The Darkest Colors

by David M. Bachman

  Nightmares were something she had come to accept as being the norm rather than an exception for her, since she’d undergone the Change. Not everyone experienced them as regularly as she did, or at least not as many vampires would readily admit as much, but she experienced them more often than not. She had learned how to avoid them through a bit of trial and error.

  The key to avoiding nightmares, as a vampire, was in going to bed happy and having a full day’s rest without any breaks. For her, this meant that she needed to sate the thirst of one of her three biggest guilty pleasures: blood, booze, or sex. If there was any break in her sleep – a ringing phone, a doorbell, a loud noise, a need to use the bathroom – then she would be forced to choose between calling an end to her rest for that day or simply accepting the inevitability of a nightmare-to-come.

  Being that she had abstained from satisfying any of her three “needs” the previous night before retiring for the day, she would have been more surprised to have dreamt of something pleasant or, better still, of nothing at all. The being-chased-by-something dreams were her most frequent brand of nightmare, but fortunately not the worst; death dreams, on the other hand, were absolutely the worst, and they usually resulted in her waking with screams, sobbing, or both. As of yet, she had not understood what determined the severity of her nightmares, and she was relieved that great emotional stress did not necessarily equate to worse dreams, considering the events of her past twenty-four hours.

  It took several seconds for her vision to fully swim into focus as the swirling colors of her unconsciousness curled away before she could see that she was in Raina’s bedroom. And, a second or two later, she became aware of Raina lying beside her upon that same bed, kicking her legs about in a random, violent manner. At least that explained why, in her dream, she had felt someone tripping her.

  While Brenna had snuggled her nude self underneath the covers of her friend’s bed, Raina had elected to sleep atop the covers in full attire. Or rather, she had crashed there, as Raina had been both physically and emotionally exhausted upon her return from the hospital with that Lisa woman. As much as she disliked that snippety bitch, herself, it was easy for Brenna to imagine that Lisa was as much to blame for Raina’s weariness as the Change. It had taken a great deal of self-restraint to refrain from saying something more harsh or, worse still, physically lashing out at that stuck-up, self-righteous, arrogant, holier-than-thou snob that Raina called a friend. What did she see in that bitch, anyway?

  At first, as Brenna paused to rub the sleep from her eyes, she was led to believe that Raina was either restless in her sleep or experiencing a nightmare of her own. The way she kicked her legs about and thrashed upon the bed, she looked as though she were struggling to free herself from a giant, invisible spider web.

  However, the reality of it suddenly hit her like a physical blow. She saw that Raina’s eyes were open, wide open, and the choked, gagging sound escaping her lightly parted lips was not that of a dreaming person. The way her movements then changed from a mere thrashing into something much worse, a spastic sort of cramping that made the fingers of her hands contort in ways that seemed double-jointed and surely painful. While it looked as though a phantom spirit of some manner were strangling her, Brenna knew immediately what she was observing. Raina was in the throes of a full-body vampiric seizure. And, knowing what that malady usually precluded, she realized with heart-stopping terror that her dear friend was quite literally on the verge of death.

  Brenna threw aside the covers and sprang from the bed, hurrying to find the items that Lisa had brought along with Raina upon her return. The nutritional demands of Raina’s Change were far, far greater than she had supplied. Usually, this sort of condition was preceded by an intense, ravenous, almost rabid state of bloodlust that usually resulted in the commission of unthinkably brutal, barbaric crimes against others. Usually, it took a lot to reach a state of bloodlust. Severe injury, extreme psychological trauma … even several days’ worth of starvation were necessary for a vampire to be pushed so far over the edge by the drive of their physiological needs that they fell into true bloodlust, whereupon they would seek nourishment from the nearest available (and usually unwilling) donor.

