The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations

by David M. Bachman

  Hoping to add a bit of urgency to the authorities’ efforts to find Jasmine, Raina took it upon herself to make use of the gathered media by issuing a public statement in which she pleaded for the local citizens to be vigilant and to help find Jasmine Thuy as soon as possible. She also decided that now was as good a time as any to make use of her ceremonial authority as Grand Duchess by issuing another public decree.

  “Let it be known that for his crimes past and present, actions which violate both the Code and human laws, Dante Giovanni is now to be considered a rogue vampire,” Raina announced in a loud, clear voice to the crowd of gathered cameras and microphones aimed in her direction. “He has proven himself to be an uncontrollable danger to society and, thus, he must be stopped immediately. I am told that a warrant has been issued for the arrest of Dante Giovanni, and that if he surrenders himself peacefully, he will be given a fair trial by jury. However, as Grand Duchess, it is my sworn duty and privilege to uphold the Code, which is the law of all vampires. And in the case of Mister Giovanni, I intend to enforce those laws exactly as they have been enforced for centuries.” And, to clarify her intent, she held up her sheathed sword slightly and patted its hilt.

  “Do you intend to kill Mister Giovanni, your grace?” one female reporter immediately asked.

  Raina forced a bitter, menacing smirk as she narrowed her eyes slightly. “Let’s just say that he would be wiser to surrender himself to the police than to me.” That caused a flurry of shouted questions, which Raina hushed by holding up a hand for a few seconds until they were silenced again. “I would also like to state that any vampire known to be participating in the kidnapping of Jasmine Thuy, or any vampire that assists Dante Giovanni in eluding the authorities or myself, will also be regarded as a rogue and will also be dealt with accordingly.”

  “So, you’re saying you will kill anyone that helps him?” the same reporter asked.

  She tilted her head and gave the overly made-up brunette an annoyed look. “Come on, now. Do I really need to spell it out for you?” The woman only responded by continuing to hold out her microphone with an expectant look upon her face. Raina sighed and rolled her eyes. “Any vampire that I catch helping Dante Giovanni will share in his punishment.”

  “And what about humans, your grace?”

  “What about them?”

  “If they are helping him, will you kill them?”

  “Only if they are threatening harm upon my friend, Jasmine. I have consulted the local authorities, and yes, I am within my legal rights to use any means necessary to defend a human being whose life is in imminent danger.”

  “And if humans are attacking you, will you kill them as you recently killed those three men in London?”

  Raina did her best not to allow her frustration to override her composure. There always seemed to be at least one or two reporters of every crowd that was a muckraker, someone that always wanted to make a name for themselves by asking bold, usually rude and provocative questions that were usually just thinly disguised accusations or insults. The woman was clearly trying to get Raina to paint her own public portrait as just another monster, a bloodthirsty, primal, wicked thing hiding behind a regal façade of peaceful, civilized harmlessness. Any other time, it would have simply been annoying, but on this particular occasion, it was downright inappropriate.

  “What happened there is not entirely relevant to the situation here at hand,” Raina told her. “What we have here is a fairly simple case of a rogue vampire abducting a human being. I’m surprised that some of you haven’t already started encouraging the whole city to form a lynch mob to go after this guy. What I’m trying to do is help save this young woman’s life by getting folks to look for her and hopefully find her before this rogue vampire does something awful to her. If saving a human’s life means less to you than trying to goad me into saying something that you can take out of context and exploit for your own benefit, then your priorities are seriously messed up.” She woman appeared to shrink back a bit, withdrawing her microphone slightly. “No more questions.”

  The on-scene investigation wound down fairly quickly after the coroner’s office had taken away the body and the forensics team had photographed and documented the area to their satisfaction. The alley behind the club remained taped off, however, and the detectives insisted upon questioning Raina and the others yet again before they were given permission to leave. Samantha appeared to have calmed down after recovering from the initial shock of seeing the dead young woman. She was still apparently excited by the prospect of her new association with the House of Fallamhain. She suggested that they follow her back to her home and was beginning to walk toward the parking lot when something occurred to Raina.

