“What the hell’s the matter with you? Not in a room like this!” Lisa yelled angrily at the rent-a-cop as she, herself, shielded her face with her sleeve from the pungent fumes of the pepper spray. “Get the hell out of here and get us some real help, before you get us all killed!”
The officer backed away slowly from the continuing struggle upon the floor. Both Robert and Duvessa stopped screaming, and then one of them struck the side of the bed again. Lisa had just finished unlocking the last restraint upon her right wrist and began to say something when the right side of the hospital bed was suddenly bowled over by a strong force from below. Raina tried to hang onto the side rail of the bed as it was toppled. Lisa backpedaled frantically in an unsuccessful attempt to get out of the way, but the left side of the bed came crashing down on her legs. Raina, herself, was thrown upon Lisa’s upper body with such force that it knocked the breath from her own lungs, even as Lisa absorbed much of the impact of her left shoulder with her chest. Raina felt a sharp jerk at her right elbow that pulled her arm upward as she landed, soon feeling an additional source of breathtaking pain. Holding the crook of her elbow with one hand as she immediately rolled off of her poor friend, she soon found that her IV had been ripped violently from her vein, tearing some of the clear tape that held it as easily as it had torn her flesh in its exit.
Raina found herself at the security officer’s feet, looking up at him with an unintentionally fang-bearing grimace of pain. The officer took one look at her, turned, and bolted out of the room, nearly plowing over Loki as he stood near the door with Lady Svetlana. She heard the officer yelling for help into his radio in the hallway outside as Loki and Svetlana both hurried to Raina’s assistance.
A cough and a strained groan of pain to her immediate left brought Raina’s attention back to the woman lying beside her upon the floor. Both of her legs were pinned beneath the overturned bed, but it was not the weight of the bed or its impact that was her biggest hurt. Her pretty eyes were squeezed shut and her face contorted as she curled into a half-fetal position, clutching her hands between her small breasts. The fall had been sudden and hard enough that the poor woman had nearly been crushed.
As though on cue, Duvessa’s face appeared as she began to arise from the other side of the bed. Her face was drenched wetly in gore, blood literally drooling from her mouth as she grasped the edge of the bed’s lower half to push herself upright into a standing position. The right side of her face and her forearms were already visibly covered with blisters from the chemical burns caused by the security guard’s defense spray. Her eyes, now far more terrifying than beautiful, were fixated upon Raina with a look that confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the killing wish vibe that Raina sensed before was utterly genuine.
“I’ll kill you,” she snarled in a low, breathless voice. Her movements were slow and menacing, her white dress stained and smeared brightly with crimson. The look upon her face was something beyond demonic possession. “I’ll bleed you dry, you filthy brown whore.”
Svetlana had already grabbed Lisa’s shoulders and was dragging her out from underneath the overturned bed when Loki took the cue to do the same for Raina. They were halfway across the room when Duvessa suddenly exhibited a burst of speed in her actions. She practically leapt over the bed, grabbing both of Raina’s ankles and pulling her away from Loki.
For a brief moment, they were actually playing Tug-of-War with Raina, as Loki gripped her arms tightly while Duvessa held her legs out straight until she was being lifted completely off the floor. The bloodlust-crazed High Court gave Raina’s legs a sudden and solid jerk and her wrists slipped right through Loki’s hands. She was dropped onto the floor with a thud that again left her breathless banged her head smartly upon the floor. Spots of brilliant color flashed before Raina’s eyes as she fought to hold onto consciousness.
Duvessa sprung upon Raina just an instant after she hit the floor, pouncing upon her like a jungle cat seizing its prey. She grabbed two fistfuls of Raina’s dark hair and dragged her to her feet. She then seized her by the throat with one hand once again, drawing her face close enough that their noses almost touched. Raina momentarily stumbled over William’s lifeless, outstretched arm as he lay dead upon the floor nearby, but Duvessa managed to hold her upright with a bit more upward force upon her neck until Raina’s feet were no longer upon the floor. She kicked her legs frantically as the Grand Duchess suspended her by her neck, easily lifting her in an incredible display of upper body strength. With the weight of her own body supported entirely by the crushing grip of the hand around her throat, Raina may as well have been hanging from a noose made of steel cable.
