Broken Moon (2 page)

            “I
am Justice,” she told him, an icy smile curving her red lips. “And I’m here to
deliver.”

            Darkness
spilled over the edges of his vision then, blocking her out, blocking
everything out, and he passed out.

Harley woke up to find himself in a cell.
Not the Shawshank Redemption kind, with bookshelves and posters of Rita
Hayworth, but the kind with no windows, with nothing but three sides of
concrete, and a row of metal bars around him, along with a small cot with a
ratty blanket beneath him.

            Oh,
and then there was the matter of the chains binding his hands and feet.

            Groaning,
he tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea rolled through him, and he promptly
leaned over the side of the bed and threw up onto the concrete floor. The
sharp, acrid stench of vomit filled the air along with the sound of his
retching, and as the vomiting subsided another sound caught his ears.

            The
mechanical hum of cameras whirring.

            Looking
around, he saw there were closed-circuit cameras stationed in the hallway, and
one installed directly in one of the corners of his cell, nestled carefully in
the ceiling just out of reach. He wasn’t going to be able to reach them, not in
his current form – his human legs couldn’t propel him that high. But if
he could just shift…

           
“I
would leave the cameras alone, if I were you.”

           
Harley
lurched up into a sitting position at the sound of Amelia’s voice coming
through the speakers. Another retching sound echoed from his throat, but since
he had nothing in his stomach left to empty he managed to stay sitting up.
“What the fuck did you do to me?”

            Dark,
feminine laughter bounced off the concrete walls. “I presume you’re referring
to the drug we pumped into your system? It’s a combination of pure silver, and barbiturates.
Rather effective, don’t you think?”

            Harley
growled. That would certainly explain why he felt as though flames had scorched
the insides of his veins. As a werewolf, he was unable to tolerate silver, so
it made an unfortunate amount of sense to weaken his immune system with enough
of it so that the drugs could take effect. “You’re one sick bitch,” he spat.

            “I’m
sure that’s not what was going through your head when you were thinking about
spreading me out onto the table and fucking me.”

            Harley
sprang up from the cot with a roar, using his superhuman strength to rip
through the chains at his arms and legs. His eyes blazed a bright, unearthly
glow as he grabbed the cell bars, prepared to stretch a gap wide enough that he
could burst out of here, find the bitch, and rip her throat out.

            Fiery
pain blazed up his arms, and he fell back with a howl, third degree burns
etched onto his palms.

            “Oops,”
Amelia said, a teasing tone in her voice that Harley did not even remotely
appreciate. “Guess I forgot to mention that the bars were made of silver, huh?”

           
Harley simply
lay back, resting his head on the cold concrete, as he waited for the burns on
his hands to fade. It took awhile, as his regenerative system was still
sluggish from the silver that had already been pumped into it, but eventually
the burns began to fade.

            “What
do you want with me,” he said raggedly, his golden eyes blazing with hatred as
he stared into the camera.

            “Oh,
nothing much,”
Amelia said nonchalantly. “Just to run a few simple
experiments. Break your mind. Convince you to come and work for us.” A door
swung open at the end of the hall, and a chill ran through Harley’s veins at
the sound of footsteps ringing against the concrete floor.

           
“Experiments?”
he asked. “Is that what you’ve been doing with the shifters you’ve been taking
off the street?”

            Amelia’s
low chuckle in response told him his guess had been correct – that she
had been behind the kidnappings. “As a matter of fact, yes,” she told him as a
group of burly, uniformed men stopped outside his cell door. Keys jangled, and
Chase assumed a crouching position, his muscles rippling as he began to shift.
“We started with them because they were easier to capture, but civilians are
only so useful to our operation. They’re more fragile and much less
disciplined. So we devised a ploy in order to flush one of your Order out, and
I must say it worked perfectly.”

            Harley
was hardly listening now; he was pouring all his concentration into
accelerating the shift. Muscles stretched and rotated and reformed; skin and
claws and teeth lengthened, hair sprouted and bones shifted and realigned,
sending a million pain signals sparking through his body. The door swung open,
and he sprang for the throat of the first man who entered, his maw gaping.

