The Darkest Colors Page 15

  She looked down upon the nearest part of the body bag. The zipper ended at the top end of the unglamorous modern death shroud, opposite her end of the gurney and far beyond her reach. Though she was not sure why, she felt a need to look upon him one last time, to truly see him. She had never done so before, of course. She had never dared to take a peek at a body – those that died in the hospital usually were deposited here with a sheet over them, not a zippered bag – but she knew exactly what she would find. The Duke would look somewhat greasy and pasty, his eyes probably half-open and his mouth slightly agape. Did she want to remember him like that? … or would she have preferred her true final memory of him, looking guilty and apologizing repeatedly as he’d forced that soaked cloth upon her? She had known him in person for less than an hour of her life, yet she would dare not forget him for the rest of her days … or rather, her nights.

  There would be no funeral for him, not of the usual variety that any human might expect or desire. There would be no wake, no open casket with a line of mourners passing by for a final glimpse. This, right there in a chilly, bland morgue cooler room of the county hospital, was the official final viewing of Duke Sebastian Fallamhain. This was how a century-old vampire of noble descent was to be remembered. This was as good as it would get. Some random young woman, soon to become his bloodspawn against her will, perhaps illegally catching a glimpse of him as he lay in state for an audience of one in a room slightly above a freezing temperature. In death, a High Court was truly no more glorious than any Commoner, nor any more special in treatment than, say, an elderly human that had simply keeled over from heart failure. She wondered how long it would be before it became her turn to lay upon a gurney in a cheap body bag, waiting to be split open and documented piece by piece, just another interesting piece of meat…

  The sound of the morgue office door opening drew a gasp from her. Somehow suddenly more afraid of being locked within the cooler than being caught in her curiosity, Raina lunged for the heavy door and shoved it open. Her heart lurched within her chest. A security guard and two members of the Medical Examiner’s Office were filing into the office with a gurney of their own. To her relief, the guard did not draw his weapon and commence to arrest her; he recognized Raina and simply gave a friendly smile and casual greeting. He knew that she worked in the lab, and he knew (or assumed, anyway) that she was only there on official business, by chance. Raina picked up her things from the desk and stepped aside, holding open the door as the two ME’s Office workers entered the cooler.

  “Hey there! I was … just dropping something off,” Raina lied to the officer, without being asked.

  “Right on. You saw our guest of honor in there, didn’t you?” Jim asked.

  She forced a smile as she nodded. “Yeah, I heard. Are they taking him away?”

  “Nah, they’re leaving the High Court guy here for now,” he replied. “They just came for the two Commoners. The ME wants to do his thing with them first, since they’re supposedly waiting for someone to claim the Big Cheese. He doesn’t wanna cause a big PR nightmare by stepping in before the body’s claimed by someone who’s got legal first dibs.”

  Raina watched the two workers, a male and a female, set the brake on their gurney and transfer the body of Lady Kathleen Fallamhain from one to the other. She asked, “Is there a time limit on how long they have before someone can claim the body?”

  “Yeah. I think it’s either twenty-four or forty-eight hours. I’m not sure,” he said with a shrug. Jim looked at her with a grin. “Why? You wanna sell his leftovers on the Internet, or something?”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yeah, I know … but someone out there will probably do it,” he insisted. “You know, there’s gotta be some greedy sucker out there that wants to make a buck off this mess.”

  “What if the Grand Duchess claims his body first?”

  He chuckled at that. “Yeah, like she could hop a plane and get over here that quick. I don’t see it happening. Isn’t she over in, like, Ireland or something?”

  “Britain, I think.”

  “Oh. Well, either way, that’s a long flight. I doubt she’ll get over here in time. She might get someone else to claim the body in her absence, but it’d have to be someone official, y’know? And the only two people I figure she had in town that could’ve taken custody are right there in the cooler with that dude, too.”

  Raina stood aside as they wheeled Lady Kathleen out of the cooler and then out of the office. “It’s kind of sad, isn’t it?”

  Jim shrugged, saying, “Yeah, a little. But, y’know … shit happens. It comes with the territory. I mean, once you make that stupid decision to go sprouting fangs like these folks did, you kinda give up the right to whine about how the old rules don’t always apply.” He glanced back to Duke Sebastian’s body. “Besides, that dude was filthy rich. I dunno who’s gonna wind up with all of his estate, or if the government gets to claim it all, but whoever does wind up with it is gonna be one happy son of a bitch.”

  “Doesn’t it all belong to the Grand Duchess?”

  “Nah. From what the Medical Examiner folks were telling me on the way down here about that guy in there,” Jim said with a nod toward the cooler, “he was plenty rich on his own. I mean, that Grand Duchess chick has some big bucks, but he was kind of the brains of the whole operation when it came to money. He had his own pile of gold on the side, too, y’know? I guess he ran things over here in the States and his wife or whatever took care of things over in Europe. It’s all over the news and stuff right now.” He looked at Raina with a raised eyebrow. “Hey, aren’t you here kinda early today?”

  She clutched her purse and work things tightly at her waist as she nodded, saying, “I had to come in to talk with my boss about something … and then, y’know, while I was here, they had me run something over here because they were too squeamish to do it themselves.”