“I offered you my body, my love, and my life,” Duvessa hissed at her as Raina desperately thrashed about. “All I ever wanted from you was your trust and loyalty.”
This isn’t going to help you earn it back, Raina wanted to say as she once again felt the fiery redheaded High Court beginning to choke the life out of her. Even then, she could not understand her own efforts to fight back, her irresistible compulsion to try to save her own life. Hadn’t she been wishing for her own death only a minute or two ago? Wasn’t this what she had wanted? She had already decided that she was supposed to die, that her death was a necessary price that had to be paid in order for the Grand Duchess and the House of Fallamhain to be brought down once and for all. People had witnessed Duvessa’s madness firsthand. Many could attest to her ill temper, her less-than-sane fits of rage. And the truth would surely be learned of her past crimes, as well as the true facts behind the blood war between Duvessa and her daughter. Most would surely be led to agree that she was no longer fit to lead the IVC. If Raina died by her hand, then these charges would be lent further credibility. Raina would sacrifice herself for a greater good, and in so doing, she would also find peace at last in death … presumably … right?
Bullshit.
Seeing those telltale bursts of color and the creeping in of darkness at her peripheral vision, Raina summoned every ounce of strength she still possessed to draw her legs up toward her own chest. She arched her back for a moment, kicking her legs back quickly to give herself momentum before bringing them both forward again. She kicked her right foot squarely into Duvessa ribs, not so much to cause damage as to stun her and gain leverage. She threw her left leg up and over Duvessa’s head to hook it across her face while scissoring her extended arm between her thighs. The idea was that Raina would secure that hold by grasping Duvessa’s wrist with both hands, and then arch her hips upward against the back of her elbow, hyperextending and possibly breaking the joint. It was a grappling technique that would have normally been done on the floor and not in mid-air, but she hoped that it would still work. And it did, indeed, yield a result … although not the kind for which Raina had hoped.
Duvessa was apparently aware of what was being attempted, either by skill or by simple intuition. Instead of resisting, she simply released her grip upon Raina’s throat and dropped down to one knee, thus slamming Raina down upon the floor. The fall was expected and the angle was not severe enough to hurt her, but the jarring impact caused Raina to lose her grip upon Duvessa’s wrist. Instead, she wound up latching onto a blood-splashed sleeve of the Grand Duchess’s white gown. Realizing that she could not hold her, Raina instead kicked both of her feet out at her enemy’s chest, shoving her away. The silk tore loudly and Duvessa staggered backward awkwardly, flailing her arms in a windmill-like manner to try to regain her balance as she headed straight for the large curtained window.
Raina saw how fast Duvessa was backpedaling, how unbalanced she was, and her almost choreographed path toward the window, and for a split second, she dared to hope. Duvessa hit the window with her shoulders, glass shattered, and she began to pass through the opening she had just made … but she caught herself. With her arms out wide, she caught both sides of the window’s frame, and the heavy curtain over the window served as an additional restraint. Like a wrestler thrown back against the ropes, Duvessa immedi
ately rebounded and began to lunge forward again, eyes wide and charging away from her once certain fall to go in for the kill once more.
Raina was still struggling to push herself off the floor when Loki practically jumped right over her head and charged at Duvessa with his hands extended, apparently seeking to shove her out of the window. The High Court deftly leaned to her right and parried his arms away to the left, adding a solid shove of her own that sent him airborne over the toppled hospital bed and slamming against the painted brick wall next to the window with a grunt. Raina was surprised, even touched, that Loki would do such a brave but foolish thing. Seeing him hurt on her behalf, knowing that he had willfully accepted that consequence, Raina was supplied with yet another reason to fight on: she wasn’t the only one that was willing and able to stand up to the Grand Duchess, after all.
