“Bettie Page was your mother?” Thomas asked, voicing Raina’s thoughts.
Sam laughed and shook her head. “No, no … although she did admire her work. Her name was Beatrice Schwarz. She worked as a dancer in Reno and also in a few stage productions in Las Vegas. She was actually quite successful in the late 60’s and early 70’s … but nowhere near as well-known as Bettie Page, of course.”
Samantha showed them down the hall toward the bedrooms. The first door to the right led into a full bathroom that was not filthy but obviously used, for which she apologized profusely – her brother’s fault, she insisted. The second door on the left was originally Dominic’s room, although once he had moved out and her son, Seth, had been born, it had become his room until he had left for his military service.
“After Seth left for boot camp,” she explained “it just felt so cold and empty here, so I asked Dom to move back in.” She paused, wringing her hands nervously. “After I was diagnosed with cancer … right after Seth left … I just … I was afraid that I would die alone.” She forced out a bitter, strange chuckle and smile. “I know, that probably just sounds pathetic…”
“Not at all,” Raina insisted softly, touching her shoulder without even thinking about it. “I know the feeling.”
After a moment, literally shaking off her own thoughts, Sam said, “Anyway … Dom was having trouble making ends meet on his own when he split with his last girlfriend, so I wanted to help. Things seem to be going well with his new girlfriend, and he’s been saving for a new home, but … I really would hate to see him leave again because I was planning to leave everything to him. I had originally planned to leave it to my son, but…”
Her voice trailed off and she left her explanation unfinished. Apparently, her son’s departure for the military bothered her for reasons that went beyond a typical case of “empty nest syndrome.” Raina wasn’t going to press her for details about it. She would explain more when she was ready. There would be plenty of time for it. After all, once Samantha became her bloodspawn, their (theoretical) immortality meant that they would have plenty of time to discuss it.
“I would show you his room,” Sam said with another awkward smile, gesturing to the other closed door on the left, “but I don’t want to send you running away, screaming in terror. Dom’s always considered the floor to be a laundry basket and a trash can.”
The second room, Sam explained, was the bedroom that she and her sister had shared throughout most of their childhood, up until Brenna’s abrupt departure. It would have been a generously-sized room, had it been for only one, but with two twin-sized beds and two sets of dresser drawers in it, the room appeared to be a bit cramped. There was a large walk-in closet on the far left wall, which they had presumably shared, and three windows – two on the east wall, one on the south. The curtains, bed comforters, sheets, and pillows were all, of course, black.
Raina could not resist asking, “Who had which bed?”
“Well,” she sighed with a genuine smile, “originally I had the one nearest to the closet. But when I was about five, after the third time that Brenna jumped out of the closet and scared me half to death, I begged Mother to let us switch beds and we kept it that way.”
The only door on the right, besides the one leading into a closet, had also been left shut. The master bedroom, Sam said as she opened the door, had always been her mother’s until she had quietly passed away in her sleep. The mattress, box springs, and all linens of the bed had since been changed out, of course, but she admitted that she had never been able to sleep in that room and had instead only used the attached bathroom.
“It isn’t so much the idea that this was where she passed,” she explained, “but it’s just that she was always very strict about keeping us out of her bedroom when we were young. I never felt right about being in here, and I’ve only made use of the bathroom because I honestly can’t stand what Dominic and Seth have done to the other one.”
Raina looked back to Sophie with a slight smirk. With a subtle nod, she agreed. Apparently, Samantha was a neat freak with a mild dirt phobia. Raina was already beginning to question Sam’s claim to have helped out with the overhaul of her old car; chances were, Dominic had done all of the dirty work and Samantha had either handed him tools or just held a light for him. She would probably fall in love with the Fallamhain Estate’s rustic, historic, antiquated charm, but she would also probably lose her mind in trying to keep everything as dust-free and spotless as most of her own home appeared to be.
