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  Dark Dreams, Dark Nights

  By

  Savannah Russe

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Epilogue

  * * *

  Praise for the Darkwing Chronicles

  "Exciting, fast-paced� it has everything."

  �Huntress Book Reviews

  "Savannah Russe [lets] us know that there is more than one way to tell a good vamp's story."

  �Victoria Laurie, author of Demons Are a Ghoul's Best Friend

  "Exciting� superior supernatural suspense."

  �The Best Reviews

  "Wonderful� with a sharp bite."

  �Midwest Book Review

  * * *

  * * *

  SIGNET ECLIPSE

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  Penguin Books Ltd.. Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Signet Eclipse, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, December 2008 10 987654321

  Copyright � Charlee Trantino, 2008 All rights reserved

  SIGNET ECLIPSE and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Printed in the United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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  * * *

  To the courageous men and women of America's armed forces�they give their all

  * * *

  I dream, therefore I am.

  �August Strindberg

  He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process becomes a monster himself.

  �Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

  * * *

  Chapter One

  THE embassy's thick walls didn't block the sound: a hollow bang followed by ominous silence, then, a heartbeat later, another bang. Mortar fire, Sam thought, 122mm, Katyusha rockets, maybe. People are dying out there.

  It wasn't a guess. Sam knew they were dying. The images came to her as vividly as if she were witnessing them with her own eyes. A little boy of perhaps ten years old lay motionless in the street, blood becoming a puddle beneath his small body, his blue bicycle twisted and ruined near where he had fallen. His mother, screaming his name, emerged from the doorway of a nearby house and rushed toward him.

  Sam felt the woman's anguish wash over her. She wished she didn't hear, didn't see such things, but she didn't know how to shut them out.

  Pushing the disturbing scene into a dark corner of her mind, Sam sat down at her desk, took a deep breath, and turned her attention to the letter that had just arrived in the diplomatic pouch. She ran her index finger across the smooth surface of the white business envelope. On its front her name was printed in a plain font: SUSAN ANN MARIE CHASE. Stamped in red in the lower right corner, like a smudge of blood, was the warning: EYES ONLY.

  The flap had been glued shut on the reverse side of the envelope. Then, for added security, an official wax seal had been added. She thought this was odd, old-fashioned, really. Quickly she used her fingernail to crack the irregular blob of carnelian in two, making it look like a broken heart.

  A wide smile released the tension in her face as she pulled out the sheet of official stationery and unfolded it. She had been waiting weeks for these orders. The delay had been driving her crazy. Back in May she had heard from reliable sources that she was being posted to the embassy in France. Since then she had daydreamed about sitting in a Left Bank sidewalk cafe, sipping wine, a gorgeous man lounging in the chair opposite her.

  Her dream man was always the same. He would be urbane, well educated, and smartly dressed. He would never have saluted, marched, or held a rifle. He would read Sartre and have arguments about modern art until three in the morning. And he would be crazy for her.

  Then she began reading the letter she held in her hand. Her smile faded. This wasn't what she had expected. She flicked her eyes away from the words and thought, What a fool I have been. A victim of vain self-delusion. A stupid woman who believes in hope instead of truth. If I had been going to Paris, there would have been no delay, no lame excuses about a glitch in the paperwork while I stayed in this abattoir, doing my best not to get killed.

  Suddenly the anguish she felt was entirely her own. She let the sheet of paper slip through her fingers onto the desk. Why hadn't she seen this coming? What happened? What went wrong? Paris was going to change everything. Now it was� what? Just another dream that died.

  Paris absolutely wasn't in the picture anymore. Her orders were clear: She was to report to CIA headquarters at Langley in McLean, Virginia. She frowned, making an angry line appear between her eyes. Why? she thought. Going back to the United States made no sense. If the agency wanted to recruit her, as they did routinely with employees of the foreign service, a handler could have contacted her here. Or in Paris.

