Savannah Russe - The Darkwing Chronicles 03 - Beneath the Skin.pdf - Dokumenty - sysia1544

Beneath the Skin

Savannah Russe

Introduction

This has been the winter of my discontent. Its cause is no mystery to me: My search for

love has hit a dead end. Well, that's my excuse. The Buddhists say that to find inner

peace, we must let go of "attachments"—all that good stuff that I really care about.

My big "attachment" is to one hunky, sexy Darius della Chiesa. I guess, if I am ever to

be enlightened, I need to "let go" of my dream of true love.

I've fallen hard twice now in my life. Neither romance turned out well. They turned out

about as bad as relationships can get. The first time I went head over heels it was a

disaster—and a tragic loss for literary history to boot. That was when I bit and killed

Lord Byron. The second time I felt that zing‐a‐ling I learned not to trust a good‐looking

guy. Darius played dangle, and I was the danglee.

But, right now, as far as I'm concerned, Mr. della Chiesa can kiss my sweet ass. I'm

moving on. I have more important things on my plate—like saving America. You see.

I'm not just a vampire. I work for the United States government. I'm a spy.

Chapter 1

"… yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible."

—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1

A hand snaked out from the pink satin interior of the coffin and smacked down hard on

an alarm clock's snooze button. The hand was mine. I was sleeping alone in the secret

room behind the bookcases of my Upper West Side apartment. With more than a little

sarcasm, I called this well‐hidden nook the "crypt of the living dead," a place that

admitted no light except for the garish red numbers of the digital clock.

The darkness around me mirrored the blackness within my soul, which had been

damned more than four centuries earlier by the bloody kiss of a Gypsy king. Lost,

wandering, without roots, I was a soul in torment, a fallen angel hurled headlong

flaming from the sky to bottomless perdition.

Oh, yeah right , I thought, as I climbed out of my coffin, my bare feet slapping against

the hardwood floor. Stop being such a drama queen , I told myself. In point of fact I

lived in New York City, which may be its own kind of hell, but I'm no fallen angel,

rebellious or otherwise. It's not that I have never been good in my life. Unfortunately I

have more often been bad. And like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her

forehead, when I was good, I was very, very good, but when I was bad, I was horrid.

Agreeing to become a member of a deep black spy operation—an antiterrorist team

that may or may not be part of the CIA—was one of the very good things I've done.

The fact that I still lied, stole, occasionally killed without conscience, and drank human

blood made a prima facie case that I was—despite my efforts at reform—still as bad as

bad could be.

Being bad is my nature, inasmuch as some authorities call me an "undead creature."

Since I am very much alive, it would be more accurate to say I am one of the long‐lived,

ignoble, and mysterious race called vampire . True, we are made, not born. Many of us

feel our conversion is a rebirth that transforms us from human to something "not."

Others feel the conversion is a living death. We are neither demon nor angel, but we

contain the capacity to resemble both. We live long. We often prosper. But we also

have urges for passions and pleasures that my moral self resists but my dark side seeks

out with no regard to rules or ethics. Most of the time, in the centuries since my birth

in 1591, I had learned to control my erotic compulsions, or redirect them, letting them

flow like a rushing stream around the rock, which is my heart, instead of uprooting it

and carrying it off. Most of the time. But I had my slips, and they were often deadly.

Now, after a sleep haunted by nightmares, I rose when the sun slipped beneath the

rim of the earth. I felt cranky and out of sorts. I would have preferred to curl up and

return to slumber, but yesterday I had a gotten a summons via a voice mail to come

tonight to the Flatiron Building for the first meeting of Team Darkwing since the wrap‐

up of our last mission. We were supposed to be getting a week off. We had gotten only

a few days. And after what had happened during that previous mission, I didn't feel

like making nicey‐nice. Part of the time I felt like resigning from the team. The rest of

the time I felt like kicking somebody's butt.

I had my reasons, I thought as I padded over to the lever that swung open the faux

bookcases that hid the doorway into the human world—my Manhattan apartment.

This five room flat in a vast pre‐World War II building looked like hundreds of others in

the neighborhood: It had high ceilings and huge windows, steam radiators that banged

and hissed, and an old‐fashioned bathroom with hexagon‐shaped white tiles and a

vintage clawfoot tub with a jerry‐rigged shower. A casual look around my dwelling

place would not arouse even the slightest suspicion that a monster—for indeed that

was what I was—lived here. As long, that is, as no one peeked inside my refrigerator

and saw the bags of human blood ordered from a blood bank under a phony clinic's

name.

The blood was my elixir of eternal life. I needed it with such a fierce intensity that if I

could not purchase it, I might be roaming the dark streets in search of prey. I had not

hunted humans for decades, but I knew that without my FedEx delivery once a week,

I'd soon be reverting to barbarism… to the horror that lay beneath my skin, always

yearning to break free.

