The Darkest Colors

by David M. Bachman

  Looking around the room, she gradually became aware of the fact that she was not wearing her eyeglasses, and yet everything was sharply in perfect focus. She could not recall the last time in her life when she had been able to see this clearly without the aid of a rather strong pair of prescription eyeglasses, and she had never been very comfortable with using contact lenses. The feeling of seeing so clearly without that blurred border of an eyeglass frame around the edges of her peripheral vision was strangely liberating. Had she undergone some kind of corrective eye surgery while she had been unconscious?

  Feeling her wits returning to her and her alertness beginning to sharpen as a trickle of adrenaline began to course through her veins, she was only slightly relieved when a nurse finally did enter the room. The nurse clicked on the fluorescent lights overhead as she entered with apparent urgency. Raina winced with anticipation of a blinding amount of light. Mercifully, this was either one of many of the hospital’s rooms with faulty overhead lighting that barely worked, or they had purposefully dimmed the amount of available light. She barely even needed to narrow her eyes in reaction.

  “Raina?” the nurse called to her as she approached the bed. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I hear you.”

  “My name is Kelly. I’m your nurse. How are you feeling?”

  “Great, awesome, wonderful,” Raina lied impatiently. “What the hell am I doing here in the detention wing? And why am I all tied up like this?”

  “Do you know where you are right now?” Kelly asked, checking her IV drips and lines.

  “Of course. I used to work in this hospital.”

  The nurse halted in her duties to look at her. “Really? When?”

  “Like, a day ago,” she replied. “I used to come up all the time to do lab draws for you guys in the evenings.”

  She stared at her for a moment, studying her, then the recognition hit her.

  “Oh, wow. I thought your name was familiar,” Kelly acknowledged almost blandly with a smile before returning to her functions. “I usually work nights, but I think I remember seeing you here a couple times at the start of my shift.”

  “Yeah, probably.” She waited for a few seconds while Kelly checked her pulse and IV monitors. “So, uh … what’s the deal?”

  Kelly again gave her a blank, innocent look. “What do you mean?”

  “Why am I here, tied up like a criminals in the scumbag wing of the hospital?” she asked. “What the hell did I do?”

  “Oh … that,” she said, as though she only then realized what was going on. “I don’t think you did anything, really. It’s just for your own safety. You were thrashing around a lot, and the doctor wanted you to be restrained so you wouldn’t rip out your IV’s again and … y’know.”

  “What?”

  “Well…” Kelly hesitated. “They were afraid you might attack someone.”

  “Why? I’m not…” Raina began to say. Once again, reality settled in. “Oh … yeah.”

  “How are you feeling right now? Any nausea, aches, pains, anything like that?”

  She tried to hold up both of her hands to gesture. Kelly visibly flinched, as though expecting to be assaulted.

  “My nose itches, my eyes have a bunch of crud in them, and I think I need to pee,” Raina said. “I don’t suppose you could cut me loose so I could take care of any of that myself, could you?”

  The nurse shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry. Only the doctor can give permission for me to undo your restraints. You were having seizures now and then, and then you started being combative whenever someone would try giving you any kind of treatment.”

  “Well, I’m obviously not having seizures anymore.”

  “This is true.”

  “So, then…?” Raina held up her empty but restrained hands with a hopeful and weary smirk.

  “I can’t do that. I’m sorry.”

  “Would it help if I promised not to hurt anyone? I’m not just some blood-sucking, homicidal monster,” Raina insisted gently. “It’s not like I’m going to hop up and start biting people the second you turn me loose.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Kelly agreed, “but I would get in a lot of trouble if I went against the doctor’s orders. You know how that is. I could lose my job over it.”

  “Because I want to scratch my nose? And because I want to go pee like a normal adult person?”

  Kelly appeared reluctant to reply. “No, but … since you’re … y’know…”

  “I know, I know,” Raina sighed, closing her eyes. “I’m a vampire. I’m a monster. I’m a blood-sucking demon from Hell. I’m untrustworthy by default.”

  “You know how it is. I mean, I’m sure you had to have given it some thought before you became one,” the nurse said. She blinked at Raina with uncertainty. “Right?”

  “Honestly,” she said, “the only time I had to think about becoming a vampire was after I found out I’d already been exposed. And it was already too late to do anything about it by then.”

  “Well, you weren’t accidentally exposed, were you? Like, in the lab or something?” Kelly asked with obvious doubt. “I mean … if you don’t mind me asking…?”

  Raina shook her head. “It wasn’t an accident, no. But it wasn’t my idea, either. I never asked for this.”

  “But … I thought you had to … you know…?”

  “What?”

  “Do it voluntarily?”

  “That’s what I always thought,” Raina admitted. “Or at least I did, up until this one guy knocked me out and pumped a syringe full of blood into me … among other things.”

  “A guy did?”

  “Yeah, a guy. I mean … not human. It was Duke Sebastian Fallamhain, actually,” she confirmed with a nod. “Why?”

  Kelly just stared at her with a confused, almost alarmed look upon her face for several long seconds before finally saying simply, “Oh.”