  No, something had gone fundamentally wrong with this transfer. Somebody wanted to screw her out of the posting she deserved. It wasn't fair. She had worked so hard to excel, yet� No, she didn't want to even consider that someone could have found

out about her, about the things she hid.

  Sam's eyes, as golden as Baltic amber, filled with unshed tears. She glanced up at the early-morning light leaking through the thin, vertical window. Another thought skated along the surface of her consciousness: The same kind of windows are used in prisons.

  Through that narrow opening she saw a slice of sky, not blue, but a rusty orange, filled with the sand of an approaching storm. "Sam," a high school nickname that came from S. A. M., her initials, knew exactly how hot the day would soon be: 122 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, not unusual for July in one of the hottest and most dangerous cities in the world.

  That city was Baghdad�just another word for pure, unmitigated hell.

  She heard the mortar fire again, closer this time, but still not in the Green Zone. Most days insurgents lobbed four or five shells at Baathist houses and shops before scurrying away like rats into the ruined buildings along the streets. The whump and thwack of the mortars were psychologically disturbing. But the shells�not much more powerful than hand grenades�posed no threat to anyone working inside the new, heavily fortified, $2 billion U.S. Embassy compound.

  This thought had barely registered in Sam's mind when she felt a tingle, like an electric current, surge up her spine. Beneath her honey-colored hair, pulled as usual into a severe chignon, her scalp began to crawl. Then she heard a voice speak inside her head: Get out.

  Her heart began to race. She immediately pushed away from the desk and hurried through the office door into the hallway. All was still. The long corridor lay silent and empty under the glare of fluorescent lights. Most of the people working on this floor hadn't arrived so early in the day.

  Run. Get out, the voice commanded.

  Sam didn't hesitate. She hiked up the skirt of her boxy blue business suit and sprinted toward the exit. She didn't know why she had to run, but each time the voice had commanded her to do so over the past months, what Susan Ann Marie Chase had been fleeing was death.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  BEFORE exiting the embassy's cavernous lobby through the huge outer doors, Sam yelled to the guards by the entrance's metal detector, "A bomb! Run!" She didn't wonder about how she knew there was a bomb. The thought had come into her consciousness, and she understood it was true.

  The two MPs, their uniforms crisp, their faces clean shaven, and their eyes very young, stared at her with puzzled looks. They stayed unmoving at their posts. Sam didn't stop to argue or explain. She yelled once more, "Run, you fools!" and continued her headlong dash outside.

  A haze of heat encircled Sam as she stumbled and nearly fell when her feet hit the cement walkway between the buildings. The parched ochre dust in the air made it hard to breathe, but her legs kept churning, carrying her away from the building she had just exited.

  A thin young woman and a man carrying a briefcase, newcomers to the foreign service, were walking toward the embassy. Sam knew them both and cried out as she ran, "Amy, Tom, turn around! Run! A bomb!"

  The woman's face registered surprise, then fear, but she got the message. She turned and ran too. The man did not. He remained standing on the sidewalk, gazing in bewilderment at the fleeing women.

  The voice inside Sam's head came again: Go there. The armored truck.

  Sam spotted the fifteen-ton Mine Protected Clearance Vehicle, or MPCV, parked a hundred feet away. A U.S. Marine officer in a camouflage-print uniform crouched in the open rear door. He was intent on tying his right combat boot.

  Sam rushed desperately toward him. "Let us in!" she screamed. "A bomb's about to explode!"

  The man jerked his head in the direction of Sam's cry, then moved swiftly to the edge of the sand-colored vehicle. He yanked Sam up by her outstretched hands. As she scrambled into the blast-protected interior, the soldier grabbed the other woman's arms and swung her up too, then pushed her in front of him into the steel-encased truck. He slammed the door shut, and barely a second later the vehicle rocked violently as a massive explosion roared outside.

