Devil Inside (30 page)

“How long is it going to take for the bond to finish?”

“Depends.  Some people take longer than others.”

Harley nodded even though she felt frustrated with such a vague answer.  Suddenly something else occurred to Harley.  “Will I heal fast at all?  Without drinking blood, I mean?

Nya smiled at her question.  “You’ll heal.  Just not as fast as once you start.”

Harley felt a little relieved.  She knew that eventually she would have to start drinking the blood of Burners, but now the thought wasn’t appealing at all.  What did it mean that she was craving Levi’s blood and not Ignis blood?  Before she could work herself up too much of this question, Nya interrupted her thoughts.

“Let’s see how fast you are.  Have you ever done sprints before?”  Nya asked, interrupting her thoughts.

Harley wrinkled her nose,
shit.
 

Nya put her through exercise after exercise.  How fast can you run?  How high can you jump?  How much weight can you lift?  Harley had been shocked and amazed by how much she could do.  But she was still wasn’t able to do as much as a fully bonded Nocte.  She tried to not be too disappointed with herself as she walked back toward Nya after dropping the heavy weight Nya had had her lifting.  She knew that if she was ever going to be able to fight Burners—and a certain blonde one in particular—she was going to have to work hard.  Her heart ached as much as her body did when she reminded herself that Jamie’s death was the reason she had to make this work.  She needed to do the things Nya asked her to do if she was ever going to be able earn her chance at revenge.

“OK,” Nya said finally.  “That about does it.”  Harley felt like weeping with relief.  “One last thing though,” Nya said turning away from her.  The momentary relief that Harley felt washed away as she wondered what Nya was going to have her do next.  Nya moved so fast that Harley, even with her advanced reaction time and vision, could barely follow her movements.  Nya drilled Harley’s jaw with a bone crunching right hook that snapped her head to the side with violent force.

The side of Harley’s head exploded with pain.  Her head whipped to the right with an excruciating crack.  She felt the bones pop in her neck at the same time she felt her jaw shatter and her vision went black.  Harley didn’t even remember falling but she did remember the force with which her body slammed into the floor.  After the explosion of pain she felt nothing for what seemed like minutes but must have only been half a second.  As the blessed numbness passed it was followed a roaring agony.  Harley realized that she couldn’t move her jaw and as she brought her hands to her face her stomach lurched at the slack and unnatural looseness of her chin.  She began mewling and thrashing about in shock and pain.

Nya’s dark amused face suddenly appeared in Harley’s line of sight.  “Hurts don’t it?”

Harley’s anger broke through the pain of her broken jaw and she attempted to climb to her feet to defend herself.  Nya reached out and forced Harley to lie still by griping her shoulders.  “Relax.  Breathe.”

Harley forced herself to stop flailing about and glared at Nya with her breath heaving through her nose.  The pain in her jaw was a pounding ache that continued to make her feel sick to her stomach.  She felt like she had been kicked in the face by a horse.  She could feel her Nocte goad her into getting up and fighting back.  But as she looked into Nya’s smiling face, she felt her rationale regaining control.  Nya obviously had a good reason for what she did because she didn’t look mad, she looked curious.

“Whuh,” Harley flinched as the pain flared through her head as she tried to ask “why?”

Nya seemed to understand her and her smile grew wider.  “I wanted to test how quickly you can heal.”

“Ungh?” Harley grunted in pain and confusion.

“If I had warned you it would only have hurt worse.  You would have tensed up and it would have caused more damage.  And everyone needs to learn how to take a punch anyway,” she laughed.

Nya’s amusement at Harley’s predicament only irritated Harley more but she forced herself to lie back against the floor and breathe as normal as possible.

“Good,” Nya said and released her shoulders.

