The Darkest Colors

by David M. Bachman

  “You’re in love with her?”

  She seemed surprised by the question, pausing in her actions for just a second as her alluring green eyes again briefly glanced to him. She smiled, suddenly almost shy and embarrassed.

  “Well … maybe I am, maybe I’m not,” Brenna said coyly, “but I’m not a lesbian, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “But you prefer women…?”

  “Says who?” Her smile faltered at that.

  Worried that he might have pushed a wrong button with her, William quickly said, “I’m sorry, it’s … it’s none of my concern, really. Forget that I even asked.”

  “No, no,” Brenna said, spinning to face him directly, “just come out with it, already. You think I’m a dyke, don’t you.”

  “I said no such thing.”

  “No, you just said that I prefer women.”

  “I meant that as a question, of course, not a statement. I never intended it to be accusatory.”

  “It’s a presumptuous question, though.”

  He shrugged innocently. “I meant nothing by it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I am truly sorry if I have offended you, Brenna.”

  She shrugged as well. “I’m not offended. It takes quite a bit to offend me, actually. I just don’t like it when people jump to conclusions about who I am, especially when they haven’t tried to really get to know me.”

  “Of course, I would like to get to know you better,” William admitted.

  “Oh, really?” Brenna smiled again, posing herself slightly. “Why? You like what you see?”

  “Well, we will probably be seeing quite a bit of one another from this night onward … assuming of course, that you choose to accept the Grand Duchess’s offer. As a lady of the House of Fallamhain, you would be one of the primary focuses of my security efforts. I will be responsible for protecting you in the future, just as I am responsible for your safety at this present time.”

  She continued to grin at him. “Wow. You just completely avoided answering that question.”

  William paused a moment, allowing himself to smile a bit more. “Do I like what I see? Was that the question?”

  “Do you?”

  “If you truly wish to know,” he said, “I do think you are stunningly gorgeous.”

  “On a scale of one to ten?”

  “Oh, a nine, definitely.”

  She pretended to pout in response to that. “Aw … only a nine? What is it? My tits? My ass? My face?”

  He hesitated. “If I may be so blunt…?”

  She nodded eagerly.

  “Your personality,” he replied, glad that he could be completely honest for a brief moment.

  Surprisingly, Brenna did not seem offended or hurt by that, at all. She merely shrugged, then nodded.

  “I had a feeling you’d say that,” she admitted calmly. “People tend to either love me or hate me.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, I certainly don’t hate you,” he said. To a certain extent, that was true.

  She chuckled. “No offense, pal, but I’d rather not know if you love me, either.”

  “Why not?” He spread his arms wide, presenting himself with mock pride. “Don’t you like what you see?”

  Brenna laughed out loud, setting her brush down upon the dresser before she approached him. She startled him slightly by grabbing the lapels of his jacket firmly and pulling upward until she had encouraged him to stand before her. She deliberately moved her face close enough to his own to be intrusive, smiling impishly. For an instant, he thought she was going to kiss him.

  “To be quite honest, Billy-boy,” she told him in a hushed voice, “I don’t think you could handle me.”

  “You’d be surprised what I’m capable of handling.”

  “Not what I can dish out, that’s for sure,” Brenna challenged him softly. “I know how to take ‘kinky’ to a whole new level.”

  He grinned back at her. “I can just about promise you that one night with Duvessa will completely change your perspective forever. ‘Kinky’ isn’t even foreplay for her.”

  “Sounds like a good time.”

  “I suppose that depends on what you consider to be a good time.”

  “Should I be scared?” she asked, clearly not taking his words seriously.

  “You should.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “No,” he insisted with a nod, “you really should.”

  Brenna’s eyes seemed to gaze right into his very soul as she met his stare, reading him. Either what she saw within him unsettled her, the underlying seriousness of his review of Duvessa’s bedroom ways, or she was foolhardy enough still to not take his words literally. She closed her eyes and nuzzled her cheek against his, almost cat-like. Her lips neared his ear, and the sound of her soft exhale, the warmth of her breath upon his skin, and her body that close to his own was undeniably arousing.

  “And what about you?” she asked in a whisper. “Should I be scared of you?”

  “Not really. It is my job to protect you, after all.”

  “Don’t be so modest. You know that’s not what I mean.” She flicked the tip of her tongue against his earlobe teasingly. “Would you make me beg for it? Would you make me say please and thank you? And once you gave it to me, would you make me beg you to stop? Would you make it hurt?”

  Good Lord, she was intoxicating. Maybe it had been too long since he had been given an opportunity to be with a woman, particularly one of Brenna’s caliber. And it had been awhile since he’d had the opportunity to truly drink, to give an honest bite. Or maybe she really was every bit as good as she liked to present herself? Was she all talk, or could she truly back up her words? The urge to find out for himself certainly was tempting. Maybe his attraction to her honestly had less to do with duty than it did with raw appeal…?

  “Perhaps,” he replied hesitantly, partly to her and partly to his own unspoken questions.