  “What do you mean, oh?”

  “They’ve been saying on the news that some female vampire is your Maker,” Kelly explained. “They’ve got her in jail right now because they think she forced the Change on you.”

  Raina’s eyes went wide. “What?”

  “I mean, that’s just what they’re saying right now. They said that the cops were called to your place and that she had you all drugged up and was using needles to put her own blood in you, or something like that,” she said, leaning upon the rail of the hospital bed casually, now. Her fear of Raina was beginning to ease slightly.

  “That’s not what she was doing! She was helping me! That’s my friend, Brenna! Brenna Douglass!” Raina cried, beginning to feel panicked now. Only then did she notice that she’d been tugging firmly at her restraints, as the clanking of metal upon metal from the chains clattering against the bed rails caught her attention. “Seriously … Kelly, this is all a big mistake. I’ve got to talk to the police. She’s not the one they need to have locked up. Please, can you tell someone I need to talk with them? Like, one of the guards out there or something?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Kelly nodded eagerly as she backed away. “They said they wanted to talk with you as soon as you woke up. I’ll go let them know you’re awake.”

  “Thank you,” Raina said. Just before Kelly reached the door, something occurred to her. “Whoa, wait up!”

  Kelly’s shoes squeaked as she stopped herself by grabbing the doorframe to look back over her shoulder. “Yeah?”

  “How long have I been … y’know … zonked out? Unconscious or … comatose? Whatever?”

  “A little over a day,” she replied. “They didn’t know how long you were out before they found you, but you’ve pretty much been out of it since you came here last night.”

  Kelly seemed to interpret Raina’s silence following her reply as a dismissal, as she then disappeared into the hallway with hurried footsteps. She had more questions, of course, but someone else would most likely better know the answers – someone presently being held in a jail c
ell.

  The nurse returned within a few minutes, bringing with her two Sheriff’s Office detention officers. Kelly informed her that the doctor was not in the hospital at the time, but he was on his way there, and she had been authorized to remove her restraints in the meantime. The Sheriff, however, did not want her to leave the detention wing room under any circumstances, and that he was also on his way to speak with her in person. He had also stated that under no circumstances should she speak with anyone in the news media until he had interviewed her. This was of no consequence to Raina, as she hated the media anyhow.

  Raina graciously thanked Kelly and the officers as they removed her restraints, immediately relieving the nagging itch of her nose and rubbing the crusty muck from her eyes. With a bit of persuasion, Raina was allowed some privacy as the officers agreed to wait just outside of the door while her catheter was removed and the EKG probes were unclipped from her upper body. She was a bit dizzy and unsteady on her feet, but she was able to walk to the nearby toilet on the other end of the room on her own, with Kelly escorting her to make sure she did not fall. The stainless steel combination toilet-sink fixture was brutally cold, and having a relative stranger like Kelly nearby at the time was terribly awkward, but she was able to relieve herself without incident. Everything about it just felt so clinical and strange. Between the pair of IV lines still connected to her, the strangeness of all of her heightened senses, her unfamiliar anatomy as a whole, and the way that everyone seemed to look upon her with awe, she felt like a captured space alien.

  She had begun to tremble with anxiety from the minute she’d learned that Brenna was being held as a suspected criminal. How could they do something like this to her? If anything, Brenna should have been lauded as a heroine, not a criminal. If only she hadn’t been in such a hurry to get up and see what was going on, she might not have passed out when the cops came. She could have explained to the police that Brenna was there to help her through the Change. She could have avoided a whole lot of unnecessary confusion over nothing, if only she’d just laid there in bed and not over-exerted herself at a time when she was barely halfway through her Change.

  But why had the police been there in the first place? How long had she been going in and out of consciousness between the time Lisa dropped her off until the time the police had arrived? So far, she could account for only one day’s worth of her time of unconsciousness, where the nurse had claimed she essentially had been lying in a hospital bed, being a fussy comatose patient … but what of the rest? Surely, there was more time missing.

  Her mind racing, Raina silently went over the most recent events she could remember before this night as she carefully made her way back to the hospital bed. She had been exposed on Wednesday night. Thursday morning, she had driven herself down to the hospital to turn in her resignation. Her teeth had started coming out, and then … things got murky. She barely remembered her argument with Lisa, and almost nothing at all of the trip from the hospital back to her house. As an afterthought, she hoped that her car hadn’t been towed away, as it had been there for at least a full day since Lisa had taken her home, perhaps two days. She had an employee parking permit hanging from her mirror, so perhaps that might have helped. Anyway, according to Kelly, it was now Friday night. So, roughly a day-and-a-half’s worth of time was missing from her life. Wow. Crazy.

  Raina was surprised by the eagerness with which the medical staff seemed ready to discharge her from the hospital, especially considering that she had just awoken from what amounted to a 36-hour coma. They simply wanted her out of their hospital and, thus, out of their hair as soon as possible, only keeping her around long enough to see that she wasn’t dead or dying. To an extent, it was understandable. Hospitals were in the business of healing sick and injured humans, rather than in aiding foolish humans through their transition into a vampire. Now that she was back on her own two feet, albeit unsteadily and still feeling quite sore and weak from head to toe, the rest of her recovery and the beginning of her new life – her afterlife, as some may have called it – was up to her.