  The severity of Raina’s malnutrition was so great that she had either bypassed that state completely, or it had made her so weak that she had been completely unable to act upon those primal vampiric urges of bloodshed and/or lust. Having been there, herself, Brenna was well aware that failing to help Raina at this point meant that she could very well die of starvation if she didn’t acquire some sort of nutrition very soon.

  “Hang on, babe,” she said, perhaps more to herself than to Raina, “I’ll get you fixed up.”

  She started yanking things from the bag of items and lining them up in a row along the surface of the bedroom dresser. Four cans of energy drinks, several bottles of various vitamin supplements, a bag of marshmallows, a large can of protein-enriched powdered shake mix, and two bottles of potent liquid cold-and-flu medicine were in the bag. Carbohydrates and nutrients were what the girl needed, and Lisa had actually done a fair job of scoring a worthwhile gift-pack of goodies for her formerly human friend.

  Brenna wasn’t going to stop to ponder how it was, exactly, that Lisa had known exactly what to get. Rather, she preoccupied herself with the frantic task of opening each of the bottles of vitamins and spilling out a handful of each onto the counter. There was no need to measure these things out. More than likely, assuming she could even get Raina to ingest these things, there was a good chance that she could wind up purging them before her body had a good chance to absorb what it could from them. In its bid to rid itself of all things human, the Change had a tendency to turn the digestive system from a lazy, winding, Sunday-drive side street into a speeding straightaway on the Autobahn … with an occasional urge to suddenly and completely reverse the flow of traffic.

  Popping open the tabs of the energy drink sodas was the most difficult part. The length of her fingernails was sometimes more of a burden than they were worth in allure, as she could never open cans without the aid of something else like a nail file or her car keys. She managed to find success with a quarter that she liberated from Raina’s nearby purse.

  At last, when she turned to face Raina, she was alarmed to see that she had stopped moving almost completely. Was she dead? Was this it? Had she waited too long? Had she missed her chance to help her friend by snoozing away the day, when she should have been all but force-feeding Raina the things she now had lined up on the dresser? Brenna dropped to her knees beside the bed and let panic get the best of her for a few moments.

  “Raina? Raina, honey?” she called to her as gently as she could, shaking her half-human friend by the shoulders. “Can you hear me, baby? It’s me, Brenna. I’m here, okay? I’m here with you. Everything’s gonna be cool. All right? Can you hear me?”

  Raina’s gaze was fixed unblinkingly at the ceiling, even as strands of her own dark brown hair laid directly upon her eyes in a way that should have bothered any conscious person. She was breathing, shallow and rapid, and her body felt as taut and rigid as though almost every muscle in her body were being clenched tight as Brenna lifted her and placed a pillow back under her head. She was frozen in a horrifyingly casket-like position with her arms folded across her chest, although her hands cupped her own breasts rather than grasping her own shoulders or laying neatly atop one another. Brenna had no idea at all if anything that she said could really be heard and/or understood by her friend, but she was willing to err on the side of positive thinking. She had to assume that hope still remained. If she accepted the idea that Raina was beyond any form of communication, she may as well have accepted the possibility that she was too far along towards death to ever be brought back.

  “Listen, we gotta get you something to eat, okay? You’ve gotta get some stuff in you before you start shriveling up like a raisin,” Brenna told her as she retrieved one of the opened drinks and a handful of marshmallows from the
dresser. She held them up for Raina to see. “I know this ain’t cheese and wine, but it’s gonna hafta work for now. All I need you to do is just open up and say, ‘Ahhh,’ and start wolfing this stuff down. Can you do that?”

  Brenna watched for a few seconds as Raina continued to focus her unblinking stare upon nothing at all. This was not going to be easy. In fact, she wasn’t even sure that this was going to work at all. They hadn’t taught her anything like this in the phlebotomy class that she’d attended with Raina. She knew how to draw blood, label tubes, and check in specimens that came to a lab. She didn’t know the first thing about feeding a catatonic person that was halfway through the Change and so far gone that they couldn’t even blink. As far as she knew, the only way to get a person in this sort of condition back to health was through an intravenous drip, and maybe even by means of inserting a tube down her throat. Did they make IV drips for Red Bull and melted marshmallows?

