The Darkest Colors Read online

  She hesitated. “Where, then?”

  “Wherever it works for you, and as soon as possible. I’m quite familiar with the process of drawing blood, but I’m not skilled enough to draw from my own veins,” he replied.

  “You want me to draw from you?”

  “Yes, as long as that’s not a problem for you.” The Duke held up an unsteady hand for her to see. “I’m under quite a bit of stress, you see, and I’m afraid I’d only muck it up if I tried to do it, myself. I don’t know of anyone else that is willing and able to do this for me, except you. Here…”

  He reached into his breast pocket and again withdrew his stack of money. The High Court vampire flipped through what had to be well over a thousand dollars, pinched out three hundred-dollar bills, and held them out to Raina.

  “…I’ll pay you in advance, if you’d prefer.”

  She looked at the money, shook her head with a sigh, and gently pushed it away. It wasn’t that she had no use for money – far from that, actually – but she didn’t like having cash waved in her face as a means of pressuring her to do something. It wasn’t the first time she’d experienced it, and it was usually done by lesser men requesting far less “professional” services from her … and usually, if Brenna witnessed it, an intense verbal (and sometime physical) confrontation soon followed.

  This wasn’t some scumbag offering money for sexual favors, though. The Duke was genuinely desperate for her help. She understood that much quite well. However, the reason for his desperation (or apparent lack thereof) was what made her more suspicious more than anything else. She decided to play along, even if only to gain more time to decide whether or not she should actually follow through with the act.

  “Let’s just go to my car,” she told him. “I do most of my work there.”

  * * * *

  Chapter Four

  Raina led him to her own Lincoln, a dark gray Town Car that Brenna sometimes jokingly referred to as “Das Boot” for its size and color, exchanged her purse for her box of equipment from the trunk, and led the vampire to one of the rear doors.

  “Step into my office,” she told him with a smile as she opened it and gestured to the back seat.

  The process of leading up to one of her freelance blood draws was always exciting to her, but this was more unnerving than thrilling. Though the sight was positively fascinating, the subtle (and literal) glow of the High Court vampire’s flesh as a result of his heightened stress was not a reassurance. He hadn’t been glowing when he’d first approached her, nor had he when she’d spoken with him a moment ago in the dimly lit parking lot. Either he was another individual with a phobia about needles, or something else was on his mind. Perhaps against her better judgment, she elected to trust that his intentions were not malicious.

  “Okay, then,” she began as she started to lay out her materials, “for legal purposes, and just for my own curiosity, I’ve got to ask why you want me to draw your blood. I mean, usually I’m drawing from a human for a vampire, not the other way around … and I assume that you’ll be giving your blood to a human. Right?”

  “Yes and no,” he replied. She despised that kind of response, but he elaborated. “I will require only one vial of blood. I owe a debt to my mistress.”

  Raina looked at him with one raised eyebrow for a second, then reached into her equipment box and withdrew a single green-topped, sodium-heparin tube. She was about to draw blood from a High Court vampire. The blood she would draw would then be given to the Grand Duchess, herself. The idea of a vampire not wanting to cause permanent damage to a human by using their fangs was understandable, but the concept didn’t apply to vampire-on-vampire blood communion; vampiric flesh didn’t scar, healing was swift, and pain was much more tolerable. If the Grand Duchess required a measure of her consort’s blood, for whatever reason, she had both the right and the freedom to take it from him however she chose. Usually, though, something of that nature meant that a Debt of Blood was owed, and the resultant collection was rarely a gentle or courteous act. The issue was enough to make her head spin … unless, of course, the alcohol of her first drink was already beginning to hit her.

  “So, you intend to create another bloodspawn.” Raina made it a statement, not a question, as she watched the vampire awkwardly remove his suit jacket and roll up his left sleeve.

  “Yes. The Grand Duchess wishes to preserve her bloodline.” He hesitated. “I am the last of her surviving bloodspawn. She has entrusted me with the task of ensuring that the House of Fallamhain does not fall tonight.”