            The
bastard raised his gun and shot Harley in the chest before he made contact. Harley
collapsed to the floor as the drug swept through his system, stealing the life
from his limbs once more. He dimly heard the guard barking orders to the other
men, and then he was being bound and lifted onto some kind of stretcher device.

            “What
a shame that you’ve resisted,” Amelia’s voice echoed through the speakers
again, dark with displeasure. “Now I’m going to have to wait for you to wake up
again so I can have you punished…”

           
Her voice
faded into the darkness.

           
Icy cold
water struck Harley’s face, and he woke up sputtering and blinking. Bright
light shone harshly in his eyes from a spotlight above, and he turned his head
to the side only to see a bank of machines to his right, with wires snaking out
of them.

            Looking
down, he saw that he was strapped to a long metal table, and that there were
several tubes sticking out of various sections of his body.

            “Ah,
good. You’re awake. Finally.” Amelia was sitting atop a wooden desk several
feet from the foot of Harley’s table. Dressed in a grey skirt-suit, with her
hair pulled into a bun and a pair of glasses perched on her nose, she more
resembled a school teacher than the vixen who’d seduced him into the alley. Her
dark eyes gleamed as they roamed over his body, which was completely naked save
for his boxer briefs, which they allowed him to keep. “You’re a fine specimen,”
she breathed.

            “What
the fuck do you want with me,” Harley rasped, his throat like sandpaper.
What
he wouldn’t give for a glass of water right now.

            Amelia
lifted an eyebrow. “You’ll find out soon enough.” She lifted a hand and two men
stepped into view, previously hidden behind the glare of the spotlight. They
were dressed in scrubs and caps, their faces hidden behind surgical masks, but
their eyes were stone cold as they approached a metal table filled with a
hodge-podge of medical instruments, some of which looked suspiciously like
torture devices.

            This
only made Harley lift his chin. “Whatever you want to know, you’re not going to
get it out of me by torturing me,” he said defiantly. “I’ve been there and done
that already, and I’ve never broken.”

            “Oh,
I didn’t bring you here to get information out of you,” Amelia laughed, then
walked around the edge of the table, walking her fingers up the length of his
body along the way. A shiver of revulsion crawled up Harley’s spine as her
fingers walked up his chin and she tugged on his lower lip with her index
finger. “I’ve already got some of our best hackers working on extracting
information out of your files.” She slid her hand down his body and gently
cupped his balls through his underwear, leaning down to whisper in his ear.
“I’m here to test you now, to see just how far I can push the limits of your beautiful
body.”

            The
words were meant to be seductive, but they only flooded his veins with ice.
“Your scent… it’s changed,” he rasped, registering that there was nothing left
of that dark, heady sweetness that had made his head swim and his loins burst into
flames.

            Amelia
gave a tinkling laugh. “It’s amazing what a combination of the right pheromones
can do for a girl, don’t you think?” she said, and then stepped back. “Just a
few spritzes of that stuff on my neck and I had you eating out of the palm of my
hand before you said a single word.” An ugly expression crossed her face as her
grip tightened painfully on his balls, and Harley cried out as pain shot
through him.

            “Now,”
she said, stepping back and gesturing to the men in scrubs. A cruel smile curved
her lips as one of the men picked up a small, vice-like instrument with rows of
serrated teeth. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

* * *

            Harley
didn’t know how long they tortured him. It could have been days, weeks, even
years, though part of his mind logically knew that he’d probably only been in
that place for a few hours since even evil masterminds needed to eat and sleep.
But time and space and thought had all melted away under the onslaught of
torture, and his mind had been filled only with pain.

            They’d
sliced and diced him with a variety of instruments – shallow cuts, deep
cuts, short and long slices – made of both silver as well as other
metals. Amelia had oohed and ahhed as she’d examined the wounds, making copious
notes on a clipboard as to how much damage each implement had done, and how
long it took him to heal each wound. Every time his inner beast took over and
he tried to shift, they injected him with a small dose of silver-laced barbiturates
to force the beast to retreat, and Amelia made notes of each time that occurred
as well.

