The Darkest Colors Read online

  “Sorry, I’ve never been a customer of yours before,” she joked.

  “You work at that one club a few blocks from here, don’t you.”

  “Good guess.”

  “I recognize your face … your eyes,” she insisted. “I’ve seen you on the job.”

  Oh, great. She’s not going to shoot me, she’s going to start hitting on me, Brenna thought. I think I’d rather have her shoot me first.

  “Yeah, well … a girl’s gotta make a living somehow, right?” Brenna replied with a shrug. “Hell of a lot better than standing on a street corner or cooking up meth, huh?”

  “True.” The cop seemed to relax her gun-hand a bit at her side and gave her a nod to say that she was done reading her VIC. As Brenna dropped the card back into her purse, the cop asked, “So, what’s your relationship with Raina?”

  The male cop finished looking around the spare room and began checking out the office.

  Brenna shrugged. “We’re friends.”

  “Friends, like … how?”

  “Y’know … friends.”

  “What, like buddies, roommates, co-workers, life partners…?”

  “Raina’s not into girls.”

  The way the cop looked at Brenna, there was an unspoken question left hanging in the air between them: Raina might not be … but are you? She didn’t feel like answering that question, and fortunately, the woman wasn’t bold enough to actually verbalize it. She knew when not to cross that line of professionalism. The only trouble was, there wasn’t much (if anything) to stop this cop from dropping by the club on one of Brenna’s work nights to press on with that line of questioning when she was off-duty.

  “If she’s so sick, is there any reason why your friend hasn’t gone to see a doctor already?” the male cop asked from the office.

  “Well … you know how it is,” Brenna answered with a shrug. “I mean, I don’t know about you, but I was never able to get a doctor to see me the same day I wanted to make an appointment. Y’know, we’ve still got all these damned old snowbirds in town that haven’t left for the summer yet, and they’ve all got heart conditions and arthritis and Alzheimer’s and whatnot, so … y’know … it’s hard to get ‘em to just squeeze you in for an appointment on short notice, y’know?”

  “She could always go to the ER,” the cop suggested as he exited the office and peeked in the spare bathroom. “According to her other friend, she seemed to have a really big reason not to go there, earlier today.”

  “Well, duh,” Brenna scoffed, “of course she didn’t want to mess with an ER visit! I mean, think about it. Just walking in the door costs, what, fifteen hundred bucks? Then you’ve gotta sit around and wait for like eight hours before anyone will even so much as look at you. Even then, there’s no guarantee that they’ll even do anything for you. They’d just tell her she’s got a really bad cold, or a case of the flu, give her some ibuprofen that costs like twenty bucks a pill, and then send her right back out the door.”

  “How about a really bad case of vampirism?” the dyke cop asked pointedly. Brenna tried not to react to that visibly. “How about you just cut the act and tell us what’s really going on?”

  Brenna met the woman’s gaze squarely for several long seconds. “She’ll be fine, okay? She went through a lot the other night, she’s had a hell of a rough day, and she’s feeling pretty miserable right now, but she’s gonna be fine.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “No, of course not! I already told you, she’s sleeping in the other room!”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Brenna gasped as she spun to look down the hall, hoping the female cop wouldn’t shoot her for moving so suddenly. Raina stood in the doorway of the bedroom, leaning lazily upon the door. Her hair was wild and visibly damp with sweat, her face glistening with perspiration, and she looked barely able to hold herself upright, but she was managing to make her appearance. Brenna wasn’t sure whether to feel elated to see her back on her feet and somewhat conscious, already, or if she should instead feel doomed to be persecuted by the cops for how they surely would interpret Raina’s sorry condition.

  “Are you Raina?” the male asked as he approached her, shining his light directly at her.

  Raina held up a hand to block the glare of his flashlight. “Yeah. What the hell’s going on, Brenna? Why do I have cops in my house?”

