Similarly, Raina was already wearing a very similarly-themed businesslike outfit of charcoal gray, although she was a bit more “edgy” by Olivia’s design – higher heels, shorter skirt, dark sheer stockings, and a black blouse with a plunging V-shaped neckline exhibiting the large golden ankh pendant she had inherited from Duvessa. Olivia had apparently never cared much for Duvessa’s more flamboyant, elegant manner of dress. Raina certainly didn’t like to rub her own status in everyone else’s face with her appearance either, even when it was expected of her, but she also wasn’t especially fond of being told what to wear all of the time.
“Oh, your grace,” Olivia swooned with what seemed to be genuine happiness to see her as she gave a formal bow, “I cannot begin to describe how excited and honored I am to accompany you on this night.”
“I’m very glad to have you at my side, Olivia,” Raina replied with a smile and a nod as she watched the others file into the study, assembling as though by rehearsal on either side of the Commoner.
The others were not dressed quite as formally, but still were very neat and classy in appearance. Black and red were the predominant colors among the two Sabertooths and lone Commoner, the men wearing black slacks and silk shirts with red ties while Sophie, Olivia’s bloodspawn and niece-by-birth (her brother’s daughter), wore a fine red dress of design similar to that of what Lady Svetlana had worn on the night of Raina’s Communion of Blood – full-length, but slit up to mid-thigh level and open-backed, elegant without being too revealing.
Olivia hesitated a moment, her smile faltering just a tick. “Have you changed your mind on the issue of your hair for tonight?”
Raina shook her head as she anxiously ran her fingers through it, sighing, “No, Svetlana will help me finish getting ready in a little while. I’ve just been … preoccupied…”
“Well, dear, I can’t say I blame you a bit for feeling anxious,” Olivia said, clasping her hands together. “This is, after all, a rather historic occasion, being the first mandated full gathering of the IVC since we all made our first appearance before Parliament. I just hope you’re not letting your nerves get the better of you tonight.”
“Me? Nervous? Yeah, whatever,” Raina replied with mock indifference, waving it off. She turned to the desk, quickly unlocked her briefcase, and withdrew the neatly-bound pages of her draft from within. She presented it to Olivia with an unmasked look of uncertainty. “As long as this doesn’t cause a full-scale riot, then everything else tonight should be a piece of cake.”
Olivia’s eyes widened slightly as she took the pages into her hands. “Is this it?”
“That’s it,” Raina confirmed with a nod, folding her arms. “An awfully huge fuss over a few pieces of paper, huh?”
“Mind you, it’s not the paper but the words that have everyone concerned,” she said. Olivia glanced at the cover sheet of the draft for a moment and began to lift the first page when she hesitated, looking up to Raina once more. “It was to my understanding that you wished to keep this an absolute secret until you addressed the Council…?”
Raina shrugged. “It’s not too late for last-minute proofreading.”
Olivia looked confused. “Your grace … your computer has a spell-checking program and…”
“I mean, I’d like your opinion on it,” she interrupted.
“You would trust me with this responsibility?” Olivia asked, genuinely shocked.
“If not you, then who else?”
“But … I am only a Commoner, your grace.”
Raina held up a hand to silence her, shaking her head. “Let’s not get racial. You’re my top advisor and my public spokesperson. You’ve been dealing with vampire politics longer than I’ve even been alive. Frankly, you’re more qualified than I am to be writing up important legal documents like this.”
“Even if that were all true,” Olivia admitted, “the fact remains that you are the Grand Duchess, not I. It has been your decision from the start to change the Code, not mine.”
Raina gestured impatiently as she said, “Just … humor me, would you? Give it a look. Tell me what you think.”
Reluctantly, she gave in with a slight shrug and a lifting of her thin, light eyebrows. “As you wish.”
Olivia took just over a minute to skim through the more than twenty pages of text. Halfway through, she softly requested that she and the Grand Duchess be allowed a few minutes of privacy. Readily obedient, the other Fallamhain associates bowed politely and filed out of the study. Simon followed, although not before giving a concerned glance over his shoulder to Raina. She smiled reassuringly and nodded to him before he closed the door quietly behind himself.
When Olivia flipped over the last page, she drew in a deep breath and let out a bothered, heavy sigh as she glanced over her shoulder to double-check that they were alone in the study. She held the stapled copy of the draft in her hands with a delicateness, wearing an almost disgusted look upon her face as though she were instead holding a paper plate with something warm and foul plopped upon it.
“Great,” Raina sighed before Olivia could even speak, sensing her reaction. “It’s crap, isn’t it?”
“Do you want my professional or personal opinion?” Olivia asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Professional, please.” She could always count on Olivia being direct and honest, but when she spoke personally, she could be downright hurtful with her words, whether she meant to or not.
Handing it back to Raina, she said, “I think you’re deliberately trying to get yourself killed. If you lay this down in front of the Elders tonight, I can almost guarantee you’ll hear at least three challenges being issued at once. And you know what will happen if you are challenged.”