The master bedroom was impressive, to say the least. Far different than the rest of the house, which had a distinctive contemporary (and monochromatic) theme to it, this room had a very classic Victorian theme that was unsettlingly like the master bedroom of the Fallamhain Estate. The dresser, featuring a very large mirror with a decoratively carved frame, and the chest of drawers were built of a darkly-stained wood, perhaps oak. The canopy bed frame that extended to within an inch or two of the fairly high ceiling, with dark wooden posts cut with spirals and bulbous forms from top to bottom. The fabric canopy hanging over the bed was surprisingly not black but a deep burgundy that matched the color of the paisley-patterned comforter and throw pillows atop the bed. The pillows, comforter, and canopy additionally featured a gold-colored tassel on every corner, as did the matching drapes on either side of the French doors that offered a view of the back yard. The floor here was actually a bare hardwood with a large Persian throw rug covering the open area next to the bed that sat immediately to the right of the door, which was a stark difference from the boring, medium-pile dirt-brown carpet in the rest of the house. The items laid out neatly upon the dresser – a fancy brush, glass bottles of perfumes, and so on – had been kept dusted and arranged in what Raina was sure had been exactly the way Samantha’s mother had left them.
It genuinely looked like a bedroom fit for royalty … and given the way Samantha seemed to revere the memory of her own mother, and the way her mother apparently ran the household, Ms. Schwarz seemed to have fancied herself as the queen of her castle. It occurred to Raina that if this was how Mother Schwarz had been, and if Samantha had modeled herself closely after that woman, then perhaps Sam was better suited to the High Court lifestyle than Raina could ever hope to be.
“I’ve replaced a few things as needed, but I’ve tried to keep everything exactly as it was,” Samantha explained. “I thought that it would make the transition easier if I didn’t change anything too dramatically, but … I still can’t bring myself to sleep in here.”
“That’s too bad,” Sophie said from behind as she stood in the doorway. “This place is beautiful. And the way those doors are right in front of the bed, you could wake up to that view every morning.”
“Well, you’re more than welcome to sleep in here. I’ve been content to settle for my old bed all these years, anyhow.” She shrugged. “It’s the only bed I’ve ever known, really.”
“Weren’t you married at one point?” Raina asked.
“Briefly,” she answered. “It only lasted long enough for him to get me pregnant. After that, he lost interest in me, started having an affair with a younger woman, and filed for divorce. I only lived with him for about six months before he threw me out while I was pregnant with Seth, so his new lady-friend could move in.”
“Wow. What an asshole,” Sophie commented.
Raina gave Sophie a warning look, but Samantha nodded with raised eyebrows. “Oh, yes. Yes, he was.”
Samantha insisted that Raina have the master bedroom for the following day, and Thomas and Sophie were content to accept the beds in the other large bedroom. The idea of sleeping in Brenna’s former bed had strangely appealed to Raina, but she did not protest. As much as the idea surely repulsed her, due to her issues with her brother’s lack of organization and household cleanliness, Raina assumed that Sam would either take his bed or, if nothing else, she would sleep on the large sectional sofa in the living room. For some reason, the idea of making Sam sleep in eit
her of those places seemed wrong, perhaps rude, but the only real alternative would have been to share the king-sized bed in the master bedroom.
She honestly wasn’t sure how she felt about the idea of sleeping with Samantha, much less how Sam, herself, might have felt about that whole idea. Samantha was beautiful, simply stunning in her own right, and her attractiveness was a factor in Raina’s reluctance to even suggest the idea of sharing a bed. In spite of what had happened the previous night with Thomas, Sophie, and Serenity, and in spite of her own conscious decision to embrace her core nature as a Fallamhain, Raina was still not cozy with the concept of casual sex.