  “Someone asked us to check on you. She was worried that you might be in trouble,” he replied, trying to visually examine her. “She told us you were going through the Change, and she was worried about your safety. How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve had better days,” Raina replied with a shrug. Her words were slurred and mumbled, slightly affected by her changing dental condition (or lack thereof, at that moment), but she was at least coherent enough to respond.

  The cop noticed the puncture mark on her arm. “What’s that?”

  “What?” Raina looked to where the cop was pointing the beam of his flashlight. She hesitated. “That … that’s where I, ah … had some blood work done.”

  “What kind of blood work?”

  “Transfusion,” Brenna answered for her.

  The male cop shined his light at her for just a moment. “I wasn’t asking you.”

  “She’s right,” Raina insisted. “It was … basically a transfusion … thanks to Duke Sebastian.” She was still not all there. She wasn’t even referring to the same arm as the one that Brenna had used for the transfusion.

  “How long ago did your Change start?” the cop asked. As Raina pulled her hair back over her ears, he visibly jerked back with surprise. “Whoa. That’s different.”

  Raina noticed the difference of her ear, as well, feeling how much longer and more pointed it was at the top. Looking to Brenna with wide eyes, she murmured, “Holy shit … it’s really happening.”

  “Are you her Maker?” the female cop asked, holstering her pistol and stepping away from Brenna towards Raina.

  “I’d say it’s pretty obvious I’m not. I mean, take a look at my ears,” Brenna said, pulling her hair back so they could see. “I’m just your average everyday Commoner. Raina’s Maker was a High Court.”

  “A High Court vampire?” the dyke gasped. “Then who’s her Maker?”

  Brenna and Raina met each other’s gaze halfway across the mobile home. Raina’s eyes were wide and full of panic, almost wild. Things were about to get really tricky. They couldn’t lie to the police and expect them not to become even more suspicious. Just the same, they didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag quite yet. Brenna was absolutely paralyzed. She didn’t want to go to jail, nor did she want to get Raina in trouble for lying to the police. But even worse would be to reveal the identity of Raina’s Maker and, thus, set the gossip train into motion that would inevitably lead Countess Wilhelmina straight to them. It would be hard to worm out of this one, being that they had already figured out that Raina was becoming a High Court vampire, but…

  “The Duke … Duke Sebastian … Fallamhain,” Raina finally confessed, sounding breathless as she staggered forward a couple of steps. “I am … the Grand Duchess’s … blood … spawn.”

  And, having said that, Raina then collapsed to the kitchen floor.

  * * * *

  Chapter Fourteen

  With a sudden gasp, Raina awoke to the sound of beeping medical equipment, the smell of antiseptics, and the feel of a body that was entirely alien to her. Every nerve of her body felt raw and naked, sensitive to the slightest brush of fabric or the softest shift of temperature in the room’s air. The deafening sound of white noise faded in and out of her ears, strongly at first, shrinking back momentarily with the sound of an electronic beep, fading back in, and then retreating as another beep sounded.

  Raina tried to open her eyes. They felt as though they had been glued together. She had to contort the muscles of her face this way and that to help pry her eyelids loose from one another, as they had somehow adhered themselves together with the crusty sort of s
ubstance she would have otherwise experienced with a case of pinkeye. Her vision was blurry, burning for the first few seconds until she could manage to blink away her slumber.

  Her stomach growled loudly, and she felt as though a thin shaft coated with hot sauce had been inserted between her legs while she’d been out. She had been catheterized. A pinching sort of sensation in both of her arms near her elbows drew her gaze to the IV lines taped to her forearms. Wires trailed everywhere her body from leads glued all over her upper torso. Trying to reach for her own face to rub at her eyes, she found her wrists bound by leather bands and steel chains secured to the rails of a hospital bed. Her ankles were similarly restrained. From where she lay, there was very little available to look at, due to the overly-fluffy pillow under her head that blocked her sight in either direction. Her view was limited to a fluorescent light directly overhead, thankfully switched off, and the wall she could see directly ahead that featured a window covered with a heavy metal screen. The glass of the window was frosted to obscure any images from viewing inside or out, but at least she could tell that it was dark outside.

