The Darkest Colors Page 24

  Raina accepted the penlight cautiously, almost as though she expected it to explode as soon as she touched it. She looked to her friend with uncertainty. Brenna merely shrugged. Reluctantly, Raina clicked on the light, aiming it at the floor, and she quickly waved her hand in front of it a couple of times. Nothing happened. She moved it over her hand more slowly, now. The light caused a sensation of heat upon her skin, but it was not painful.

  “We were surprised to find that even though you appeared to have completed the majority of your Change almost twelve hours ago, your skin exhibited very few signs of photosensitivity typical with most vampire races,” the doctor explained. “Do you feel any pain from the light?”

  “Feels kinda hot,” she told him. “It doesn’t hurt … but it’s definitely warm.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Does this mean I can still walk in daylight?” Raina asked as Brenna gently took the pen light away from her. She shone the light quickly upon the back of her left hand, then almost immediately hissed with pain and cursed under her breath as she jerked the beam of UV light away. One of the deputies at the doorway chuckled in amusement.

  “You have a tolerance for UV light that is nearly equal to a human’s,” the doctor said, “but the fact that you say that the light does feel warm tells me that you’re not completely immune to that particular allergy. If you do try to expose yourself to sunlight, I would strongly recommend wearing a sun block with a high SPF rating.”

  “A day-walking High Court hottie,” Brenna mused with an admiring smirk, shining the light at her friend’s bare forearm. “Boy, did you get lucky.”

  The doctor continued, “We are not yet sure about your resistance to other typical vampiric allergies … garlic and silver, namely. If you would be willing to stay with us for just another day or two…?”

  “I don’t think so,” Raina replied immediately, folding her arms under her breasts. “I just quit my job the other day, so I don’t have any health insurance right now, and I don’t have any way to pay out-of-pocket. Everything I’ve already had done is probably going to cost me a fortune.”

  “No such thing as health insurance for vampires, anyway,” Brenna commented as she clicked the pen light off and handed it back to the doctor. “We’re not exactly known for ever catching the flu or coming down with a bad case of the sniffles, y’know.”

  “I’ve already spoken with the board of directors,” he said, “and the research department has already agreed to pay for your stay and all of your related tests, as long as you’ll consent to them.”

  Brenna turned to her with an impressed look, but Raina was not so inclined to accept. She drew in a deep breath and shook her head, letting out a heavy sigh.

  “Like I said, I’m not going to be anyone’s guinea pig,” she replied. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t like the idea of being treated like I’m some kind of space alien. It would be bad enough if I was just a High Court vampire, but since I’m some kind of a one-off race, I know you guys would just study me to death. If I sign myself over, I’m just going to end up on a table getting sliced up into little pieces in the name of science.” She shuddered at a sudden, gruesome mental image that she developed. “I don’t even want to know what you people did to Duke Sebastian while he was in the morgue…”

  Brenna tapped her on the shoulder and jerked her thumb back toward the doorway. “We’ve got a ride waiting for us, anyway, and the clock’s ticking. Remember? Crazy evil German chick on the rampage with a sword…?”

  “Yeah, yeah … you’re right,” Raina admitted with a nod. She looked to the doctor with a shrug. “I’m not trying to be selfish here, but…”

  “I know about this other vampire that wishes to harm you. We have an excellent security staff here, armed officers we can post outside your room…”

  “Forget it. I just want out of here,” she insisted with gentle firmness. “If things were different … maybe I would, but … I just can’t. I’m sorry. I’ve never wanted to die in a hospital.”

  The doctor appeared ready to say something else in protest, but Brenna silenced him before he even spoke, merely by shaking her head at him. After a moment, the doctor finally sighed and nodded as he relented.

  “I will authorize your discharge, then. But if you ever change your mind in the future…”

  “Don’t worry,” Raina said confidently, “I won’t.”

  * * * *

  Chapter Fifteen

  The door of the detention unit slammed shut behind them, loud and abrupt. Raina and Brenna stood alone in the hallway, the Sheriff and others having remained behind to attend to other matters. Raina was not sure why, but she had somehow expected that they would receive a police escort on the way out, or at least someone from hospital security to see them safely outside. As things were, though, they were completely on their own for the time being.

  They had been keeping her in protective custody during her Change, after all. But as it turned out, they had only been concerned about the media intruding upon the Sheriff’s domain. Camera crews and the like were generally not allowed inside the hospital anyhow, but as he explained it, the Sheriff had not wanted any visitors at all to speak with Raina and perhaps change her story regarding Brenna. He really had believed that Brenna had forced the Change upon her, and he had a serious desire to see her prosecuted … and summarily put to death.

