The Darkest Colors

by David M. Bachman

  Sneering angrily, Duvessa slapped Raina so hard across the face that she felt as though her head might be knocked clean from her shoulders. So much for Raina’s theory about hiding signs of abuse. The blow struck her oddly across her nose, causing her eyes to reflexively shed another wave of tears, and a second or two later, Raina felt a trickle of blood from her nostrils. For as tough as a vampire was supposed to be, and in spite of the power and potential she’d felt in fighting Wilhelmina, she certainly felt as fragile and helpless in that moment as she ever could have as a human.

  “You are only hurting yourself with these insults, young lady,” the Grand Duchess scolded her in a stern tone. “Nothing you can say will hurt me any more than it will cause me to hurt you.”

  “And you think I care? You think I give a shit what you do to me?” Raina countered bitterly. “Why don’t you just kill me and get it over with? Who cares what anyone else says? You wrote the Code. You’re the Grand Duchess. You’re the queen. You make the rules. If you wanna kill me, then just go ahead and fucking do it!”

  Duvessa was about to reply, but hesitated, rethinking her words. “Your grief is making you into a fool, Raina. I will do no such thing. I will not reward your insubordination with mercy.”

  “I’ll bet you said the same thing to Elizabeth, too.”

  The Grand Duchess struck her once more, this time across the other cheek with the back of her hand. The blow brought stars to Raina’s vision and made her ears ring. The IV monitor on the right side of Raina’s bed continued to beep loudly, and now the heart rate monitor on the other side of the bed was beeping. She could feel her pulse thudding in her throat, and soon in her head, as well. She fought to keep a straight, defiant face, outwardly showing no fear.

  Duvessa loomed over her with wild eyes, her breath visibly and audibly intensified with her rage. Raina had finally touched on the right nerve. She had finally found the right button to push with Duvessa. Perhaps this was her ticket out. It would hurt, obviously, but pain was always temporary, and the angrier she made Duvessa, the more likely it would be that she could earn a swift death. It would be difficult, but she could probably goad Duvessa into murdering her. Perhaps her death, especially in light of everything else, would cause others to lose faith in her ability to lead as Grand Duchess. If her sanity appeared to be in such doubt that she could kill her own bloodspawn, especially with Raina’s recent history having been made so public, then others would no longer support her, perhaps even turning against her. But whether or not her own death served a purpose, Raina knew that it would not personally matter to her. She only wanted this to be over, all of it, forever.

  Something inside of her flatly told her that it would not be that easy. She should have known better. She could feel the Grand Duchess’s rage, feel her burning anger like a hard, hot crushing pressure inside of herself straining to be contained. She knew this feeling, as she had felt it only hours before while fighting the Countess. During their duel, Wilhelmina had not wanted to kill Raina, not really, but every time her eyes glanced in Duvessa’s direction, every time she moved that sword to kill someone, Raina felt that same scalding hot inner pressure, that same choking rage. It was a killing wish. And it was that same killing wish that she felt from Duvessa in that moment.

  Without a doubt, Duvessa wanted to kill Raina. No matter what she said otherwise, she could not deny feeling that urge to destroy her. If what Raina felt was anything like the instinctive impulses that Duvessa surely felt, then the Grand Duchess surely wanted nothing more than to jerk Raina’s head aside to bear her neck, bury her teeth deeply, tear her flesh, and feast upon the sweet, hot, coppery fluid within. She wanted to do exactly to her what Raina had done to Duvessa’s daughter only a few hours ago, to indulge in that ultimate taboo. She wanted to feel that warm jet of crimson pouring into her mouth, coursing down her throat, and filling her belly, spreading its narcotic warmth throughout her body.

  With just Raina’s words, and perhaps with whatever general stress that was upon her, Duvessa was literally teetering on the ragged edge of bloodlust. Any other vampire surely would have given into that urge by then. Duvessa was a seasoned High Court vampire of over two hundred years, though. She could resist those urges, those violent temptations, because she had learned to control them. But even with that restraint, Raina was truly testing her, and for Duvessa to be so close to losing control, it must have taken something very, very powerful to continue to hold her back. Surely, it was not guilt. The Grand Duchess obviously had no conscience, or at least not as far as killing her own bloodspawn was concerned. And, as Raina had always understood it, a Maker was always within their rights to kill their bloodspawn if they deemed them to be unworthy of the life that they had been granted. Unless…

  Raina stared directly into Duvessa’s eyes. “You can’t do it. You can’t kill me.”

