Tearing her eyes away from the ghastly sight of the corpse, she looked about to see if anyone else remained. She heard a screech of tires and a revving engine. Several yards away from the limo, she saw the attackers’ SUV departing from the scene with frantic haste, glancing off the fender of a panic-stopped vehicle in the roadway with a bang. She glanced about the area for a few seconds more, and then turned with a startled gasp at a flash to her left that almost caused her to raise the pistol and fire once again. One of the throng of paparazzi was using a flash now to snap his all-important photos.
Raina shook her head in disbelief, removed the pistol’s magazine, racked the slide to eject the round in the chamber, and tossed the emptied pistol and its magazine upon the trunk of the limo. It felt weird to her that she had even thought to do that, clearing a gun for the sake of safety. However, in hindsight, she would have been wiser to hang onto the pistol until being absolutely certain that no threats remained in the area.
Squinting against the almost painful brightness of the headlamps of the cars behind her, she stared at the completely insensitive media jackals for a few moments, deeply angered by their callous actions but too numbed by shock to do anything about it. She hadn’t expected them to come running to her aid, but it seemed rather sick to be making a public entertainment spectacle of a terrible, violent event such as this. She fully expected to see magazine covers, newspapers, and web pages splashed with images of herself standing over the bodies of three dead humans – sensational stuff for the bloodthirsty masses.
Taking a moment to check herself for any injuries beyond the burn to her left palm and fingers, she then returned to the opened rear door of the limousine. Raina was relieved to see that Svetlana, Thomas, and Sophie were still alive. Thomas had pulled himself upright to stand upon his knees, clutching the wound to his right shoulder, and Sophie was helping to apply pressure to the entry wound on the opposite side. Svetlana had only managed to prop herself up with one elbow underneath herself, clearly in far worse shape than Thomas. The wet gurgle and wheeze of her rapid breathing, as well as the blood that trailed from her lips and nostrils, seemed to indicate that she had some severe internal bleeding. Sophie appeared to be the only one fortunate enough to come out of the attack completely unscathed. The only blood that was upon her belonged to Thomas.
“How bad?” she asked Sophie.
She hesitated to sniff back her tears before answering, “I’m fine. I’m not hurt.”
“You?” she asked Thomas.
He nodded, wincing with pain. “I’ll be okay.”
She didn’t have to ask Svetlana to know that she was in bad shape. She laid a hand gently to her cheek, causing the beautiful Commoner to open her blue-green eyes just enough to look at her. She said nothing, simply giving a subtle nod as though to say she was fine, but Raina could not help feeling disheartened at the sight of her dear friend in such pain. She knew very little in the way of first aid, having spent far too much of her life in the study of causing harm rather than undoing it. Yes, they were vampires, and yes, they were able to endure far more damage and heal much more quickly than any human, so most wounds generally did not require professional assistance. However, the extent of Svetlana’s wounds was quite severe, even though it appeared she had only been shot once. The kind of help that she would need was far more than Raina could ever hope to offer, and for that she felt utterly powerless.
“Does anyone here have a cell phone?” Raina asked.
Sophie shook her head with another sniffle.
“Thomas?”
He shook his head and replied through clenched teeth, “No … not here.”
“Shit.” She hesitated, cringing at the sight, and then gestured toward Ethan’s body. “What about … him?”
Sophie glanced over her shoulder to him and then immediately flinched away with a yelp, as though the sight of his ruined face caused her physical pain. She kept her eyes squeezed shut and her face turned down and away as she shook her head. As she thought about it, Raina recalled having seen Ethan text-messaging someone at one point during the drive earlier. However, given how bullet-riddled his corpse appeared, it was probably safe to assume that his phone had either been destroyed by the slugs that had torn through him or ruined by the gush of blood that had escaped his body.
“God damn it,” she muttered bitterly.
Feeling in some ways as though history were repeating itself, Raina stepped away with a heavy sigh. She looked back at the gathering of spectators and saw that more heads were popping up from behind doors, dashboards, and fenders as people realized that the street warfare had ended. There were more flashes now as the other photographers became brave enough to start snapping pictures again.
“God, I hate people,” Raina grumbled as she began to walk toward them.
The photographers and video camera operators at first appeared bewildered by her approach, but as she drew closer, they actually began to get up and retreat a few steps in apparent fear. Raina was surely a terrifying sight in that moment. Upon Olivia’s insistence, she had tied back her hair in such a way that her High Court ears were plainly obvious. Adrenaline still heavily coursing through her veins and making her knees feel somewhat rubbery as she walked down the street. The rush was also contributing to the bright glow of her exposed skin, giving her an unearthly appearance. And the blood and bits of one dead gunman’s skull contents that had splattered across the left side of her face, neck, and shoulder were plainly visible in the glare of the stopped vehicles’ headlights. She held her empty hands wide apart to show that she was unarmed as she continued to step closer.
“Hey! Y’know, I really hate to bother you guys,” Raina shouted angrily, “but does anyone here have a cell phone or something?”