  Her throat burned with thirst, dry and scratchy as she swallowed a thick paste that hardly qualified anymore as her own saliva. She parted her lips to moisten them with her tongue, or at least to attempt to do so, and she felt a painful tearing sensation. Her lips were so dry that they split painfully in a couple of places as she yawned, the worst being her lower lip. Something scraped against her tongue, sharp like a needle, and her tongue recoiled as she gave a light gasp of surprise. That was when she first noticed the fangs.

  Two of them, located where her upper canine teeth once were, the fangs felt entirely natural in placement, yet their tips were both smooth and sharp in a way that assured her they were perfectly new – like those of a young kitten, she idly mused. The rest of her teeth even felt strange and alien. They were new and completely unfamiliar to her, as though someone had implanted them in her jaws during her unconsciousness, yet they were so perfectly aligned and comfortable that they should have felt as though she’d already possessed them for her entire life. They were all sharp, though not in the same way as her fangs. Whereas her upper canines were like two small stilettos, the rest of her teeth were like edged like organic razorblades. Her molars were shaped somewhat like her human teeth, but they felt much simpler in form, somewhat flat with an outer edge that was ever so slightly serrated. These were the teeth of a humanoid carnivore. These teeth were not made to do much chewing of plant-like substances, but rather to help tear away flesh and cut it into pieces that could be swallowed.

  These were the teeth of a vampire … and they were now hers.

  A sharp, bittersweet flavor reached her tongue, unfamiliar to her memory but nevertheless registering with instant recognition in her genes. Warm and wet, she ran her tongue over its source, a painful split in her lower lip near the center. The pain was there, but she dug her tongue into it anyway. The blood, the delicious, sweet blood was little more than a taste, an essence of the feeding that she truly desired, but it was not enough. And then the taste faded, dwindling as the wound closed and gelled over. The sharp pain of the split skin faded to a dull ache in less than a minute. She could still run her tongue over that spot, trying to encourage that deliciousness to return, and she could feel the small bump of the gel-scab, but the yummy treat would not return as she wished it, for it was sealed.

  She was consciously aware of her own inner motivations, this perverse appreciation for the taste of her own blood. It repulsed her, fascinated her, and frightened her all at once. Was this bloodlust? Or was this merely thirst? Was this how a vampire always felt, always miserably burning with thirst and craving another taste of that coppery delight? Or did she only feel this way because she only needed blood now?

  There was nothing sexy or romantic or in any other way appealing with regard to the way she felt, tied down to that hospital bed with more tubes and wires coming out of her than the engine of her Lincoln Town Car. This was nothing to envy, nothing any sane person should ever desire. In the past, had she seriously entertained a desire to willingly become this creature, this thing of misery? How could anyone stand to live like this? This was awful. This was beyond terrible. It was something that only a mad person would consider to be a sane option, and something that would drive a sane person mad.

  It had to get better than this. There had to be some kind of merit, some kind of light at the end of the tunnel. There had to be some way to justify living in this kind of a horrible, sorry state of existence. If not, then there would not be as many vampires roaming the world as there were. Unless, of course, the world was full of more fools than she’d ever thought there to be. Fools that were foolish in such a foolish way that Raina had foolishly never before expected or believed she could be fooled into believing something so otherwise foolish. Or something. And stuff. Umm, yeah. And it was right about then that she realized there were probably some seriously hardcore painkilling drugs in her IV drip.

  The beeping returned. It had stopped for a minute or so during the distracting experience of rediscovering her oral anatomy. It seemed louder now, obnoxiously so, as if whatever was beeping had become frustrated that its previous calls had gone unanswered. It wanted attention. Raina wanted attention, too. She had questions … and lots of them.

  There were sounds of movement and a sigh of frustration to her left. The beeping was halted abruptly as a woman muttered something in Spanish under her breath.

  “Hey,” Raina managed to say on the fourth try, the first three emerging only as choked whispers. “Hey, you … lady.”