  “I could, but I won’t … at least not right now,” Duvessa insisted. “I would only be doing you a favor by killing you at this time.”

  “That’s not it. You won’t kill me because you can’t.” She felt something resembling a crazed smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, even as she tasted blood … or perhaps because of that taste. “Like you said, it’d just look bad for you. That’s all you care about, isn’t it? You’re just worried about your public image.”

  “It is my responsibility to project a proper image as Grand Duchess,” she replied with a haughty, smug little smirk. “As I’ve said, it behooves us all to keep a positive light on the House of Fallamhain.”

  “Well, see, that’s where we’ve got ourselves a bit of a problem.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “Because,” Raina replied, “I don’t think the IVC Elders and the rest of the general public is going to be too fond of you when they find out that the House of Fallamhain and the IVC is being led by a Nazi conspirator that killed her own daughter just to save face.”

  “And what makes you think that they will ever find out?”

  “The sworn statement that I signed, corroborating everything that Countess Wilhelmina said,” Raina replied. “She asked me to hand-sign each of the copies of the statement that she sent out to every major television news network in the city and to the FBI. She also recorded video of me reading my statement, which she was going to upload to several WoohooTube accounts.”

  Duvessa’s face went completely blank. “Well … those can easily be dismissed as forgeries.”

  “Senator Daniels observed the signatures and signed off as a witness to each of the copies. He’s already planning to make a public statement before the press when the story breaks. It’ll take a couple of days for the copies to make it through the mail system, though, and the video uploads of my testimony will take at least a few hours to process and post on the Internet, so you’ve still got some time to prepare a speech of your own.”

  She saw the look that washed over Duvessa’s face and something within herself turned loose, like that feeling of weightlessness a person feels just before falling down a flight of stairs. In that very moment, Raina realized that she had sealed her own fate, as well as Duvessa’s, by using a weapon that cut far more deeply and burned more painfully than any silver-plated sword she could have wielded: shame.

  * * * *

  Chapter Thirty

  Raina was rewarded with yet another blow, this time a solid punch to her left cheek that nearly knocked her unconscious. Before she could even recover from the attack, she felt Duvessa’s fingers close around her neck and begin to squeeze.

  “Why, you miserable, ungrateful little tart!” Duvessa cried as she began to tighten her grip upon Raina. “I am the Grand Duchess! I am your queen! I am your bloody Maker! Who the hell are you? You’re nothing to me! Nothing! I will kill you just as surely as I created you, and I will personally deliver you straight to Hell, you unappreciative, ignorant, selfish little brown-skinned whore!”

  And with that, Duvessa began to throttle Raina with vicious ferocity, lifting her head and thumping
it back down against the pillow. If not for the cushioning behind her, either her skull or her vertebrae would have quickly broken. Instead, Raina felt her trachea being crushed slowly, steadily, as Duvessa pressed her thumbs into her throat with more and more intensity. The look in her eyes was like nothing she had ever seen before, nothing of which she had ever before seemed capable. She bared her teeth fully as she did this, clenching them together tightly in what Raina was sure was a deliberate attempt to resist that final urge to open her jaws and fill it with warm flesh and blood. With her hands and feet bound so securely, so mercilessly by those cold steel restraints, Raina could do nothing to defend herself except to tighten the muscles of her neck and keep her body as rigid as possible.

  Either way, Raina realized that she had won. If she was wrong about Duvessa’s reasons for holding back, then she would soon be rewarded with a final dive into the darkest colors of consciousness on her way into the infinite bliss of death. However, if she was right…

  “What the hell are you doing? Security!”

  Raina recognized the voice, a woman’s, but she could not yet place a name to it. Duvessa did not immediately release her, but she did stop choking Raina as she turned her attention away from her to look at the voice.