  “Oh? What was in the goodie bag, today?” Jim asked with a ghoulish grin, leaning past her to glance at the nearest gurney with its collection of random human pieces.

  Raina shrugged. “I dunno. All I know is nobody in Processing wanted to deal with it. Probably an arm or a foot again, I guess. I didn’t care to look.”

  “Just as long as it ain’t yours, huh?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.” She began to step away from him. “I’d better get going…”

  “Whoa, wait. Here,” he said, holding up a clipboard that she hadn’t noticed him holding. “Can I get you to sign off for these guys? They need a witness besides just me. Y’know how they made a huge deal about that last big mix-up a couple of weeks ago…”

  “Oh, you mean the guy with three arms?” Raina asked with a smirk, accepting the clipboard.

  She had almost been blamed for that mess. A severed arm from a trauma patient had been sent down, and Raina had taken it to the morgue. The same patient had later died, but somehow, the arm had mistakenly been packed in with the body of a different individual when a funeral home runner had picked it up. One body with three arms, the other with one, and a whole lot of finger pointing and paperwork had ensued. Raina had done nothing wrong, since she had never actually been involved with the bodies (just the amputated limb), but because she had been the last to handle the arm, they had somehow initially tried to pin the blame on her. Extra checks and balances were now being put into place to hopefully ensure that it never happened again, hence the reason she had to print and sign her name below Jim’s on the form.

  With her name and signature upon the form, she handed the clipboard back to Jim with a friendly smirk and bid him farewell. Her time with Duke Sebastian was over. She was not sure what sense of closure or resolution she had hoped to gain from her brief time with the deceased High Court vampire, but her opportunity for it had certainly expired. Surely, she already knew, she would look back upon this moment with regret for something she had failed to do, to say, or to observe … but that was, of course, assuming that she would ever live long enough to have an
opportunity in the future for reflection upon her past moments. In hindsight, considering what he had done to her, Raina probably would have only regretted missing the opportunity to uncover his face and spit upon it, anyway.

  Raina departed the morgue office and walked briskly to the lab. As was the usual case when she entered the lab specimen processing area, the whole department was a swarm of people in white lab coats moving about with an almost fevered pace, multiple phones ringing incessantly, and employees cursing under their breath at the understandably human inability to multitask to a degree that the job seemed to demand. Those that noticed her presence smiled and greeted her, but were far too busy with their tasks of answering phones, sorting specimens, placing calls to nurses and doctors on the upper floors, and entering data into their computer terminals. No one had time to stop and chat. She didn’t mind. It was expected. To drop everything and devote one’s attention solely to the task of holding a conversation with anyone in the processing area was essentially the same as abandoning one’s duties, altogether. There was simply too much going on at one time in that main area for anyone to really have time to do more than smile and say hello. Times for conversation and the like didn’t come until after eight o’clock in the evening, or upon weekends, when the steady flood of specimens coming down from the upper floors and from outpatient visits was reduced to a slow trickle.

  Raina inconspicuously stepped over to her manager’s office nearby, peeked into the doorway, and saw no one within the office. The door was open, the light was on, but her boss was not there. Probably another one of the countless meetings that she had throughout the week – a euphemism for very, very long lunch breaks shared with other supervisors. It was honestly quite a relief, as this was something she had been counting upon before she had arrived. Raina laid her keys, identification badge, and neatly folded notice of resignation upon her supervisor’s desk with a sigh. She stood there for a moment or two, simply staring at the physical incarnation of her reluctant but irrevocable decision, and she told herself over and over that this was the right thing to do. The Duke had made this decision for her when he’d chosen to sedate her and become her Maker against her will. She could only accept the inevitability of her situation. What had been done was done, and what must be done would be done, plain and simple. Realistically, it was highly unlikely that a county hospital, a government-funded health institution, would ever approve of a vampire being on their payroll as a healthcare provider in any form. Everyone had always joked that phlebotomists were “professional vampires,” but to literally be one would most likely not have gone over well with most folks.

  Raina’s intent had been to slip into the office and then nonchalantly walk right back out of the lab without the slightest bit of fanfare or notice whatsoever. She would let the natures of rumor, gossip, and general word-of-mouth take its course in her absence. There was no need for her to give a teary-eyed farewell to everyone with whom she worked. As much as she may have considered them to be a family, she was quite certain that the sentiment was not universally mutual. People frequently came and went in this line of work. The turnover rate, especially in the Specimen Processing area of the laboratory, was almost as high as that of a fast-food business. If anyone expressed an overly sincere sense of loss for her departure, for whatever reason, it would likely have been out of over-done politeness and cordiality. People might ask questions, but nobody truly cared about the answers they received. To say that her reasons for leaving were simply “personal” was both honest and sufficiently vague enough to satisfy the passing curiosity of nearly all of her coworkers … save for one. And it was she that, as fate would have it, just then happened to be passing by as she stepped out of her supervisor’s office.

  “Hey, you!” Lisa greeted her as she halted in her footsteps, a printout of some random report in her hands. “What’re you doing here this early?”