  “Hold on a minute, Sam,” she said, causing her to halt and turn. “How big is your car?”

  She hesitated only because of the apparent randomness of the question. “It’s … pretty big.”

  “A four-door?”

  “Yes. It’s a ’67 Lincoln Continental.” She raised an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

  Raina turned to Serenity, meeting her gaze squarely as she said, “I think it would be best if we parted ways now, at least for the time being.”

  Serenity was surprised. She shouldn’t have been. Ever since that ugly but necessary confrontation in front of the hotel, Raina had been hoping for an opportunity to finally get away from her. Again, she didn’t hate the beautiful High Court Elder; she simply didn’t feel comfortable being accompanied by someone that she could not trust.

  “But … your grace … you need me,” Serenity protested almost timidly. “I promised to help you through this difficult time, and you’re experiencing so much…”

  “Stop it. Just stop,” Raina said abruptly, holding up a hand to silence her. “For right now, I think it would be best if we just split up.”

  Serenity was genuinely hurt. “Am I of no use to you anymore?”

  “You can’t shoot a gun, you don’t know how to fight, and you have a very bad habit of conveniently forgetting to tell me things until the last minute,” she explained bluntly. “Frankly, you’d be doing me more harm than good if we stuck together right now.”

  “But … we have strength in numbers. Nobody would dare to attack us when we…”

  “We make a bigger, easier target when we’re standing around like this in a big group,” Raina interrupted, raising her voice very slightly, “and I’m surprised that whoever’s trying to knock me off hasn’t already tried to take another shot at me by now. The fact that you either can’t or won’t wear something that doesn’t attract everyone’s attention within sight of you means that I stick out like a sore thumb in public when I’m with you.”

  Serenity looked away and down with a deep, sorrowful sigh. It took her a few seconds, but she finally nodded in acknowledgement. It wasn’t that she was a problem because she wasn’t aware of the things she did. She was a very intelligent individual, very insightful, and her plans were usually well thought-out … even though her scheme to trick Raina into a Debt of Blood had been a little bit absurd. She was a liability, not an asset, and a questionable ally. Frankly, Raina’s odds for survival were better without Serenity’s “help.”

  “Listen,” Raina told her, “I appreciate the fact that you’ve brought me here, I really do. And really, if you honestly meant a single word of what you said last night…”

  “Oh, I did,” she insisted with a sudden enthusiastic nod, “I most certainly did, your grace.”

  “Then I appreciate that, as well. You have been very kind, very generous, and very helpful,” Raina said. She deliberately failed to mention that Serenity had also been very deceitful, very dishonest, and very manipulative. “However … right now … I just think it would be best if we parted company. Okay?”

  Serenity nodded sadly. “I understand.”

  “Thomas? Sophie? Could you take our things out of the trunk, please?” she requested without breaking her stare. Hearing them both reply and immediately head of
f to one of Serenity’s two Lincolns, Raina lowered her voice slightly. “I do not hate you, Duchess Serenity. But don’t think for a minute that I’ve forgotten what was said in front of the hotel. What you did, and what you were trying to do, was wrong. You have disrespected me, and you have disrespected my title by thinking you could trick me into owing you a Debt of Blood. The other Elders will be made aware of it, and you will be brought before the IVC to be judged by your peers.” She shook her head and felt her lip curl with bitterness. “I can’t believe I almost let you use me like that.”

  “I only wanted to help you … as a friend,” Serenity insisted.

  “You mean, you only wanted to screw me over … as a friend,” Raina replied sourly.

  “Your grace…”

  “Save it for the Council,” she said, turning her back upon her and walking away.