  “Mind your own affairs! This does not concern you!” she yelled as she continued to squeeze Raina’s throat forcefully.

  “That’s my friend you’re choking, you psycho bitch!” the woman hollered. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Let go of her!”

  “I will deal with this worthless bit of rubbish as I please!” Duvessa practically shrieked.

  “Let go of her! Security! Someone call security right now!” The woman came into view as he first tried to push Duvessa away, and then attempted to pry her hands away. Raina now recognized her as Lisa, apparently stopping by during her regular shift, still wearing her white lab coat. “What in God’s name is the matter with you? Stop it! Stop it, right now!”

  “Leave us!” the Grand Duchess shouted as she removed one hand from Raina’s neck to give the medical technologist a powerful shove.

  She heard Lisa fall back and knock over something with a metallic clatter and a yelp, tumbling over some equipment nearby. Raina was able to turn her head enough to look to the door and see William rush into the room. Duvessa’s freed hand returned to Raina’s throat and began to squeeze again as she resumed throttling her in a psychotic rage.

  “Your grace! Your … oh, God … stop! Stop! What are you doing?”

  William hurried to her side as the doctor had, and similarly began to try to pull her hands away. He quickly found more success with his effort. Even as a Commoner, he was much stronger than a human and perhaps even stronger than a High Court vampire. He soon pulled one hand away from Raina and was even managing to pry away her other.

  “Don’t do it! Please, Duvessa! Don’t do this!”

  “Let go of me,” she warned him in a low voice through her clenched teeth, looking at him with wide, crazed eyes. “Do not interfere!”

  “Darling, please! You know you can’t do this! Think of how this will look!”

  Think of how this will look? Raina thought to herself. God, he’s just as shallow as her!

  “I don’t care! Let go of me!” Duvessa struggled to overpower him, straining against his grip as he tried to pull her away toward the foot of Raina’s bed.

  Robert soon hurried behind her and tried to assist by wrapping his arms about Duvessa’s waist and lifting her. Raina was finally able to draw a full but ragged breath, coughing to clear her throat and struggling to draw another breath as her throat seemed to have something stuck within it, like a piece of half-chewed food. For an instant, it seemed like they would succeed in controlling Duvessa. Then, as Robert lifted her up and back completely off of her feet, Duvessa kicked a leg out with deliberate force. Her high-heeled shoe struck William in the face, right about at nose-level, and blood instantly gushed from under her shoe as his nose was crushed, looking as though she had just smashed a tomato against his face.

  William’s reaction to the blow was strange, though. His head did not jerk back and he did not stagger away, but rather he seemed to lean toward her while Robert dragged Duvessa away. Her foot slipped out of the shoe and she began to wail with a berserker rage as she continued to kick out her legs wildly. William, meanwhile, crumpled almost bonelessly to the floor. Raina caught a glimpse of his face as he fell out of sight. The stiletto heel of Duvessa’s shoe had entered his skull through his left eye socket, apparently lodging itself within his brain. He may or may not have been dead, but either way, he was certainly out of the fight.

  “Let me go! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you all!” Duvessa screamed frantically as she kicked her heels back at Robert’s shins and knees.

  She first struck her fists at the hands Robert had secured at her belly to keep her in that bear-hug. Then, like a cat being held by its tail, she began to claw and scratch at his hands, arms, and any other part of him that she could reach. His hands slid up and, at least for the moment, he managed to apply a wrestling hold upon her that Raina recognized as a “full Nelson.” Raina saw movement to her left and turned her head away from the struggle between Robert and Duvessa to see Loki and Lady Svetlana rushing into the room, followed by a security officer. The officer was already shouting some kind of coded alert into his radio microphone.

  “All right, God dammit! Break it up!” the officer shouted at them loudly. He glanced down, and apparently only just then noticed William lying upon the floor. A glance a bit more to his right showed him Raina, still coughing and gasping for air with blood running from her nostrils and down to her chin. And turning farther still revealed Lisa in the far corner, struggling to rise to her feet and disentangle her leg from a wheeled bed tray upon which she’d apparently fallen. “Holy shit…”

  The officer started to draw his pistol, but Lisa grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back. “No! Not in here! You might hit one of the other patients next door!”