  Brenna’s right hand released his lapel and glided down his chest, grabbing the buckle of his belt and giving a firm tug. “I dunno. I don’t think you have it in you. You’re too submissive. You’re the Grand Duchess’s servant boy. Hell, I might even break you.”

  “Is that a dare or a challenge?”

  “Maybe both,” she said, moving her face away enough to meet his gaze again, “or neither. That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether or not Raina wants to call dibs on you,” Brenna replied. Quite casually, she released him and walked away, gliding along on those long, elegant legs of hers. “C’mon, Billy-boy, don’t play innocent. You can’t tell me you didn’t notice the way she was looking at you during the whole ride over here.”

  Now that was surprising. Raina was more pleasant, and she had more potential, even though she was quite emotionally damaged. But his focus, at least in this sense, was not upon her at that time.

  “I’m afraid I don’t really know her well enough to say that I could have rightly noticed.”

  “She’s definitely into you. You don’t have to know her that well to have seen it in the way she was staring at you,” she told him as she looked at herself again in the mirror, licking a finger and trying to rub away some leftover makeup from under her left eye. “Until that panic attack hit, she was practically staring at you with little hearts floating in the air around her. Raina’s not too good at hiding it when she likes a guy. You’d almost have to deliberately try not to notice.”

  He thought for a moment, then shrugged, saying, “I guess I was too distracted to notice.”

  “Well, you are the big head honcho of security for the Grand Duchess. I’d imagine you’ve probably got a lot on your mind with the way your job is…”

  “That wasn’t what distracted me.”

  Brenna let her arms flop to her sides and turned toward him with an exasperated sigh.

  “Oh, come on! Don’t even say it,” she said disgustedly.

  “Don’t say what? That I was distracted b
y you?”

  “Oh, give me a fucking break,” she cried, rolling her eyes. “You? Distracted? By me? Ha!”

  “No, really! How could I not be?”

  “Well, for one thing, I would think that Raina’s a bit more important than me by a long shot. You should have been more focused on her to start with,” she replied. “Add to that the fact that she’s twice as cute as me and a whole hell of a lot less bitchy, and that should be more than enough to make anyone ignore me.”

  “Madam, I could never ignore you at all, even if I tried,” William said quite honestly. “Whether it’s intentional or not, you do have a way of drawing attention to yourself with your very presence.”

  She stared at him for a few moments, almost looking angry. At last, she smiled, closed her eyes, and laughed. “You’re a shitty liar, Billy.”

  “Billy?”

  “Yeah, you. Billy,” she repeated. “What’s the matter? You don’t like being called Billy?”

  “Not particularly, no.”

  “Well, then I definitely have to call you Billy,” Brenna said with a wicked grin, wiggling her thin, neatly-plucked eyebrows. “And I bet your partner hates being called Bobby … or Bob.”

  William shrugged, but he may as well have said yes by doing that. Damn it. He was acting like a fool. He usually had better control of things than this. Brenna positively had him spinning. He didn’t know whether to feel irritated or infatuated … or perhaps one emotion coming about as a result of the other, in either order.

  A few moments of silence passed between them. Brenna stood with her arms folded under her tantalizing breasts, barely contained within the black satin cups of her bra, and her very womanly hips cocked slightly aside as she shifted to favor her left leg slightly. She said nothing for awhile, merely staring at him … studying him. Likewise, he took the liberty of staring at her, head to toe.

  The sound of running water from within the bathroom suddenly ceased as Raina ended her shower. Had this conversation been able to transpire before the start of that shower, William had a good feeling that he very well could have been already buried to the hilt in Brenna, by now. Without a doubt, seducing this saucy whore to break her ties with Raina and secure her loyalty was going to be far, far easier than he ever anticipated.

  * * * *

  Chapter Eighteen

  Raina had been reluctant to leave the comfort of the steaming-hot shower. She felt as though she was rinsing away an invisible film of sickness from herself in that warm, watery haven. Emerging from the shower to step out upon the soft, fluffy black towel she had laid out upon the floor before entering the shower, however, she soon realized she faced an even greater reluctance to face her own reflection in the bathroom mirror.

  It was not as simple as turning her back to the large mirror, of course. The very glass of the shower door, as well as its chromed hardware, was reflective enough to create several distorted versions of her image, all of them disturbing. Earlier, she had almost convinced herself that she had already come to terms with her condition, that she had accepted her Change as readily as the Change had seemed to accept her. However, that false confidence and resolution had melted away during her shower.

  While the physical comfort of a hot shower was more than welcomed, everything else about it seemed wrong. The entire time, she had found herself looking down upon the naked body of a stranger. Some things were missing, completely erased without even a hint of their prior existence. Other things were present that had not been there before. For every plus of the Change, there seemed to be at least one or two minuses. Being bereft of hair from the neckline down did mean that, as Brenna had jokingly pointed out, she would probably save a small fortune on razors in the future. However, she was so acutely aware of her own nakedness that she felt naked even when clothed, and the enhanced sensitivity of her skin (if not all of her nerves entirely) made some clothing materials feel strangely rough and uncomfortable, almost abrasive. Her navel was gone, replaced by a featureless but blessedly flat and tight belly. Her elongated ears were simply strange, an annoying feature to avoid as she had shampooed, conditioned, and rinsed her hair. Her fangs were wickedly pointy, and because they were so new and unfamiliar, her own tongue seemed unable to leave them alone for more than a few seconds at a time, nor any of her other new teeth that were equally fresh and sharp. And, in running her tongue over her own teeth, she was both repulsed, annoyed, and fascinated by the way she could so easily cut her own flesh by accident … and then find a sickly pleasant taste in the flavor of her own blood.