  She froze in mid-motion as she held her tourniquet in preparation of wrapping his bicep. Raina stared at his bared arm for a moment, already seeing the prominent bulges of two excellent veins at the crease of his elbow. The gravity of the situation was reaching the point of becoming unbearable.

  “The last? You mean…”

  “Cedric, Leofric, and Hiroshi are dead,” he informed her gravely. “Countess Wilhelmina von Reichenbach seeks to take control of the Council, and she intends to do so by destroying the House of Fallamhain.”

  “She had them assassinated?” Raina asked, proceeding to secure the tourniquet around the Duke’s well-muscled arm and securing its buckle with a click.

  “No. She challenged each of them, one after the other, and slew them all herself,” he replied. He squeezed his left hand into a fist a few times, causing his major veins to stand out more clearly than any that Raina had ever seen. “The Countess is on a plane bound for Phoenix at this very moment. She has made it clear that she intends to challenge me, as well.”

  “She’s just going around, killing everyone? How is that even legal?”

  “The Code allows any member of the High Court to challenge anyone of another bloodline to engage in a duel to the death. She intends to use against us the very Code that Duvessa created.”

  Raina struggled to stay on task and not become distracted by their conversation. She tore open the foil wrapped of an alcohol-soaked gauze pad and rubbed the pad vigorously over the prominent central vein that she intended to use. Her pulse was beginning to race, and she could feel the steady trickle of adrenaline in her own veins as her stomach knotted and her chest tightened. She had to do this quickly before her hands became so unsteady that she would be of no help at all to the Duke … and the Grand Duchess, as well, it would seem.

  “Why doesn’t she just challenge the Grand Duchess? Why does she have to, y’know … fight all of you?” she asked, politely trying not to use the word kill.

  “Because she wishes to completely eliminate the House of Fallamhain,” he answered. “Even if she challenged the Grand Duchess and won, she would still have to contend with the rest of us in the aftermath. She knows that not a one of us would ever stand to live with her as our new mistress. Even if she simply had the Grand Duchess assassinated, the eldest bloodspawn would succeed her and become Grand Duke or Duchess of the IVC. However, if no one of the reigning house is left to survive the Duchess, then the title will be bestowed upon her slayer. The Countess intends to exterminate the House of Fallamhain completely before taking control.”

  “Nasty way to go about climbing the corporate ladder.”

  Raina elected to use a standard needle-and-hub setup for this draw. The Duke had huge veins, thick and firm and full of pulsing life. She could thereby use a larger-bore needle, get the job done twice as quickly, and not worry about hemolysis (damaging the red blood cells) of the specimen. Time was becoming more of an issue, now, as she felt her hands beginning to tremble slightly as she uncapped the output end of the needle and screwed it into the clear plastic hub. She was sure that he could see her building anxiety, and she worried that his slightly intensified glow was not a sign that he was becoming unsettled by her worsening condition. But then, why should he worry? A vampire could often sustain bullet wounds to vital areas and keep walking, or even lose a hand and regenerate it over a period of time. What was a tiny needle stick compared to that? The concept was almost amusing – alm
ost.

  “I know this is an odd request, but would you possibly have a standard syringe with you?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a few in my box, here. But I only need those for people with really tiny, fragile veins. I have to pull from them really slow, because the vacuum in a tube can collapse their vein sometimes,” she replied. “You’ve got friggin’ pipelines for veins. I wish everyone I drew from had veins as big as yours. It would sure make my life a lot easier when I go to draw from someone that’s in their eighties.”

  “I’m one hundred and twenty-two years old, actually.” He smiled lightly. “I’m afraid I don’t fit the standard profile of a geriatric patient.”

  “No kidding.” She held the empty tube in her left hand, guided him to straighten his elbow slightly, and grasped the unsheathed needle in her right hand. “Whatever you do, don’t move.”

