Dreary as the weather was, the night air hanging thick with the chilling autumn rain of London, she had nevertheless felt so glad to be standing in it as she was in the moment she first stepped outside. Given all that had happened before, and particularly what Raina had expected in reaction to her words that night, she had not entirely expected to find herself alive to experience that bit of gloomy weather, at all.
Surprisingly, there were even more people now than before – members of the press, as well as a throng of fans, and police officers to keep them all at a distance. A lengthy applause erupted as Raina and the others emerged from the Hall. Loki and Olivia walked closely beside her, ready to catch or aid her if she began to stumble, but she managed to descend the front steps without assistance, even doing so at an almost casual pace. Sophie and Simon followed closely behind.
Loki had arranged for one of Raina’s other cars to be brought to the Hall to replace the destroyed limousine. Raina and Olivia were led into the back of the Mercedes-Benz sedan. Raina paused briefly to give Loki a brief, loving kiss before their departure, an act that brought the clicks of many surrounding cameras (as it always did). Loki again rode separately from Raina, accompanied by Sophie, while Simon again drove them. The driver of the sedan in which Raina and Olivia rode was only vaguely familiar to her, a polite, handsome, and soft-spoken man by the name of Derry. The ride back to the Fallamhain Estate was, thankfully, uneventful and completely devoid of any gunfire.
As she had somehow expected, Olivia was quite agreeable to the idea of Raina accepting Duchess Serenity’s deal. After all, she had been practically hounding her to begin looking for another bloodspawn to extend her bloodline, or at least to surround herself with more Commoner and Sabertooth vampires for a bit of added safety and convenience.
One selling point she did offer Raina, however, was that adding a third member to the Fallamhain race would enable her to at least occasionally travel with Loki, as they would not then be placing their entire bloodline at risk by being together in close proximity. As much as they had seemed to be drifting slightly apart as of late, Raina nonetheless cherished every opportunity to be close to her consort. Being made aware of this detail did a bit more than simply sweeten the appeal of the arrangement.
Raina was insistent about wishing to see Svetlana and Thomas, and so she stayed at the mansion only long enough to shower, properly dress her wounds, put on a fresh set of clothes, and depart again. Loki seemed especially eager to come along, showing a particular eagerness to check up on Svetlana, but Raina insisted that he remain at the mansion. She didn’t want to travel more than it was absolutely necessary, hopefully minimizing the amount of danger to which he’d be exposed, at least for the time being. She did not tell him about her talk with Serenity, instead keeping the deal a secret with Olivia, whose professional discretion she trusted. She did not mistrust Loki, but the fewer who knew, the fewer there would be involved, and thus the fewer lives there would be at risk. He seemed almost hurt by the idea of staying behind … and yet somehow, it didn’t entirely seem to be all about wanting to be close to her, because he knew they would again have to travel separately.
By the time Raina arrived at the hospital, Thomas was already in the process of being discharged. He was in good spirits and especially happy to see that Raina had emerged from the Hall, alive and victorious. Feeling reasonably safe in the hospital, and equally sure that a second attack against her was still only just then being planned, Raina asked Simon to drive Thomas back to the Fallamhain Estate so that he could be safely inside before dawn broke.
Thomas had been hit several times, but surprisingly, his wounds were not particularly severe. One bullet had become lodged in his left side, requiring surgery to extract it, but the others had passed right through his body, amazingly having caused only light organ damage – nothing that he couldn’t manage to heal within a day or two. Their attackers had been using NATO-issue full metal jacketed nine-millimeter ammunition, bullets that did not expand or fragment upon impact and, thus, caused wounds that were much less traumatic. His vampiric physiology also had minimized the amount of blood that he had lost, causing the wounds to gel over in a relatively short amount of time. Aside from the minor surgery to remove the bullet near his left lung, all that he had required was a transfusion of one unit of blood. His discharge from the hospital was already in the process of being arranged.