  Seeing that he no longer had a case, no longer an opportunity to take one more vampire off the streets, he had turned them loose to essentially throw them to the wolves. He’d made no bones about it. If some High Court vampire on a rampage wanted to see Raina dead, the Sheriff was not about to risk any of his officers’ safety to stop them from doing so. Even though Congress had established that vampires were entitled to the same basic civil rights as all humans, law enforcement almost never got involved in vampire matters. The duality of current laws stated that vampires were to be considered humans, yet they were subject to so many special exclusions that made such laws mainly symbolic. Law enforcement generally turned a blind eye to vampire-on-vampire violence unless humans were somehow directly involved, or unless they were under intense political and/or legal pressure to intervene. Sadly, the general public still found vampire politics to be more of a soap opera than a real life-or-death matter. People honestly seemed to regard the sword duel that had ended with Duke Sebastian Fallamhain’s gruesome death as morbid entertainment, rather than as a brazen act of public murder. One vampire cutting down another with a blade seemed no more significant than, say, a big-name Hollywood couple announcing their divorce.

  “So,” Raina sighed as Brenna put an arm around her, “now what?”

  “Well … I guess we go meet the Grand Duchess,” she replied with a shrug. “The Sheriff said she had someone waiting outside to pick us up.”

  “Yeah, along with a thousand cameras and reporters,” Raina grumbled. She met Brenna’s gaze worriedly. “I don’t want to do this. I really don’t.”

  Brenna smirked. “You don’t wanna be a celebrity? From what I hear, your name’s already been all over the news since they brought you to the ER here.”

  Shaking her head, she answered, “I don’t want to be paraded around in front of a mob of people like some kind of freak again. You know I’ve already been through that before. And to think … that a bunch of people are going to be looking at me, just…”

  “You could always just hide your face and refuse to talk to anyone. Just say ‘no comment’ a lot and get the hell out of there.”

  “Yeah, but … I don’t even know where I’m supposed to be going.”

  Brenna considered that for a moment, then shrugged again. “Well … as late as it is right now, there’s only one major way in and out of the hospital that I know of, and that’s on the south end by the ER entrance. Pretty safe bet that everyone’s waiting for you out there.”

  Raina’s chest felt tight as she thought of that. Everyone was waiting for her – everyone. Brenna made it sound as though the entire
world were waiting for her to walk out of the hospital. For all she knew, being that her status as a High Court vampire was clearly no longer a secret, there very well could have been a throng of national and even international news reporters waiting for her outside.

  She had never truly considered herself to be completely neurotic, or at least not a victim of a generalized anxiety disorder, but she had always, always hated large crowds of people. She especially loathed the idea of being the focus of attention of any group. Even speaking in front of the classroom during her phlebotomy course for a presentation project they’d all been given had turned her into a trembling, stuttering mess. The media frenzy following the death of her parents, the necessary testimony in court, and the group therapy she had tried afterward … no, not again. If she once again had to face up to all those lights, all those flashbulbs, all those camera lenses, those microphones being thrust in her face, that onslaught of questions all being shouted to her, all of those eyes cast upon her, looking, judging, disapproving…

  “You okay, my sweet?” Brenna asked with both a chuckle and genuine concern. “You look sick…”

  “Restroom,” Raina only managed to say before pushing away from her and making a hurried half-dash to the door around the corner from the three elevators before them. She threw the door open, slammed it shut behind her, and dropped hard to her knees in front of the toilet as flashing bursts of color and light swirled before her eyes.

  She waited for it, almost welcoming it as she hugged the bowl, but it never came. She managed not to throw up, although perhaps only because she had nothing to purge – a couple of dry heaves, hardly anything more than a bit of saliva. She hadn’t actually eaten for almost two full days. However, she had been given a lot of fluids, apparently more than she needed. As soon as the nausea passed, she found it necessary to make an abrupt about-face, drop her loose-fitting lower garments, and relieve herself. The second time in less than thirty minutes? She must have been given a lot of saline, and her kidneys were ridding her system of the excess fluid in an overly efficient manner.

  The touch of the tissue paper was strange to her, things not being quite what they once were since her Change, and the sensation actually made her jump a bit. She decided not to become distracted by that detail for long, although she did pause to look at herself in puzzlement. Aside from the strange feeling of ultra-nakedness she had from being devoid of hair from the neck down, feeling overly aware of her own nudity under her own clothing, she could not help but to notice the more subtle details of her Change.

  The skin of her hands was extremely smooth, as though she had rubbed them recently with a very expensive lotion that had left them quite silky but not at all greasy. There were no calloused areas, no rough spots, no cracks from dryness, no hangnails … not a single imperfection. As she looked even more closely, she noticed that even the faint scars she had once remembered having from random minor injuries over the years were now gone. The lines left upon the back of her left hand, for example, where a stray cat had slashed her with its claws when she’d been a young girl, or even the scar across the palm of her right hand where she had deeply cut it while fooling with a sharp sword as a teenager … all gone. She didn’t know whether to be excited to have these flaws repaired, or to mourn the apparent loss of her own history. There were, of course, things in her past that she was glad to forget, but those were scars that had nothing to do with marks upon her skin.

