at her. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You tricked me into thinking that I was doing something noble by defending you. You seduced me and gave me a false sense of security and trust, and then you used that to get me to do whatever you wanted.” Raina stared directly in the Grand Duchess’s eyes. “You put me in a position to kill your own daughter because you couldn’t stand to do it yourself.”

  Raina lay there in wait for several long seconds, expecting her to be shocked or, at the very least, deeply offended by the accusation. Instead, Duvessa seemed to regard her almost with indifference, as though she were not at all surprised that Raina had figured this out. She was not even going to deny it. The smug bitch was too pleased with herself for having succeeded in her objective so completely that she could not be bothered with the emotional consequences. The only sign that Raina’s words had any effect upon her at all was when her eyes shifted away for a few seconds. Raina could sense a tiny bit of uneasiness within her.

  Meeting her gaze once more, Duvessa asked, “Do you know what a proxy war is, Raina?”

  Raina said nothing in response. The term was familiar, but her mind was adrift with too many other thoughts to give it any consideration.

  “A general does not often wade into battle and attempt to cut down the enemy with their own sword. The President of a nation does not march alongside his or her troops in battle. What makes you believe that I should be any different as Grand Duchess?” she demanded in a soft yet stern voice. “I am a leader. It is my role to direct the actions of others. It is not my duty, nor my responsibility, to personally strike down every enemy of my bloodline. If I were to carry out every task with my own two hands, I would be no better than any Commoner of the world. Perhaps this concept escapes you, Raina, or perhaps the nature of our relationship has clouded your perception of me, but rest assured, my dear, I am in a position of supreme authority. I command others to carry out my will. I am Grand Duchess of the International Vampiric Council. I am Mistress of the House of Fallamhain and Fountainhead of the Fallamhain bloodline. Though the human government of the United Kingdom will not allow me to officially claim such an official title, make no mistake … I am your queen. I have servants and consorts because I cannot be expected to be everywhere and do everything for everyone else, let alone for myself. Do not act so surprised that I persuaded you to slay a mutual enemy of ours.”

  “That ‘enemy’ was your own daughter, your own flesh and blood,” Raina said, feeling the drugged laziness seeping out of her body as rage steadily swelled within her to replace it.

  “She was no more a daughter to me than you were before you met Sebastian,” she replied immediately. “Elizabeth was not sane, even as a human. I had thought that it would help, but instead the Change only worsened her madness. Worse still, it empowered her. Given the historical context into which she was reborn, she became a threat to the stability and very survival of the House of Fallamhain. I could not easily slay her because to do so would have brought suspicion and negative opinions upon my House. Whether or not I could justify doing so, it would not have served my position well as Grand Duchess to kill my own daughter and thus lose the faith of the other Elders of the High Court.”

  “So, you just gave her away to someone else … like an unwanted cat,” Raina said with undisguised disdain.

  “I saw in her an opportunity to make peace with a rival House at the time, and I capitalized upon that,” she answered confidently as she folded her arms under her breasts. “Her dismissal from the House of Fallamhain was a blessing in many ways. Sworn into a separate bloodline, she could not take action against my House without risking severe consequence, and she could not persuade her new master to do her bidding when he had signed a truce between our Houses. When he died and Wilhelmina became Mistress of the House of von Reichenbach, she believed that the truce was no longer valid and that she was free to challenge my bloodline with her own. From what I have been told, she had spent the better part of the past quarter-century training to carry out her revenge upon me.” Duvessa smiled slightly. “However, she had obviously not expected to encounter someone like you.”

  Raina finally looked beyond Duvessa and saw William seated in a far corner, and to his left stood Robert. Lady Svetlana was seated on the other side of Raina’s bed, looking utterly stoic and neutral to the conversation at hand but, if what Raina sensed was correct, she was both saddened by the night’s events and afraid of something yet to transpire. Raina rolled her eyes lazily back to meet Duvessa’s, and she let out a heavy sigh.

/>   “Why didn’t you just let me die?” she asked softly.

  For a moment, Duvessa simply stared at her. “What ever do you mean?”

  “You don’t need me anymore. I did your dirty work. Nobody is left to threaten your position as Grand Duchess. Everyone else is safe now,” she explained. Raina narrowed her already heavy-lidded eyes at her. “Let’s just cut the bullshit. You never meant for me to be your successor in the first place.”

  “How can you say such a thing? I bestowed the title of Duchess upon you! And in front of the entire world, no less! I even gave you a full measure of my own blood to help you survive!” she cried raising her voice slightly. “If I had no intentions of making you my heiress, I would not have bothered to go to the lengths that I have to ensure your safety and to begin the legal transfer of my powers into your name.”

  Raina rolled her eyes. “My safety? Oh, please! You and I both know that Wilhelmina was never going to kill me. That’s the only reason I beat her in a fair fight. She allowed me to win.”

  “There may be some bit of truth in that, dear,” Duvessa conceded, “but don’t be so foolish as to think that she only allowed you to win out of pity. Wilhelmina was a madwoman, but she was not stupid. She saw that death was inevitable for her, so she chose the lesser of two evils. You had already proven to be a more skilled fighter than she, and so she realized that meeting death at the end of your sword would be quick and sure.”

  Something darkened Duvessa’s otherwise pale, beautiful face, and her voice lowered to something intimate, like words spoken between lovers in the midst of lovemaking.

  “She knew all too well what I would do to her if I was given the opportunity to kill her, myself. Her death would have been epic. Her suffering would have been exquisite. She was fully aware of the fate that she faced. Surely, you heard her words as clearly as everyone else just before you killed her. She chose to die by your merciful hands because you took very little pleasure in the act. I, on the other hand, would have taken great … great pleasure in killing her.”