The Darkest Colors

by David M. Bachman

  “Okay, okay … jeez! What’s the deal?” the blonde grumbled as she fumbled about for something under the bar. She tried clicking one remote control at it a few times, yielding no results, then switched out for another one from under the bar. “Too many damned TV remotes in this place…”

  “Number Four! TV Number Four!” Brenna cried anxiously, slapping her palms on the counter almost childishly. “Hurry, before they go to something else!”

  “All right, all right…”

  At last, the over-tanned little Barbie wannabe fired the correct remote control at the television and cranked the sound. The live video feed was minimized to a picture-in-picture frame as a female anchorwoman for a local television station now dominated the screen. The anchorwoman was making the usual corporate apologies for the extremely graphic nature of the live images being shown, before she rolled into a verbal recap of the night’s events.

  “…bringing you live footage of the latest in a series of bloody, deadly battles being fought between rival factions of High Court vampires. Two vampires associated with the House of Fallamhain are already dead, and a third fatality is likely to be the outcome of this situation. It appears that here we’re seeing Duke Sebastian Fallamhain … whom I believe is the last remaining husband of … sorry, the last consort of Grand Duchess Duvessa Fallamhain, leader of the International Vampiric Council. That’s Duke Sebastian Fallamhain, apparently about to engage in … I can’t believe this, an actual public swordfight, a duel to the death, right here in the front lot of the Tempe hotel where he’s been staying. Reports are still coming in, but the woman he is about to fight is … am I reading this correctly? Countess Wilhelmina … von Rich-in-botch? Rick-in-back? Or … I’m sorry … is it Rike-in-bock? Okay, Countess Wilhelmina von Reichenbach.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Brenna whispered as she stared on, wide-eyed.

  “The worldwide vampire community has been stunned and horrified by the recent and sudden string of challenges issued by the Countess and the bloody path of destruction she has left in her wake over the past three days,” the reporter went on. “She has single-handedly defeated three out of four of the Grand Duchess’s consorts, cutting each of them down in what can only be called a bloody rampage in her quest to take control of the International Vampiric Council, or IVC. What seems most shocking to many of us, including myself, is the legality fights to the death between High Court vampires … and, in this case, also involving other races of vampires affiliated with those of the High Court. All of these killings are completely legal, officially sanctioned events according to both vampiric and human laws, because there are still no laws in any country that forbid vampire-on-vampire violence…”

  Although a part of her wanted to remain standing in front of the bar to watch the outcome of the impending duel, she nevertheless found herself running out the door and across the parking lot to Raina’s Lincoln before either of the High Courts downtown had drawn their swords. The wind of her blurred sprint roared in her ears. Brenna skidded to such an abrupt stop upon reaching the car, the smooth soles of her knee-high boots obviously not made for athletic moments, that she very nearly dented the front door in with her hip as she slammed into it. She leaned around the front pillar of the passenger’s side and pressed her forehead to the windshield with her hands at her temples, peering into the dark interior. She expected to see movement, perhaps someone in the front seat, but for a moment she saw nothing unusual at all. She had just pulled away from the glass when she saw glimpsed a bit of bare flesh through the gap between the two front seats. She looked again, practically laying upon the hood of the car to get a better look. Her heart dropped as she barely saw Raina’s face, mostly obscured from view by the spill of her dark brunette hair.

  She cursed under her breath and rushed around to the driver’s side of the vehicle, yanking upon the rear door handle. Amazingly, it was unlocked – she had totally been prepared to break through the window with her bare hand, if necessary. Raina was lying upon her side on the rear seat, looking as though she had simply lost consciousness and dropped straight over. Unless Raina had recently taken up mixing pills with her booze, there was no chance that this was a matter of her passing out after just one drink. Brenna gave her a quick glance, saw no obvious sign of injury, and grabbed her shoulder to give her a rousing shake.

  “Hey! Hey, kiddo, c’mon! Hey!” she called to her gently, trying not to let panic creep into her voice. What had that High Court bastard done to her? As much as she favored the House of Fallamhain, she hoped that son of a bitch lost his head to the Countess for this.

