Page 4 of Hollow Moon

Now what?

He looked up to see what looked like the end of a flat-blade screwdriver slip under one of the small ceiling chinks where light came in. Whoever was up there worked at the small opening, pulling the metal up. When the guy had made a small flap, he paused for a moment.

The next thing Knox saw was a hose snaking into the opening.

What the hell?

“It’s in,” the guy on the roof called.

Damn. These guys were making drugs. At least he’d assumed it was drugs. It suddenly leaped into his mind that they could be terrorists making poison gas.

Jesus.

He struggled for calm, pushing away the notion of poison gas. From what he’d heard, it had seemed more likely some drug that they thought had commercial value on the street. And they were going to test the crap on him? If it was a street drug, he had no idea what it would do to a normal man. But a werewolf’s system was different. He couldn’t even drink coffee without feeling sick. And this stuff would likely be ten times worse than it would be for a normal man.

They were talking again.

“You think it will make him—you know—see things?”

“Or horny—like it did Phil.”

That brought a round of laughter.

“Let’s find out.”

He heard a small engine start up. A few seconds later it was followed by the hiss of gas rushing into the interior. His heart began to race.

He dived for the hole he’d made in the side of the floor, thinking he had a source of fresh air they didn’t know about. But he never got that far.

A thunderclap went off inside his head, wiping away coherent thought. He sank to the dirt floor, his body jerking, as daggers of pain knifed into his skull.

Poison. Not a street drug. Poison.

CHAPTER 2

Or maybe not. A moment ago he’d been afraid of some gas. Now he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d been worried about. He could only react to the bursts of pain in his head and a wavering of his senses, as though he were suddenly fathoms under the ocean, weighted down by layers of water above him and viewing the world through layers of green.

A bright spot above him winked in and out of his vision, spraying light into the darkness then abruptly clicking off. And when the door opened a crack, he was almost blinded by a shaft of light stabbing him like a Jedi saber.

A logical thought fought to stay in his brain. If this stuff were poison, they wouldn’t chance opening the door.

But the intended effect of the gas made no real difference to Knox.

He fell back against the floor, his whole body on fire. He managed to turn his head to the side just before he threw up. The awful taste in his mouth brought him back to some sort of consciousness.

He tried to push himself up, but his limbs had turned to palm fronds.

Palm fronds? Yeah, like extensions of a big plant gone rubbery. No not rubbery. They threatened to break off if he pushed too hard. He looked down at the rest of his body, expecting to see a tree. Instead he saw scales.

He had turned into a giant lizard. Or maybe a snake.

Could any of that be true? What if he grew feathers? Could he fly out of here?

Yeah, that was a better idea, but first he had to be mobile.

Gritting his teeth, he pushed himself to his knees, then his feet. He was in a shed. At least that was a deeply embedded recent memory. But the walls pulsed around him, as though he were in a huge, beating heart.

Outside he heard a voice. “Close the fucking door. We don’t want to breathe that stuff.”

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