Furthermore, she hadn’t yet decided whether Samantha’s blood relation to Brenna should make any attraction she felt towards her a taboo thing, or if Sam’s visual similarity to Brenna was instead a bonus. She didn’t want to confuse the past with the present in subconsciously mistaking Samantha for Brenna. It would only go badly, ultimately hurting Sam’s feelings deeply and pushing Raina closer towards a chasm of insanity that she felt was drawing perilously close. Just as well, Brenna’s memory aside, Raina still was resistant to the idea of another homosexual relationship, especially when she was still on the rebound from the apparent ruination of her heterosexual union with Loki. Put simply, it was all just too soon and too much to handle at once.
Samantha treated them to an excellent meal of grilled lemon-pepper chicken, rice, and a fresh bottle of cabernet sauvignon. Cooking was one of her passions, something of a hobby for her and, much like Serenity, she had an impressive kitchen arrangement that probably would have caused a master chef to drool with envy. She explained that she tried as much as possible to avoid any processed or pre-cooked meals, using only fresh ingredients in everything that she made. It took longer to prepare, of course, but the taste was always far superior and it usually resulted in low-fat, low-sodium, lower-calorie meals, thus helping her to maintain her figure.
“Of course, time is an issue sometimes,” Sam admitted with a smile, “so every now and then I’ll indulge in some Chinese takeout. I have a terrible weakness for General Tso’s chicken.”
An obvious advantage of this home-cooked goodness, at least as far as Raina and the others were concerned, was that Sam could consciously exclude garlic from the list of ingredients she used. Sam insisted that she was no expert cook by any means, but Raina could not deny that this simple meal was much more delicious than anything she could recall having tasted in quite some time – even better than the fancy high-dollar meal to which Serenity had treated them the other night.
For the most part, Raina and Samantha both seemed to be deliberately working to keep their conversation light and away from the topic of Brenna as much as possible, instead focusing upon explaining to her the things she needed to know about what day-to-day (or night-by-night) life was really like as a vampire. Raina managed to relate to her the many things she had learned, even a few things she’d only discovered in the past few days, that she wanted to impress upon Samantha so she could be certain that she really, truly was willing to devote herself to this kind of lifestyle.
“Obviously, you’ll have to drink blood. No matter how much you try to work around it, sooner or later, you’ll need at least a taste to keep yourself sane,” Raina explained. “You’ll be hormonal as all hell. Think of the worst PMS you’ve ever had, or maybe when you first became pregnant. Think of how edgy and impulsive and moody and crazy you probably felt then, and multiply that by about five. You’ll snap at people you love over stupid, little things, and you’ll feel like turning violent over minor issues. You’ll find yourself wanting to do things that you’d never even found remotely interesting before, and you’ll start craving these things at totally inappropriate times. Like, you’ll be talking to a total stranger, someone that’s not even really that attractive at all, and your mind will just start wandering and obsessing over the idea of what it would be like to do it with them. And the more you think about it, the more you’ll want to act on it, until you finally get to a point where you have to decide to either give in and have sex with a stranger or just run away.”
“I don’t think that’ll be a problem for me at all,” Sam insisted confidently as she picked up a carrot stick. “I’ve felt like that a thousand times before as a human, but I’ve managed to stay perfectly single for the past eighteen years. I just had to remind myself that I had a child to raise, and that his future was more important to me than having a boyfriend. Of course, Mother never let me forget that, which is why I was never allowed to date anyone when Seth and I were living with her.”
Raina shook her head. “You’re not following me. I’m not talking about dating or falling in love with someone. I’m talking about sex …simple, dirty, sweaty, nasty sex. Not making love, not even making out, but straight up fucking. You know … one night stands where you don’t even actually sleep with them, and you don’t even get completely undressed. You just drop his fly, hike your skirt, and go for it.”
“Oh, that. No, I’ve never done that,” she insisted, although she looked down at the table as she said it. There was a long pause as Raina stared at her for a few moments. Sam eventually sensed her attention, smiled, and shrank down a bit. “Well … not recently…”
Raina decided to be a bit bold. “When’s the last time you’ve been with another woman?”