  The room seemed relatively well-lit in spite of the total lack of any lighting. Raina could see the woman’s face quite easily as she moved to stand near the left side of the bed. Dressed in scrubs and wearing a clipped-on ID badge, she was clearly there to help out, but she didn’t dare to lean over the rail or otherwise seem willing to actually do much of anything for her. The woman clearly was afraid of her, as made obvious by the look of uncertainty upon her face and the way she stood there uneasily, apparently ready to take off running at any moment.

  “Are you … a nurse?” she asked the short, chubby, older Hispanic woman.

  The woman babbled something softly in her native tongue, apparently a response to Raina’s question. Was she even in Arizona anymore? Had Brenna somehow smuggled her across the border into Mexico, perhaps to place her under the care of a physician that would accept cash and render care without asking too many questions?

  “Where am I?”

  The woman said something else in Spanish. She rattled it off so quickly that she didn’t catch it, so Raina asked her to repeat it. She said it again, only slightly less quickly than the first time, and she yammered on with something else after that. Even without a drug-induced haze clouding her mind, the extent of Raina’s foreign language education was extremely limited. Constantly harassed by authorities and other people that always assumed he was Mexican and, by assumption, an illegal immigrant, her father had deliberately avoided teaching her Spanish, much less ever using it around her. By the time she’d had an opportunity to take classes to learn Spanish in high school, Raina was at a point in her life when she wanted as little as possible to do with anything that had to do with her father … or her mother, for that matter. But that was all another matter entirely…

  “Where am I?” Raina asked again.

  Once more, her question was met with words that she didn’t even remotely understand.

  “Lady … please … I no speak-a the Spanish. Okay?”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “English?”

  “A little.”

  “Are you a nurse?” Raina asked again.

  The woman seemed to take a moment to find her own voice. “No, I … I just here to … to watch.”

  “Can you go get one?”

  “Que?”

  “Can you please get me one?”

  “You … want watch?”

  “
No, no…”

  “Are you … wake up?”

  “I dunno. You tell me,” Raina answered wearily. “If this is a dream, then I hope I wake up soon.”

  “Que?”

  “Never mind.”

  She seemed to know as little English as Raina knew Spanish. Great. Odds were that someone in Admissions had taken one look at Raina’s name and specified Spanish as her language on her chart. Given the demographics of the Phoenix area, it was an easy enough mistake, an assumption that perhaps even she might have made herself, had she been a registration specialist instead of a phlebotomist and lab assistant.

  “You want nurse?”

  “Yes. Yes, I want nurse. Please. Quickly. Like … STAT … or something.”

  The woman nodded anxiously and stepped out of sight.

  Raina attempted to sit up as best she could manage, in spite of the restraints upon her wrists. The upper half of the bed was already elevated, so she was at least able to lift her head far enough to see over her pillow. She had been confined to a large room, alone. As with the window directly opposite her bed, the other two large windows in the room were also frosted and covered with a heavy-gauge steel wire security screen. The colors were relatively washed out in the low level of light in the room, but they were immediately familiar. The air was uncomfortably cold upon the parts of her body not buried under the blankets that had been laid over her body. From the hallway outside of the room, she heard the familiar sound of the metallic clanging and thud of a security door.

  Rather quickly, she realized that her guess about being taken across the border had been way off. This was local, a place that Raina knew well. She had been here many times – almost daily, in fact. But her visits to this place had always been brief, voluntary, and always for the sake of performing her daytime job duties as a phlebotomist. She did not particularly like the clientele. This was the detention wing of the county hospital where she worked … or rather, where she had worked, until she had tendered her resignation. The patients in this wing were prisoners and jail inmates. Convicted murderers, sex offenders, drug dealers, junkies, hookers, rowdy drunks sleeping off the previous night’s liquor, and other undesirable members of society were the norm here, aside from an occasional special-circumstance case here now and then. Now, she was one of them … although she had no idea why. Oh, wait! Fangs! That was why! Now it made sense…