Broken Communication

Chapter One

Sweat-soaked and in a panic, his body shaking, Casey Black sat up on the edge of an old cot in the center of a sparsely furnished room, his head hung in defeat. A quick check of his watch revealed he'd been asleep less than an hour. Denying himself much-needed rest over the past week had left him exhausted and his mind a muddled mess. Not that his mind hadn't been heading in that direction on its own for a long time.

While the sleep had been required for his body to continue to function, it had not been welcome. He'd dreamt of horrors from long ago—ones he could no more change the outcome of than he could control the weather.

With his forearm, he wiped the sweat from his brow and stood, stretching his sore muscles. The bathroom off the bedroom wasn't anything that anyone sane would want to use, let alone drink from the faucet, but Casey wasn't what anyone would term of sound mind. He bent his head and put his mouth under the old faucet, unconcerned with the rust and grime coating the sink as he turned the handle. The water tasted heavily of rust and sediment, but it was cool and quenched his thirst, so he paid it little mind. He'd had worse.

He had bigger matters at hand than the quality of his drinking water. He had to find Harmony. She'd already been gone a week. His gut said she was still alive, but he suspected that wouldn't last long. If he knew anything about the woman, she was full of spit, vinegar and probably caviar or some other fancy food.

"Don't," he said to his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Mold coated the bottom corner of the mirror, leaving only a portion of Casey's face visible, but it was enough for him to see just how far he'd fallen. He looked like a crazed mountain man rather than the high-society gentleman he'd once been, long ago, before deciding to serve his country—before he signed away his life. Before he agreed to be reinvented.

Re-imagined, even.

He snorted and half-laughed at the sight of himself there. "Furball."

Harmony had called him that more than once over the years. It was strange how much he missed her annoying names for him and her cutting remarks. How much he missed her.

He splashed water on his face and left the small bathroom, making his way across the room. He tossed on the overhead light and the single, suspended bulb did little to cut through the darkness of the room. The damn thing was practically an antique, and he wasn't sure how it didn't burn the whole fucking place down. Exposed wires on the frayed cord signaled the mice were back. They'd leave now that he was at the safe house again. They knew when to avoid a predator, and he was the biggest around. And like the many times before, once he stopped bothering to do more than check in on the place every couple of months, they'd resurface, sensing the big bad wolf was gone.

The light from the bulb barely made a dent in the quest to illuminate his findings. Some human habits died hard. Lighting a room was one of them, even though he preferred it darker. His eyes, having been genetically altered long ago, were sensitive to light.

Ever since the unfortunate mishap.

"Yeah, if that was a mishap, then the Hindenburg was a hiccup and the Titanic sinking was kind of bad for the boating industry," he said softly, though he wasn't sure why he bothered whispering. The safe house was secure and remote. All his safe houses were. It's why he'd picked them over the decades.

He had homes all over the world. Some were fancy. A lot were barely standing. He had money. Most immortals did—even the ones on the run. There had been a time and place when he'd thought all life's questions had answers found in fortune.

He'd been wrong.

Nearly dead wrong.

He bent his head in remembrance of the life he'd been forced to leave behind over a century ago. His mother would have been horrified at the state of disrepair the safe house was in. He rubbed his shaggy beard, just under his chin, knowing she would have forbidden such an unsightly state. As much as he'd loathed her demanding nature, he missed her. Missed all his family. They'd passed long ago.

"You have Laney now," he said softly, reminding himself that, in reality, his enemies had given him something of a family again when they'd used his DNA samples, taken against his will, to help in the creation of other supernaturals. Laney was a good girl who was mated to a man who could protect her. Casey had passed that baton to him a week prior, after carrying it faithfully for years.

So much had developed in such a short period of time. Casey had foolishly permitted himself to be lulled into a false sense of security. Into believing his life of living on the run was behind him. He'd known better. Deep down. But that hadn't stopped hope from burning strongly within him.

His emotions welled. Letting them free was a bad idea. He wasn't allowed to have extreme emotions anymore. Doing so left him weakened against his inner beast.

"My own fucking demon," he said, venom dripping from every word. He'd never, as of yet, completely mastered the animal side of himself. Over the years he'd met natural-borns, men and women born with the ability to shift forms into animals. He'd even run into those who had been attacked by a natural and lived to tell the tale— getting pretty fucking furry the month following. They all seemed to have a better handle on their animal sides than he did.

Special.

That was what the scientists had called him way back when he'd been their pet project.

"Special, my ass."

They'd gotten lucky with him. Unbeknownst to Casey and the scientists at the time, he had supernaturals in his family history somewhere, which left his body in a better position to accept what wasn't natural to it—wolf DNA, among other things the group had thought up and used.

