“Cream and one sugar, right?” he interrupted with a knowing smirk.
Raina hated to be waited upon hand-and-foot, but as she had learned over the past few months, some people genuinely seemed to take some kind of pleasure or personal satisfaction in being subservient. She reluctantly nodded, sighing, “Yeah, that’d be great.”
“Right away, your grace.” And just like that, he slipped away to her right down the narrow hall that led to the kitchen, leaving a faint scent of cigarette smoke and ale in his wake.
She supposed that, at least on this occasion, Simon felt that he’d been caught slacking off. Truth be told, Raina didn’t care if he was or not. She didn’t see him as a human servant so much as an important ally, as well as an all-around nice guy. He was in his mid-thirties, average in height, average in looks, but far, far above average in his general enthusiasm and energy levels. Simon had apparently been Duvessa’s favorite human servant, both from what Raina had been told and what she had read in some of the former Grand Duchess’s personal writings. In Duvessa’s words, Simon was “such an incredibly hard-working and devoted chap, calm and efficient in a professional setting but adorably awkward in private, and always good for a smile.”
Whereas Loki was more of a flawlessly obedient and stoic trooper, Simon was just flawlessly … well … human. Apparently, people like Simon were what helped to remind her why it was necessary to continue to stress that vampires should integrate and live harmoniously with humans. Others in the High Court tended to isolate themselves from humanity and surround themselves almost exclusively with other vampires or, when necessary, only quite mature humans with very frosty personalities.
Duvessa, however, had preferred to employ and attract a slightly more youthful, vibrant band of individuals, particularly her human servants, while preferring far more mature individuals as her consorts. Of course, by her own admission, Duvessa had done this for the sake of better keeping in touch with the times, to stay “fresh” and “current” with the generation of the day so. She had felt that it had increased the longevity of her popularity and helped her avoid appearing to be out of touch or completely aristocratic, although she had been quite unsuccessful in the latter objective.
As such, Raina had found almost every one of Duvessa’s human servants and young vampire associates quite ready to devote themselves to their new mistress. While she was not fond of the idea of anyone being in servitude to her, at least Raina was able to relate to these people quite easily because of the lack of generational barriers.
Simon was a bit of an odd duck, though. Raina followed him into the kitchen and watched as he went about the task of preparing a pot of coffee for brewing with the usual frenetic pace he had in doing things for her. She wondered where Duvessa had run across someone like Simon. Surely, it had to have been a completely random chance encounter. She couldn’t imagine that Duvessa would have put out an a want ad seeking a “hard-working man with great professional skills and a keen sense of humor but a tendency to be very awkward in private settings, particularly around female vampires.” What really seemed odd to her was how much Duvessa, in her journal writings, had insisted that Simon had appeared to be quite infatuated with her, if not in love with her, and yet he did not seem to miss Duvessa at all, at least as far as Raina could sense. In fact, Simon actually appeared to now have something of a crush upon Raina, instead. Either Duvessa had been truly terrible at reading human sentiments, having been so full of herself that she had felt everyone had worshipped her, or she had apparently mistreated Simon in such a way that he’d been glad to see her go. Raina, it seemed, had been in the house that had fallen from the sky and crushed the wicked witch.
“So, did you just wake up, or are you getting ready for bed?” he asked as he began hurriedly tossing a couple of scoops of darkly-roasted coffee beans into the grinder.
“Just got up. Can’t sleep … as usual,” Raina replied, stifling a yawn with the back of her hand as she leaned upon the doorway. Clumsily, she lightly pricked one of her knuckles upon one of her bared canines. She saw just a tiny dot of blood rise to the surface of her pale skin, and she put it to her lips to suckle it away. Even after several months following her Change, she was still having a hard time adapting to her fangs.
“Oh, I’m … I’m sorry, your grace,” he said, turning to her with a sudden look of sincere apology. “I thought I had the telly down far enough, but I might have been a bit too loud on the phone…”
“You’re fine, Simon. Really,” she insisted with a smile. “Even with these big, pointy ears of mine, I couldn’t hear you at all until I walked all the way over to the far end of the dining hall.”
“Oh.” He seemed genuinely surprised, perhaps even disappointed as he glanced down for a moment. “Was it the dreams again?”
Now it was Raina that was surprised. She blinked at him for a moment. “Who told you about that?”
“No one, I … it was, umm … I just … I was reading, y’know, and ah, I … well … the Web,” Simon stammered as he rubbed the back of his neck – one of his many nervous tics. “But I mean … y’know, it was just … this site was, y’know, it was probably rubbish, just rumor, and…”
“Simon.”
He straightened up immediately. “Yes?”
“Relax. We’re just talking,” Raina said with a smile. “You know … like normal people. I’m not going to bite you or anything.”
“Well, that’s … that’s certainly good to know,” he replied with a nervous chuckle after a moment’s hesitation. He almost didn’t sound sure.
“If it helps, just pretend that I’m someone else. Don’t be so uptight,” she told him as she folded her arms under her breasts. “You don’t need to be so formal. It’s just us in here right now.”