As Harley grew calm the pain in her jaw began to subside.  But it suddenly flared again as she felt her broken bones begin to grind against each other.  She groaned in pain and peddled her feet against the floor uselessly.  She could feel the muscles pushing and pulling at the broken pieces of bone, forcing them back into their correct location.  For several agonizing minutes she lay on the floor trying to breathe through the agony of her jaw bones knitting themselves back together.  The raw, damp cracking and scraping sound dug into her brain and nearly drove Harley mad.  Finally, the pain subsided, as did the sickening sound, and Harley opened her mouth tentatively.  Her jaw muscles were sore and still damaged but she could tell her bones were no longer broken.  She heaved a sigh of relief and looked into Nya’s face again.

“That was an asshole thing to do,” she told Nya weakly.  Nya only laughed and held out a hand to help Harley to her feet.  “Shit, that hurt,” she rubbed her jaw.

Nya laughed again.  “You heal quickly though.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, when I did that to Rafe it took almost a whole day for it to heal,” she said with a mischievous smile.  “He’s a slow healer.”

“Huh!” Harley and her Nocte both were pleased to hear that.  She could feel her Nocte fluff with pride.  Nya chuckled at her reaction and shook her head.

“That really is enough for today.  Go get some rest.  Explore some more.  Do whatever you want.  The real training starts tomorrow,” she said with a wicked smile.

Harley’s stomach dropped at the warning Nya leveled at her. 
Fuck! 
She moaned to herself.

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Harley took a shower and found herself sitting on the same side porch from when she first woke up.   She liked this spot.  It was out of the way and provided a good view of the field and forest that surrounded the house.  Her jaw still ached slightly and she stretched it to try to work some of the lingering tenderness out.  She stared out into the night practicing letting her vision focus on the finer details in the darkness.  The birds sleeping with their heads under their wings.  The fox that sniffed the air searching for the creatures that had scurried through earlier.  Harley tried to focus on the nightlife and distract herself from the thoughts that threatened to force their way into her brain.

Unwillingly, she found herself remembering hiking with Jamie and her family.  Harley had never been hiking before and lagged behind Jamie and her family—both because she wasn’t used to the physicality and because she enjoyed watching Jamie and her family together.  She kept smiling at their playful teasing.  Jamie kept putting leaves in her dad’s hair and her mom—on to Jamie’s game—kept playfully slapping her hand away whenever Jamie would try to put leaves in her hair.  They had traveled up the side of an easy mountain trail for a while in this manner until Jamie’s dad had stopped and called back to Harley.

“Hey, slow poke.  Need us to slow down?”

A dull ache flared up in Harley’s chest.  Jamie’s mom and dad probably thought she was dead too.  She knew she owed it to them to tell them what happened to Jamie.  But she couldn’t bring herself to face them.  There was no apology, no matter how sincere, that could make up for her failing to save Jamie and then running away.  The only way that she could possibly hope to ever face Jamie’s family again is if it was telling them that she had taken care of the bastards that had murdered their daughter.  She had considered asking to use someone’s computer to read the news of what had happened to her and her friend.   However, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.  It was easier to forget about what happened when she didn’t have to confront the reality of it.  The pain of her loss took her breath away and she curled into herself as the tears threatened to break free of the dam she held them back with.

Harley forced herself to breathe slowly and push all thoughts and worries from her head.  Soon she settled into a meditative lull and stopped wondering and thinking about the past and the future, and instead just enjoyed the cool night and the life that it held.  The calmer she felt herself become, the stronger her Nocte seemed.  Harley could feel her twist and writhe towards the surface.  She felt like she was floating on the calm surface of a river while the undercurrent raged below her, threatening to suck her down.  The closer her Nocte climbed towards the surface the more uneasy Harley became.  Just as she felt her Nocte nipping at the surface, her instinct broke free and kicked away from the leviathan that resided inside her.  Harley blinked and shook herself out of her stupor.  The frustration that she felt was intensified by the anger emanating from her Nocte.  Sighing, Harley gave up for the night and returned to the house.