  She tried pressing a marshmallow to Raina’s visibly dry, chapped, blood-smeared lips. “C’mon, you love these. I know you do. I had to take that bag away from you before you ate the whole thing when we were making crispy treats that one time.” She waved the marshmallow under her friend’s nose. “See? Good stuff. Yummy num-num naughty food. C’mon. Take it. Open up. Ohm-nom-nom-nom-nom.”

  Brenna was aware that her admittedly lame humor was not entirely meant for Raina, but rather to try to keep her own spirits up. She was a hair away from true, full panic. Her hands were trembling terribly. She felt her lower lip quivering. Her throat was tight, and her eyes welled with tears that threatened to spill as she tried to lure her beloved Raina back from near-death with a white sponge-like piece of sugary fluff.

  Giving up on the marshmallow for now, Brenna stifled a sob and just popped the thing into her own mouth. Chewing on it with angry chomps, furious with herself for being so helpless to save her friend … to save her love from death, she could taste just a hint of something coppery and tangy with it that didn’t quite belong. She must have picked up a bit of the blood from Raina’s lips as she’d tried to feed the morsel to her.

  Dimly, she realized that this was the first time she had been afforded the opportunity to taste Raina’s blood. As she picked up on that thought, then dwelled upon it, she then feared that this would be the last time she would ever be afforded such a carnal knowledge of the woman she loved. After all, she had long wished to drink of Raina, even if only just to have but a taste of her … but she had never dared to take that from her without invitation. Not only was it illegal for a vampire to drink from an unwilling human, but it went against her own feelings of respect for Raina. Brenna had fantasized on countless occasions of how she wished to first taste her, how she wished for it to be a mutual event of affection and love. Instead, this was it, a faint hint of her life’s essence laced with the chewy, mushy, sugary-sweet mass of a marshmallow as she lay dying before her, slowly shedding her mortal coil as Brenna sat idly and dumbly without any proper knowledge or means of saving her. She barely managed to swallow the sacred treat without gagging upon it as her emotions finally overwhelmed her, and she choked back a few sobs while hot tears finally trailed down her cheeks.

  Brenna was about to attempt to pour a measure of energy drink from the can directly into Raina’s mouth, holding her bloodied lips apart with her left hand, when suddenly a loud electronic bell-ringing sound began to sound from somewhere behind her in the room. She was so startled that she fumbled about to avoid dropping the can of soda completely, splashing a bit of it here and there upon Raina and herself in the process. It took her a second or two, but she recognized the ring tone as being that of Duke Sebastian’s cellular phone. By the third ring, she had managed to locate the phone in Raina’s purse. Still holding the can of Red Bull as she flipped open the phone and pressed a button to answer the call, she did her best to try to sound nonchalant as she spoke.

  “Whoever you are, this had better be pretty fucking important,” Brenna said bitterly, although the sniffle that followed those words and her otherwise stern tone rather diminished her attempt to sound tough.

  “Raina? Is this Raina Delgado?” a female asked on the other end of the line.

  “That depends on who’s asking.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Excuse me, but who the fuck are you? You called me, lady.”

  “Who I am is of no concern to you. If you were Raina, then you would not need to ask,” Grand Duchess Duvessa Fallamhain snapped, “nor would you dare to address me in such a tone, if you valued your own blood.”

  Brenna suddenly felt about as small as a flea. Her anger vanished in a blink, replaced with reverent awe. “I … I-I’m sorry … your highness…”

  “Your grace,” the Grand Duchess corrected her coldly.

  “Your grace, I … I-I didn’t know that you…”

  “Identify yourself, please.”

  After a second’s hesitation, she replied, “Brenna Douglass.”

  “You are the Commoner of whom Raina spoke earlier. Correct?”