Duvessa continued her advance practically unabated, again reaching for Raina with both hands. She was stopped once more by yet another person that chose to wade into the fight. Of all people, Svetlana lunged at her, hooked an arm about her neck, and attempted to apply a chokehold upon the Grand Duchess. Duvessa tried to continue on toward Raina with her arms outstretched, but she was dragged backward by her neck with a bloodstained, fang-bearing snarl, not unlike a mad pit bull being reigned in by its collar.
If not for the probable fact that they had surrendered their weapons to security upon entering the hospital, Duvessa surely would have already been stopped by a hail of bullets or, in Svetlana’s case, a knife buried to the hilt in her chest. Instead, they were all being forced to fall back upon their empty-handed fighting skills. Svetlana was not completely inept, but certainly no match for the Grand Duchess, who promptly turned, elbowed her sharply in the abdomen, and then threw her over her shoulder with an angry cry. Svetlana crashed down upon the side of the overturned hospital bed with a yelp, her foot catching the IV monitor as she was thrown and thus knocking it over into the far corner of the room.
As Raina finally managed to rise to her feet, Duvessa focused her rage upon Svetlana entirely, grabbing her by her shoulder with one hand and seizing a handful of blonde hair with her other. She lifted Svetlana upward, dragging her backward slightly off the side of the bed, and she struck at her with wickedly bared teeth. Svetlana apparently felt the bite coming and she clenched up, tucking her head down and shrugging her shoulders upward so that all the bloodlust-possessed High Court could get was a mouthful of the Russian’s collarbone area. The bite was not a mortal wound, but it was surely painful, as Duvessa bit down with enough force to easily puncture Svetlana’s flesh through the material of her dress. Svetlana did not scream, but she thrashed and struck her fists at Duvessa with obvious panic as crimson blossomed from her shoulder.
Raina’s right arm was barely functional, heavily oozing blood from the wound at the crook of her elbow, and she was both weakened and dazed by the pain already inflicted upon her. She managed to tune it out, or at least most of it, as she came to the brave servant’s aid. She grabbed Duvessa’s shoulders from behind and pulled while kicking her left leg at the back of her foe’s knees. The redhead fell back instantly and she disengaged her bite so abruptly that a small splash of blood arced through the air between them. Raina put a hand under Duvessa’s jaw, grabbed her left arm with her other hand, and pivoted abruptly, redirecting and accelerating her enemy’s backward motion so that she was sent flying backward into the opposite wall. The Grand Duchess smashed against the wall with crushing force once more, creating a great deal of damage to the room’s drywall. This time, the blow actually seemed to stun her. Duvessa dropped to her knees and was visibly dazed by the impact, blinking and giving her head a shake as she fought to focus upon her foe.
Raina was dimly aware of the sound of someone shouting something at her to her left, but she chose to disregard it. She had slipped into that strange trance-like state of calmness and inner convergence, that same state of mind she had found in her times of sparring and meditation, and that same paradoxical sense of peace and stillness that she had found while fighting an otherwise terrifying duel to the death with the Countess. There was only movement, action and reaction, and below all that … thirst. She felt the same hunger, the same need that had completely overtaken Duvessa’s mind. Although it drove Raina to ignore her pain and to draw upon newfound strength that she had never before known, it did not completely override her conscious rationale. In this fight, Raina was focused, but she was not wild with anger; Duvessa, on the other hand, had just gone completely batshit insane.
Duvessa reached out for Raina as she approached, grabbed her thigh, and dug her fingers in fiercely as she tried to use that as leverage to rise into a standing position. Raina seized that hand, however, and gripped it by the meaty side of her palm with a thumb pressed piercingly into the back of Duvessa’s hand while she twisted. The rabid High Court’s wrist was torqued about as Raina began to apply a wristlock, but Duvessa leaned into the movement before Raina could straighten out her elbow to secure it, defeating Raina’s effort.
“Kill you!” Duvessa cried a split second before Raina poked her fingers into the pit of her throat, forcing a gagged sound from her and immediately forcing her back down.