For a moment or two, they all just seemed to stare at her dumbly. She looked to the nearest person, a male with spiky blonde hair and a video camera on his shoulder as he crouched behind the fender of an idling sedan. She slapped a palm down upon the hood of the car loudly, making him jump back slightly.
“Dammit, I’m talking to you people! Doesn’t anyone here speak English? Cell phone! A cellular telephone! A telly, a fucking mobile! Does anyone here have a phone, or not?” she demanded.
“I do!” a man to her right finally responded, holding it up for a moment before putting it to his ear again. “I’ve already called the police, your grace, and they’re on their way.”
“Finally! Someone with a brain! Thank you!” Raina said exasperatedly, letting her arms flop to her sides. “Could you have them send an ambulance, please?”
“Right away, your grace,” the man replied with an eager nod before relaying the order to the emergency dispatcher on the phone.
From her left came a British woman’s voice: “Your grace, are you all right?”
Raina spun to face her abruptly, still feeling terribly jumpy. Reluctantly, she answered her with a nod. “Yeah … I think so. I’ll be fine.”
“Was anyone with you killed?” the woman, apparently a reporter, asked immediately.
“Yes. One or two,” she replied regretfully. “I know that Ethan is dead. I think the driver may be dead, too.”
“Was Ethan your lover?”
Raina simply gawked at her brazen question, too stunned to reply.
“Did anyone else survive?” another man asked from nearby.
Another voice: “Is anyone hurt?”
“Were you expecting to be attacked?” asked another.
“Did you know your attackers?”
“Were they vampires, as well?”
“How did it feel to kill again?”
“Are you going to seek revenge?”
“Will you drink the blood of your attackers?”
Around her vision, she could see the media swarm beginning to converge upon her as reporters and photographers weaved between stopped cars to move closer to where she stood. She looked around at them with utter disbelief and disgust.
“What the hell is wrong wi
th you people?” she cried. “Do any of you have any sense of decency at all? Is that all you care about? Blood and guts?”
Angrily, she stepped closer to the nearest person with a video camera as she wiped her hand across her left shoulder, scooping a warm, wet something-or-other into her hand. She reached over and smeared it directly upon the camera, painting blood and a couple of gory bits right onto the lens.
“There’s your blood and guts,” Raina told him before turning to walk back to the limo.
Police cars and ambulances arrived in force within a few minutes, their arrival delayed by the uncooperative clog of traffic upon the street in both directions, both human and vehicular. People were clamoring for a better sight of the carnage, snapping pictures and taking video of the scene as usual with cameras and cell phones. The non-media witnesses were just as ghoulishly interested in seeing what they could, although they did so from much farther away. Everyone seemed to very deliberately keep a distance of at least ten yards from the limousine, as though they perhaps expected the vehicle to explode.
Realizing that her window of opportunity was limited, Raina hurriedly began checking the bodies of her enemies, starting with the one that she had shot. At first, she only kicked at their bodies, jamming the heels of her stiletto shoes into their ribs to provoke a response, just in case it turned out that they were not as dead as they appeared. She then took to unmasking each of them and checking them for identification. Some people standing away on the sidewalks in front of the surrounding tall, historic buildings shouted for her not to touch the bodies, one man insisting that she was affecting the crime scene. She was sure that the police would be able to identify these men one way or another, but she doubted that they would be willing to share any of that information with her. She needed to know who had wanted her dead.
None of the three men had any form of identification that she could find, although they did have the usual folded cash, change, cigarettes, and the like. All three were human, and all were dressed almost identically in cargo pants, sweatshirts, ski masks, and military-style boots, all black. All had been wearing bulletproof vests, but in all three cases, the wounds they had suffered were fatal in ways that the vests would not have helped at all. Their rifles were military-grade, fully-automatic machine guns with large magazines, and given the strict gun control laws in the UK, they probably had been smuggled into the country.
The first of her attackers was actually still alive when she reached him, moaning wordlessly and half-sobbing as he mourned the loss of both of his hands. He expired in less than a minute’s time, though, becoming completely still and silent as he apparently succumbed to his rapid blood loss. Raina made absolutely no effort to try to question him, quite certain that he would not willingly offer her any information of value. In fact, she had fought the urge to grab his pistol and put a bullet through his head just to shut him up. The callousness of that very idea would have horrified her at any other time, but not then, not when she’d just seen her people get killed.
Judging by their attire, their weapons, and their total lack of identification, these were contract killers. Revealing the identity of one’s employer was surely a cardinal sin among assassins … not that these men would have even known who really had ordered the attack, anyhow. They were just pawns in a bloody game of political chess. She needed to find out who was their king, so to speak … or their queen.
The only thing of any possible use that she found, just as the first of many police cars began to near the scene, was a cell phone in the left front pocket of her first attacker. As quickly as she could, hearing the first police car’s siren cut off, she opened the phone and tried to search for the last-dialed number in the phone’s memory. She found it and dialed the only number programmed into the phone at all, putting it to her left ear because her right ear was still ringing and mostly deaf. She held up her right hand to show that it was empty as two police officers approached in a half-run.