  “As you wish, m’lady,” he replied, not even wincing as she stuck him halfway through that sentence. He paused a moment, watching her push a tube up into the hub and onto the rubber-sheathed output needle shaft inside. The blood that filled the tube was a deep, deep red, but amazingly held a bit of its own glow, perhaps because the substance that caused his bioluminescence was circulated throughout his bloodstream. “Actually, I need a syringe to use with the tube that you are drawing … for injection, rather than drawing.”

  “Oh.” She was too fascinated by the strange sight of glowing blood filling one of her tubes for that explanation to really register in her mind.

  “Could I purchase one from you?”

  “Purchase? You don’t have to pay me anything. You’re more than welcome to have anything that I have with me,” she answered softly. “I’m just … very flattered you came to me.”

  “Thank you. I must admit that I sought you, specifically. I’ve read much about you on the Internet.”

  “But … I don’t advertise what I do.”

  “No,” he agreed, “but people do talk. Your skills come very highly recommended, and many speak quite fondly of you. As popular as we may be, vampires truly are a small, close-knit society. So, it is not simply a figure of speech when I say that you are literally the talk of the town among vampires in the Phoenix area.”

  She smiled shyly, struggling not to say something negative about herself, for once. “Well … thank you. But like I said, I’m just happy to help. Honestly, I don’t even want to charge you for this.”

  “Nonsense. I still intend to pay you for your services.”

  She considered that as she glanced down at the tube. It was not even halfway full yet, and it had stopped filling. Expired tubes had a tendency sometimes to lose their vacuum with age and thus would fail to properly fill. Alas, she had been depending upon these tubes for her extracurricular phlebotomy practice, as they were freebies given to her by the lab manager that would normally otherwise just been thrown away. When asked by co-workers why she wanted these tubes, she had always claimed to be donating the tubes to the school where she had earned her phlebotomy certification. The rest of her supplies came from local drug stores and medical supply companies from which she ordered online.

  “Well, crap.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Bad tube,” she replied, grabbing another from her supplies.

  The Duke hesitated. “Can you still draw another?”

  “Of course. I can do it all night long,” she replied with a wink, “but I don’t think you have that much blood in your system.”

  Did I really just wink at this guy? Raina thought to herself.

  “Probably not. But I’m willing to pay you enough to cover the cost of your supplies for quite awhile.”

  “Don’t worry about it. This one’s on me.”

  “Nonsense. You do excellent work. You should be compensated.”

  “No really, I insist. Seriously, I’m just glad to help,” she said, mixing the first tube with a few inversions purely out of habit and then examining its glowing contents. “Honestly, I’ve always kinda been a fan of the Grand Duchess. I’m more than happy to do anything I can for her … or her people. I really respect everything that the House of Fallamhain has done for all of the vampires in the world. If it weren’t for her, or for you, things would still be a lot worse for everyone than they are now. We’d still be living in the Dark Ages. People like Brenna would still have to hide out from the world and do a lot of terrible things just to survive, because it would still be legal for humans to hunt vampires for sport. So … I kind of feel like I owe her for everything she’s done.”

  Raina was suddenly very aware of one minor consequence of her decision to use a standard needle-and-hub setup for the draw: it tended to require that she be much closer to the person from whom she was drawing. In the near-darkness of the Lincoln’s interior, she glanced up and found that her face was rather close to his. Their eyes met, and Raina found it all the more difficult to look away from his gaze.

  “Such loyalty to someone whom you have never even met,” he said in a hushed tone with something near reverence in his voice.

  She shrugged lightly, being careful not to move the needle in his vein as she switched tubes. His eyes still held hers. “People do it all the time. Not everyone gets to meet the royal families, but everyone has to swear allegiance to them.”

  “But you are not a vampire. You owe your allegiance to no one.”

  “True,” she agreed, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect her, or her people. I mean, I honestly don’t believe in voting, because pretty much everyone in politics is full of crap and the elections are pretty much rigged, anyway. But if I were a vampire, and if the folks in the IVC were in elected positions, I’d vote for her as Grand Duchess in a heartbeat. She’s awesome.”

