The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations

by David M. Bachman

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah,” she said, but then appeared to rethink that for a moment. Sophie nodded again after that brief reconsideration. “Yes.”

  “You’d really want to be a part of that?” Raina asked. “I mean, I haven’t decided exactly what should be done, but … you do realize what we’re talking about, right? You know how this kind of thing is usually handled, don’t you?”

  “I do.” She sniffled, standing up a bit straighter. “If you’re going to do that, then … I want to be there when it happens.”

  Raina nodded in agreement. “If that’s what you really want, then I’ll see to it.”

  “When?”

  “Soon enough,” she answered. “You’ll know when.”

  Raina stepped over to her, helped wipe away a fresh pair of tears that fell from her eyes, and kissed her forehead before giving her a brief hug. She had already suspected that something would inevitably happen between them, but she had never expected that it would be something like this. Not only had the nature of their relationship been drastically altered, but the ultimate event of bonding that had yet to transpire would be a truly bittersweet moment, much less pleasant than what had happened with Thomas. Indeed, Raina did already know what she should do in response to Sophie’s revelation, but she didn’t know if she would, or even if she could. At least she had a fair amount of time to think about it in advance … and to muster the courage to do what needed to be done.

  * * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The argument had already become quite heated by the time Raina emerged from the master bedroom and walked down the hallway into the living room. From just the sound of his deep, ultra-masculine voice, it was clear that Dominic did not approve at all of what was going on. The things that Raina had already overheard him saying before she had even left the bedroom were quite unsympathetic to Samantha’s situation, to say the least. Upon noting her entrance, both Dominic and Samantha immediately became silent and looked at her almost blankly. Thomas was standing by the entrance to the kitchen with an equally blank look upon his face.

  Dominic was simply gargantuan in height, and he was impressively built. His long, straight, jet black hair spilled over his shoulders as he turned his head to look at her. He wasn’t what anyone would ever call cute, perhaps not even handsome by most standards. His jaw was too square, his brow too pronounced, his mouth too full, nose too wide, eyes too deeply set … too much of everything, it seemed. He wasn’t ugly, though – far from it, really; he was basically the total opposite in masculine appeal to Thomas, who was frankly more androgynous than manly. Given his height, which was easily over six feet, and his well-toned but not bulgingly-developed body muscle, Dominic’s deep, booming voice fit his appearance perfectly. Tattoos were visible up and down both of his arms, but Raina could not yet make out the designs from where she stood. Wearing black denim jeans, military-style boots, and a plain dark green T-shirt that looked a bit too narrow for his immensely broad shoulders, and still holding a large, beat-up guitar case at his right side, he looked a bit like a gothic-metal giant.

  “Hey,” he said simply in greeting.

  “Hey,” Raina replied back.

  That simple exchange more or less set the tone right away for how she viewed Dominic – informal, but not disrespectful, and someone that (for once) didn’t bow down and worship her.

  “Oh, ah … your grace, this is my brother, Dominic,” Samantha offered as she gestured to him, trying to pretend the argument had never happened. To her brother, she said a bit awkwardly, “Dom … this is the Grand Duchess Raina Fallamhain.”

  Dom stared at Raina for a few moments, apparently eyeing her over from head to toe as though he could size her up by sight alone. After a few seconds, he looked to Samantha with an inquisitive glance, and then turned back to Raina.

  “So,” he finally said, “you’re the one.”

  Raina was still standing at the end of the hallway, clasping her hands together anxiously. She wasn’t sure whether he resented her or not, either by the tone of his voice or his choice of words. It seemed more a casual, bland statement than an accusation of any sort.

  “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘the one’, but … okay,” Raina finally responded with a nod. Finally deciding that she felt a bit odd about merely standing in place, she began to walk toward Samantha. “I hope that you don’t object to my being here.”

  “Object?” He shrugged and turned slightly away to lean his guitar case against the wall next to the front door. “Why would I object?”