Having forced her into a kneeling position once more, Raina kept hold of Duvessa’s left wrist, cocking back her right leg an instant before thrusting a knee at her face. Amazingly, Duvessa ducked the knee, grabbed hold of that leg, and burst upward, shoving Raina back, up, and then down. The corner of the hospital bed plowed into her back below her right shoulder with breathtaking pain and Raina felt something pop and crunch inside – probably her ribs. Just like that, the last of her strength evaporated instantaneously, and Raina collapsed to the floor beside Svetlana and Lisa.
Duvessa dragged herself to stand once more, looming over Raina menacingly. She was not beautiful anymore. She was not the ethereal, regal, almost angelic sort of entity Raina had just met the other night. She was not an embodiment of sexuality and femininity, nor the picturesque example of refined, cultured, highbrow intellectuality that Duvessa had originally seemed to have defined. What stood before Raina, hunched over slightly, panting eagerly, and literally drooling gooey strings of blood and saliva from her chin, was a scary thing of selfishness, greed, megalomania, and sadism, sloppily dressed to only vaguely resemble the great Duvessa Fallamhain. This was no Grand Duchess, for there seemed to be nothing grand about her at all … nothing, that is, except for the degree of fear that she now instilled in Raina. She was powerful, she was skilled, and she was motivated not only by her already sinister and narcissistic tendencies but also by the undeniable compulsions of bloodlust gone wild. Duvessa had gone rogue, utterly and completely.
But bloodlust or not, this woman … no, this thing only cared for its own survival. It cared nothing for love, not really, for it only saw love as a simple and animalistic sentiment, a tool that could be used to manipulate others. Neither friend nor family were any safer from this being’s selfish wrath than a sworn enemy. To say that Duvessa was completely spoiled by her own position of power would have been a compliment when compared to the closer truth. She was not merely spoiled, but rather putrefied. The attractive and intact exterior she had always shown was but a hollow shell that had concealed the absolutely decomposed corpse of a human soul that resided within. To have survived over two hundred years of life as a vampire was one thing, but to have spent a great deal of that time (if not all of it) as a woman of great power and prestige only served to contribute to the decay of her humanity. Publicly, she had long argued that vampires were just humans of a different breed, that the Change only brought about superficial differences in people, but the same human spirit and soul remained within. This may or may not have been true for the vast majority of others, but in the case of Grand Duchess Duvessa Fallamhain, leader of the International Vampiric Council and Mistress of the House of Fallamhain, whatever vague sense of an honest identity she’d possessed as a human had died off at least a century ago.
&nb
sp; There were orders being shouted by men from the doorway of the room. A blurry glance in that direction by both Raina and Duvessa showed them at least three security officers standing in the doorway, two of which were aiming semi-automatic pistols at the Grand Duchess. Their eyes drifted away from the officers and they locked gazes once more. Duvessa looked ready to pounce upon Raina at any moment, but she held fast. She stood taller, straightening her spine as her hands slowly relaxed and hung limply at her sides. Unbelievably, she smiled. She actually grinned at Raina … and then laughed. At first, it was only a snicker, but it soon swelled into a full-voiced cackle that made Raina’s blood run cold.
“Put your hands on top of your head and get down on your knees!” one of the officers was shouting at her. “Do it now! Get on the floor with your hands on your head, right-fucking-now, or we will open fire!”
Duvessa’s laughter faded as she barely managed to control herself. She seemed to hear the officers, but she had eyes only for Raina as she said in a chuckling, mad voice, “I am … the Grand Duchess. I answer … to no one!”
“This is your final warning!” the officer warned her loudly. “Get your fucking hands on top of your head, right now, or I will kill you, right now!”
“I answer to no one!” Duvessa insisted. Her eyes were so fixated upon Raina’s that she honestly could not tell, even with her emotional empathy, whether she was talking to her or to the officer. Her hands balled up into fists at her sides, her eyes narrowed, and her brow became furrowed as the smile upon her face clenched into a hateful grimace. She sucked in a quick and deep breath, and Raina knew that death had arrived.
The Darkest Colors Page 58