Svetlana, on the other hand, was in sad shape. As it turned out, only one shot had struck her, but the damage it had done was terrible. The bullet had entered through the side window of the limo, losing some velocity before punching into her left side, ricocheting upward off one of her ribs, and traveling across her torso before it finally exited with a large, gory wound below her right collarbone. The slightly deformed pistol-caliber bullet, itself, had been found lying upon the floor of the limo, sheathed in Svetlana’s blood.
As a result of the projectile’s path of destruction, Svetlana had sustained damage to both of her lungs, her stomach, and her liver. Her left lung had collapsed entirely and her right had partially collapsed as well. She had been in such terrible shape at the time she’d left the scene of the crime that paramedics had barely managed to keep her alive, forcing breath after breath into her on the way to the hospital. She had been on a ventilator for awhile until the doctors had stabilized her, which was relatively unheard of for a vampire. Although Svetlana was now conscious and recovering quickly, she was still in a great deal of misery. The dosage of drugs needed to affect any kind of painkilling upon a vampire was very high. Blinking slowly and barely able to keep her eyes open, Svetlana appeared to drift into consciousness only long enough to see that Raina was there, to offer a feeble half-smile, and then close her eyes again to rest.
The sight of Raina’s dear friend in that hospital bed, with so many tubes and probes and such hooked up to her, was too much to bear. Left alone by the nurse to visit her, Raina took her friend’s hand into her own, nuzzling her face against it, and finally let go. She cried with guilt, feeling so responsible for all of this that she felt she may as well have pulled the trigger, herself. She sobbed with gratitude for having someone so brave and selfless to have literally used herself as a shield to protect her. But most of all, she bawled simply because she hadn’t been given the chance to do so for what seemed like forever. Nobody was looking. Nobody could see her now. Nobody cared. She let go, and it felt good. God, how it feel so good to finally…
“No.”
Raina gasped so sharply that she very nearly choked upon her own tears. She sniffed back her sorrows, hurriedly wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand – her makeup was a mess now, so what – and she arose from the chair placed beside Svetlana’s bed. Svetlana was awake again, looking directly at her with those beautiful, icy blue eyes of hers. Raina gripped her hand a bit more tightly and forced herself to smile.
“Hey, girl,” she said softly, “it’s okay. I’m here. What’s up?”
“No … no crying,” Svetlana told her, barely above a whisper. Her breaths were shallow, slow, and visibly painful.
“Shhh … don’t worry. Everything’s cool,” she told her, patting her hand.
“No … no crying,” Svetlana said again.
Raina nodded and wiped at her eyes again. “You’re right. I know, you’re right. I’m not supposed to cry. I keep forgetting that I’m the Grand Duchess. I’m not allowed to have a total breakdown like normal people.”
Svetlana squeezed her eyes shut as she swallowed painfully, shaking her head slowly. After a moment, she wheezed, “I am … sorry.”
“Sorry for what? You didn’t do anything wrong.” Raina felt her eyes again beginning to water. “Svetlana, honey, you saved me from that attack. You took a bullet for me. I owe you my friggin’ life.”
Svetlana shook her head, a bit more vigorously this time. “No … I … sorry for…”
Raina waited and Svetlana paused again to swallow. She coughed slightly, and that effort seemed to hurt her most
of all, causing her to curse something in Russian under her breath. She gathered herself for a moment, keeping her eyes squeezed shut, and finally she freed her hand from Raina’s to gesture for her to come closer. She had to whisper, and her usual broken English was made even worse by her terribly limited lung capacity, her agonizing pains, and the effects of her morphine high. She had to whisper it twice into Raina’s ear before she finally understood … and even then, she still did not entirely understand.
Raina backed away from her slowly, shaking her head slowly. “I don’t … Svetlana, I don’t think you know what you’re saying.”
“I do,” Svetlana insisted softly with the barest of nods. “I am … sorry.”