The next day Harley found herself getting punched in the face by Nya again.  At least this time she expected it.  Each time that Nya popped her in the face with her hard clenched fist it stung and caused the anger to flare up inside Harley.  She knew that Nya was holding back and it didn’t hurt as much as it really pissed her off.  She wasn’t able to avoid Nya’s punches or land any of her own during her fumbling clumsy attempts.  The more annoyed Harley got, the more amused Nya became.  Finally, after Harley had become so mad and her swings so wild that she had tripped over her own feet and fell to the floor, Nya stopped their “sparring.”

She squatted on the floor next to Harley who lay panting trying to catch her breath.  “I wanted to show you just how much you needed to learn.”  Harley glared at her.

“So this was for your amusement?”

“Not just my amusement,” Nya laughed.  “You needed to see how hard it is to fight.  How much you needed to learn.  You needed motivation and a goal.”

Harley gritted her teeth to maintain her composure.  She could feel her Nocte throw herself against her confines in frustration.  “Well consider me effectively shown and highly motivated.”

Nya laughed again.  “Get up.”

Harley readied herself for more and pushed herself off the floor.  She brought her hands up in her lame attempt to block more of  Nya’s punches.  But Nya rolled her eyes and lazily knocked Harley’s hands out of the way.  “Put down your dukes,” she giggled.  Nya lead the way to one of the hanging bags to the side of the open sparring space.  “I’m actually going to show you how to throw punches now.”  Behind Nya’s back Harley threw up her hands and shook her head while looking to the ceiling.  “I saw that,” Nya laughed and Harley growled under breath.

“The first part of every night is going to be devoted to fighting styles.  The last half to weapons.”

Harley felt excitement bubble up from her Nocte. 
Now this sounds more like it
.  She knew deep down that she would still be getting her ass kicked but this was the part that she had been waiting to learn.

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Harley was getting used to Nya’s training techniques.  She seemed to operate under the philosophy that people learned best by experiencing things for themselves.  It was painful, but Harley had to admit, effective.

As Harley’s training progressed they started slowly with weapons.  They worked with combat batons and staffs first.  Then they slowly progressed to knives and swords.  They practiced stances, lunges and swings and stabs, slowly at first, and Harley was proud of herself for not having cut her own hand off yet.  The weapons were heavy and even though Harley was stronger than she had ever been, eventually—before the end of every weapons session—her muscles would be screaming in protest.

One day, at the end of a particularly brutal session with a samurai sword, Harley stood bent over massaging her aching arms.

“I know that bullets don’t effect Burners very much, but I didn’t have too bad of luck with a shotgun before I got here.  Can’t I have a machine gun or something?”  She laughed only half serious.

Nya looked at her with a raised eyebrow.  “I’m sure that you slowed some Ignis down, but it doesn’t stop them for long.  Especially the older ones.”

Harley couldn’t resist arguing, “But I managed to—dispatch?—two of them on the way here.”

“Fine,” Nya said and turned to walk away.  Harley knew enough to stay where she was.  She also knew Nya enough by now to know better than to think she had gotten her way.  Nya rummaged in a cabinet near the rack where weapons were kept and came back with a huge handgun.  Harley’s stomach clenched because she had a feeling she wasn’t going to like this.  She was right.  Ten feet from Harley Nya raised the gun and fired one bullet straight into Harley’s chest.

She felt like a freight train had slammed into her chest accompanied by the most incredible boom she had ever heard.   She felt herself fly through the air and slam straight into the floor without even a second to try to catch herself.  She landed in a heap with her ears ringing and vision blurring

“Fuck me,” she gasped looking at the hole that leaked blood from directly in the center of her chest.  Two inches to the side and it would have gone straight through her heart.  A wound she knew could have been fatal.  She struggled to breathe but felt like she had an elephant sitting on her chest.  The wound itself felt like a red hot poker was embedded inside her body and she could even smell burnt flesh.  She lay there for several agonizing seconds before the wound began to close before her eyes and slowly the pain and pressure in her chest faded.  She sucked in a sweet gulp of air and climbed to her feet barely feeling any lingering effects of the bullet.  The itching sensation of her back healing told her the bullet must have went completely through.  Sure enough, when she turned around she saw a bullet hold marring the support beam a few feet behind her.