  She blinked and found herself staring directly at her own reflection in the mirror before she even realized she had turned. Her hair hung in damp, wavy strands that stuck to her face, neck, and shoulders in thick semi-curled lines of black, like someone had painted the image of her hair sloppily with two downward strokes of a worn-out and over-saturated brush. Her eyes were far darker than she ever remembered them having been, and her lashes appeared so thick that she seemed to being displaying some natural, innate application of both eyeliner and mascara. Her lips were a bit darker and just a tad fuller. As she stared at herself with her mouth closed, there was surprisingly not even the slightest hint of the deadly fangs that she hid. She faked a smile, progressively widening it until she could see the first clear hint of fangs, and was surprised by how naturally she could smile without showing too much – perhaps by design, or perhaps because she simply didn’t feel much like smiling, anyway.

  Raina had been holding the towel wrapped about her body. Curiosity got the better of her. She had never quite been happy with the way her body had looked as a human – but then, as she figured, what woman ever truly was? She had especially been unhappy with her own looks in the past few months, either because her depression had worsened somewhat, or because she had begun to find a bit too much comfort in the overindulgence of alcohol. As such, while she hadn’t exactly been overweight, she had no longer possessed the same supple, lean figure that she’d had as an eighteen-year-old. And yet now, unwrapping the towel from around herself, she suddenly saw not only the body she’d had in her younger years, but one even more developed than that in several ways.

  She could not figure yet exactly if her breasts had increased in size, or if they simply appeared to be bigger by illusion because her waistline had dissolved by a couple of inches. Her stomach was not just flat – even more so, now that her navel had somehow been “deleted” – but it showed a faint ripple of muscle that she could have only attained with countless sit-ups over the course of several months. Her legs were slender and strong, her thighs only thick with strength rather than cellulite, and her behind was firm, although still round enough to adequately fill a set of jeans and give her something to sit upon. The underside of her biceps no longer felt soft and loose. While she should have felt relieved to apparently be in such excellent shape, the difference was so drastic and sudden that it was difficult to readily accept without a bit of awkwardness.

  Lastly, her total lack of any bodily hair was still unsettling, even more so outside of the shower and in the view of a mirror, because there was not even a hint of stubble upon her legs, nor anywhere else to which she had previously been accustomed. It was like she had been given a full-body waxing during her coma. She had never been especially fond of the dark stubble of her lower hair, anyway, nor the tedious and sometimes painful ritual of so much shaving – something she had long done for her own preference rather than anyone else’s benefit. This was perhaps the only readily welcome change of all, although it was still something to which she would need time to adjust.

  Raina’s gaze locked upon itself as she stared at her own reflection for what seemed an eternity, her eyes staring into the hugely dilated pupils of the creature in the mirror that she could hardly believe was herself. She was not ugly, not hideous … but too strange, too alien. The ears, the fangs that her tongue practically refused to stop examining, the impossibly smooth and seemingly featureless pale skin that now was nearly Caucasian, th
e newly athletic muscle tone … all of it she knew, on a conscious level, were simply new features upon what was essentially the same old body. All of this was her. She was still the same soul she had been before, and yet she wondered if she could ever truly convince herself to believe that.

  Perhaps what made the acceptance of her new self was the very fact that it was not merely the change in her appearance that disturbed her. It was easy for Brenna to have insisted that she was still the same Raina Delgado as ever before, that her memories and personality were still intact and untouched. However, Raina knew that simply wasn’t true. Perhaps Brenna’s Change had been a different affair, considering the differences in their vampiric races and, thus, the way in which their Changes had progressed. Brenna’s had been gradual and more natural, giving her time to adapt to and cope with the strangeness of each detail as it developed. Raina’s Change, however, had been sudden, violent, and traumatic … not to mention the fact that more than half of it had taken place while she had been dead to the world in a vampiric coma. And because so many details of the High Court race had been deliberately withheld from public knowledge, it was difficult (if not impossible) for her to gauge just how much of what she felt were simply natural tendencies of her race and how much was due to outright madness, pure and simple craziness.

  First and foremost, obviously, was the shock she still felt over the very idea that she had willfully and deliberately kissed Brenna. Given, she had kissed her in the past, but that had been in the midst of an alcoholic binge, much of which had been blacked out from her memory, anyhow. This had been a clear, lucid, and thought-out action. It had seemed so very right at the time, so very natural and … well, so very necessary. But the very idea of it all still was no less unsettling. She had practically made out with Brenna right there on the side of the Loop 202, right in front of a group of strangers. Even though they had a lot of personal history together, there was still no excusing the fact that it was sudden and bizarre.