Ignoring the officers for a moment, Raina listened as someone picked up the call almost immediately on the other end of the line. There was a brief pause before a man’s voice, deep and accented, answered with a rather annoyed tone: “What do you want now? Did you do the job or not?”
“Your men failed,” she replied.
“What? Who…?”
“Yeah, exactly. Who the hell are you, and why do you want me dead?”
The unidentified male responded by hanging up immediately.
“Shit,” Raina muttered as she tossed the phone onto the dead assassin’s chest and held up her hands in surrender to the police.
Surprisingly, the police officers did not order her to the ground, nor did they address her with hostility or suspicion. They seemed to recognize who she was almost immediately, instead addressing her politely, asking Raina if she was okay, and asking if anyone else was hurt. She had fully expected to be handcuffed and shackled the very moment they saw her pointy ears or caught a glimpse of her fangs. Apparently, whoever had called in the emergency had informed the dispatcher as to whom she was.
Raina directed them to her wounded companions in the limousine, and within five minutes, medical personnel were on the scene and administering aid to Svetlana and Thomas. The burn that Raina had suffered to her left hand was painful and had already formed a nasty-looking blister, but she declined to let them do anything more than cleanse the wound and wrap it in a bandage. Having survived much worse injuries before, Raina knew that it would heal on its own soon enough. She was more concerned with Svetlana’s condition than anything else at that time.
Svetlana was carefully pulled from the limo and placed upon a stretcher before being rushed into an awaiting ambulance. Thomas actually was able to walk on his own to another ambulance. Although he was in a terrible amount of pain, he was able to reassure Raina with a feeble smile as he softly insisted that he would be fine.
The police were surprisingly kind and sympathetic to Raina and her companions, keeping the bloodthirsty media parasites at a good distance, being very polite with their questions about what happened, and always formally addressing her as “your grace.” They quizzed Raina and Sophie separately, escorting them to the sidewalk and shooing away curious bystanders as they taped off the area surrounding the scene of the attack. Aware that the bullet-riddled bodies of Ethan and the limo driver were in plain sight, the police draped blue tarps over the shattered windows of the limousine to put a damper on the bloodthirsty public’s curiosity, as well as covering the bodies of the three dead assassins.
A steady drizzle of rain had begun to fall again, and Raina was kindly provided with an umbrella to hold overhead, as well as towels to wipe away the blood from her face, her hands, and her ruined blazer … although not before they took a series of photos for the sake of evidence. These same pictures would later, of course, wind up being posted all over the news and countless Internet websites, along with all the other photos and still-frame video shots captured by paparazzi during the attack.
She felt some small measure of satisfaction in witnessing the police confiscate cameras and videotapes from several paparazzi that had lingered after Raina pointed out a few that she had glimpsed filming her as the attack had unfolded. The ghouls protested loudly and angrily about their rights and threatened lawsuits, but the police ultimately got what they wanted. Surprisingly, the cameraman whom she had splattered with blood said nothing at all when asked to surrender his video, as she had half expected him to press charges against her or threaten a lawsuit.
As she answered the officers’ many questions, she gradually began to unwind the painfully tight coil of tension inside that kept her skin glowing for quite a long time, dulling her bioluminescence to a level where it was no longer discernable in the night full of flashing emergency vehicles’ colored strobes and the glare of the flood lights that were set up at four corners around the scene. The impressive, highly visible re-establishment of order and security in the street set her much more at ease, though she could not fully le
t go of the stress of so many unanswered questions that ate at her from within. Officers shut the street down completely, directing all traffic away at both ends of the block and ordering all pedestrians away from the area at the same distance. The large reduction in the number of so many naked stares and cameras being aimed at her was a very welcome change.
With surprising swiftness, the police officers concluded that they had as much information from her as they needed, and after surrendering her bloodstained blazer to them for the sake of evidence, she was informed that she and Sophie were free to go. The only bone of contention that came up was the issue of her sword: being that it had played such a crucial role in the deaths of two humans, they wanted to confiscate it for evidence. However, after politely but firmly insisted that she would not leave without it, she spoke with the senior police official on the scene that reluctantly and conditionally granted her request. He insisted that they be allowed to sample the blood from its blade for analysis and photograph it thoroughly, with which she had no problem.
Additionally, they stated that she would not be allowed to hold or carry the sword until she arrived at her destination, as it would have been a violation of common weapon laws for her to be roaming about with a large edged weapon. The only reason why it had never been an issue before, the officer told her, was because the High Court tradition of bearing a sword was generally protected under the same clauses in the law that excluded swords intended for ceremonial purposes or martial arts demonstration and practice.
After all, until then, there had never been a single reported incident in the United Kingdom of a vampire attacking a human with a sword, and the only occasions when High Court vampires actually did use their swords for combat was in duels with one another. Vampire-on-vampire violence was still largely regarded as a “victimless crime” by the established laws in most countries … including the laws that she, herself, was responsible for enforcing.
The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations Page 11