  The three of them sat there in silence, their faces eerily green from the light penetrating the thick tinted windows. For a moment nobody spoke. Then the woman called Amy whispered, "Tom. He's still out there." She started shivering violently despite the heat, her legs trembling, and her hands shaking like aspen leaves in the wind.

  Sam did not shake. She did not quiver. She appeared calm, her face placid. Pressing her lips into a hard line, she quashed her emotions down far inside her and pressed her palms together to make sure a tremor didn't reveal the turmoil roiling through her gut.

  Soon the rumbling of the explosion faded away into no sound. The dark-haired marine, one elbow resting heavily on his knee, the shoelace of his boot still untied, looked at Sam and asked in a soft South Carolina drawl, "Just what happened back there, ma'am?"

  Sam's voice held a convincing sangfroid. "A bomb went off inside the building."

  "Do you think it was a suicide bomber?" The other woman could barely whisper the question.

  "No. The explosion was much more powerful," Sam answered without thinking, a scene coming like a dream into her mind, her words revealing facts she didn't even know she possessed. "I saw a fuel delivery truck pull into the service road. Early, around seven, when I got here. The tank had a false bottom that was rigged to�"

  Sam stopped herself abruptly and shrugged, dropping her eyes. "You know�" she finished feebly.

  The marine, who wore a second lieutenant's gold bar on his shirt, stared hard at her now, his eyes filled with questions. "Pardon my asking, ma'am, but just how do you know that? And how did you happen to know when this here bomb was going to go off?"

  "I� I�" Sam felt her face getting hot. "I got a tip, a call, to get out of the building," she lied, still avoiding his eyes. Then, making her face hard, she coldly met his gaze. "I can't tell you anything more, Lieutenant. It's classified. I shouldn't have said anything at all. I trust you can keep your mouth shut."

  Her words, sharp and condescending, clearly held authority. "Now, I'd better get back out there and find my section leader."

  The marine was polite toward the women, as boys raised in the South are taught to be, but his suspicions had put anger in his tone. "Well, before you do that, ma'am, may I get your name? And yours." He nodded toward the other woman, who had collapsed into herself, becoming small as a frightened mouse.

  "Susan Chase," Sam replied, raising her chin, her nose pinched in with hauteur. "Perhaps you know of my father. Brig. Gen. Hilton Chase?" Sam grew up around soldiers. She knew how to pull rank when she had to, and to keep this marine, who was probably ten years older than she, from questioning her further, she intended to pull rank now.

  "Well, ma'am, I guess just about everybody in the corps knows of General Helldog Chase," the marine said, his belligerence ebbing. "Shame he had to retire when he did. Guess your being his daughter explains it."

  "Explains what?" Sam asked, arching an eyebrow.

  "Why you're such a cold-blooded SOB, ma'am. No offense," the marine said without rancor, and flung the truck door open into a world strewn with rubble and echoing with screams.

  Emerging from the MPCV, the first thing Sam saw was an arm. It lay in the road maybe fifty feet away, and it still held a mahogany calfskin briefcase clutched in its hand. A shoe, a bloody foot inside, sat undisturbed on the sidewalk where Tom had once stood.

  Sam squeezed her eyes shut for a brief moment. She choked, then coughed as she climbed down from the huge vehicle. A fine grit covered every inch of her bare skin and got into her hair. She could taste salt from dried perspiration on her lips. Her suit was wrinkled and her low-heeled pumps were scuffed.

  She didn't even consider searching for the rest of Tom. There was no point. He was dead, the arm probably the largest piece of him left.

  Barely glancing toward the damaged embassy, she walked quickly away from the MPCV toward her apartment on the far side of the huge embassy compound. Despite what she told the lieutenant, she had no intention of finding anyone or explaining anything. As soon as humanly possible, she planned to get her clothes off and stand under the shower until her fingertips wrinkled. She imagined she would be happy to stand there, the cool droplets striking her face, for the next couple of years.

 

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