The Darkest Colors Read online

  “Up again, already?”

  The sound of Brenna’s voice so close behind her startled her. Brenna had been lying beside her upon the bed the entire time. She was clothed and lying atop the covers, just as Raina had been. Had Brenna been taking a nap, or had she been watching her sleep? Was it merely concern for her friend, or was she truly becoming serious about her feelings towards Raina? She didn’t want to think about it. There wasn’t time for it. Without a reply, she got up and staggered over to the bathroom, having to lean upon every wall and sturdy piece of furniture within reach all the way there. She closed the door and braced herself before turning on the overhead light.

  The glare of the fluorescent lights was painfully blinding, even more than she had expected it to be, and her head throbbed all the more with pain. The nausea was gone, at least for the moment. She attended to her menstrual needs, surprised by its intensity – alarmed, actually – and took a moment to look at herself in the mirror. The sight was anything but reassuring.

  Her pupils were blown, even in spite of the glaring light overhead, and the whites of her eyes were bloodshot. Squinting against the brightness, she felt and looked like someone that had been living underground for the past ten years, the tone of her normally olive-colored skin having taken on an almost sickly pale hue. Every inch of her bare flesh was covered in a sheen of sweat, and her feverishly heated condition seemed only worse since she’d risen from the bed. Not having to worry about Brenna leering at her, she decided to alleviate her misery a bit by taking off her stockings. It helped only slightly, and even unbuttoning her blouse halfway and fanning herself brought her very little relief. She was loathe to just make herself at home in anyone’s residence, but Raina feared that if she didn’t find some way to cool off, she would suffocate in her own warmth. She wasn’t sure exactly what her temperature was, but she was undoubtedly running a terrible fever. A black silk robe hung from a hook upon the back of the bathroom door, and there were fresh, black terrycloth towels on the rack next to the toilet. The thought of a cold shower called out to her then like a natural spring in the Sonoran Desert.

  She had just stepped out of her skirt and begun to pull her blouse overhead when she noticed the crinkling papery feel of something underfoot. Upon the floor was a yellow sticky-backed note that seemed to have been hidden within her clothing somewhere, perhaps in the waistband of her skirt. It was crumpled and damp from having been so close against her skin throughout that night, and the ink was a bit smudged and blotted from its choice of hiding places, but the words scrawled upon it were quite legible. She began to read it aloud to herself in a murmur.

  “Unto you, my blood, my body, and my life. Arise, alive and new,” Raina read from the note. She read it to herself again, stopping halfway through the brief message as it finally sank in. “Oh … no. Oh, God … Jesus, no.”

  She looked again at the marks upon her right arm. She looked now and saw them for what they were. The Duke hadn’t bitten her after managing to subdue her. He hadn’t anesthetized her for the sake of feeding upon her or raping her … or at least not only for those reasons. Rather, he had given her a measure of his own blood from the very tubes she had drawn from him just moments before. That explained his question about blood types; the only blood a Type O Negative recipient can receive is that from another person with Type O Negative blood.

  Raina looked at herself again in the mirror, horrified. She was going to die soon. Raina Caron Delgado, only twenty-eight years old, unmarried and childless, would soon be dead; arising in her place, “alive and new,” would be a monster formed in her own visage, a humanoid parasite whose life depended upon the consumption of others’ lives. She would soon become the very thing she had sworn to never become, the very monster about which she’d had so many nightmares as a child, and the very creature that had caused the death of her own parents. Raina stared at her reflection, focusing upon her own eyes, as she realized she was witnessing the simultaneous death of herself and the birth of a vampire.

