The Darkest Colors

by David M. Bachman

  “What line?”

  “The one between being friends and being lovers. Like I said, she’s a homophobe. She doesn’t want to do the girl-on-girl thing.”

  “I see.” The Grand Duchess let out a frustrated sigh. She said more than asked, “Then I would hope that, for the sake of her survival, you might know of another way to shed your own blood … one that does not involve the act of biting.”

  “Well … yeah, but…”

  “Then collect as much blood of your own that you can reasonably spare, and instruct her to drink it,” she replied, as though it made perfect sense. “If I were not a thousand miles away, I would gladly perform the task, myself. She is my bloodspawn. I intend to care for her as any mother would care for her own daughter. But in lieu of my presence, I must entrust her survival to you. You do love her, do you not?”

  “Oh God, yes,” Brenna replied with a nod, sniffing back her emotions again as she looked at Raina, seeing that her eyes were closed now but she still was breathing. “I would die for that girl.”

  “Then I trust you will do everything you can to see to keep her alive until I may see to her safety, myself,” she stated proudly.

  “I will.” And with those two words, in a way, Brenna felt the same weight of importance as if she had just taken a vow of marriage.

  “Excellent! I will see to it that you will be justly rewarded for your efforts, Ms. Douglass,” the Grand Duchess said. “In the meantime, I have made arrangements for someone to keep watch over her. I have dispatched the closest of my remaining personal guard that are nearest your location. Their job will be to keep Raina safe from Countess Wilhelmina and her minions until my arrival. Your job will be to do the same, until my people arrive to relieve you of your duties. I pray that it will not be difficult for them to find you.”

  “Well, if you need the address where we’re at…”

  “No! Don’t say it!” Duvessa interrupted urgently. “Our conversation might be overheard, and I do not wish to save the Countess the trouble of tracking you down first on her own. My escorts are bound to me by blood, and I have such faith in their abilities that I would entrust them with my own life. God willing, they will find the two of you sooner than the Countess. For now, I will ask that you see to Raina’s care immediately. Do everything in your power to keep her well, no matter what the cost. I will call again soon. I will expect to hear news of improvement in her condition.”

  Brenna almost literally had to bite her tongue to resist the need to say something regrettable. Instead, she managed to force out a polite but strained, “As you wish, your grace.”

  “Thank you,” she said, “and may God be with you.”

  “Um … thanks,” Brenna replied, for lack of a better response.

  It wasn’t until she clapped the phone shut to end the call that she realized that she had conducted her very first conversation ever with the Grand Duchess of the IVC entirely in the nude. There she had been, conducting a life-or-death phone conversation with a world-famous celebrity, wearing nothing but a smile … or, well, not even that much. At any other time, she might have found it to be hilarious. Perhaps in hindsight, it still would be. That was, of course, assuming that she and Raina would both even be alive to laugh about it together in the coming nights.

  * * * *

  Chapter Thirteen

  Brenna was in such a panic to do something, anything, to help save Raina that it wasn’t until she dropped the plastic-wrapped syringe a third time that she realized just how badly her hands were shaking. She closed her eyes, balled her hands up into fists at her sides, and tightened every muscle in her body for a few seconds as she forced herself to calm down a bit, even if only physically. She managed to find Raina’s gathering of medical supplies in her office room on the opposite end of the house, thankful that sundown had come before this time so that she could safely venture out of the bedroom. Although everything she needed was present and available, she nevertheless had a great deal of difficulty in selecting the items she would need to perform this impromptu small-scale surgical procedure.

  Only by rehearsing the act quickly, pantomiming the actions she would soon be performing, was she able to remember and grab each of the items that she would require. It had been awhile since she had drawn blood from anyone with a needle, let alone one that was connected to a syringe. She and Raina had, after all, worked out an agreement where Raina would draw the blood of any voluntary subject that Brenna brought before her, and in return Brenna would cover Raina’s bar tab for the night. As such, Brenna’s venipuncture skills had grown a bit rusty with time, to say the least.