Raina looked to the bags of fluid, the tubes leading into her friend. “C’mon, it’s the drugs. You’re jacked up on painkillers and talking nonsense. You can probably see a pink elephant standing behind me…”
“I tried … to tell … in car,” Svetlana reminded her. “I tried … but they … shoot … and now … you say … I lie.” She closed her eyes, and for the first time ever, Raina saw a tear squeeze its way out. “I have … hurt you … and I … am ready … to die.”
Svetlana’s words were like a hammer driving nails into the lid of a coffin. Raina continued to back away slowly, as though Svetlana were a fire that was quickly swelling and threatening to engulf her if she did not keep her distance. Raina clumsily thumped the back of her head against the window of the glass window and rattled the aluminum blinds before she finally stopped backing up. She stared at Svetlana, holding her gaze from across the small private hospital room and slowly shaking her head.
“I don’t … I don’t understand,” Raina said after a few moments. “Svetlana, you’re my friend … my best friend. Why would you even say something like that?”
“Because,” Svetlana said, barely audible from where Raina now stood, “it is true.” She kept her eyes closed. “Please … kill me.”
“No.” Raina’s eyes were awash with fresh tears and her throat was tight, but she would not cry again. She wasn’t sure that she had anything left inside for it. “No.”
“Please!” Svetlana cried hoarsely as she tried to push herself up off the hospital bed.
As was standard fare for vampires in hospitals, a security precaution against sudden bloodlust, Svetlana’s wrists and ankles were secured with shackles that prevented her from getting up. She flopped back down and a croaking sob of sorts escaped her softly as she closed her eyes and turned away. Monitors began to beep with alarms, disturbed by her sudden movement and change in pulse rate.
Raina buried her face in her hands. She would much rather have gone through another duel or faced another trio of gun-wielding assassins than this. She would have much preferred that either of those threats had succeeded in killing her before this. This was too much. This was the last of the last. Raina was done, through with this. She couldn’t take this any longer. She was through. She was out.
A nurse hurried into the room glanced at Svetlana, and then turned to Raina. “What’s going on? Is everything all right?”
“No,” Raina said, shaking her head sadly as she refused to sob again. “Not anymore.”
Before the nurse could ask anything more, Raina turned away and stormed out of the room without looking back. She marched down the hall, her heels clacking loudly with an echo upon the perfectly clean white tile floor. She had to get away, far away, and right away. She was so done with this.
Raina went straight for an elevator, got inside, and stabbed the button for the ground floor with her finger, painfully jamming her nail backward as she did so. Her wounds were still terribly sore and throbbing, burning with pain, but their ache was somehow dulled at that time. Her flesh was brightly aglow, and so when the elevator car stopped only one floor down from the ICU floor where she had been visiting Svetlana, Raina sought to conceal her race by standing with her nose in the corner and pulling her hair over the sides of her face. The long sleeves of her coat and her full-length dress hid everything else, and she kept her hands stuffed within her pockets as four people made their way into the elevator, one of them being pushed along in a wheelchair.
“Did you hit the button?” a woman asked.
A male grunted a gruff acknowledgement. A few moments of silence passed, disturbed only when Raina sniffed back a bit of wetness in her nose. Someone else did the same, and after a second or two, Raina heard another woman stifling her own sobs. After the second time Raina did this, she felt something gently being laid upon her right elbow.
“Aw, missy, what’s the matter?” an elderly lady asked her with a thick British accent. “Are you all right?”
“No,” she said, “but thanks, anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman told her. “Have you lost someone?”
Raina shrugged and then nodded, keeping her face buried in the shadow of the corner and the shade of her own hair. “Yeah … I guess you could say that.”
“Aw, that’s too bad, dear,” the woman said. “It’s been a hard night for us all.”
“Yes, it has.”
“My nephew just passed a few hours ago.”
“I’m … I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“Who did you lose tonight, dear?”
“A close friend.”