            “I
do wish you would stop that,” she’d said irritably after the third time he’d
done it. “Each time we inject you it affects the results of our experiment. We
will have to repeat this one a second time.

           
A
second time?
He’d thought, panic rising in his throat.
He was going to
have to through this again?

            Then
again, maybe that wasn’t so bad. The next form of torture wasn’t likely to be
any better, and in fact was probably going to be a lot worse. Maybe he should
continue to try and muck up their attempts…

           
Jesus
Christ. You sound like a fucking five year old. The more you resist, the worse
this shit is gonna get.

           
Yeah, and
unfortunately for him, resistance was built into his blood. He would not
– could not – give in.

            Two
burly guys dragged him from the room by his underarms, his toes scraping
against the floor as he tried to keep up, but the silver had weakened him to
the point that his muscles were like jelly, unable to hold his weight. It took
all the strength he had just to lift his head and peer through his
blood-drenched hair at the prison layout, which, as far as he could see,
amounted to nothing more than row upon row of silver-enforced cells.

            A
chill went through him as he realized this particular prison had been built
specifically for his kind. The acrid stench of antiseptic and bleach coated the
air, but he was willing to bet that beneath it all, if his nose was working
properly, he would be able to catch the faintest scent of other shifters who
had been here, as well as the odors associated with blood, sweat and death.

            After
all, it was clear that was all that awaited him at this place, and likely what
all the other prisoners had gone through.

            “Where…
where are the others?” he asked, his voice strained.

            Harley’s
ears rang as the guard on his right cuffed him. “No questions,” he barked as
one of the other men slid open Harley’s cell door. They tossed him
unceremoniously into the cell, and with no strength left at all, Harley
collapsed against the cold, unforgiving concrete, unable to even make it to the
too-small cot in the corner.

            The
cell door rattled shut behind him, followed by the ominous
click
of the
lock sliding into place. “All your other beasty friends are dead,” the guard
informed him snidely. “You’re the only resident of this fine establishment, and
going by what happened to the others, you’re not likely to be here long.
Probably a week, tops, if you’re lucky.” He laughed, and his buddies joined in
until they were practically guffawing in the hall.

            Their
raucous laughter lingered in the halls with Harley long after they’d gone,
along with the palpable taste and scent of despair, and Harley wondered if he
was ever going to walk out of this place alive.

It turned out that the guard was wrong. Harley
was still alive at the end of the first week. And the second. And the third.
Every day the guards came to collect him for Amelia’s ‘experiments’, and every
day she continued to torture him with various methods and devices.

            The
first three days were more of the same, but on the fourth, Amelia had evidently
tired of the whole slice-and-dice routine because she moved onto fire. Well,
more accurately, heat. Metal rods, blowtorches, burning coal, and heated coils
were applied to his body for various lengths of time. He’d even taken a certain
fascination with watching his skin char, turning from flesh pink to a harsh
black, as it curled away from his flesh. After all, he had to get some kind of
enjoyment out of this whole thing, or what was the point? There was absolutely
nothing she could do to him to break him, though she tried everything
imaginable. She moved forward relentlessly, her eyes void of emotion, testing
torture after torture on him, methodically cataloguing each of his weaknesses.

            The
fire experiments only lasted two days, but she spent at least three on
electrocution. She also seemed to have great fun stretching him on the rack,
though unfortunately for her they had to ‘take a break’ because his spine took
four days to heal after she’d broken it – another ‘wonderful’ discovery,
by her standards.

            He
wondered how long it would take for her to recover if he separated two of
her
vertebrae.

            “You
know,” she told him conversationally one night, when they opened up a skylight
in the window to see if the light of the full moon had any effect on him. It
was one of his better days, as her assistants had yet to touch him with any
kind of implement. “You’ve weathered all of this much better than any of your
predecessors. I must say I’m quite impressed.”

            “That
so.” His response was flat, his eyes fixed upon the skylight as he waited for
the cloud to shift and reveal the moon. The luminescence of the full moon
tended to bring his beast out in full strength, and though he doubted it would
be enough for him to overcome her men, he still had to try.