  Thomas and Sophie dutifully transferred their luggage into the back of the antique Lincoln – the trunk was positively cavernous, even compared to the Serenity’s Town Car – and Raina refused to make any further eye contact with Serenity or her consorts as they departed. Samantha apologized unnecessarily for the “sorry state” of her car, as she had neglected to have it detailed that month as she regularly did, but the car looked to be almost show-quality. Aside from the modern stereo and security alarm, the car appeared to be almost entirely original, showing just a few subtle signs of normal wear and tear here and there. As she explained, her mother had originally bought the car straight off the showroom floor. So many miles had been driven in the vehicle that it had been rebuilt from bumper to bumper several times over by then.

  “Three minor accidents, one major accident, three engines, three transmissions, and God knows how many oil changes,” Sam explained with smile. “We had to put in a totally different motor and transmission when the last motor wore out. Nobody makes replacement parts for it anymore, so we put in something more modern. It’s a little faster now, and it uses less gas than it did.”

  “I’m sure that wasn’t cheap.”

  “Actually, it wasn’t bad at all. We bought a used motor and transmission and put it in ourselves.”

  Raina raised an eyebrow at that. “You did?”

  “Well,” she admitted after a moment, “Dominic did most of the work. I only helped.”

  She couldn’t help but to smile as she said, “I never would have guessed you were a closet grease monkey.”

  “Oh, I’m not really,” Sam chuckled, “but I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty. Mother taught us to be very independent and self-reliant. She always said that if we couldn’t learn to take care of ourselves, then we would never be able to take care of our own children someday. So, we all grew up with a very do-it-yourself kind of mindset about everything.”

  “Sounds like your mother was a pretty smart lady.”

  “Thank you.” Her smile faded a bit as she paused. “I only wish that Brenna hadn’t been so obsessed with her independence. She always seemed go overboard with some of the things that Mother taught us about thinking for ourselves, questioning authority, and relying upon ourselves. I think she had the right idea, but the way she applied it…” She shook her head woefully before glancing to Raina and once again saying, “You know how she was.”

  “Honestly … the more I learn about her, the more I realize that I barely knew half of how she was,” Raina said with a shrug.

  The drive to Samantha’s home was fairly brief, located in a well-to-do neighborhood in the eastern part of Mesa, which was surprisingly close to the area where Raina had once lived. She marveled at the idea that she had been living within a couple of miles of Brenna’s sister all that time without ever having known. Of course, Brenna had known exactly where she could have found her sister if she’d have wished to reconcile with her. Alas, Brenna had left – or rather, she had been kicked out – and she had never once looked back, and the changing of her last name hadn’t made things any easier for Sam to find her.

  Seeing the home in which Brenna had been raised was something of a surreal experience for Raina. She felt as though she were being made privy to details of Brenna’s life that she had never been meant to know … and for all intensive purposes, that was perhaps the truth of it. Brenna had never made much mention of her family and had deliberately sought to avoid making Raina aware of it because she had worried how it might affect their relationship. The strange thing about it was that, really, there was nothing at all about which she could have been so ashamed that she couldn’t have shared it with Raina. She would have still treasured their friendship, knowing everything there had been to know about Brenna. Ultimately, she would have loved her just as much, either way.

  The house wasn’t especially elaborate in design or height, although it was slightly above the norm in overall size as a three-bedroom house. Outside, the yard was broad and open, largely plain and simple with little more than a well-kept lawn and a security lamp in the middle of the yard as its only distinguishing features. The concrete driveway leading into the yard through a gateless opening in the brick fence out front featured a parking area directly in front of the house. It also ran alongside the house to another larger area in the back and a modestly-sized detached garage. The house and garage were painted as plainly as one could imagine – bright white with black trim under a plain gray shingle rooftop – and aside from a bench swing behind the house and a bird bath and a citrus tree in the middle of the back yard, the rear was just as unremarkable, clean, and simple as the front.

