Beneath The Skin: The Darkwing Chronicles, Book Three
by Savannah Russe, 2006

An Excerpt

Chapter One

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 me, darkening 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 and slapped my bare feet against the wood 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 anti-terrorist team that may or may not be part of the CIA--was one of the very good things I've done. 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.

Savannah Russe / DarkwingChronicles.com Pennsylvania E-Mail RusseReaders@Homexpressway.net For requests for media interviews, writing seminars, or book signings, you can contact: Writers Unlimited Inc. 570-675-3447