  Raina stood and dressed, flushed, and began to wash her hands as she was suddenly caught by her own reflection in the polished stainless steel mirror. The face that stared back at her was vaguely familiar, but not enough that she recognized it as her own. She looked too young, too supple. Part of it was the fact that she wasn’t wearing her eyeglasses, but there was more to it than just that. The crow’s feet that had begun to show at the corners of her eyes were gone. The subtle smudges of weariness and general age under her eyes had been erased. Aside from the obvious fact that her ears were now elfish and tall, the tiny holes in her earlobes and cartilage from her piercings had filled in. The earrings that had once occupied them were now in the bottom of the plastic bag of personal effects she’d been given when leaving the detention wing. Just for the sake of curiosity, she dug out her eyeglasses and tried them on to compare the difference with how she had looked before. Looking through them even for an instant made her feel as though she was going cross-eyed and she yanked them away abruptly.

  With great reluctance, she peeled back her lips widely to reveal her new dental structure. She wasn’t sure why, but Raina had somehow expected them to look grotesque and horrendous, monstrously jagged and random like the mouth of a shark. Had she been unfortunate enough to have been attacked by a Nosferatu, then that very well could have been the case. As it were, however, she had honestly been blessed with a set of teeth that even the best cosmetic dentists would have been challenged to craft. Her teeth were perfectly straight and even, albeit shorter than she remembered … with the obvious exception of her canines. Her upper fangs were not absurdly long in appearance, although in her unfamiliarity with them they did certainly feel that way in her mouth. She was surprised to find that she had a subtle pair of lower fangs, actually, although these were more just a very, very slightly exaggerated version of her prior human canines. They were simply more pointed than before, not the least bit any longer than the others of her lower teeth.

  A click of the door’s latch caused Raina to turn with a gasp. Brenna stood outside the barely opened door with wide eyes.

  “Are you okay?” she asked softly.

  Raina closed her eyes, turned to face herself again in the mirror, opened them again, and unhappily sighed, “Honestly? No.”

  Brenna entered the restroom and closed the door behind herself, locking it. She embraced Raina from behind, nuzzling her face against her friend’s as they both faced their reflection in the mirror. The difference in their height was quite obvious, as Brenna actually had to stoop down a bit to comfortably match her. Raina didn’t let it distract her. She was still too mesmerized by the image of the vampire … no, the two vampires that stood looking back at her in the mirror.

  “It’s hard to get used to it. I know,” Brenna told her softly. “Believe me, I spent a long time after my Change trying to convince myself that it was just a nightmare. I honestly kept hoping I was just going to wake up at some point and find out it was all just a dream. At one point, I even thought I was dead. Like … y’know, like I was just this ghost of some kind, because I’d kept myself locked up in my own place and hadn’t spoken with anyone for so long. I kinda lost touch with reality for a little while.” She gave Raina an affectionate squeeze. “Then you finally called me, and when you came over that first time, I knew it was real. I knew it when you touched me for the first time. Remember? Remember when I told you to pinch me?”

  “Yeah. I remember,” Raina murmured, feeling tears well up in her eyes. “I’d never seen you so spooked before.”

  “I know it sounds stupid now,” she continued, “but I had to be sure. I couldn’t get you to slap me, but I was sure about it by then, anyway. I was sure when I saw you with my own eyes, when I heard your voice in person … when I held you close like this. I finally knew it was all real. And that’s when I decided that I just had to accept it. I had to accept what I was … or I really would have been dead.”

  Tears spilled silently down Raina’s cheeks. “I don’t feel like … like I’m really here. This is all just so surreal. If this is some kind of a dream, then I hope to God I wake up soon.”

  “Want me to pinch you?” Brenna asked with a smile.

  Raina sniffled. “Yeah, sure.”

  Brenna took that loose bit of skin at the back of Raina’s elbow and pinched it hard. “How’s that?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “No?” she asked. Brenna pinched harder, shaking that loose bit of skin lightly. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

  “No,” she sighed, closing her eyes and squ
eezing out another pair of tears. She couldn’t hold in the choked sound that escaped her, half chuckle and half sob. “You can pinch there all you want and it doesn’t hurt. You showed me that trick a long time ago.”

  Brenna turned Raina about to face her, lifting her face towards her own with a finger under her chin. Raina’s eyes opened briefly, then closed. She wasn’t sure why, but she could not bring herself to meet her friend’s emerald green eyes, beautiful as they were. Raina felt her gently wiping the tears away from her cheeks with her thumbs. Affording herself a brief glance, she saw Brenna bring one of her thumbs to her lips, tasting Raina’s tears with the tip of her tongue. Her eyelids looked heavy, almost lazy, although it could have only been the blurriness of Raina’s vision as she fought to hold back more tears.

  “You’re real, my sweet. I’m real,” she told her softly. Brenna hesitated. “This is real, too.”

  Raina felt her drawing closer before it ever happened, feeling the spill of Brenna’s raven-black hair against her chest and the warmth and sweet scent of her breath before she felt that first brush of her lips. Soft, moist, and warm, Brenna kissed Raina directly, but chastely. She didn’t jerk away, not immediately, because she was initially too shocked to even react. She honestly could not believe that it was even happening, stunned that her dear friend was kissing her – not like a friend, but like a lover. Something twisted inside of her, a knot of something, as she felt her own mouth opening just for a second in response … and then that knot clenched tight and hard as she snapped to her senses.