His smile faltered and he considered that for a moment. Simon took in a deep breath, stuck out his lower lip slightly, and exhaled with a brief jump of his eyebrows before rubbing his chin.
“That’s, ah … that’s exactly what … she used to say,” Simon replied.
Raina’s smile vanished as well. “I’m not her. I’m nothing like her at all.”
Simon hesitated, smiled a bit more again, and nodded. “Well, you’re quite right about that, your grace.”
He began to manually grind the coffee in the hand-cranked mill. He appeared just slightly less tense, but she could sense that he still was uneasy. Raina had never quite understood why, but her High Court abilities of empathy – her ability to sense the emotions and intentions of others, not quite true telepathy – were far less effective in trying to read humans, whereas with vampires and particularly other High Courts, the connection was especially powerful. She sensed others’ emotions as her own, and sometimes it was very difficult to discern her own true feelings from that which she was picking up from those around her. As such, the emotions she picked up tended to influence her own. If someone else was extremely angry, she tended to become a bit short-tempered, herself. Another’s feelings of lust in moments of intimacy seemed to fuel her own, as though she fed upon them. And whenever someone was particularly on edge, such as Simon seemed to always be when he was around her, it made her feel rather uncomfortable, too. Even with two centuries of practice, Duvessa had once admitted to having the same tendency to be affected by outside emotions.
“What was she like?” Raina asked rather abruptly. “I mean, you know … as a person?”
Simon paused in cranking the coffee mill for just a second, glancing at her.
“You mean, as a human?”
“No, like … as an individual.”
He finished grinding and offered a shrug with a curled lower lip.
“She was … nice.”
As far as she could tell, Simon’s simple description of her was totally sincere.
“Nice?” Raina echoed after a moment of stunned silence. “You mean … you never saw her get angry with anyone?”
“Well … she did have her off moments now and then,” he admitted with a shrug as he removed
the lid of the mill and shook the coffee grounds into the French press. He froze for a moment, reconsidering his statement, before resuming his actions. “Actually, she had a lot of off moments. But for the most part, I thought she was rather nice. I mean … I’ve worked for people a lot worse than her before, I can tell you that.”
Raina was still gripped with utter disbelief. “What on earth did you do for a living before you met Duvessa?”
“I sold electronics in a department store downtown,” Simon answered. “Believe me, it’s much easier to deal with an aristocratic vampire with rage issues than it is to face random members of the general public on a daily basis.” He set down the coffee mill and turned, pointing to her with both hands. “That wasn’t directed at you at all, I swear.”
“No, I … I know what you meant,” she chuckled.
“Don’t get me wrong, she was still a complete and utter lunatic. I mean it. I could always tell that, deep down inside, she was a complete nutter. Seriously. She was absolutely stark raving mad,” he explained, gesturing with both hands excitedly as he often did. “But at the same time, she was also extremely, incredibly intelligent.”
“Some of the smartest people in the world are also some of the craziest,” Raina commented. “Sometimes it’s easy to mistake a genius for a lunatic, and vice-versa.”
“Maybe so. But either way, Duvessa was smart enough to know that she couldn’t go around abusing people without a reason, because then nobody would want to work for her. So really, she was always rather nice to me.” He grinned. “She had to be. I was the only one that could get her all those fancy electronics at a discounted price.”
“Really? You’d never know it by the old-school Victorian look of this place.” Raina considered that for a moment as she watched him fill the French press with boiling-hot water from the special filtered, high-heat tap near the large stainless steel sink basin. “What kind of electronics, exactly?”
Simon shrugged again as he put the plunger lid atop the press. “A bit of everything, really. She was always fond of technology. This instant hot-water tap system, for example, she thought was amazing. But then, you have to also consider that she was born in the days before indoor plumbing…”
“Specifically, Simon,” she interrupted him gently, “what kind of ‘fancy electronics’ did she request?”
He hesitated once more, this time not so much out of his shyness or anxiety. Instead, he seemed reluctant to be surrendering a secret of some kind.
“Just … things.”
“What things?”
“Electronic … things.”
She rolled her eyes impatiently. “Simon…”
“Computers … laptops, mainly,” he finally began to confess, “mobiles, radios, monitors, cameras, alarms, locks, that sort of thing…”
“Wait, wait,” she blurted again, waving her hands as she stepped closer. Simon almost reflexively shrank back from her a bit. “Sorry. You’re talking about security equipment, right?”
“Mostly, yes.” His eyes shifted away nervously as she stood with his hands behind his back, rocking back and forth onto his heels. “She, um … she had a lot to hide … as I’m sure you already know.”
“Yes, I do,” she agreed, “and I think I know where she kept a lot of it.”
Simon drew his lips in, biting them for a moment before speaking. “You want in the cellar, don’t you.”
“And how.”
“I’m, ah … not sure you really want to do that.”
“Oh, I do, Simon,” she assured him with a nod and a smile, stepping closer. “I most certainly do.”
“Not … if you knew what’s down there … your grace.”
“You know what’s in there?”
“I’ve, ah … heard things and … seen … things…”
“So, you’ve been in there?”