  “Please, don’t be rude,” Sam cautioned him softly as she drew a bit closer to him.

  “How am I being rude?”

  “Just be nice, please.”

  “You don’t think I am?”

  “Just…” Samantha made a flustered, frustrated gesture with both her hands and rolled her eyes with a sigh as she faced Raina directly. “I’m sorry.”

  “What did I miss?” Raina asked as she passed Thomas and drew closer to Samantha .

  “What? Oh, nothing,” Dominic replied with mock dismissal. “It’s just that Sam here tells me you can cure cancer. That true?”

  “Dom!”

  Raina halted in her footsteps just short of being within arms’ reach of Samantha as the woman glared up at her brother, who was staring at Raina with those same emerald-green eyes that seemed to be a Schwarz family trademark. On Brenna and Samantha, those eyes looked strikingly beautiful; on Dominic, they just looked striking, more intimidating than anything else. He seemed to be trying to burn a hole through Raina with his gaze, though the way he had spoken his words was very calm and casual.

  Trying not to let the awkwardness of the situation hold her back, Raina answered, “If you don’t want me to be here, then just say so and I’ll leave.”

  “No! No, don’t leave! Please, it’s … it’s all right. Really! It’s okay,” Samantha pleaded immediately as she spun about to face her. Then she whirled about to face her brother again, pointing at his face. “Why are you being so rude?”

  “What? I just asked her a question. What the hell’s your problem?”

  “You’re trying to cause a scene.”

  “Hold on a second. I think I know what’s going on here,” Raina said as she stepped close enough to put a hand upon Samantha’s shoulder. To Dominic, she explained, “I know we’ve never met before, and I know you probably hate me anyway, because of what I probably represent to you.”

  He shrugged again. “Hate you? I don’t know you well enough to hate you.”

  “Well then, maybe you should. It’s because of me that Brenna isn’t alive right now. If I hadn’t gotten her involved in that whole mess that I’d gotten sucked into, she would still be alive today. There were a lot of things behind what happened that I don’t expect you to even care to understand, and I’m sure you don’t want to hear me making any excuses for what happened, so I won’t,” she told him. “All I can tell you is that, in spite of whatever you may or may not have felt about her over the years, Brenna was a very, very wonderful person, and I loved her very much. I really feel like I let her down when she died, and I don’t blame you one bit for feeling the way you probably do toward me. If you want to blame me for her death, then that’s fine, because I’ve been blaming myself for it ever since it happened. The only reason I’m standing here right now is because your sister asked me to be here, because she needs my help. And I really want to do whatever I can to help her because I’m sure that Brenna would have wanted me to.”

  Dominic stared at her in silence for a few seconds after the last of that explanation. His eyes drifted to his sister, who had taken a step back so that she could look back and forth from Raina to her brother, and eventually his gaze returned to Raina. She could feel a bit of anger, a bit of hostility within herself, but she wasn’t sure if it was what she sensed from Dominic or from Samantha, who appeared a bit unhappy with Raina’s statement of self-loathing.

  “Wow,” Domin
ic said after a moment. “That was quite a speech.”

  “I, ah … didn’t mean for it to be,” Raina responded rather sheepishly.

  “So,” he said, “you think that turning my sister into a bloodsucker is going to help her?”

  “I know how it sounds, but please…” Sam began to say before Raina silenced her by holding up a hand.

  “Look, the Change isn’t a cure-all. I’ve tried to explain this to Sam, and I hope that she understands the risks of what she’s requesting,” Raina said. “The Change tries to reset a person’s entire genetic makeup by overwriting a lot of it with its own DNA. There’s a genetic preset, sort of a template, and anything that doesn’t fit that template gets changed by the new DNA. Things like teeth, skin, hair, internal organs, ears, blood type … any of the stuff that doesn’t fit gets redone. And a side-effect of that is sometimes the results are better than where you started out. When I was a human, I had a crooked spine, and I used to be nearsighted. Now, my spine’s straight, I’m about an inch taller than I was, and I don’t need to wear glasses anymore.”