  As Samantha explained, the back yard had once offered a plain, open, wonderful view of the desert when she was a very young girl. That is, of course, until someone decided it was a good place to build Highway 60, and then a series of cheap cookie-cutter houses had sprung up like weeds within the past five years to obliterate the view almost entirely. Raina understood the feeling perfectly; her former home a few miles away had offered an equally splendid panorama of the Superstition Mountains to the east, up until some developer had decided to plop an excessively tall manufactured home right smack dab in the middle of that view, directly across the street from her house.

  Samantha insisted upon getting Raina’s baggage for her, and so Raina was left only to carry her sword as they walked around from the rear parking area, which was covered by a fairly new and well-shaded carport, to the front side and the main entrance.

  “Normally, I would come in through the back,” Sam explained as she fumbled with her keys to unlock the front door, “but it runs through the laundry room, and it’s really not a pretty sight at the moment, I’m afraid.”

  Immediately after opening the front door, a beeping from inside the house could be heard. She turned and entered a code into the security system panel next to the door, silencing the alarm before picking up Raina’s luggage again and leading them inside.

  “Wait right there,” she said, “I’ll get the lights.”

  Raina could already see inside the house quite well from the ambient light that filtered in through the front windows from the single old streetlamp-styled light in the front yard. Switching on a rather bright light in the kitchen, even though it was two rooms over, caused her to squint and both Sophie and Thomas behind her to groan slightly with discomfort. Her eyes began to adjust quickly after just a few seconds, however, and she could see that the inside of the house was quite cozy and, although simple, very attractive.

  The living room, which was to their immediate left, featured a large black leather sectional sofa that formed an L-shaped border next to the front door. A broad glass coffee table with a squared black metal frame in the center of the room hosted a few remote controls, magazines, and a decorative jar filled with what appeared to be black jelly beans. The far wall held a fairly large flat-screen LCD television, and just below it was a small entertainment center that housed a few audio and video units. On either side of this were two very tall glass-enclosed sets of shelves that featured an impressively large collection of compact discs and DVD and Blu-Ray movies.
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  To the right was an elegant dining area with a table similar to the coffee table in the living room, constructed with a thick glass surface and supported by a black metal frame. The chairs were also of the same black metal frame construction, with black cushions. The antique-looking enclosed glass-fronted display cabinet in the corner of the dining room featured a collection of miscellaneous small items that looked like important family heirlooms – small antique pictures, silverware, a locket, a pocket watch, and so on.

  “Oh, look at you!” Sophie cried with sudden delight. A solid black short-hair cat had hopped up onto the top ridge of the sofa and was nuzzling its face against Sophie’s outstretched hand. “My, aren’t you a cutie! What’s your name?”

  “That’s Anisette,” Sam explained with a smile. “She’s our little four-legged butler. She doesn’t clean anything except herself, but she always greets everyone at the front door.”

  Raina finally could no longer resist the urge to ask: “Is everything that you own black?”

  “No, not everything,” she admitted, “just most of it. That way, everything matches.”

  “So I’ve noticed.” Raina advanced a few steps so that Sophie and Thomas could enter fully and close the door. She gestured to a large one of the many framed photographs on the far wall, next to where Samantha was now standing. “Is that your mother’s picture?”

  Nodding as Raina drew closer, she replied, “Yes, her senior high school picture.”

  The resemblance was every bit as distinctive as that between Samantha and her older sister, Brenna. The black and white photograph, slightly airbrushed by a professional, showed a gorgeous woman in a dark turtleneck sweater with straight, shoulder-length, dark hair with bangs, and bright, glimmering eyes – presumably the same striking emerald green color as that of her daughters. She had an elegant but shy smile and high cheekbones, a subtle dimple in her right cheek, and a classic beauty mark near the left corner of her full, slightly pouting lips. She could have very easily been a model in her time. In fact, she very much resembled a certain model that had, decades after her retirement from the business, developed a cult following of fans in the gothic, fetish, and vampire subcultures.