Straight humans weren't so lucky.

He almost laughed at the idea of what had happened to him being anything other than a nightmare. It had been nearly one hundred years since he'd volunteered to help better his country. Since he'd agreed to try to make a difference and better the future of mankind.

Since he'd said yes to becoming a lab rat. A human test subject for twisted scientists who wanted to better the human race.

Spoon-fed lines of total and utter bullshit.

He was living proof of that.

Sure, their goal eventually worked, but that meant little for the good men and women who had been used to further the cause of science and died because of it. And it sure the fuck meant little to those who had been subjected to testing against their will—by some of the very same doctors who pioneered the first attempts at creating super soldiers. The brains of the eugenics movement.

So many thought, wrongfully, that the Nazis were the ones who'd pioneered eugenics. Their quest for a Master Race was all over history books and etched in the brains of many, but they'd not been alone in the beginning.

Far from it.

The roots of eugenics hit much closer to home. Hell, it was in people's backyards to this day, but they didn't know. The government liked to bury its ugly history and point in another direction to divert attention from themselves.

His existence solidified the statement. Though, had the men and women in charge of it all had their way, he'd not be living proof of anything. The others like him —the ones whose bodies rejected the doctors' tests and experiments in some form or fashion and who were lucky enough to survive the ordeal—had been relinquished to a secure location to live out their days in peace.

"More bullshit," he said, his voice harsh.

Casey thought back to his time in what the higher- ups had taken to calling a "long-term care facility", when in reality it was a prison. Bars were on the windows, armed guards at each entrance and exit, and the men were locked in their rooms at night. None of that added up to a cushy place to lay low and live out their immortal lives.

Far from it.

They'd really been sent there to be held until the government could figure out what to do with them. Apparently, the age-old question of "What do we do with our mistakes?" hadn't been fully thought out prior to the start of the testing. In the end, the government decided termination and elimination of any evidence of their spectacular failure was necessary.

They wanted no trace of the Outcasts—the genetic rejects. And they'd nearly gotten their wish.

Ironically enough, the doctors were the reason Casey had survived the first attempt on his life. They'd altered his DNA and changed his genetic make-up, making him something much more than human, but thankfully not totally animal, as he'd seen some of his brethren become during the testing stages. The doctors had paid particular attention to increasing Casey's ability to heal, attaining a level that was relatively unheard of, even in the supernatural community.

He looked down at the back of his hand, remembering the smell of burning flesh, as if the explosion had happened just yesterday, rather than decades ago. He could vividly recall that his flesh looked like wax, melting, leaving muscle and bone painfully exposed. He'd not stopped what he was doing. Men—lab rats like him—had still been in the building during the explosion. It didn't matter that he'd been burned badly. He'd done what he had to in order to get them out.

As many as he could.

Getting to safety had needed to wait when so many were still trapped.

When he'd gained consciousness a week later and found himself in the care and treatment of a tiny elderly woman gifted in the arts of Chinese medicine, there had been no regrets. Didn't matter that his body hadn't, at that point, fully recovered, or that every second of every hour he'd lived in excruciating pain. He'd freed his brothers-in-arms. That was all that mattered to him.

What bothered him most wasn't even the attempt to wipe them all out, it was how they'd been forced to scatter like rats in the wind, losing contact with one another after they'd gone through so much together. He missed them and regretted not being able to locate any of them. They'd been trained well in the art of escaping and evading. They were ghosts and would only be seen and found when they wanted to be. As far as Casey knew, none of the Outcasts wanted to be found.

He couldn't blame them. They not only had to worry about their own government still wanting them dead, they had to worry about new enemies over the years— sick fucks who wanted to create supernatural armies, and they'd do anything and hurt anyone to see that come to pass. They were as bad as the men who had turned him into what he was.

"Bastards," he said as he reached to the wall and touched one of the sketches of the main scientist who had been in charge of Casey's treatments so long ago. Casey had drawn the picture from memory, the man's features forever seared into his mind. Hell, the guy still haunted Casey's nightmares.

Others had picked up the baton the doctor dropped and the testing continued in secret, hidden from the public after the shock and horror of Hitler and his scientists came to light. To this day, the war conducted under the noses of humans continued. Though, it was getting harder and harder to hide from them all.

Forensic science advancements continued to grow daily, and at some point hiding would become nearly impossible unless every supernatural in the world went totally off the grid. As Casey had done.

It would never happen.

His attention went to the laptop a geek buddy of his had assured him couldn't be tracked by anyone. The information pulled up on the screen spelled out everything that had been done in the creation of the Immortal Ops and what so many humans and supernaturals had been subjected to over the years.