  “Yes, your grace,” Brenna replied formally, almost feeling a need to bow to the voice in her ear.

  “As a daughter of our Great Mother Lilith,” the Grand Duchess chastised her, “I would hope that you would know to communicate as a lady of civility, rather than speaking in the tongue of harlots.”

  Wow, Brenna thought, what a royal bitch. Nevertheless, she tried to let it go.

  “I am very sorry, your grace. It’s just that…”

  “Where is Raina?” she interrupted impatiently.

  “She’s, ah … unavailable right now.”

  “What do you mean, unavailable?”

  “I mean … she’s, umm … not … able to talk on the phone right now.”

  “And why not? She was expecting my call. I made it clear that I would need to contact her again. She assured me that she would make herself available.”

  Brenna had never been the best at hiding her anger, especially when it came to dealing with rude people. Already, she had just about reached her limit in dealing with this regal snot. Grand Duchess or not, she was only willing and able to sustain so much attitude before surrendering to the need to dish out some of her own in return.

  “I’m sorry, your grace, but she’s in the middle of having a full-blown seizure, right now,” Brenna answered with enough false sweetness that it could have gagged her. “If you’d like to leave a message, I’m sure she’ll be happy to call you right back, as long as she isn’t dead…”

  The lengthy pause was enough to make Brenna fear for a moment that the Grand Duchess had ended the call. Without a trace of anger now, clearly more concerned now, she asked, “What do you mean, she’s having a seizure?”

  “She’s just all clenched up, just laying there all scrunched up like she’s having one of those hardcore bloodlust seizures,” Brenna replied, trying not to let panic creep back into her once more. “She’s staring off into space. I don’t think she can hear or see anything, at all. It’s almost like she’s…”

  “She’s going under. Oh, dear God,” the Grand Duchess murmured. “Did you not tell her to prepare for the Change at all? She was depending upon you to guide her through this, Miss Douglass! You were to be her Rebirth Guide. Did she not eat as she should have?”

  “She started to, but it all went faster than we expected,” Brenna protested. “I mean, when I went through the Change, it took a couple of weeks to finish. But here, it’s only been a few hours, and she’s already almost halfway through the Change!”

  “Of course! The Change of a High Court is the most dangerous and intense of all races,” the Grand Duchess replied. “The Change of a High Court is begun only by taking the blood of another directly into one’s veins, not merely by drink or by lust. Not only must a candidate be of a compatible blood type, they must also be strong enough to survive such an intense Change. That is why there are so very few of us in the world. And that is why she was depending upon you to keep her alive. But if she has
been allowed to go this far into bloodlust, then it would seem that she made a rather poor choice in selecting her Rebirth Guide…”

  Brenna felt like screaming at the Grand Duchess. Barely, she managed to contain herself. Instead, with emotion making her voice unsteady again, she asked, “How do I save her … your grace? She’s dying. I know enough about vampirism to know that she’s in some serious sh— … uh, trouble.”

  “Has she tasted blood yet?”

  “Other than her own? No, I don’t think so.”

  “Her own?”

  “Yeah,” Brenna confirmed, remembering the unpleasant sight of watching Raina spit several of her teeth out in the bathroom sink. “She’s already lost all of her human teeth, I think.”

  “My word. She has progressed even faster than I could have ever hoped,” the Grand Duchess marveled. “So you have not offered your own blood to her?”

  “Um … no, I haven’t.”

  “And why not? Must I again remind you that you are her Rebirth Guide? You owe her your blood! It is your fault that her condition has deteriorated to this point! Why have not yet fed her from your veins? Do you not feel she is worthy of a Commoner’s blood?”

  “I just … didn’t think she’d go for it. I didn’t want to weird her out.”

  “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t understand what that phrase means.”

  “Raina’s a homophobe. She knows I love her, and she probably would have thought that sucking my blood would have crossed the line.”