Enough of such morbid musings!

I shook my head to clear it as my malamute, Jade, who had been lying patiently in the

hall like a sentry, barked a greeting. I gave her back a rub while my eyes squinted

against the light, dim though it was. In a few steps I had passed from the impenetrable

darkness of my lair to the murky illumination of the forty‐watt bulbs that cast shadows

and gloom throughout my apartment. I had gone from a phantasmagoria of dreams to

the reality of this world, and even my nightmares were more appealing than what lay

ahead of me this evening. Dreams didn't require any effort, or come with a shitload of

responsibility… for as I walked back into my human life I remembered clearly what else

the voice mail message had said: We're in Code Red .

Code Red meant a terrorist threat against the United States had been detected and

was imminent. Was it a nuclear device? A bio‐threat like anthrax or smallpox?

Something worse? I didn't know, but I couldn't stand around guessing. The mundane

tasks of life still took precedence over a national emergency: Jade had to be walked.

I passed quickly into my bedroom, where I do not sleep but where I do keep my

clothes, and pulled on a pair of jeans and a black sweater (my standard "uniform"),

then stuck my feet into a pair of UGGs. I dragged a brush through my hair to remove

the tangles while my white rat Gunther chattered loudly in his cage. I grabbed a

leather coat from my closet, one that had deep side pockets, then released Gunther

from his prison. I put out my hand and he jumped onto it, ran deftly up my arm, and

perched on my shoulder. He liked to come along on my nightly perambulations with

Jade. He had always ridden in the pockets of his former owner, an octogenarian art

dealer who went to pieces, thanks to a murderer's ax. Once we hit the streets, Gunther

would scoot down from my shoulder to ride in an outside pocket. I had learned that

when I'm walking a very big dog and have the head of white rat peeking out of my

coat, people look at them and not me. Those same people also kept their distance,

which suited me just fine.

I'm a loner by temperament as well as by circumstance: My vampire state has made

intimate relationships virtually impossible. As a result, I have been solitary for over

four hundred years. Even the few nights that my last lover, Darius, stayed over in my

apartment had proved problematic. Sure, the sex was great. I also loved cuddling on

the sofa and playing footsie while we drank coffee at the kitchen counter. I loved his

smell and the sound of his voice.

But we were incompatible in other ways. I didn't love picking up the wet towels from

the bathroom floor after he took a shower or washing out the mug he left in the sink.

Okay, okay, those were petty things, and all men need retraining. Every woman knows

that. What I couldn't fix so easily was my resentment that he was an intruder in my

space. Maybe I was too set in my ways. Face facts, girl , I thought, use 'em, then lose

'em is your motto. You weren't cut out to be the happy homemaker. The happy hooker

maybe …

The sharp cold of the night air hit me hard in the face as my animals and I pushed

through the glass doors of the apartment lobby and entered the streets of Manhattan

at rush hour. March had come in like a lion. After a few balmy days that held the

promise of spring, the weather had shown its fickleness. The temperature had dipped

into the teens as a front known as an Alberta clipper blew in from the north. My spirit,

buoyed by the hope of the approaching spring, plummeted with the thermometer. I

turned up my collar and hunched my shoulders against the icy wind.

Phalanxes of people marched down the sidewalks in both directions, but everyone

gave Jade a wide berth as we headed west toward the narrow dog park along the

Hudson River. I shivered to think how much colder the damp air there would be. A

subway rumbled beneath my feet as we hurried along Broadway. Horns honked.

Steam rose from manhole covers. The smell of cooking meat escaped from the corner

deli. After moving quickly along a few more blocks, Jade and I dashed across traffic‐

clogged West End Avenue. I stumbled and nearly fell when my boot struck the lip of a

raised sidewalk. No one around me seemed to notice. Always wary.

always more than a wee bit paranoid, I scanned the passersby and saw no familiar

faces.

The crowds had dwindled to a few hardy souls by the time we reached Riverside Park,

a narrow strip of green that runs along the Hudson River. Wet river air stung my flesh

and stiffened my fingers. I focused on keeping my wits about me. not on the evening

ahead or the days just past when I had lost so much. With the Darkwing meeting only

an hour away, I didn't want to dally, so I kept Jade on the leash as she searched out her

usual spots and did her thing.

The heartless wind lifted my dark hair. I cursed myself for forgetting a hat. I don't

handle the cold well. Thin blood, you know. But my pace had slowed and despite my

need to stay in the moment, my mind wandered and my thoughts kept returning to

the meeting later tonight and the danger ahead.

In truth, except for my team and immediate superior, I didn't know much more about

America's antiterrorist operations than the general public did. I had seen that the

creation of Homeland Security added another level of bureaucracy but hadn't unified

America's security agencies. The FBI and CIA remained rivals. Local police were kept

Savannah Russe - The Darkwing Chronicles 03 - Beneath the Skin.pdf

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