  However, even at her best, Brenna had never done something like this before. In fact, she was quite sure that this sort of thing was a ridiculously bad idea, probably something that would cause Raina more harm than good. But a bad idea was perhaps better than no idea at all. If she tried, there was a chance for success, however small it might be; if she did nothing and simply sat in idle helplessness, then Raina’s death would be certain.

  Raina needed professional medical help. Brenna had been a medical professional of sorts, herself, but only in the past, and not at all of the kind that was trained or certified to perform a blood transfusion. Any other time, with anyone else, in any other situation, she would have long ago just grabbed her cell phone and summoned an ambulance. A trip to the ER would have saved Raina perhaps an hour or two beforehand. However, at this point, unless Brenna stabilized her immediately, Raina would surely be dead by the time she was transported to the ER and whenever they felt like getting around to treating her. After all, hospitals run by humans didn’t exactly go out of their way to save dying vampires or humans that were in the process of becoming vampires.

  The Grand Duchess had instructed her to give Raina her blood to drink, but Brenna had not been afforded much of an opportunity to explain to her that Raina was in no condition to drink anything, at all. She knew that it wasn’t possible for people to go mixing blood types, when it came to blood transfusions. However, her own blood type as a Commoner vampire, Type V Negative, was compatible with any human blood type – were it not, then vampires would have had a much more difficult time in creating their bloodspawn. In their phlebotomy class, they had been told about the existence of a few cases where people had become infected with vampirism after light exposure to Type V Negative blood, plasma, or serum, making it transmissible almost the same as any viral blood borne pathogen such as HIV or hepatitis. Thus, her half-baked plan to transfuse her own blood into her dying friend would have to work. It simply had to work. It had to.

  Even if Countess Wilhelmina did not already know that Raina was becoming a part of the Fallamhain bloodline, she would not need any secretive or seemingly omniscient resources to learn as much if Raina was admitted to a hospital emergency room. The local media would do all of the work for her. It was rare enough that someone would be admitted to an emergency room with the kinds of symptoms from which Raina was suffering, such an extreme case of nutritional anemia as a result of a hyper-fast Change. As soon as the hospital staff figured out that she was no Commoner but was, in fact, a High Court vampire, word would inevitably and quickly spread to the media in a matter of minutes. The local news agencies would gladly point out Raina’s location to the Countess with a late-breaking story, and Raina would only have a few hours left to live before surely meeting her death at the edge of the very sword that had also slain her Maker. Countess Wilhelmina would walk right in, kill her, and walk right back out, and nobody would lift a finger to stop her. Why? Because who the hell cared if one vampire killed another? Far as any human was concerned, it would just be one less pair of fangs roaming the Valley. Their only gripe would be about the bloody mess left behind.

  That was all, of course, dependent upon Brenna choosing to take her to a hospital … something that really wasn’t even a valid option. So, in her mind, it wasn’t even a matter of choice now. She knew what needed to be done. The only question remaining was whether or not she
could actually do it without screwing it up.

  She hurried back into the bedroom with Raina’s usual tackle box of supplies and a small armload of other items, dropping them to the floor as she knelt beside the bed. To say that this was going to be a weird procedure would have been putting it mildly. She had never drawn blood from herself before, so the mechanics of it were entirely different. She had performed phlebotomy with one hand many times before, perhaps more often than not, but not in the sort of manner that she was going to try. She only knew how to take the red stuff out, not how to put it back in.

  For one, there was the problem of the tourniquet. Looping it around her bicep and cinching it tight was easy enough with the type of clip-release band Raina used, but there was the question of how she was going to release it when she had her only free hand preoccupied with a needle. Then there was the question of how she was going to swap tubes with only one hand, without letting the needle lay at an angle that would ruin her vein or fall out of her arm completely.