  “So, like I said,” Dominic replied, “Sam thinks you can cure cancer.”

  Raina shook her head. “Not exactly. Vampirism is a disease, in itself. It’s sort of like the opposite of HIV because it kicks your immune system into overdrive, but it’s not like other diseases where it causes your body to start attacking itself. It basically just goes through the body and constantly fixes anything that it thinks is broken. But the problem is, if it doesn’t think that something is broken, it won’t fix it. So, if it sees something like cancer as something that actually belongs there, it won’t get rid of it.” She winced slightly as she glanced at Samantha. “In fact, it might even try to help the cancer along and speed up its progression. So … instead of it being a matter of months or years … it might be a few days. Maybe even a few hours…”

  “And that’s really what you want?” Dominic demanded as he looked to his sister. “Instead of doing the right thing and getting treated, you’d rather just kill yourself?”

  “Dom, I’ve explained this to you a hundred times before. The doctors have already said that I’m too far along,” she insisted. “It’s already spread to my blood system and it’s starting to turn into acute lymphoma. Don’t you understand? I have a terminal illness. I’m already dying! If the Change doesn’t help, then so what? Either way, it’ll be the same result. But at least Raina is giving me a chance to live. A chance, even a slim chance, is better than no chance at all.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re seriously considering this.”

  “I’m not considering it, Dom. I’ve already made up my mind. It’s already been decided, and my decision is final,” Samantha insisted firmly. “I’m doing this because it’s the only choice I have left that makes sense. It’s the only chance I have to live.”

  “I guess that all depends on what you call life,” Dominic retorted with a nod toward Raina and Thomas.

  “Would you rather see me die?” Samantha asked pointedly. “Is that what you would prefer? Would you rather I just throw my hands in the air and just give up? Just lie down and die? Maybe you’ve already forgotten about Mother. Maybe you don’t remember how hard she tried, how brave she was. She went through all of those treatments, all of the chemotherapy and surgery. She did everything she could, everything the doctors told her, because she wanted to live.”

  “Then do that! You’re so fuckin’ obsessed with being just like her, then why don’t you just do exactly what she did?” Dominic asked, raising the volume of his booming voice a bit.

  “Maybe you’re forgetting that I still have a son.”

  “Yeah, a son that doesn’t talk to you anymore.”

  “It hasn’t been that long.”

  “Three months isn’t that long?”

  “He’s in the middle of a war in a third-world desert country, Dominic,” she protested with an angry glare. “I wouldn’t expect him to put down his rifle just to write me a letter or make a phone call in the middle of combat. He’s a soldier, and he’s out doing his job. He’ll talk to me when he’s ready to talk to me. He’ll write or call when he can.”

  “You really think so?” he asked doubtfully.

  “He’s embarrassed. He’s ashamed to call me his mother because he and his friends know about the things I’ve done. I understand that,” she admitted. “But he doesn’t hate me. I am his mother. He knows how much I love him. And I’m sure he knows that those things that he feels were an embarrassment were the things that I did so that I could pay for his schooling, for his medical and dental bills, for his clothes and toys and everything else. It’s hard for him to accept, but I’m sure he’ll understand. And when he does, and when he’s ready to talk to me again… and when he’s not dodging bullets so that you and I can stand here as free people in this country right now … he’ll let me know.”

  “Yeah,” Dominic responded, “keep telling yourself that.”

  Raina could sense the raw pain in Samantha’s emotions, but she was surprised to see how little of that pain she allowed to show upon her face or even in her eyes. Shaking her head sadly, she told him, “I can’t believe you’re being this cruel.”

  “And I can’t believe you’re being this fucking naïve, Sam,” he said immediately. “Have you even told your son about how sick you are? Does he even have a clue that you’ve got cancer?”