  As she watched him struggling to continue holding Duvessa, Raina heard Robert yell, “Get the Duchess out of here!”

  With that, Duvessa again kicked back and this time scored an audibly painful blow to one of his knees. Robert suddenly turned and slammed her against the nearby wall with such force that she nearly went through the sheetrock of the wall that divided the two patient rooms. Lisa turned to the security officer and held out a hand demandingly.

  “Your keys! Hurry!”

  “But … they’re…”

  “Your frickin’ keys! Come on!” Lisa insisted as she took the initiative to snatch the officer’s jingling ring of keys from a clip upon his duty belt. She frantically began to flip through them as she hurried over to Raina’s bedside. “Don’t worry, girlfriend, I’ll get you out of this…”

  Duvessa continued to thrash about and gained enough leverage to turn herself halfway around to face her bodyguard. Robert swung her in the opposite direction and fell with her down upon the floor at the right-hand side of Raina’s bed. The security officer was torn between wanting to intervene in the struggle and objecting to the med tech that was about to set loose yet another vampire with his handcuff key.

  “Hey! Hey, you can’t…”

  “You do your job, damn it, and I’ll do mine!” Lisa shouted over her shoulder to the officer as she fumbled about with trying to poke the key into the lock of Raina’s left ankle cuff. She glanced up at Raina with wide eyes and asked, “Can you walk?”

  Raina hesitated to reply as the struggling pair of vampires on the floor bumped the bed aside a foot or so with a violent shove. “I guess I’ll find out soon enough.”

  The security officer finally had the presence of mind to step around to the other side of the bed and draw his chemical spray, aiming it with both hands at the struggling pair upon the floor. Lisa finally managed to unlock the first restraint and was working on opening her left handcuff when Duvessa let out a short, muffled screech of either rage or pain.
A moment later came a more unsettling sound: Robert screaming aloud in agony.

  “Hey … h-hey! Enough! Stop it! Stop fighting, you two!” the officer shouted at them. Whatever he was witnessing below Raina’s field of sight upon the floor near the bed, it was clearly horrifying him beyond rational thought. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, God…”

  “For fuck’s sake, do something, you fucking clown shoe!” Raina yelled at the officer.

  Lisa apparently thought Raina was yelling at her, as she glanced up at her and angrily replied, “Chill out, already! I’m getting you loose as fast as I can!”

  Finally deciding to act, the officer grimaced as he aimed the spray canister and depressed its thumb trigger firmly. A jet of yellowish-orange liquid shot out of the canister’s nozzle – crazily, urine was Raina’s first thought upon seeing it. The officer moved the spray back and forth slightly, as though he was spraying an angry nest of hornets with insecticide. Robert’s cries of pain became that much louder in response, and Duvessa’s voice joined his in a duet of wailing, coughing, and gagging as they were both doused with the officer’s defense spray.

  Police officers and security personnel had begun to regularly carry a specialized mixture of oleoresin capsicum and garlic extract – “Bat Repellant,” as it was jokingly called by one of the security officers that Raina knew. The pepper spray portion of the weapon was generally effective against both humans and vampires; the garlic extract, however, was a particularly wicked addition in that it did absolutely nothing to humans, yet it could cause severe chemical burns to most vampire races. She had often heard others joke about how they thought a concoction of hot peppers and garlic would work better as a flavor enhancer on pizza or tacos, rather than being used a self-defense weapon.

  As the officer wildly sprayed that substance around in a panic, some of it splashed upon Raina’s right forearm and hand. The relative coldness of the liquid that had been splattered upon her quickly morphed into an intense burning sensation, as though she had been splashed with boiling-hot water. The taste of garlic and some offensively strong spice reached her nostrils and tongue as she inhaled sharply through her clenched teeth in response to the burn. Just as quickly, she felt as though she had inhaled the fumes of some kind of caustic acid. She coughed and gagged, trying to lean as far away as she could from the right side of the bed while the officer finished emptying the contents of his spray upon the fallen Grand Duchess and her guard-turned-victim.