  She came to decide upon using a winged collection device, or butterfly needle, which had just long enough of a line between the needle and the hub that she would be able to change tubes and still hold the needle steady. She selected the largest-bore butterfly that Raina had, a 16-gauge, and grabbed a handful of tubes from the tackle box, making sure to avoid using any tubes with a clot-activating additive – she needed whole blood, not serum or plasma.

  The draw went surprisingly swift and much more easy than she’d expected. She had always had good veins, as had Raina. It was something that had helped to lead the two of them to buddy up in their phlebotomy class together, in fact, as it made their practice draws that much easier … aside from the fact that there had been a strangely intimate feeling to the act, anyhow. She cleansed the site with an alcohol pad, made an easy puncture into her median cubital vein, and drew ten seven-milliliter green-topped tubes. Brenna didn’t want to risk allowing the blood to clot, hence the use of heparin-treated tubes, but she also worried that introducing an anticoagulant into her bloodstream could cause other problems that she could not foresee. With the last tube filling, she awkwardly managed to release the tourniquet by biting its release button, and then hooking its fabric upon one of her fangs to pull it clear of the puncture site. Finally, she withdrew the needle with an exhale of relief, sheathed it, and slapped a square of cotton gauze over the small dot of blood that began to well up from the puncture wound. She knew that it would clot almost immediately, but it was simply a matter of habit to apply pressure to a draw site with gauze.

  Brenna gathered the tubes up in both hands, inverted them a few times, and then held one up to examine it. She had never noticed before, but her vampiric blood was much, much darker in color than she remembered it having been in her human years – very rich in hemoglobin.

  “Now for the hard part,” she murmured to herself as she tossed aside the piece of gauze she’d been holding to her arm.

  Raina’s arms were still folded across her chest, but her muscles were no longer taut with the strain of her earlier seizure. She was still breathing in that rapid, shallow manner that she had been, earlier, but aside from that, her body was completely limp. Brenna had expected the hardest part of this to be in fighting to pry one of Raina’s arms into a suitable position without hurting her. Instead, the most difficult part would reveal itself to be in finding a usable vein anywhere.

  Raina’s body was rapidly beginning to consume itself now, so much that her face was beginning to appear gaunt, her cheeks hollowed, and her eyes slightly sunken. Her blood pressure had to be dangerously low at that point. The veins that were readily visible were only the thin, spidery veins that trailed along closely to the surface of her skin, which looked paper-thin and a sickly grayish color. If she hadn’t still been breathing, Raina could have easily been mistaken for a corpse.

  With a bit of effort, Brenna did manage to find a solid vein in Raina’s left arm, although it was the cephalic vein closest to the inside of her elbow. It would be harder to anchor the vein and, assuming that Raina could even feel it, it would hurt more. Brenna hoped that it would be resilient enough to support the needle that she intended to use. She was tempted to employ a 23-gauge needle but, remembering her phlebotomy training, she realized that doing so might damage the red blood cells in such a way that it would make the whole transfusion a wasted effort. She opted for an 18-gauge needle, withdrew it from the package … and then had to stop as she struggled to control her emotions once again as her hands began to shake terribly.

  This isn’t going to work. I’m going to kill her. I’m just going to fuck this up, and it’s going to kill her, Brenna silently cursed herself over and over again. She hated to delay, but she had to calm herself enough to function, or she would be better off simply giving up and calling for an ambulance. Not knowing why, she got up and hurriedly clothed herself in her garments from the previous night as she once again contemplated exactly how she was going to go about doing this odd procedure. Thankfully, by the time she had finished throwing her clothes back on and wolfing down several marshmallows, hoping some sugar carbohydrates would calm her nerves, she had worked out a plan that sounded better than her initial method.

  Originally, she had intended to draw the blood from each tube into a syringe, puncture Raina’s vein, inject it, withdraw, and repeat. However, given the sordid condition of Raina’s vascular system – actually, the weary state of her body, as a whole – Brenna realized that there was no way she could reasonably expect to find more than a couple of useful veins, at all. She had to make as few sticks as possible, and she had to make them count. If Raina hadn’t stocked her equipment as thoroughly as she had, Brenna would have found it impossible to do what she needed to get her own blood into her.

