The Darkest Colors Page 14

  Chapter Ten

  Being quite honest with herself, Raina could admit that she was not entirely happy with the conditions of her job. For one, she had never truly been a “people person,” or at least not the sort that a customer service-oriented type of job would prefer. She was not difficult to get along with; rather, it was the general public, as a whole, that was nearly impossible to please, no matter how far she went out of her way to do so. The medical field was not entirely so different than any of the low-paying, entry-level retail jobs that she’d held in her years before delving into phlebotomy. Put bluntly, she had never been comfortable with (or skilled at) kissing ass, especially when dealing with selfish, ungrateful, impatient, and unbearably rude individuals. Standing half-bent to draw from bedridden patients all day caused considerable and constant pain for her lower back, perhaps as a symptom of her scoliosis. And perhaps most annoying of all was that only a third of her patients could speak or even understand much (if any) English. It annoyed her to no end that people would take note of her Hispanic features and automatically assume that she was Mexican and/or fluent in Spanish. It was details such as these that made her decision that morning a bit easier to make. Of course, given the fact that she was apparently about to become a High Court vampire and get whisked away to another continent by the unofficial queen of all vampires, it wasn’t like she really had a choice, anyhow.

  In spite of her willingness to let go of her job so readily, she had a good deal of friendship going with the vast majority of her co-workers. They could be a bit dysfunctional at times while going about their daily job duties, but they nevertheless got along well enough to almost be a family of sorts to her. In the absence of having any actual siblings, familiar cousins, aunts, or uncles, nor any surviving parents or grandparents, Raina almost felt that the nature of their association was quite literal; true family members did not always get along perfectly, but they did not necessarily have a choice in the matter of their relation, so they generally accepted the whole arrangement as a necessity with more benefits than drawbacks.

  So familial in nature were her co-workers, the closest to a true sister that Raina had ever known was her other dear friend, Lisa. No longer having the convenient pleasure of working with her from day to day was the hardest fact of all that she faced as she walked down the long squared tunnel ramp that led to the basement level of the hospital, a common back entrance that most of the lab workers utilized. Sure, over the years they had bumped heads on a few issues, even snapped at each other over trivial day-to-day work details, but it was certainly nothing worse than the kind of behavior a true pair of sisters might exhibit. She would miss Lisa dearly. Over and over again, she promised herself that she would not cry today, that she would do this as calmly and casually as possible. She would not make a scene. She would not be a drama queen. Period or not, Change be damned, she would be a sane and mature human being about this … while she could still rightfully call herself human for these last few hours, at least.

  Smelling strongly of coconuts from an overly liberal application of sunscreen, feeling smothered by the need to wear a long-sleeved shirt in spite of the heat, and repeatedly pushing up her prescription sunglasses that kept slipping out of place, she felt like a fool to be giving up a less comfortable life in favor of this new and terrible existence. If she could deny having had any choice in the matter, she would not despise herself for the consequences of her actions. Nobody had forced her to be alone with the Duke in the first place, after all. Just the same, the decision she had made to come to this place, presumably for the last time ever, had also been entirely her own. She only hoped that Lisa would understand without feeling hurt or resentful about it. Most importantly, she hoped her friend would not ask too many questions. In her present state, deprived of sleep, aching from head to toe, buzzing with caffeine, and still afflicted with a terrible fever that stubbornly refused to fully break, she could not trust her own sense of judgment enough to keep her mouth shut about what was going on.

  The electrical snap of a small insect meeting its fate at a bug-zapping light near the entrance made Raina jump with a gasp. She was already on edge, but the fact that her sense of hearing seemed to be growing keener by the hour was not helping things. She clutched her tiny black PVC purse tightly in one hand, and the wad of her business effects in the other – lab keys, ID badge, and a note to her manager. The path of the seemingly endless waxed concrete walkway extended past other halls and doors that led to Central Sterile, Food Service, the Morgue, and the Powerhouse. With remarkable timing, the door leading into the morgue opened as she was only a few yards away, and a familiar face emerged. Mike glanced at her once, giving an almost automatic friendly smirk, then looked again as he recognized her.