  She was given back her clothes, which had been neatly folded up in a stack and placed inside a plastic bag, and she went about the awkward process of dressing herself behind a privacy screen. Raina noticed immediately that nothing seemed to fit quite right anymore. She recognized the clothes as her own, even recognizing the scent of her preferred brands of perfume and laundry detergent upon them, but they fit so terribly loose upon her that she almost thought that a seamstress had altered them somehow. She had lost a significant amount of weight in a very short period of time during the Change. The nurse, overhearing her comment about the looseness of her clothes, explained that her body probably had been so desperate for resources during the Change that it had begun to self-cannibalize, feeding upon itself for the raw materials it had needed.

  It was surprising, but not alarming. In fact, it was perhaps the only positive note she could find about her new status as a High Court vampire. She had previously complained of gaining a bit of weight, mostly from her waistline down; now, suddenly, she was actually somewhat underweight. Better still, the only item of clothing that still seemed to fit her just right was her bra. While the rest of her seemed to have dissolved away, her breasts still had retained their prior size and shape because of the increased muscle tissue underneath. While she was not voluptuous in any sense of the term – nothing at all like Brenna’s perfect hourglass figure – at least her assets were now pleasantly proportionate to the rest of her body. She felt as though she was a teenager again, at the peak of her physical development. Now, as she had then, it would probably take some time to adjust to her svelte new body … and pointy, razor-sharp teeth … and tall, elf-like ears … and pale, bioluminescent skin…

  “All right, where is she?” a man’s voice demanded from the outside hallway.

  She was just beginning to wiggle her feet back into her shoes when a well-dressed, middle-aged East Indian male stepped around the divider and past the nurse. Raina thought it was a bit rude of him to intrude without asking, even though she was already dressed, but chances were that the doctor had seen so many naked bodies in his time that the sight would hardly have been titillating in the least.

  “What’s she doing out of bed already?” the doctor demanded. He looked stunned that Raina was standing there on her own, clothed and about ready to walk out. “Why isn’t she restrained? Where are her IV lines? Who authorized this?”

  “You … umm … you did, didn’t you?” the nurse stammered, suddenly paling.

  “Of course not! This subject is a vampire that just underwent the Change!” the doctor fumed. “She’s supposed to be restrained and kept under observation.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I was told…”

  “The sheriff ordered it,” one of the deputies said from the doorway.

  The doctor spun on his heel and stared at the deputy, out of Raina’s view, with wide eyes of shock. “What?”

  “He wanted her up and out of here as soon as she woke up.”

  “The Sheriff has no authority to make those kinds of decisions! Doesn’t he have any idea at all what’s going on here? This subject was in critical condition when we brought her in!” the doctor protested. He turned and pointed to the nurse, then to Raina. “Get her back in bed!”

  “This woman is under protective custody, doctor, and the Sheriff wants her to be moved.”

  The nurse gently took Raina by the arm and began to guide her back to the hospital bed. The doctor took her other arm to assist. Neither of them were really necessary to help her along, as she felt quite capable of walking entirely on her own, but she wasn’t going to shrug them off.

  “What the Sheriff fails to understand is that the subject’s condition is extremely uncertain right now. She’s an unfamiliar race of vampire, and the onset and speed of her Change was extremely unusual,” the doctor explained, still quite angry. “Releasing her right now could jeopardize not only her own health and safety, bu
t that of others.”

  “No point arguing with me, doc,” the deputy said, holding up his hands, “I don’t call the shots. I’m just passing on what I’ve been told.”

  “This subject is…”

  “Hey,” Raina said suddenly, halting in her tracks. “My name is Raina, okay? Raina Delgado, not this subject. I’m a person, not a thing.”

  “I’m sorry … Raina…”

  “And I’m not letting you guys treat me like a guinea pig, either,” she insisted. “I know how you all treat vampires when you get them here. That’s why you’re referring to me as a subject instead of a patient. And I know my being a High Court means you probably want to dissect me and study me under a microscope, but…”

  “You’re not a High Court vampire.”

  She looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “I’m not?”

  “Not as far as your blood samples have shown, no.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  The doctor shrugged. “Neither do we, honestly.”

  “How’s that?”

  Guiding her to sit upon the bed again, helping lift her legs up even though she did not require the assistance, the doctor explained that her blood chemistry did not consistently match the profile of any known race of vampire, even a High Court. There were characteristics of more than one vampiric race in her blood. He did not specify what exactly that meant … or at least not in terms that Raina could comprehend. In his excitement, pausing only briefly to check her pulse and blood pressure with a typically icy-cold stethoscope, he was rattling off more medical terminology than she knew or could presently grasp with her painkiller-clouded mind. Raina finally raised her hands and shook her head.

  “Okay, wait. Hold up a minute,” she said. “Let’s just pretend for a minute that I never used to work here and I don’t know a thing about medical terminology. In plain English, if I’m not a High Court vampire, then … what the hell am I?”