Excerpt: Tears From the Moon

The first injection felt like fire entering her veins, but the fire didn’t stop. It just kept spreading and spreading until she knew for a fact the location of each and every tiny capillary in her body. But even then the burning did not stop, and she felt herself straining against the straps that bound her to the bed, concentrated bands of burning agony that refused to allow her to curl up into the fetal ball her body insisted it needed to become. She choked on the liquid in her mouth and realized it was blood from biting her lips so hard in order to keep from screaming. She spat it out and heard it hit metal, so she guessed someone was holding a basin near her head. How very thoughtful of them. The burning intensified as the substance they had injected into her veins began doing its work. Now it was not only her bloodstream, but each and every cell in her body that cried out in agony. She screamed along with them. Her eyes felt like they were swelling into great balloons within their sockets. Great balloons of liquid fire that she needed to scratch out. She strained again against the fire that held her into place, trying to free her hands to claw at her eyes. She screamed again and again in frustration as she felt more straps being bound to her wrists and then to the table. Her eyes were going to explode any second now. The burning kept growing and growing. Even her hair was on fire now, and the webbing between her fingers. She couldn’t hear herself screaming anymore, although she was screaming so hard her burning throat was bleeding like her lips. She would drown in the blood soon.