Torture.

Testing.

Death.

A small piece of Casey was happy the information had gone public on the internet, despite having gone to great lengths trying to keep it from coming to light. When he'd destroyed a computer running some sort of program that was decrypting files on the creation of the ops, he'd assumed that was the end of it.

Hardly.

He'd never thought about a backup system. He wasn't clueless about technologies, and was skilled enough to be dangerous, but he was out of his league in certain areas.

The strange, sick satisfaction he got from knowing the information was now out there for those willing to listen, was because it meant the people behind all the madness were probably shitting their pants, scrambling to make it all go away. Another part of Casey understood the panic and pandemonium that would result should humans really believe what had been released. Thankfully, the information leak had occurred on a fringe site—one run by Laney, a woman he thought of as a little sister in so many ways. She'd meant well when she'd researched it all. And she'd never intended for the information to go live.

Unfortunately, Harmony, Laney's best friend, did as requested. She'd made the information live, thinking harm had befallen Laney. Now the shit storm raining down on them all was massive. Casey should have cut and run, forgetting about everyone else but himself. That attitude had been one he'd adopted once he'd recovered from his burns long ago. Laney, Bill, and Gus had changed that side of him. They had become a family of sorts to him.

Bill and Gus, who were aging at a normal human pace, and who both had suffered horribly at the hands of mad scientists who worked for the government, were safe and sound for now. The Paranormal Security and Intelligence Agency was looking out for them. And Casey's gut said he could trust PSI. Gus, who seemed connected into the greater cosmos of life, trusted PSI. That was enough for Casey.

Reaching out to the wall again, Casey touched another sketch. This one didn't remind him of his horrible past. No, this one gave him hope of a future. There were many, similar to this one that he'd done over the course of the past four years. All were of her.

Harmony.

He let out a long, slow breath, his focus pulling to her. He'd find her, no matter the cost. She'd probably have thought it creepy that he could draw her from memory. He wasn't exactly proud of the way he'd lurked when she was near, or how often he'd trailed her back to her home to assure himself she was safe and sound before he returned to one of the many places he laid his head when the need called for it. It wasn't as if he was proud of the beast side of him—he struggled to co-exist with the animal instincts on a daily basis. They intensified his own emotions, leaving him so close to losing his control around Harmony that he often came off as gruff with her, even harsh.

In many ways, she reminded him of the socialites he'd known long ago, in his own days of being in the thick of it all. Not much had truly changed. The rich still considered themselves entitled. He knew there was more to Harmony than she presented to the public. He'd seen her feeding the homeless on more than one occasion, and he'd seen her in a tucked-away corner of the park, under a tree, reading a book that some of the brightest people he knew would struggle with.

Not his Harmony.

She was beautiful, hardheaded, often outspoken, rarely shy, and underneath it all, a very intelligent and caring woman. And right now she was out there, probably scared, more than likely hurt, and he needed to get to her.

Chapter Two

"She is gonna fetch some high coin."

Harmony glared at one of her captors, willing him to come closer so she could try again to take his eye out with her heel. She'd nearly been successful on her first attempt. Damn her for over-thinking ruining her favorite pumps. Worth it if it meant the dirtbag lost vision in one eye. Even better if she took out both eyes. She was hardly a shrinking violet, though most assumed she would be. Her love of fashion, makeup and hair tended to fool a lot of people into thinking she was one-dimensional and shallow.

She wasn't, but it did make for a nice suit of armor to keep others at arm's length—protecting her closely guarded secret.

He kept going, "Bitch is gonna make us big bank."

Harmony wished she had wings so she could take flight and slam into him. The men had been threatening for days that they were going to sell her on some underground sex-trading ring. So far, they'd only threatened as they continued to discuss an upcoming, large-scale event. Apparently, slimeballs could organize.

Who knew?

The man curled his lip at her before he leered in her direction. She flipped him off. He raised his brows. "If you don't behave, I just might come in there and teach you how to," he threatened.

"In that big of a hurry to get your ass handed to you by a girl—again? Oh yeah, nothing screams manly man like crying after I kneed you in the balls." When they'd blitz-attacked her at her friend's backup pad, she'd been caught off guard, her mind too focused on the disappearance of her friend to worry about her own safety.

Stupid.

She knew that now. Though, she had given her attackers a run for their money, making it anything but easy for them to subdue her. Had one not stunned her with a stun gun, she was pretty sure she'd have been the victor, even in her heels and with her manicure intact.

The man made a move to charge the cell bars. The other guy, who never seemed to leave Jerk Off 's side, grabbed him, yanking him back. "No. Krauss wants her without any bruises and untouched. You do not want to piss him off."