  Samantha appeared to be caught by that, hesitating for a moment before saying, “I didn’t find out until after he’d already left for boot camp and we had stopped talking. I was only just diagnosed last month. I would have told him as soon as I’d found out, if I could have. You know that, Dom. But honestly … right now, I don’t see any point in telling him now. I don’t want him to worry about me while he’s thousands of miles away, fighting terrorists somewhere in Afghanistan. It would only be a distraction.”

  “So, you were just going to wait until you died and then leave it up to me to tell him?”

  She shrugged, looking down. “I felt it would be better that way.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “No, that’s a mother caring for her son’s well-being,” Raina finally interjected. “Either way, if she had chosen to die from her cancer, then he would have found out the same thing either way. She cares enough about him, though, not to put him through that kind of emotional stress when he’s probably already going through a lot already.”

  “And how do you think he’s going to feel when he finds out his mom is a vampire? Don’t you think that’ll mess with his head just a little bit?”

  Samantha once again hesitated to reply, clearly caught off guard. Of course, Raina did not approve of the tone that Dominic was taking with his sister, but he wasn’t simply being cruel. Had Sam really not considered the long-term consequences of taking on the Change? Had she really been so preoccupied with the idea of (hopefully) overcoming her terminal illness that she hadn’t stopped to consider what sort of price she might have to pay in the aftermath? Apparently not, judging by the way she again looked to the floor and found herself without an adequate response.

  “Your son hasn’t spoken to you for months because he found out that you were a stripper and a porn star for awhile,” Dominic said flatly. “What makes you think he’s going to be any less pissed off or embarrassed when he finds out that you’re a bloodsucking vampire, too? I mean, how would you feel if our mother had done something like that?”

  Samantha folded her arms under her breasts and continued to stare at the floor as she spoke. “In case you’ve forgotten, Mother was a dancer in Nevada. She admitted to having done a lot of things in the past that I’m sure you’re conveniently choosing not to remember. In fact, there were some things she told me that I’m sure she never told you because you’ve always been so judgmental. I know that Mother was not a saint, but she did what she felt she had to do because she wanted only the best for us.” Looking up to him with just her eyes, she added, “Maybe you should try
showing a little gratitude for the things Mother did for us, and stop acting so self-righteous.”

  “Look, what she did and what you did … I’m over that, okay? That’s not my point,” he insisted, pointing his finger at her. “But we’re not talking about your son, my nephew, feeling humiliated because the guys in the barracks are teasing him about some stuff they found on the Internet. If you become a vampire … her vampire…” He jabbed a finger in Raina’s direction accusingly. “…then how do you think that’s going to affect his military career? Don’t you realize that the government doesn’t take things like that lightly? They’ll strip away his security clearance, for one thing. I know that for a fact. He’ll get transferred out and lose his combat pay. He’ll lose any chance he’s got at a promotion. Everyone will know about you, and everyone will know he’s your son, and that shit will come back on him, not you. You think he catches a lot of flak because of what you did before? Wait ‘till his buddies start giving him hell about all the shit that you’ll probably be doing with her. Sucking blood, having wild orgies, hacking people to death with swords, practicing witchcraft, torturing people…”

  “Oh, give me a fucking break,” Raina groaned bitterly, rolling her eyes. “Do you honestly believe a word of what you’re saying? Or are you just trying your best to sound like a bigoted asshole?”

  Samantha’s eyes went wide as she looked to Raina with surprise at that, but she said nothing in protest. Perhaps what she’d said had been a little bit out of line, but she was tired of standing idly and listening to Dominic berating his sister like that … and insulting the House of Fallamhain, to boot. Dominic would not be backed down by Raina’s sharp response. In fact, he even dared to take a broad step toward her.

  “It doesn’t matter whether or not I believe it,” he told her, practically towering over her. “What matters is that’s the kind of shit they’re going to be saying and thinking. You’re not famous, you’re infamous. If Sam wants to ruin her own reputation by getting tied in with you, that’s her business. But whatever she does is also going to come back on Seth. It’s a little thing called guilt by association. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”