  * * * *

  Chapter Eight

  Under the steady downpour of a cool shower, shrouded in the comforting darkness of the barely-lit bathroom, Raina leaned against the side wall of Brenna’s corner shower and did the best she could to stifle her sobs. The light had been too bright for her to bear for very long, as her eyes seemed to refuse to adjust. There seemed no point in trying to conceal her misery from her friend – she would discover the truth soon enough, anyhow – but she nevertheless struggled to keep hold of her emotions. It took everything within her to keep her thoughts away from the regrets of her shortcomings, the sorrow for what she had already lost and had yet to lose, and the fears she held for her own so-called future. She had to force herself to concentrate on what mattered most, digging her nails into her palms until she felt that they would bleed, just to distract herself from thinking about anything but the present. She needed to be rational, not emotional. Falling apart now would do nothing but waste time. Now, she had to be strong, to think, and to act. Later, there would be time to indulge and wallow in her own misery … as long as all of this didn’t wind up killing her soon, of course.

  Adjusting the water temperature until it was running fully from the cold side – which, at any time but the dead of Arizona’s winter months, was still tepid – she finally managed to somewhat alleviate the terrible feverish temperature of her own body, and her dizziness had finally begun to subside. She still ached from head to toe, however, not only with every little movement but with a strange twitching, throbbing sort of feel in her muscles, like thousands of needles were poking at her from within.

  Her immediate concern was that of the initial Change, itself. For one, she wasn’t sure how long she had before it would really come into effect … that was, of course, assuming that the dilation of her pupils and her earlier sickness weren’t already the first stages. It had been a few hours since her exposure – how many, exactly? The Change was vastly different for everyone, dependent upon an almost countless number of factors. She had heard that, in some odd cases, it took as long as a full month for the Change to be fully completed, whereas it might only take a week for some. She had known Brenna long enough to remember her as a human, and she had heard all of the gory details of her Change at its worst – the tooth loss, the wild muscle spasms, the skin irritation, the cramps, the way her navel had filled in and essentially vanished, and even a full-blown seizure at one point. The worst of it had lasted three days, but it had taken two weeks for Brenna’s body to completely stabilize. Realizing that her own Change had only just begun and that she had a lot of suffering ahead, Raina already had her doubts as to whether she could survive this, both physically and emotionally.

  She had plenty of vacation time available from her job, and she could always claim a personal crisis as grounds for time off, but … would they want her back? Was the hospital willing (and legally able) to keep a vampire on their payroll? The irony of being a vampire and a phlebotomist would, without a doubt, be enough to terrify the majority of her patients. If she was lucky, they might still let her work in the lab, perhaps on a night shift. Assuming that she could find a way around having to appear for work during daylight hours, or at least to avoid burning alive during the noontime commute, was there any chance at all that she could keep her new identity a secret? If she was only a Commoner like Brenna, it would almost be a possibility. She had heard of vampires masquerading as humans successfully for years, but…

  “Raina? Hey, babe … you okay in there?” she barely heard Brenna call to her from outside the bathroom.

  She didn’t trust her own voice enough to answer. The obvious response would be to insist that she was okay, but she was a horrible liar … especially when she was already crying. Raina heard the door open, and so she immediately turned off the water. She was as clean and cooled off as she was going to get, and she’d only be running up her friend’s water bill by lingering any longer.

  “Raina, my sweet?”

  She swa
llowed down the choking lump in her throat, and barely managed to answer, “Yeah?”

  “Why are you taking a shower at three in the morning … in the dark?” Brenna asked almost worriedly.

  “I ... I just … I needed to cool off.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  There were perhaps a thousand different things she could have said in response to that query that would apply, but she settled for the most generic: “Like I’m dying.”

  “You still throwing up?”

  “No.”

  “Dizzy?”

  “No, not anymore,” she replied. “I’m just … hung over.”

  “After two drinks?” There was a long pause. Finally, Brenna let out a heavy sigh. “Look, I … I already know what’s going on. You don’t have to try to lie about it with me. I know what he did to you, and you don’t have any reason to be ashamed. I’ve been there, myself. I know exactly what it’s like.” She paused. “C’mon out. I promise, I won’t look.”