“When the swords come out, someone dies. Yes, you’ve told me before,” Raina acknowledged impatiently, nodding as she began to make her way around the desk. “Look, a lot of people in the IVC would be happy to see me dead, just because of who and what I am. I can’t let the possibility of a challenge stop me. It’s bound to happen at some point anyway. And if my proposals ruffle some feathers … well, so what? I’m not trying to win a popularity contest here, Olivia. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
“The right thing, your grace,” she said, “would be to throw this into the nearest fireplace immediately and simply apologize to the IVC for having suggested amendments to the Code in the first place. At the very least, it would be wiser to make the changes less drastic. Are you aware of how much power you would be surrendering with this? You would practically cripple yourself. Your title as Grand Duchess would be little more than a formality.”
Raina sat down as calmly as she could in the high-backed leather office chair and leaned back a bit. “I’m not stupid and I’m not insane. I just don’t want to see history repeat itself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Duvessa deliberately put herself in a position of power with absolutely no real checks and balances when she wrote the Code. She only used the Elders and the IVC for added wealth and extra protection. She hacked her way to the top of the food chain and then built this huge, multi-layered castle of people around her to keep herself in power,” Raina explained. “She even said so herself. The only reason why she didn’t officially claim the title of Queen was because she didn’t want to cause a fuss with Buckingham Palace. But really, who cares whether or not I have a crown and people call me their queen? I mean, I can rape, torture, and kill with absolute impunity, as long as I’m only doing it to other vampires. It’s friggin’ ridiculous! Not even the King of England has this much power.”
Olivia gracefully sat herself in one of the two chairs arranged on the opposite side of the desk from Raina, crossing one leg over the other and resting her hands atop one another upon her knee as she kept her spine perfectly straight. Raina sometimes wondered if Olivia had learned some of her uppity mannerisms from Duvessa, or if it had been the other way around. From what she’d read in Duvessa’s journals, she had held Olivia in a high en
ough regard that either scenario was equally possible.
“I’ll be the first to admit that the Code is far from perfect,” Olivia said. “And I agree, there are certain provisions within it that Duvessa obviously designed to favor the ruling Grand Duchess and her bloodline quite unfairly. But the reason why the Code has survived for as long as it has in its original form was not because she was so adamant about enforcing it. The Code has survived this long simply because it works. And because it works, everyone else supports it.”
“Whether or not it works is a little subjective. From where I’m sitting, the whole thing seems pretty dysfunctional.”
Olivia was obviously restraining herself, as evidenced by the way she visibly tensed and began to blink slowly but more frequently. Raina could sense the Commoner’s frustration quite clearly within herself. She was not going to let her advisor’s misgivings sway her from the idea of changing the Code. This was not a situation of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” because the Code definitely was in need of repair. Its failures were not by damage, but by design. She merely hoped that Olivia could help to provide some feedback on how to better phrase the changes, which she was proposing. The basic gist of her changes, really, weren’t as backwards and chaotic as everyone seemed to be making it out to be. The main bone of contention wasn’t so much what she wanted to change as much as it was the very fact that she wanted to change anything. The conservative attitudes of the High Court, as a whole, made even the most right-wing Republicans in American politics seem like absolute moderates, if not left-leaning liberals, by comparison.
“May I be frank with you, your grace?” Olivia asked, her face visibly tightened. Raina nodded. “After all you have been through in your life, and even in your human life, and after all I have taught you, you still seem to have absolutely no real grasp of what a vampire truly is and is not.”
“How so?”
“We … are not … human!” Olivia declared sternly, her eyes widening with something bordering upon anger. “We look human, most of us are born human, and we may generally try to pass ourselves off as human. But I assure you, we are anything but actual human beings. You know this, dear. You know this for a fact, but your sense of denial runs so deep that I fear it will get you killed.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Clearly, your grace. But this is a well-known and proven fact. We vampires are not people, not in the classical sense of the term. The modern systems of government that work for human beings do not work for us. Humans are much more easily controlled than vampires because humans are weak creatures by their very nature,” she insisted. “Why else do you think we have human servants? Why do humans never have vampire servants? We feed upon them, not the other way around. We are not on the same level of the food chain. You cannot expect wolves to live by the same laws as sheep.”
“Stop. Just … stop, already,” Raina groaned, rubbing her temples. “Jesus, I’ve heard enough of that racist Nazi eugenics bullshit from Duvessa to last me a lifetime. Half of her journal entries are filled with that pseudo-intellectual, elitist garbage.”
“Don’t completely discredit something just because of its source. Just because the Nazi Party was a fascist regime obsessed with anti-Semitism does not mean that everything that came out of Germany during those years was rubbish,” Olivia cautioned her.
“Look, I’m not talking about the virtues of Hitler’s anti-smoking campaign…”
“Nor am I, your grace,” she interrupted, bordering upon rudeness, “but the fact of the matter is that you cannot expect vampires to abide by the same system of legal controls as humans. Vampires cannot be governed by democracy. It simply won’t work.”