  She pushed the output needle into the rubber stopper of the third tube, glancing down with just her eyes for a moment as she did so. The flow did not come right away; she pulled back the needle a bit, as it had moved forward enough to lay against the wall of his vein, and his blood spurted into the tube with a soft, liquid sound. When her eyes lifted again to meet his, she was slightly alarmed to find that he had leaned closer to her.

  “Have you given serious thought to the Change?” he asked carefully.

  Raina had to lean away from him and break the stare, pretending to focus upon her work. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to be seductive, or something else, and it was just too unsettling. The lower calf muscles of her left leg began to twitch slightly as she fought the urge to nervously tap her foot. Almost every muscle in her body seemed taught and ready to spring her away from him, her flight instinct overruling any urge she might have to fight. She suddenly found herself wanting to be out of the car, away from the Duke. She wasn’t sure whether it was because, on some primal level of defensive instinct, she was afraid that he might try to bite or rape her (or both), but if she didn’t finish this soon, she would panic. The last thing she needed now was to be known as the phlebotomist that had left a High Court vampire with a needle hanging out of his arm while she’d run away from him, screaming like a little girl.

  Still, what had she been thinking, trusting him like this? Her self-defense spray was still in her purse, locked in the trunk. His words and urgency had disarmed her, misleading her to believe he was completely harmless to her. It was a stupid, stupid assumption. No vampire was completely harmless … perhaps not even Brenna, quite honestly. It wasn’t always a question of their intentions, just their nature. They were predators; she, as a human, was prey. The fact that she was female and he was a male only added to the tension. Could the simple act of bloodletting be enough to push a stressed, possibly nutrition-deprived High Court vampire into a state of bloodlust? Or was she simply allowing her general fear of these beings to overrule her common sense and self-control?

  “I could never do it,” Raina finally told him. “I’ve had offers, but … honestly, the idea scares me.”

  “The Change?”

  “Death,” she replied. “If the Change doesn’t kill m
e, then someone else will. Vampires are supposed to be immortal, but … well, you probably know the average lifespan of a vampire is only about five years after their Change.”

  “The Grand Duchess is over two hundred years old. Several members of the Council are over a century in age, including myself,” he countered softly. “And if the legends about Lilith are to be believed, and if she is, indeed, alive as many claim she is today … she could very well be over a thousand years old.”

  “You don’t believe in fairy tales, do you?”

  “Our Mother of Blood is no fairy tale, I can assure you. If she were, then I would not be here to tell you so,” the Duke insisted almost defensively.

  “I guess that’s probably true.” She paused. “I would probably be a pretty ugly vampire, anyway.”

  “I sincerely doubt that. You make a very beautiful human.”

  “You’re only being nice to me because I’ve got a needle in you.”

  “Nonsense. I’m saying so because I find you very attractive.”

  She felt her cheeks flushing warmly. “Are you hitting on me?”

  “Are you offended…?”

  “Not at all,” she answered. Raina felt beads of sweat forming on her brow. “Damn.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Where were you a few minutes ago when I was whining to Brenna about being hopelessly single?”

  They shared a soft laugh as Raina released the tourniquet. The first of the two filled tubes had begun to lose a bit of its glow, compared to the other. She wished that she could take one back to the hospital laboratory. Scientists and medical experts had been trying to convince members of the High Court race to submit samples of any tissues or fluids they could offer, so that they could be studied to better understand their unique physiology. Thus far, they had all managed to defend the secrecy of their race quite diligently. Even in the aftermath of a fatal High Court duel, the cadaver was always quickly collected by their loyalists and disposed of in some manner. Splashes and traces of blood were all that anyone had ever been given the opportunity to study. If she could bring a full tube of the Duke’s fresh, heparinized blood to the lab, it would truly be a major accomplishment. Besides, she had a weird curiosity to see what High Court blood looked like after a tube of it was spun down in a centrifuge.