  In the darkness of the bathroom, backlit only by the dim blue nightlight at the end of the long vanity sink countertop, she could barely make out the distorted silhouette of Brenna’s image through the frosted glass door of the shower. She saw her friend hold up a large towel, spread out and ready for her. Reluctantly, biting firmly upon her quivering lower lip, she slid the door open slowly. Seeing that Brenna was, in fact, facing away from her with her eyes squeezed shut, she elected to emerge from the shower. Truthfully, giving Brenna a free show was the last thing she was worried about; she just didn’t know how to broach the subject of her Change without risking another wild fit of sobbing.

  As she came close enough to touch the towel with the front of her body and she began to accept it from her, Brenna gently wrapped the beach-sized linen around her and embraced her tightly. She kissed her temple and reassuringly caressed her back and shoulders.

  “It’s okay. I’ve been there, myself,” Brenna told her again as Raina almost reluctantly returned the embrace. “Someone raped me once.”

  “But … he didn’t…”

  “Shhh. It’s okay. I understand,” she interrupted. “Even if he didn’t, like … have intercourse with you … I know he touched you. I saw that he took off your underwear. He did something to you while you were out of it, and that’s why you were … y’know.”

  “Squishy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t … I mean … I don’t think that’s what it was.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t … y’know … semen…?”

  Raina hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “Look … even if it was … so what? Okay? Nobody wants to admit to it. Not right away, at least. It’s embarrassing, I know, because nobody wants to be a victim. I know what it’s like to go through what you’re feeling right now. I know exactly how you feel, my sweet. You don’t have to play it off like it’s something that it’s not. He did what he did to you, and you can’t just pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “But … but I’m not lying to you, though! He just…”

  “Shhh, Raina, honey. Don’t talk. Just listen, okay? I’m telling you, I know exactly what it’s like,” Brenna went on. She seemed almost consumed with the need to get this issue aired out. “I haven’t been straight with you these past couple years about what happened to me … y’know, with my Change.”

  Brenna took a deep breath, paused, and then finally said, “Remember how I always said that I’d wanted to be a vampire all along, that I just hooked up with the first dude that was willing to be my Maker and that I just had a one-night stand with him? Well, that was all bullshit. Truth is, I never really wanted to be what I am, now. I got a little too drunk one night when I was in a club in Scottsdale, so some vampire offered me a ride home. I was really zonked, so I passed out while he was driving. Might’ve been drugs, might’ve just been the booze, I don’t know.” She held Raina just a bit more tightly. “Next thing I know, we’re parking in a back alley behind a grocery store, and this dude’s just … just fucking me in the back of his SUV. I woke up right in the middle of it, I totally wigged out, and I tried to fight him off, but that just pissed him off. He hit me hard enough to knock me out again, and then he bit my neck while I was out. And I don’t just mean he bit me, like he left two neat little holes. This dude just tore into me, ripped into my neck with all his teeth and tore at me, like he was a fucking pit bull. And then I guess he figured I was dead at that point, because when he was done getting his fill, he threw me in a dumpster behind the store and took off.”

  “Jesus,” Raina murmured.

  “Not quite as romantic as a one-night stand, huh?” she chuckled bitterly. “Anyway, I got lucky. He didn’t get my jugular vein or any arteries, so I didn’t bleed out. I mean, he sure fucked me up, and I lost a lot of blood, but obviously not enough to kill me. I flagged down a cop and got a ride to the nearest hospital. I only stayed there long enough for them to stitch me up and pump some blood back into me and make sure I wasn’t going to die, and then the next morning I acted like I was going outside to have a smoke and then I took off. I didn’t have any ID on me, and I gave ‘em a fake name … y’know, my stripper name, Raven Blackwater. Nobody really knew who I was.”

  “But … why?”