  “I just had to drop off some paperwork,” Raina immediately replied. “I was just about to leave again, actually. I’ve got an awful lot to do today.”

  “So, you’re not working tonight? I thought you said you were working a one-to-nine-thirty again…?” Lisa asked with a raised eyebrow.

  Raina faced her only other true friend in the world with a reluctant sigh, standing with her in front of the humming centrifuges nearby. Lisa knew her well enough that even if she had been skilled at deceit, Raina’s dishonesty would have been immediately obvious. She was well aware of the fact that her survival depended upon the anonymity of her future identity as a High Court vampire, and she had hoped that this chance encounter would not have occurred. She should have known better; Lisa worked mornings and Raina was an evening shifter, so the odds of running into her on this day were almost inevitable. And she knew better than to try to keep a secret from her friend – not simply for the sake of morality, but simply because she was a terrible liar. Raina glanced about, making sure that nobody else was within earshot, and she leaned a bit closer to her friend.

  “Do you have a minute? I really don’t want to talk about this here,” she said in as much of a hushed voice as she could manage over the hum of the centrifuges and the low roar of the nearby ventilation fans.

  “What’s up? You got a hot date tonight?”

  “Who, me? Are you friggin’ kidding? I haven’t been on a date in forever.”

  “Well then, what’s the deal? Are you calling off work today?” Lisa pressed. She narrowed her eyes at her. “You don’t look too perky. Are you sick?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  Lisa shrugged. “Well, your eyes are bloodshot, your hair’s all damp and frizzy-looking like you just hopped out of a shower in a hurry, and you’re moving kinda like you just crawled out of bed. Are you actually sick, or just hung over?”

  “Umm, kinda both, I guess,” Raina answered impatiently. “Can you take a break real quick or something?”

  “Sure. I was just about to head for lunch in a couple of minutes, anyway.” Lisa looked at her for a moment or two, still suspicious. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yeah … very wrong,” Raina admitted with a nod. “I’ll tell you about it in a bit. Can you just meet me by the lockers, or something?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Raina watched her friend regard her with deep concern in those caring dark brown eyes of hers, and she went off to her place of work for the day in the hematology department. Raina waited impatiently outside of her own locker. She made sure that her space remained unlocked, as indicated in her note of resignation, and she double-checked for anything that remained within that she might have wished to keep. She did not tend to keep much in her locker, aside from a fresh lab coat, a few spare pens, and her purse, if she was on duty at that moment. Perhaps she had been waiting for quite some time for the moment when she could resign from her position, even on a subconscious level, because she seemed to be the only employee in the laboratory that did not keep a huge collection of irrelevant items stored within her locker. She kept no makeup items, no pictures of loved ones or celebrity crushes, no candy or junk food, and no miniature libraries of books within her locker at all times, as opposed to the others whom she worked. As much as she loathed her need to leave, it was certainly a convenient matter, in the overall scheme of things.

  Raina waited for perhaps fifteen minutes, pacing back and forth nervously. Perhaps because the brand of soap in Brenna’s shower was too drying for her skin, possibly a slight allergic reaction, Raina found herself quickly developing an overall itchiness of nightmarish compulsiveness. It wasn’t localized to any one particular area, and as soon as she scratched at one part of her body, another began to bother her. Just as she was about to reach for an itch near her groin that was driving her mad, Lisa finally passed through the self-opening door leading out of the lab area, free of her usual white lab coat. Rather than waiting for Lisa to begin asking questions, she gestured for her to follow as Raina began to walk out to the main hall and back toward the ramp leading up and out of the lower le
vel.

  “So, what’s the deal? Are you pregnant or something?” Lisa joked.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Raina sighed, “I haven’t have a date with a guy in months.”

  “It doesn’t take a date to get knocked up.”

  Raina frowned at her. “I haven’t gotten laid since last Halloween, okay? If that got me pregnant, I would’ve found out a long time ago.”

  “Well, then … what’s wrong?”

  Raina glanced over to her friend, hesitating to make the decision to include her in the overall mess of her new life. “How long have you known me, Lisa?”

  She blinked at her and halted in her tracks. “Since … grade school, I guess. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “If I told you something totally secret … and I mean, absolutely and totally confidential … like, if you told someone about it, you’d have to kill them,” Raina began, “would you totally keep it a secret?”

  Lisa folded her arms and cocked her hips. “Is this about you and that Brenna person?”

  “Well, no, but…” Raina hesitated. “Well, actually … technically speaking, she’s kind of involved, but not … not like you think.”

  “Look,” Lisa said, stepping forth and placing her hands upon Raina’s shoulders, “I know she’s been hitting on you for ages, now, and I know you’ve always been into that whole gothy, fetishy, vampy scene for a long time, but … if this is about you and her, then…”

  “No!” Raina immediately spouted. And then, a moment later, itching her forearm as she said with less intensity, “Well, not really, it isn’t…”

  Lisa sighed, running her fingers through her lustrous, shoulder-length jet-black hair, “Look, you know I care about you, and I’ll support you in whatever you do … but if you’re about to tell me that you’ve turned gay for a vampire chick, then…”