Sam looked around uneasily, seeing that everyone’s attention was now focused directly upon her. She picked up her napkin and dabbed at her lips carefully, more of a nervous gesture than anything.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t be discussing this at the table,” she said, laying her napkin atop her empty plate.
“Or perhaps you just need more wine,” Raina replied with a smirk, holding up the empty bottle. She set it down upon the glass tabletop gently. “I don’t mean to be rude, but if you’re going to do this, you really need to understand what you’re getting yourself into here. This isn’t like a marriage. This isn’t even like the mob. You can’t turn state’s evidence and go into the Witness Relocation Program, because you can’t hide from being a vampire. Once you’re in, you’re in. You can’t go back. If you decide that you don’t like it, you can never go back to being a human again. It just isn’t physically possible. There’s no such thing as a cure for vampirism.”
“I am aware of that.” She closed her eyes and let out a heavy sigh, rubbing her temple. “I know … I know. You’re right.” Her face tensed as she appeared to be wrestling with her emotions. “I just … I don’t see any alternative. I need to do this. There’s just no other way.”
“Nobody’s forcing you to do this, Sam. Honestly, I don’t want you to do this. I would much prefer that you be a human.”
Sam opened her eyes to meet Raina’s. “Are you saying you don’t want me as your bloodspawn?”
“Don’t take it personally. I don’t want anyone to be my bloodspawn, because I know what a curse it is to live like this. I wouldn’t wish this kind of life upon anyone,” she insisted, “least of all anyone that I care about. Honestly, I don’t know how else to say this, but … the very fact that you’re Brenna’s sister almost made me refuse to agree to be your Maker. I seriously feel like I’m about to totally screw up your life by making you my bloodspawn.”
Samantha’s eyes became misty and she looked away. She carefully scooted back her chair, stood, excused herself from the table with a whisper, and swiftly walked toward the kitchen. As Raina heard her open the back door and walk outside, Sophie and Thomas looked to her with raised eyebrows.
“Well?” Thomas said after a moment.
Raina narrowed her eyes at him. “Well, what?”
“Will you go get her?” he asked her with a smirk.
“She’s upset. She left because she didn’t want me to see her cry.”
“She needs you, your grace,” Sophie said. “Can’t you see? She’s scared, and you’re all that she’s got left. You’re her only hope.”
Raina merely stared at her. Honestly, she was starting
to think she had slid so far into her role as a vampire that, indeed, she had perhaps begun to lose touch with her humanity.
Sophie shook her head lightly. “You’re not really going to try to talk her out of this, are you?”
Raina drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, poking out her lower lip and blowing a few loose strands of her hair upward. Damn it all, Sophie was right. Samantha was facing the prospect of death from two directions: cancer or violence. With her beloved mother gone, her brother mostly preoccupied with his own life, and her son away (and not on speaking terms), she felt utterly isolated. Sam was terrified of dying alone, and she had even admitted that aloud. She was going through a private, quiet form of Hell, and it pained Raina to know exactly what she must be experiencing.
Raina had felt the same for quite some time after her parents had been killed, always wondering when the day might come that she would find herself at the threshold of death and having no one to comfort her or, at the very least, to miss her when she passed. A similar feeling had returned when she had stood outside that London hospital just days before, believing that everyone she loved had forsaken her, and that if she died by an assassin’s bullet, it would be of no emotional consequence to anyone.
But in both cases, someone had ultimately proven to be there for her, someone to hear her and hold her, someone to help guide her back to sanity and logic … someone to simply give a damn. Before, it had been Brenna. Now … well, it wasn’t any one person, really, but others had helped her enough to keep her going and keep her from falling apart completely. Svetlana, Loki, Olivia, Simon, Sophie, Serenity, and even Thomas had all done their part to be there for her in one way or another over the past few months. Who did Samantha have? Her brother, Dominic? Perhaps … but he wasn’t there at the moment, and from the sound of things, he apparently didn’t care to become too involved with his sister’s personal troubles, anyhow.
The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations Page 47