  Raina didn’t respond. Brenna laid her fingers under the gentle curve of her friend’s jaw and immediately felt a pulse. She grabbed her by both shoulders, pulled her upright into a seated position, and carefully moved her silky, dark hair from her face. She tried shaking her awake and calling to her, but only managed to elicit a small groan from her. A few light slaps to her soft cheeks finally inspired Raina to turn her face away and lazily swat her hands at her unseen assailant. It still wasn’t enough to bring her around completely.

  Brenna looked down and saw her friend’s tackle box of “goodies” at her feet, open and visibly ransacked. Raina had always kept everything on her tray perfectly organized and stocked, but things were obviously missing, and items had been sloppily replaced in an obvious used state. Alarmingly blood-soaked gauze pads had been stuffed into her sharps container – not the amount of bleeding one could expect to find in the wake of even the most pathetically botched blood draw. Worst of all, next to these she saw a pair of black thong panties still barely looped around Raina’s right ankle. Struggling not to panic, she remembered one of her friend’s mandatory “emergency only” items and was relieved to find that it was still present upon the tray. She grabbed the tiny packet of smelling salts, tore it open, and waved it under Raina’s delicate nose.

  Raina’s eyes shot open as she came to life with a jerk and a half-gasp, just a split second before she suddenly began flailing her arms at Brenna in a panicked defense of a perceived attack. Brenna took two hard slaps to the face, a kick to the stomach, and narrowly missed a heel-kick to the nose as Raina fell across the back seat and tried to scramble away from her, letting out a strange sort of keening sound of terror, like a little girl in the final seconds of a waking nightmare.

  “It’s me, it’s me! Raina, honey, chill! It’s just me!” Brenna cried as she wisely backed off with her hands held up defensively. Raina’s eyes were almost impossibly wide open with sheer horror, but they didn’t quite seem to be focusing upon her. “Raina! Baby, what’s wrong?”

  Raina’s frenzied defensiveness melted away almost as quickly as it had begun, and for a few seconds, she simply laid there, staring at nothing and gasping for breath. Gradually, she seemed to fade back into reality, blinking her dark brown eyes rapidly and letting herself relax a bit as she finally began to take in her surroundings. Her gaze finally met Brenna’s, and after literally shaking off her own daze, she closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands.

  “Oh … God. Oh, my God,” she groaned at last.

  “Raina, can you hear me?” Brenna asked, her throat tightening slightly with emotion. “Please … my sweet … tell me this isn’t how it looks.”

  Raina didn’t immediately reply. She pushed herself back into an upright sitting position, still rubbing her eyes and then her temples, moaning miserably. Suddenly, she began looking around with renewed alarm. Her eyes met her worried friend’s once more, though they were now narrowed with lingering weariness.

  “Where is he? Is he gone?”

  “Who? The Duke?”

  “Yeah. Where…?”

  “He’s in downtown Tempe, hopefully about to get his ass hacked apart by that psycho German chick,” Brenna answered as she climbed into the car and sat beside Raina. “What the hell happened?”

  “He was … he…” she said, then suddenly began to feel around her throat and wrists for something. She found something at the
bend of her right elbow underneath the material of her shirt that made her gasp, “Oh, God.”

  Brenna put a hand upon her shoulder, demanding, “What? What is it? What did he do to you?”

  Raina unbuttoned the cuff and hastily pulled up her sleeve, revealing a neatly applied bandage of gauze and medical stretch-wrap. The gauze had clearly absorbed a considerable amount of blood, although it had not at all soaked the material completely. Raina stared at the wrapped wound for a moment, then frantically began to tear at it with her fingers, unsuccessfully trying to rip it straight off. Brenna gently moved her friend’s hand away and took the wrapping in both hands, ripping it apart with a single forceful jerk.