  “Same reason as you,” she said. “I didn’t want anyone to know what happened to me. I was ashamed. I felt like such an idiot … and a slut. I mean, seriously, what kind of a moron trusts a vampire to take them home, even when they’re drunk off their ass? Basic human common sense should tell you it’s a stupid fucking idea. What can I say? I guess I kinda wanted to see what it was like to do it with a vampire. So, in a roundabout way I did get what I asked for, and I paid the price for it … and then I made up that whole spiel about the one-night stand, and me begging some random vamp to be my Maker. I just had to accept the fact that I’m a vampire now, because I have to accept responsibility for my own actions. I was the idiot that got drunk and let a vampire give me a ride, and even though he took advantage of me, damn near killed me, and then left me for dead in a fucking Dumpster, it was still partly my fault for giving him the opportunity. I didn’t want anyone else to know what a complete idiot I was for doing that. It was just so … God, just so stupid … and beyond humiliating.”

  “But … look, he didn’t bite me, okay?” Raina insisted firmly. She held up her arm and backed away enough to show her the wounds, holding the towel in place with her other arm. “Look! This isn’t a bite mark, Brenna. They’re the spots where he stuck me.”

  Brenna just stared at her in the darkness for a few moments, then looked at her friend’s arm. “He drew from you with a needle?”

  “No! He injected me.”

  “Injected you? With what? Heroin? Meth?”

  “His own blood,” she finally confessed. “That’s why I’ve been sick all night.”

  Visibly shocked, but still appearing doubtful, Brenna asked, “Why would he inject you with it twice?”

  “He missed my vein the first time. That’s why I’ve got this big bruise around it. It’s blood under the skin … a hematoma. He either missed the first time, or he pushed it in too fast and blew the vein,” she explained. “That’s why I’ve been having all this nausea and fever and these aches and cramps and … y’know, everything. My body’s freaking out because I guess my immune system is reacting to what he injected into me.”

  “But … how do you know for sure? I mean, if you were knocked out the whole time this happened, then how do you…”

  Raina almost angrily snatched up the yellow sticky-back note from the sink countertop and held it up in front of Brenna’s face. “He wrote me this and stuck it in my clothes. I just found it a few minutes ago.”

  Brenna leaned over and held it close to the glow of the nightlight. Vampires had exceptional low-light vision, but even then, it was still a challenge to try to read in the dark without at least a small bit of lighting aid. The rough condition of the note was not helping things, either.


  “It’s the vow for the Communion of Blood,” Brenna commented.

  “I know what it is!” Raina snapped. She hated the sound of herself, immediately regretting it. Speaking much more softly as she wrapped herself more securely with the towel, she said, “I’m sorry. I just … I know what it is.”

  “Then … you’re going through the Change,” her friend said gently as she faced her.

  “Yeah.”

  “And Duke Sebastian Fallamhain … Duvessa Fallamhain’s consort … is your Maker.”

  Raina let out a sigh and sniffed back her tears, nodding. “Yeah. Looks like it.”

  “Oh … my … God, Raina!” Brenna gasped, firmly taking hold of her bare, wet shoulders. “Do you have any idea what this means?”

  “I’m gonna be a High Court vampire. Yeah, I know.”

  “Not just that,” she said, “but we’ve gotta hide your ass so that nobody finds out.”

  Raina blinked at her. “What?”

  “You’re the last bloodspawn of the Grand Duchess. If the Countess finds out who you are … and what you are … then she’ll come looking to kill you.” Brenna hugged her dear friend again, now so tightly that it almost hurt. “Oh, my sweet … God … baby, I’m so, so sorry.”

  Thereafter, toweled dry and less than comfortably back into her sweat-dampened clothes, Raina’s theme of the night became that of priorities. First on her list was the need for fresh clothes and a full meal, as her stomach now growled with hunger in the wake of her earlier purging. Within minutes, her hunger grew from a light urge to something bordering upon ravenous. Her intention had been to wait until she had arrived home before raiding the cupboards and refrigerator for something satisfying, but as soon as she was behind the wheel of her car, she decided to seek out an all-night diner. She and Brenna settled into a booth at a tiny café just a few blocks east of the border into Pinal County and ordered coffee. She knew that it was probably a bad idea to indulge in a diuretic beverage at that point, having already lost so many fluids in so many ways that night, but she desperately needed the caffeine. Time was not on her side, and she could not afford the luxury of sleep until the conditions of her Change forced it upon her.