Jerk Off collected himself, his gaze still hard. They'd go rounds again and she was betting on it. This time she'd be ready and she'd show him she wasn't a girl to be messed with. At least that was what she kept trying to tell herself. The reality of it all wasn't exactly so.

Her gaze went to the other cell, where a hulk of a figure had remained behind a partial cinder block wall, just out of her view. She'd caught sight of clawed, fur- covered hands. She'd also seen the size of the chains around the thing's wrists.

She gulped. A pang of fear licked at her gut as thoughts of the guards' previous threats played out in her head.

Giving her to the beast-guy in the next cell as punishment.

If that wasn't enough to scare the living daylights out of her, hearing it roar and snarl sure did. Of course, she did her best not to show it. She stared at the wall, wondering about the man on the other side of it—if he could be called a man at all.

She wasn't so sure there was anything human left in him. From the sounds of it, there wasn't. She'd been asleep when they'd first brought the guy in, his top half covered in some sort of a hooded mask and the rest of him chained, his body limp. It had been too dark in the holding area at the time to get a good look at him. That had been yesterday, if she was even counting her days and nights correctly anymore.

She wasn't sure about anything except she needed to get free. There was no white knight coming. No help. No one knew where she was. With Laney missing, there would be no one to notice Harmony was gone. Her father surely wouldn't.

Her nostrils flared, and she felt her magik prickle again, unable to surface for some reason. Her guess was that the cell she was in was lead-lined. That would prevent her from being able to properly use her natural- born gifts. Gifts her mother liked to say were curses and then pretend Harmony didn't have.

If Harmony could figure out how to get her magik to work, she'd stop being scared of it and use it to zap the asshole that was still making lewd gestures at her. But unfortunately, she wasn't exactly competent in her gifts. More to the point—she seemed to excel at magikal mishaps. At least most of the incidents were in her past. With her father's money, he'd been able to cover up the majority of them.

Harmony exhaled slowly, thinking about her father. He threw money at everything. It was how he showed affection, how he handled problems and how he shouldered the guilt of what he'd done—aligned himself with bad men all so he and his wife could conceive a child. A daughter born from a science that was anything but ethical, and from everything Harmony could gather, had left her father a pawn in his associates' sick and twisted world. He owed them and they'd never allow him to forget as much.

The shame she felt knowing her father had ties to groups who experimented on supernaturals and humans was epic. She'd been trying to funnel information about them out to the proper channels, but she'd hit a snag.

Mainly, Laney. Her best friend in all the world.

Moisture welled in Harmony's eyes, but she refused to cry. Refused to allow the dirtbags sitting on the other side of the bars to see her show any weakness. Her family didn't show weakness and she wasn't about to start now. Didn't matter that she'd been held prisoner for so many days that she'd lost track of the exact number.

Didn't matter that she was battered and slightly bruised or that, despite being granted bathroom privileges and two showers since her arrival, she still felt dirty, as if the grime of the cell might never wash off.

"Going to cry yet, bitch?" the man asked, making mocking gestures with his hands before acting as if he was jacking off.

"Call her a bitch again," came a shockingly deep voice from the cell next to her.

Harmony froze in place, her eyes wide as she stared over at the cinder block wall, kind of expecting a half- man, half-beast creature to burst through it. What she'd not expected was the man to sound…like a man. She leaned some, trying to get a better view of him. The wall still blocked him from full sight, but she did catch a glimpse of his hands once more. This time they were not covered in fur with long dagger-like claws. They seemed normal. They were also big. Like him.

Shifter, she thought, unsure if he was the kind that came out of the womb that way or if he'd been manufactured like a number of them had. A pang of guilt swept over her. If the man had been tested on and made the way he was, had her father played a part in it?

The two men standing guard shared a look that said they too were concerned. The smaller of the men, who was slightly less disgusting than the first and whom she'd taken to thinking of as Shorty, since he was considerably smaller in stature than Jerk Off, nudged the bigger one and shook his head. Harmony didn't need to be psychic to know the little guy wanted the big one to keep his mouth shut and avoid taunting Hulk.

Jerk Off squared his shoulders and Harmony expected the dumbass to actually try to pick a fight with her new fellow detainee. Instead, Jerk Off rubbed his jaw line and then looked to Shorty. "Why the hell is Krauss so bent on us housing this guy? He's got better places than this to hold the thing."

Notwithstanding Harmony's fears of the newcomer, she disliked hearing him referred to as "the thing" by the guards.

"No clue, man." Shorty leaned and kept his gaze on whoever was behind the partial wall. The small man paled.