  “Oh, hey, Raina!” he greeted her with a grin, twirling a set of keys upon a finger. He glanced at his watch. “You coming in early for work or something?”

  “Not exactly. Just had to talk with the boss,” she answered as nicely but vaguely as possible.

  He hesitated to continue on his direction back to the laboratory as she stepped closer. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen you with your hair down before. Looks really nice.”

  “Thanks.”

  Raina didn’t mean to seem rude or dismissive, but she began to walk past him without slowing. She wanted to get this over with as quickly and relatively painlessly as possible.

  Mike was an all-around nice guy. Tall, slender, handsome, and well meaning, he was the kind of guy that Raina often had wished she could be lucky enough to meet outside of the hospital. Unfortunately, Mike had already been seeing someone for quite awhile, now – a wedding was even in the works – and Raina had a self-imposed policy to never date anyone with whom she worked, anyway. He had always been a bit flirtatious with her, although it had always just been playful and nothing truly serious. As she’d been told, he had even admitted to others that if he were not already seeing someone, he’d have been inclined to date her. Someone had even told her that she might’ve had a chance with him early on, but because she apparently put off a vibe that told most guys she neither available nor interested, and he had decided against asking her out. Somewhere along the line, she had apparently missed a very good opportunity to be with a very good man. Such was the way her life worked.

  “Hey, did you hear about our dead celebrity in the fridge?”

  That stopped her. She spun on a heel to face him. The movement was so abrupt, atop the slight dizziness of her fever, she stumbled a single step aside before she caught herself. Mike seemed to notice, but he didn’t comment on her imbalance.

  “You saw that whole vampire sword fight thing in Tempe on TV last night, didn’t you?” he asked.

  Raina’s stomach dropped. “I, ah … I didn’t see it, but I heard about it. Why?”

  “You’ll never guess who we’ve got zipped up in a bag back there,” he told her with a smile, jerking his thumb back toward the morgue office.

  “You mean … Duke Sebastian? The Grand Duchess’s consort?” She was suddenly all the more grateful for the sunglasses she wore, as she felt her eyes growing wide with shock.

  “Bingo!”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, it’s him and the other two vamps that one chick took out at the same time,” Mike informed her, almost proudly. “Well, what’s left of them, anyway…”

  “No kidding?”

  With one latex-gloved hand, he held up the long clear plastic bar with the key ring on one end, offering her the key to the morgue. “See for yourself. Just make sure you put the key back in the drawer in Processing. I’ve gotta run and do a couple of STAT draws before the floor nurses upstairs get their panties in a wad and go crying to the boss again.”

  She accepted the key and just stood there for a moment, stunned. “Are you sure they’re in there? Or is that just what someone else said?”

  “Oh, they’re definitely in there,” he confirmed with a nod. “I mean, you can’t really see anything with them all zippe
d up in bags like they are, but they’ve got ID tags on the outside. It’s got their names on there, and a big ‘V’ for ‘vampire’ next to where it says ‘race.’ Pretty wild, huh?”

  “Very.”

  “Just make sure you put the keys back in the drawer when you’re done, okay?”

  “No problem.”

  Mike turned and walked on back to the lab with his usual broad strides and almost hurried pace, his white lab coat billowing out behind him like an albino version of Dracula’s cape. He had a bit of a ghoulish sense of curiosity and humor at times when it came to the macabre. Mike was always the first to volunteer to carry amputated limbs from the lab to the morgue with a strange enthusiasm, and he always seemed endlessly fascinated by the various specimens that came down from the operating room. Whenever that certain light and bell went off in the lab, he always sprang for the Operating Room dumbwaiter’s delivery immediately, almost like a kid on Christmas morning. Most everyone else in the lab thought he was a little bit gross or twisted for these things, except for Raina. She couldn’t fault him for it, for she was almost exactly the same way, herself. It was just another reason why she got along with him so well.