  With Raina’s left arm dangling limply over the side of the bed while Brenna knelt upon the floor, she cleansed the site, double- and triple-checked the arrangement of items upon the floor, and finally made her stick with an 18-guage butterfly needle, rather than a straight syringe. It was not a direct hit. She had to chase Raina’s vein briefly as it kept rolling off to the left, away from the point of the needle. Not surprisingly, Raina didn’t even wince from what should have otherwise been a very uncomfortable experience. At last, she felt that ever-so-soft “pop” as the needle pierced her vein and a flash of her blood appeared in the first inch of tubing on the butterfly needle. She inhaled sharply and let out a mild sigh of relief, unaware that she had been holding her breath the entire time.

  Carefully, Brenna taped the needle down into place so that it would not accidentally become dislodged during the rest of her actions. She used a small 5-milliliter syringe to draw Raina’s blood out far enough that it took the air out of the line, and then adhered the syringe to her forearm with a four-inch strip of surgical tape to free both of her hands. She screwed a transfer device onto the hub of the 10-milliliter syringe, drew the blood from the tube into the syringe, disconnected the tube, and set it aside before unscrewing the transfer device. It was a backwards use from what the items were originally designed, but for the most part, it worked. The last third of the tube’s contents could not be drawn out, due to the length of the needle that protruded through the rubber cap of the tube, but Brenna had drawn about a pint’s worth of tubes – hopefully enough to at least give Raina a nudge away from the brink of death. If she could have devised any other way of safely transferring a larger quantity of fluid, or if there had at least been more tubes available, she would have drawn more blood. She would give Raina as much as she could spare. She would have given her everything, all of it, every last drop, just so long as it meant that Raina could live on.

  Carefully but quickly, Brenna unscrewed the tubing line’s hub from the small syringe she had taped to Raina’s forearm, and then screwed it onto the end of the blood-filled syringe. She inverted the syringe, drew the plunger back a bit to hopefully remove any air that may have become trapped in the line during that exchange, and then laid her thumb
over the plunger.

  “Unto you, my blood, my body, and my life,” Brenna said as she began to push her own blood into Raina’s vein, very slowly and gently. “I love you, my sweet.”

  The process seemed to take forever. As soon as she had finished injecting as much of the syringe’s contents as she dared, keeping a watchful eye on the tubing for any sign of air bubbles, she removed the large syringe, transferred the line back to the small one to prevent it from leaking everywhere, and began to refill the syringe with another tube. Being that she was using the items in ways they had never been intended, things soon became messy. Every time she disconnected one device and began to transfer it to another, it seeped a bit of blood. The fingers of her naked, ungloved hands became smeared with blood that was both her own and Raina’s.

  “Waste not, want not,” Brenna muttered as she licked the blood from her fingertips. She was breaking enough health code rules and regulations that her phlebotomy instructor would have gone absolutely apeshit, had she attempted to do something like this in class during practice.

  The very taste of blood calmed her almost immediately, and after doing this several times between syringe transfers, she had completely lost any trace of the nervous tremors in her hands. It took at least fifteen minutes to inject the contents of all ten tubes. She waited. She watched. Somehow, she had expected Raina’s eyes to pop open and look upon her with immediate recognition. Her rate of breathing had changed by the eighth tube. Now, as Brenna finished injecting the tenth tube’s contents, Raina’s breathing began to slow considerably, almost suddenly. Her rapid gasps slowed and deepened to a slow panting, then an almost calm but labored wheezing of sorts.

  Oh God, Brenna thought as she held her would-be lover’s pale, still hand. She’s dying for real, now. I killed her. I knew it. I knew I’d fuck this up. I probably injected her with an air bubble. Or maybe I pushed in a clot of blood. She’s going to stop breathing any second now. She’s going to die because I killed her. I killed Raina with my blood.