            “Very
much so.” Amelia’s eyes gleamed as she studied him. “You’re the seventh
werewolf shifter we’ve had on this particular table. The others all changed
under the light of the moon, becoming mindless, ravenous beasts that we
eventually had to put down. I wonder if you’ll be the same.”

           
Ah.
So that explained the row of guards standing to his left with their rifles
trained on him.
He imagined that any shifter pumped with that many silver
bullets would probably die relatively quickly. “That’s not going to be
necessary with me.”

            Amelia
lifted a perfectly shaped eyebrow. “Oh? Are you more resistant than other
wolves?”

            Harley
clenched his jaw and turned away, not sure what to say. He didn’t want to give
up the secrets of his brothers-in-arms, but at the same time he also wasn’t
ready to throw in the towel and let her kill him.

            “You’ll
soon find out,” he finally growled, and then the cloud drifted away and the
light of the moon was fully upon him, bathing him in its wonderfully
incandescent glow.

            A
groan escaped his lips as his back arched, the change sweeping over him
involuntarily as the moon’s magic pulled his beast to the forefront. Snarling,
he fought to maintain a hold on his wolf, as his body stretched and changed, as
muscle and bone and sinew reformed and rearranged, and hair, claws and teeth
sprouted and lengthened.

            “Hold,”
Amelia commanded in a hard voice, as he heard guns being cocked. His eyes were
squeezed shut in agony, so he couldn’t see what she was doing, but he imagined
she was standing between him and the men, her hand held up as a fierce
expression crossed her face.

            “But
ma’am, you should at least let us give him one dart,” one of the guards
protested. “He’s going to be extremely unstable – ”

           
“I
said hold.”

           
Blessed
silence descended upon the room then, the only sound that of the men breathing,
and Harley panted as his body went through the last vestiges of the shift. When
it was done he lay on the table not as a man, but a wolf with a beautiful, sleek
coat, dappled in silvery-white. His golden eyes stared up at the moon as he
savored the lunar power coursing through him, power that chased away the
lingering effects of the silver and strengthened him.

            He
wished with all his might that he could leap up from this table right now and
rip out the bitch’s throat, but something – an invisible force of some
kind – weighed down on him as though it had a stranglehold on his beast.
She hovered close to him now, within striking range as she studied him, her
eyes lit up with intrigue, analyzing every inch of his face. Her perfect lips
were parted, her cheeks flushed with pleasure as her dark eyes ran up and down
his beast form, and wouldn’t you know it, the bitch actually dared to sink her
hands into the soft fur at his abdomen.

            Next
thing you knew, she was going to be rubbing his belly like he was a damned dog.
He didn’t know if he was going to be able to stop from ripping her hand off if
she did that, but he did bite back the growl that threatened to rumble from his
chest at the contact from his enemy. His beast was poised and ready to kill,
though he lacked the strength needed, which confused his beast, especially on
the one night of the month when he should be stronger, and more alive than ever.

            “Well
aren’t you gorgeous,” she murmured, running her fingers gently through his fur.
“Total control,” she breathed, looking into his eyes. “None of the other
werewolf shifters ever managed anything close to this. And you’re not even
attempting to attack me, are you?”

           
It
wasn’t for lack of trying.

His hackles started to rise at the cooing
tone in her voice, and Harley forced himself to relax even though her syrupy
praise made him want to sink his teeth into the perfect alabaster column of her
neck. “I think it’s time to start the second phase of your training,” she
murmured, and then straightened up and snapped her fingers. Someone pressed a
button, and the metal plates in the ceiling slid shut, closing off the skylight
to him.

            Immediately
the beast inside him relaxed, and Harley forced himself through another change,
shifting slowly back into human form.

“Second phase?” he asked, his voice barely
above a whisper.

            Amelia
smiled. “Yes, your second phase of the training. This is where I transform you
into a proper soldier for my army. But only after you’re been completely and
absolutely…broken.”

            Harley
seethed inwardly as the guards hauled him from the table, but he kept his
expression carefully blank.

            Amelia
beamed at him. “I’ll see you tomorrow, wolf.”

            She
never even noticed when he palmed a scalpel from the table on his way past.