  However, this instance was starkly different than any other. There was nothing fun or exciting about the idea of seeing her Maker’s cadaver. There was a grim and almost masochistic draw to the morgue that morning, however. The timing of it all, the coincidence of her being an employee of the very county hospital where the body of Duke Sebastian Fallamhain had been sent, just a short walk from her regular place of daily work … to say it was eerie was a terrible understatement. The fine hairs upon her body were standing on end as she turned the key in the morgue office door and stepped inside.

  There was a beeping alarm that sounded while the door was open, but it shut off as soon as the spring-hinged door slammed shut behind her. She laid her purse and other items upon the office desk, clipped her hospital ID onto her collar, and faced the cooler door of the storage room with a heavy feeling of dread that weighed like a lead balloon in her stomach. Raina was almost half convinced that she would find, upon opening that heavy white steel door, Duke Sebastian standing right before her, a gaping hole in his chest where Countess Wilhelmina had reached within to manually liberate him of his heart. Her insides were knotted once again in an anxious clench, her legs felt unsteady beneath her, and her hand trembled as she reached for the cold steel door lever.

  She gave it a jerk and slowly pulled the door open. There was a rush of cool air and the immediate but subtle and unnamable smell that was unique to the morgue cooler, but no undead vampires standing before her. As always, the room was filled with a series of wheeled gurneys. The one nearest the door, to her immediate right, had a series of clear plastic snap-lid containers that contained various gruesome details – organs, small amputations, or miscarried fetuses, presumably. There were two empty gurneys, then three bagged cadavers in a row, separate from the other two on the far end of the cooler. She let the door pull itself almost fully closed behind her, but made sure that it came to rest just short of latching shut. There was a release handle on the inside, of course, but she had a strange feeling of paranoia that she might somehow become locked in that cooler with these bodies, simultaneously freezing to death and going stark raving mad with terror.

  Raina’s life had been all too friendly with the subject of death. Her literal crash-course introduction to mortality had not begun until just after her eighteenth birthday, but the education thereafter had been intense and thorough. Over the past ten years, she had attended the funerals of both of her parents, her best friend since grade school (Robin), and three of her co-workers. A time or two, she had even driven by the gory scenes of fatal accidents on the Loop 202 on her way to or from work. To be confronted with a situation involving a cadaver was actually not all too uncommon in the course of her job, usually in the manner of drop-off visits to the morgue, such as what Mike had just done. A stranger’s body was just a body and of no emotional significance to her, at all; to see the remains of someone that she had personally known, however, somehow made the exact same situation an entirely different matter, altogether. A corpse was still a corpse, but it was a bit difficult sometimes for Raina to fully grasp and accept that transition a person made from a living, breathing, thinking, and dreaming person into a lifeless, limp (usually), and slowly decaying pile of flesh and bones. To consider the simple fact that, in death, a human was only so much meat was strangely dehumanizing to the point where her conscience fought itself from one extreme to another – regarding people as things, or looking upon the dead as eternally sleeping people.

  Raina faced the middle of the trio of bagged bodies and, drawing a deep breath and holding it, she checked the white tag that dangled from a string tied to the bottom loop. She had somehow expected that their bodies would have been laid there in a sort of somewhat ceremonious manner, the member of royalty flanked by his two guards, but that proved not to be the case. Before her lay the body of one Lady Kathleen Fallamhain – not a High Court vampire, but officially a keeper of its House, a servant. The body of the other Commoner to her left, Lord Christopher Fallamhain, was easy enough to identify without checking his tag, for his severed head was in a separate sealed black bag upon the same gurney, laid in the vague vicinity of where it normally would have otherwise been located above his shoulders.