“I’m sure the British king said the same thing about all those bloody Yankees after they wrote the Declaration of Independence,” Raina quipped. “Two hundred years or so later, democracy still seems to be working out pretty well for America. I’m sure even Duvessa realized that.”
Olivia was clearly put off by that remark, but again she held herself in check, though just barely so. She often acted as though Raina’s youth and inexperience were constantly testing her, but on this occasion Raina could literally sense how close her companion was to completely losing her cool. Raina wasn’t deliberately trying to irritate her; she simply wanted Olivia to understand her motivations for modifying the Code.
“I understand that you may think that this document is a good idea,” Olivia said carefully as she laid a hand upon the stack of pages on Raina’s desk, “but perhaps you need to hear it from someone else to help put things in a better perspective. I presume that is the real reason why you have chosen to show this to me now…?”
“More or less,” Raina admitted with a shrug. “I wanted to run it by you first to see if there was some way I could phrase some things differently. I’m not asking you to try to completely talk me out of changing the Code. If that’s what you’re trying to do, then forget it.”
“Again, may I at least persuade you to make your changes a bit less severe? I’m sure we can agree that any changes to the Code are going to be met with resistance,” Olivia conceded. “However, attempting to abruptly remake the High Court’s entire power structure is potentially going to result in an outright revolt. The risks of this do not simply involve your safety as an individual but the survival of vampires as an entire species. If the IVC falls into anarchy, then vampiric society will turn chaotic all over the world, humanity will lose all faith in its ability to co-exist with our kind, and vampires will be universally exterminated. I know your intentions are good, but there is no good that can come from this.”
Raina threw her hands in the air and let them flop into her lap, exasperated. “What then? What would you rather have me do? Would you rather I just go on and become a clone of Duvessa? Do you really want to see me go mad with power the same way she did? Would it be better if I just went around killing people and doing terrible things to everyone just because I can? Because I promise you, if I follow too closely in her footsteps, that’s exactly what’s gonna happen. Nobody can have this much power and not give in to the urge to abuse it at some point.”
“With great power comes…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know,” Raina interrupted, waving off the wise quote. She looked away with a heavy sigh. “God, some of the things I find myself even thinking about sometimes make me sick. I might not be willing to act on them right now, but if I were given enough time … and if I were in a different frame of mind … some of those things might not seem so awful. I mean, up until my Change, I never could have imagined myself wanting to kill someone. And now that I’ve killed someone, it’s like all of a sudden, I have to think of reasons not to kill again. I seriously have to talk myself out of the idea sometimes … and that’s not easy when you’re someone that can literally get away with murder.”
“If I may make a suggestion, your grace…?”
“Sure.”
“You do make several valid points in what you’ve written in this … this rough draft,” Olivia said, touching the pages again as though she wished to take them away and shred them. “Perhaps if you were to keep the changes which are likely to be less severe, and simply omit the changes to the power structure … even if only for now…?”
Exasperatedly, Raina sighed, “Look, why don’t you just come right out and tell me specifically what I should and should not do with this.”
“Again, your grace, it is not my place to dictate policy changes,” Olivia said, meeting Raina’s gaze squarely. “I am only here to advise you. You have asked me for my opinion on this. My opinion is that the changes you are proposing are too severe and they will ultimately cause far more problems than they will solve. I’m afraid I cannot be any more specific than that. I cannot state what details you should omit and what you should leave alone. The desire for these changes is yours, not mine.”
Raina closed her eyes with another weary sigh and slouched in her chair, shaking her head. She picked up the one a
nd only copy of her new draft of the Code and flipped through its pages for a few moments, re-reading her own words while Olivia sat in silent observation.
She hated to admit it to herself, but Olivia was probably right. A lot of what she was trying to do was based upon good intentions, but there was no pleasant or perfect way by which to make them happen. Raina had never considered herself to be much of a leader to begin with. How had she ever led herself to believe that she could create a utopian society for a race of creatures whose very genetic predisposition drove them to commit extreme acts of violence and lust? She was a dreamer whose ideas seemed wonderful in concept but were generally useless in practice. The High Court deserved a better leader than this. Already, she felt as though she had miserably failed before she had even begun.
Raina held the paper aloft with both hands and then made a show of tearing it in half, then into fourths, and then into eighths. Olivia smiled approvingly.
“I’m not giving up,” Raina informed her flatly as she tossed the handful of paper shreds upon the desk. “I’m not going to let the mess that Duvessa left behind continue to ruin other people’s lives. I’m just going to have to go about doing it another way.”
Olivia nodded at that. “I’m quite relieved to hear that, your grace.”
“That’s not to say I won’t still be making some changes, though. And I still do intend to make them known tonight.” She arose from her chair and began to step around the desk toward Olivia, keeping her eyes fixed upon her. “I just won’t be reading those changes from a script.”
Her advisor’s face went blank, then seemed to pale – as if that were even possible, given the deathly pallor of her vampiric flesh. “I would urge you not to do anything rash, your grace.”
The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations Page 5