  “Jesus, you let him bite you?” she gasped as she saw the unmistakable mark upon Raina’s olive-toned flesh. The neat pair of puncture wounds was clearly indicative of a delicate and calculated bite, not the vicious and ragged sort of bite wound that someone would have left upon an unwilling subject – something that would likely have still been bleeding at that point. There was a nasty, strange purple bruise that had already begun to form around one of the two little wounds, the closest to her median cubital vein. Her friend stared at the injury for a moment, then looked up with an angry but fearful glare.

  “I didn’t let him! He did it while I was out!”

  “Out? From what?”

  “Like … chloroform, I think, or something like it. He had a rag soaked with something, and he stuck it in my face,” she replied, still sounding a bit defensive about it. “I didn’t just let him bite me, dammit! He knocked me out!”

  “Jesus,” Brenna gasped, momentarily taken aback. She quickly recomposed herself. “Okay, okay, but … what the hell? I mean, did he ask you first, and you turned him down, or what?”

  Raina closed her eyes and shook her head with a heavy sigh. “He just did it. I dunno. I don’t know why he did, but it’s … it’s just my fault … for being so stupid about trusting him. I can’t believe I fell for that. I knew the whole thing sounded weird, but … dammit…”

  “Hey, don’t,” Brenna soothed her, putting an arm around her shoulders and embracing her. “Don’t beat yourself up. This shit happens. You got played. It happens to everyone. Hell, it even happened to me once.”

  “He knocked me out, Brenna! He put me under, and he … he used me. I put myself in a stupid, stupid position, and he totally used me.” Her lower lip was beginning to tremble even as she said that, the sound of emotion creeping up into her voice. “I would have given my blood to him if he’d just asked. I really would have. He really looked so desperate. I just wanted to help him … but he … God, I can’t believe I let this happen…”

  Brenna tensed as she prepared herself within before daring to ask, “Do you think he raped you?”

  “For my blood?”

  “No, I mean … literally. Do you think that he raped you? Y’know, like … while you were out of it…?”

  Raina turned and just stared at her for a few long moments, blinking slowly with a blank expression.

  “I don’t … I don’t think so,” she said at first. She hesitated, looking away for a moment. “I … I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “Trust me, you would know it if he had.”

  Raina shifted her hips slightly, her eyes widening with alarm, and she only then appeared to become aware of her underwear still hanging off her ankle. She met her gaze again, now clearly on the verge of panic.

  “God, I … I really don’t know what happened. I … but … I-I don’t…”

  “Are you squishy?”

  “Squishy?”

  “You know...?” she hinted with a vague gesture toward her lap, trying to be at least somewhat discreet.

  Raina looked both embarrassed and scared as she admitted, “I kinda feel wet.”

  “You’d better get checked,” Brenna told her, feeling her own stomach form a knot. She knew how these things went. She had seen it happen before. She had been through it herself … and in a much, much worse way … although she still had never told anyone the truth about it.

  “I can’t. I can’t go to a hospital. They couldn’t do anything for me anyway.”

  Brenna wasn’t going to argue that point, but not for the same reasons that Raina would have expected. She pulled upon Raina towards the open door. “C’mon, then. You can check yourself in the restroom, clean up a bit, and…”

  “No.” Raina clamped her hand down upon the back of the front seat to hold herself in place, visibly beginning to feel the ache of the bite wound to her other arm. “No, I … I’d rather just go home.”

  “Why? Raina, honey, please. I should already be calling the police right now…”

  “No!” she blurted suddenly, grabbing her knee and giving her a wide-eyed look. Raina relaxed a bit after a moment, looking a bit alarmed by her own reaction. More softly, she said, “No, don’t. I don’t want the police, and I don’t need an ambulance. It’s nothing that major.”

  “Raina, don’t be ridiculous, that guy…”

  “I don’t know, Brenna! I don’t know what happened, and I’m not going to start jumping to conclusions.”

  “Isn’t it kind of obvious what happened?”

  “Brenna, please…”

  “Look … aside from that, it looks like you’ve been bitten. Do you have any idea how easy it is for a bite wound to get infected?”