  Verified by process of elimination and the tag at the foot of his bag, Duke Sebastian Fallamhain lay to her right, closest to the door. The last to be rolled in, presumably, and the first to be rolled out. While it was unusual for the bodies of any deceased human that had not died within the hospital to be deposited in their morgue, as long as they had already been identified, it had been a rather common practice for deceased vampires to wind up in the county hospital, first. As she had been told, the reasoning was that vampires never died of natural causes – their lifespan was theoretically infinite – and because the cause of death was more often than not a matter of violence, common law dictated that they should undergo an autopsy by the Medical Examiner’s Office. It seemed a rather thin justification for an otherwise lame excuse to give doctors and scientists free reign to poke and prod at vampires at their leisure in a safe, controlled environment that they were rarely afforded while the vamps still drew breath. Unless these three bodies were claimed soon, then Duke Sebastian would soon become a subject of high-level clinical dissection and scientific study, as those of the High Court had allowed almost no opportunities whatsoever for their race to be examined in detail. It sickened her to know that the Duke would likely be sliced apart and spread out like a formaldehyde-soaked frog, his once wonderfully sculpted body unceremoniously butchered for the sake of human curiosity.

  She stood there in silence for a few moments and let out a heavy sigh, only then realizing she had been holding her breath for so long. So, this was her Maker. This was the man … or rather, this was the vampire that had bestowed upon her both a noble blessing and a terrible curse. There were those throughout the world that would have literally killed for the opportunity to become a High Court vampire, rather than a mere Commoner. She had not asked to become any race of vampire, at all. Beyond that, she could admit that she had found Duke Sebastian to be attractive, but knowing how he had taken advantage of her, she managed not to feel quite as saddened as she otherwise would have felt for his death.

  To her understanding, Duke Sebastian had been a loyal and loving husband to his wife, so to speak, and he had been for perhaps three times her own age – stunning, considering that so many others in this day and age could not manage even five years. The Grand Duchess was mourning the loss of him quite deeply, enough that she had dared (by her standards) to allow herself to show such raw emotion to a complete stranger … even if only over a phone connection. The true extent of Duvessa’s loss was unimaginable.

  Raina was familiar enough with the publicly known details of the House of Fallamhain to know that Duke Sebastian Fallamhain had been the el
dest and most beloved of her consorts. She knew how much it hurt to lose someone that she loved, but she had never yet lost anyone with whom she was in love. The death of one lover was surely close to the feeling of losing one’s entire family. Duvessa had experienced this feeling of loss four times over now, and in less than a week. How could she survive? How could she bear to keep living? Worst of all, how could she bring herself to fight for her life when the Countess would inevitably challenge her? The answer was obvious, and the ideology behind Countess Wilhelmina’s strategy was only then quite clear. Slain by sorrow, Grand Duchess Duvessa Fallamhain would be dead before her heart ever ceased to beat, killed by misery and loss, rather than solely by an enemy’s blade. An opponent whose will was broken before the fight even began would hardly be a challenge, even for a novice swordsman. The Countess wasn’t simply destroying Duvessa’s legacy; she was also trying to destroy her spirit, hoping their final battle would be less like a duel and more like a mercy killing.

  Raina was not entirely sure what it was that she sought from this final moment alone with Duke Sebastian Fallamhain. Did his soul still lie within his body, did he watch from above, or had he already moved on? Did he care, at all, that she was there? Was it true what the Roman Catholic Church would have so many believe, that the soul of any vampire was truly damned, and that they were every bit as much the undead (theologically speaking) as their legends of yore had indicated for centuries? Raina’s sense of religion had no true name, no official denomination or set system of beliefs, although they did sway toward that of the Catholic faith from her upbringing. She did believe in God, Jesus, angels, demons, Satan, and the concepts of everlasting life, eternal damnation, and the existence of a soul. But still, in spite of the events that had claimed both of her parents’ lives, she did not know what to think of the consequences of being a vampire. If she was, in fact, damned by default, then should she hate Duke Sebastian for the Change that was slowly corrupting her from within, consuming her humanity cell by cell? Or should she instead feel pity for him, as well as for his widowed Maker and lover?