Harmony gulped again and took a small step in the other direction, feeling the need for some space between her and the new arrival. Her gut said the chains weren't as strong as everyone was banking on.

"Nothing else to add? Done with referring to the woman as anything other than lady?" the prisoner next to her asked. This time his voice wasn't quite as deep, but still heavily masculine all the same. Oddly, his voice made her think of Casey, and she had to push the thought aside to avoid crying. She'd never see him again. As much as the hairy jerk annoyed her, she wanted to see his face again. She wanted to hear him call her princess and mock her decision to wear heels for almost everything in life.

More than that—she wanted Casey.

Jerk Off picked up another of his girlie magazines that littered the old desk near him. He eyed her and then held the magazine open in a way that suggested he was looking at the centerfold and then her, his gaze darting back and forth. He grinned and bit his lower lip.

Perv.

Shorty didn't seem to care that his buddy was a creep. He also didn't mind the guy blatantly touching himself.

Two pervs.

Jerk Off flipped aimlessly through the pages. She was surprised he could get any of them to turn and that they weren't stuck together from as much as she'd noticed his hand down the front of his pants over the last few days. The sick pig had then dared to touch, with the same unwashed, jacking-off hand, what he'd tried to pass off as food for her. She nearly retched just thinking about it.

She sighed, reflecting on her best friend Laney. Harmony had wanted to tell her the truth over the four years of their friendship, but the time never seemed right. And how did one go about telling another they weren't human? That they'd levitated the butler more than once as a child before causing the dinnerware to dance about the table after watching the animated version of a popular French fairy tale about a beast and the beautiful woman who fell in love?

Not to mention Laney's strange obsession with the weird and wacky. The girl seemed to live for outing supernaturals, and Harmony had played right into Laney's "the truth is out there" theories. She'd funneled information toward Laney, hiding behind a hacker name rather than simply telling her friend the truth.

Supernaturals were real and Harmony just happened to be one. In her defense, Harmony had finally gotten to the point she was going to confess everything to Laney, but then Laney had been so excited about her blind date that Harmony hadn't wanted to spoil it with a talk that would not have been short or simple.

"I'm sorry, Laney," she whispered, tearing up thinking about her friend. Laney had gone on a date with a man she'd met via the Net and hadn't returned. It had been foolish to let her go off alone like that with a man neither of them knew, and it was especially dumb to let her venture off on her own when she'd been doing what Harmony had tasked her to do—discovering the truth about what the government and big financial backers like her father were doing.

Experimenting on supernaturals and humans.

Harmony knew the dirty, ugly truth by accident. She'd happened upon it all buried deep within one of her father's dummy corporations. Her computer skills were impressive, and she excelled with technology. Dolls had never really interested her, but taking things apart to see how they worked did. And then there was magik. It had captivated her as a child. It didn't matter she had little control over it. She'd been swept away by it all.

Not her parents. They'd shared sad looks as if what she could do was something horrid and wrong. Something they'd somehow brought upon themselves.

When she'd discovered the horrible truths her father had never wanted her to know, she'd been sickened, and it had taken all of her to keep from going to him and shoving it in his face—demanding to know everything. She knew better. She'd seen the files and the reports. People who asked questions, even family members, were dealt with accordingly. The Corporation and its reach was vast and deep. They didn't let anyone get in their way, not even daughters.

She swallowed hard as the awareness settled over her that the men holding her had something to do with the Corporation. She'd seen the name Krauss in the files. He was some mad scientist who was anything but human— that much she'd gleaned from the dates of the records. He'd lived far longer than a human ever should, a sicko who had even worked for Hitler at one point in his past, under an assumed name, of course.

Harmony had known all of this, but still let her friend go off with a stranger. A man Harmony felt deep in her bones had links to the Corporation somehow, though she had no proof. Only a hunch. And she'd learned over the years her hunches were often right.

She fought tears as she remembered how she'd told Laney she'd have her back. That she would be her friend's stone-cold, back-up bitch.

Some back-up bitch she'd been.

"I'm hungry," proclaimed Jerk Off, standing and stretching, the girlie magazine discarded to the pile of porn. His whining pulled her from her inner thoughts and the distraction was a welcome one. "Let's go grab some food."

"What about Blondie there?" asked Shorty.

Blondie. The name made her think of Casey. He alternated between calling her that and princess. Well, and fucking ray of sunshine.

Jerk Off laughed. "She's not going anywhere."

That's what you think.

Harmony waited until they were gone from the area before she went to work trying to find a weakness with the cell bars. One that would permit her rather uncontrollable magik to assist in getting it loose.