“Oh, dear. I’m so very, very sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Hopefully they found their way to the Lord peacefully,” the woman said. “Our poor Jeffery … he was shot to death.”
Raina fought the urge to turn and look at the woman in shock. “Really?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. Was driving for a big-name vampire, he was, when some men came and shot up the car he was driving,” the woman explained.
“Fucking bats,” a man commented bitterly.
“Language, Eddie!” she chastised him.
“Sorry, mum.”
“Anyway … it’s a terrible thing,” she went on, “but I can’t say we didn’t warn him.”
“Mum, please…”
“Told him that he’d only wind up dead or missing, he would, just like everyone else that worked for that bunch. His friends even told him so.”
“Mum, please!” the sobbing woman cried. “The vampires had nothing to do with it.”
“Oh, you hush up now, child. They’re all one and the same,” the old woman said with a feisty tone as the elevator finally came to a halt with a soft chime. “Bunch of no-good, blood-sucking fiends, they are. But that was Jeffery’s crowd. He made his choice to work for them, and they paid him well. But in the end, it cost him dearly. All the money in the world won’t bring him back.”
“Oh God,” Raina whispered.
“Anyway … I’m sorry for your loss, dear. Let’s just hope our loved ones have already made their way to a better place,” the woman said, patting her elbow gently. “I’ll pray for you when I get home.”
It took her two tries to find her voice again before she could finally reply, “Thank you.”
Even though she meant to exit on the first floor, she remained standing in the corner of the elevator, leaning with her forehead against the cold metal wall while the others filed. She wanted to drop to the floor, curl up into a ball, and scream until her vocal cords were bloody shreds. Instead, she waited until the doors began to close before finally turning away from the corner, stopping the doors from closing entirely, and slipping out of the elevator car. She saw the group of people had moved far enough ahead of her and their attention was focused upon their own conversation. They paid no attention to her as she walked off in a different direction toward another exit. She pulled the hood of her coat over her head and avoided making eye contact with anyone on her way out, though she felt the eyes of a pair of security guards burning upon her with near-suspicion as she left.
She stepped out into the cold, steady drizzle of the twilight rain and withdrew her cell phone from a pocket inside of her coat, being careful to stand in the shelter of the awning over the hos
pital side entrance so as not to get the phone wet. She chose the number from the very short list of names and hit “Send” firmly enough that she worried she might crack the phone apart in her hand. After a few moments, there was an answer.
“Is everything okay?” Simon’s voice immediately asked.
She did her best to keep her voice as normal-sounding as possible. “Are you at the Estate?”
“Um … yeah. I’ve got Thomas squared away in one of the spare rooms. Sophie’s helping take care of him right now,” he explained. There was a pause. “Are you all right?”
“Can you pick me up?”
“Yes, of course. I’m heading for the car right now,” he replied. “Your grace … is she okay?”
“Svetlana’s okay. She’ll be fine,” Raina assured him, feeling her voice strain with something between sorrow and rage. “Everyone’s going to be just fine.”
Reluctantly, Simon pressed, “Are you all right?”
She wanted to answer, but decided against it. “How soon can you be here?”
“Ten, maybe fifteen.”
“I’ll be outside the west entrance.”
“Right.” And still yet another pause. “If you’d like … I mean, if you’re hungry at all, I could pick up something along the way…?”
Not caring that she was being rude, Raina snapped her phone shut and ended the call. She pocketed the phone and looked around for a few moments. She was alone. An occasional car passed by on the side street, but this early in the morning, nothing was going on. It felt strange, being out in public and not finding herself immediately surrounded and swarmed by fans and/or camera-toting paparazzi. She was anonymous here. She was nobody. And this just suited her perfectly fine. She felt anonymous. She felt like nobody. She felt utterly empty and hollow, a thing of no more physical substance than a dream or a memory. It wasn’t the first time she had felt this way in her life. But this was the first time she had felt this alone following an event that actually hadn’t involved the death of someone she loved.
The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations Page 18