  “Vampirism isn’t spread through bites. That’s only in movies.”

  “No, dummy, I’m talking about bacteria. Ever heard of sepsis? Bite wounds are fucking nasty.”

  “I can clean it, myself. It’s not like he had rabies or anything.”

  “No, but still … you should see a doctor, anyway. I’ll take you down to County, they can clean up that bite, and while you’re there they can set you up with a rape kit and…”

  “No! Please! Seriously, Brenna, I … I just don’t want anyone else to know about this, okay?” she persisted, grabbing Brenna’s shoulders. “I don’t want anyone in the bar, or anyone at the hospital to know about what’s going on here. I don’t want that kind of attention. This is embarrassing enough for me, already. They saw me leave with him, and they’ll know something is up if I go back in there like this … all dopey and looking messed-up. And they saw me drinking, too. They’ll start jumping to conclusions. They’ll say I got drunk, that I left with him and, y’know … did it with him … voluntarily, I mean … and they’ll think I’m just trying to go after him because he’s rich and famous. I mean, think of how it all sounds to a complete stranger? I’m a total nobody, I don’t have a lot of money, and he’s this super-famous High Court vampire, I’ve been drinking, we meet up and … y’know?”

  Brenna looked at her with disbelief. This wasn’t some sports star or famous actor they were talking about, this was a big-name vampire. They were still looked down upon by most people in such a way that it was almost a given fact that people would believe the word of a human over a vamp. She certainly knew this to be a fact from her own first-hand experiences.

  “Who the hell cares what people think? So what if the word gets out this asshole attacked you? I mean, if people get mad enough to form a lynch mob to go hunt his ass down, what would be wrong with that?”

  “I don’t want them to know about me, okay? I don’t want them to know what happened to me, because the word will get around and … it’ll screw up everything.”

  Everything? What, her little side-business, her reputation, and her self-image? Yeah, that was possible. But it would be tough to hide the consequences of it, if it did turn out that he’d raped her. Unprotected sex with a vampire was a means of direct exposure. There was more than one way to contract vampirism. The idea was still slow to get around. Really, vampirism was almost as easy to pick up as HIV or Hepatitis C … although, unlike an STD, it was almost impossible for someone to not know his or her mate is was infected. Put simply, the possibility of becoming pre
gnant by a vampire was almost non-existent, since male vampires didn’t produce active sperm. But in all honesty, it was easier for someone to becoming a male vampire’s bloodspawn as the result of a sexual encounter (consensual or otherwise) than it was for one to start their Change by taking on the Communion of Blood. Who’d have ever thought that a shot of semen was more potent than a cup full of blood?

  Anyway, this wasn’t Brenna’s call to make. She wasn’t the victim here. And, dammit, if Brenna had been a better friend and had looked out for her as she should have, Raina wouldn’t have become a victim, either. If Raina just wanted to let it go, that was her prerogative. It was stupid, frankly, to let someone get away with doing that to her, just so infuriatingly submissive and absurd for Raina to take that kind of abuse and then choose not seek any kind of justice.

  But it wasn’t Brenna’s body that had been violated, nor her blood that had been stolen. She had to be supportive enough of her friend to respect Raina’s decision to keep the matter under wraps, at least for the time being. It would have been a moot point to report the attack, anyhow; at that point, the least of Duke Sebastian’s worries was being charged with the crimes that he had committed against Raina. And anyway, it certainly wasn’t he first time that Raina had insisted upon defending someone that had victimized her, but … well, anyway…

  Raina looked around for a moment to the floor of the car, picked up her keys, and handed them to Brenna. Almost shyly, she asked, “Sorry, but … can you drive me home?”

  Reluctantly, Brenna took the keys with a heavy sigh of resignation. “Fine, I’ll drive. But we’re going to my place. I’m not going to just dump you off at your home and just assume that you’ll be okay.”

  Raina nodded, then gave her a firm, grateful hug, saying, “Thank you. You’re awesome.”

  “I know.”

  * * * *