“Oh, no … no.” He was looking everywhere but at Raina, now. “I mean … well, not exactly.”
“Meaning?”
“I’ve taken a peek or two … with the monitors…”
Raina stopped her advance just within arms’ reach of him. She wasn’t trying to intimidate him, at least not consciously, but she couldn’t help drawing nearer in her piqued interest. She had wanted to get in the cellar for months, but she had not yet found anyone that Duvessa had entrusted with knowledge of how to gain entry. The former Grand Duchess may as well have done the old trick of swallowing a key, because apparently she had taken the access codes with her to the grave.
Ever since she had first relocated to the Fallamhain Estate and had begun to explore its grounds, Raina had been stumped by what it was that Duvessa had taken such great measures to keep under such paranoid levels of security in the main cellar of the mansion. There were at least three layers of protection that had been heaped upon the two known entrances to the cellar: a heavy steel door with concealed hinges, an electronic keypad door lock (such as she’d seen upon doors of secure areas in the hospital where she’d once worked), and an electronic alarm visibly connected to the top of the door that presumably would be tripped if it were opened without prior access. Given Duvessa’s level of paranoia and the many dark secrets of history she’d kept from so many, Raina had never yet tested the doors, for she feared there might be other security measures involved that could prove dangerous, if not lethal, if she triggered them. At the very least, she didn’t want to deal with a perpetually wailing alarm or an unwanted visit from outside security or police officers, because she had no idea yet how to disarm the system.
What was within the cellar was anyone’s guess. Raina had theorized that it was likely a collection of historical relics, some of which probably included incriminating evidence that would have revealed her links to German Nazi officials – specifically Duvessa’s association with Dr. Josef Mengele and those of the camp at Birkenau – and could have thus put her at risk of being tried and executed for past war crimes. Loki and others had speculated that it was simply a stash of wealth, including jewelry, gold, silver, and other such things, as Duvessa had amassed an incredible network of riches in her time … some of which Raina was only gradually learning were entitled to her and yet unclaimed.
“What monitors?” she asked him softly.
“The, ah … monitors she had installed … had me install for her,” Simon stumbled. He looked at her almost fearfully. “Really … seriously … you don’t want to go in there. There’s nothing in there … for someone like you.”
She blinked. “Someone like me?”
Raina tried her best to read him. He was afraid, no doubt, but she was beginning to realize now that it wasn’t about her, now. He was bothered by the past, by memories. She still wondered just what Duvessa had done to him, or how she had at least threatened him, to make him act this skittish. His anxiety around Raina was probably attributable to her obvious resemblance to Duvessa, at least as far as her High Court features of fangs, elongated and pointy bat-like ears, and pale flesh that actually glowed to a subtle degree in times of stress or excitability. But his reaction to the subject of the cellar was strictly that of plain fear, if not horror.
“No,” Simon said. “You’re certainly not like her … at all.”
Raina stared at him for a moment longer as she began to understand. She placed a hand gently upon his shoulder and he tensed up even more, if that was at all possible. She rubbed his shoulder comfortingly, hoping to ease his stress before it drove her into an obviously nervous state, as well – her skin was already beginning to glow visibly.
“Simon … if you’re getting at what I think you might be getting at, and if you know how I can get in there, then it’s absolutely imperative that you get me in there,” she told him. “If there are things in there as bad as you seem to be saying there are … criminal things … then I need to know what I have in this place. I don’t want something like that being held against me by someone else. Do you understand? I don’t want to be put on trial for being in possession of something illegal that Duvessa
left behind.”
“Oh, you won’t,” he said quite confidently. “Nobody can accuse you of anything. Not since the video cameras were installed, they can’t. I can prove you’ve never set foot in there.”
“That’s not enough. If there’s something terrible down there and someone else knows about it, just the fact that I still have it under my roof is enough to get me in hot water with the authorities,” she told him. “And even if it’s nothing illegal, I sure don’t need to give the IVC Elders any more excuses to question my title. As it already is, I’m practically going to be facing the Spanish Inquisition when I go to discuss the Code with them. The last thing I need is for them to think that I…”
“They already know … your grace.”
“They already know what?”
“Most of them already know what’s in there.”
She stared at him. “How?”
“They’ve been in there.”
“When? How?”
“When she was still, ah … here,” he explained reluctantly, “she would host events. Meetings, parties … things like that … and at some point, she would usually go down there with someone. I was told that she liked to … well … entertain her guests there.”
“What’s down there, Simon?” Raina asked him flatly.
“Sometimes … most of the time, actually … she came back up alone. Or if three of them went down there, only two would come back up.” He gulped audibly. “I’ve heard things, and I … I saw a video once…”
“What… is … down there … Simon?” she demanded, growing annoyed.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “So help me God, I don’t know, but I’m too bloody afraid to find out. But I do know that whatever’s down there … someone like you … you’d never want to see it.”
Raina gently took hold of his other shoulder and tried to meet his gaze. His eyes were almost closed now and his face turned down and slightly aside.
“Simon … Simon, look at me, please.” Slowly, he complied. “Do you have the access code?”
He nodded again, uttering, “Yep.”
The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations Page 2
