Page 50 of Countdown to Murder
I awoke in human form, starving, back in the middle of the cell, curled in a ball on my side. I was naked now, and my clothes were gone. I remembered what had happened, and realized the water likely had colloidal silver in it.
“What have you learned?” the voice asked.
“To follow orders or get another dose of silver.”
“Excellent.Change.”
My legs were already skinnier than they should be, and shifting again wasn’t going to help with my hunger, but there was no use in fighting them. I shifted to my snake.
I have no idea how many times this was repeated. Every time I woke as a human, I was ordered to shift to snake. Did I sleep ten minutes? Two hours? And how long was I a snake? I don’t know that, either. I also don’t know what I did when I was a snake.
But the trick was to keep from eating anyone. Ryan told me this test wasn’t just about me in king cobra form, but to make certain I wouldn’t go into warrior form and eat people.
Eventually, I was bones with skin stretched over them, and wasn’t certain how many more times I could shift and live. My hunger consumed me. My stomach cramped and burned. My vision had spots. The room tilted and turned. The tendons between my ribs weren’t right. Breathing hurt.
So, of course, this was when they sent the little python shifter in. He couldn’t have weighed more than sixty pounds, and his little dick was pathetic. He was nude, and he smelleddelicious. In the wild, king cobras most often eat other snakes. They’d sent me a delicacy in human form. Child sized, but his face and eyes told me he wasn’t a child.
And he would soothe my hunger like nothing else I’d ever scented.
I was in the center of the room, and the boy was an inch from the wall, screaming in terror and pain.
I walked to him and slapped him, and he fell to the ground, pressed against the wall trying to get away from me.
The scent of burning flesh filled the air. I yanked him from the wall and to the center of the room.
“Get away from the silver, you imbecile.”
He retched as if he was going to puke, but nothing came up.
“They sent you in on an empty stomach, to make sure you couldn’t throw up.”
He nodded, and I didn’t explain this was to keep me from eating whatever he puked up. I know it sounds disgusting, but when you’re starving, you aren’t terribly picky about what it takes to keep you alive.
“Sssss...” He took a breath. “Snake. You. Ssssnake.”
“And they sent you in terrified, hoping it would help trigger the predator in me, so I’d shift and eat you.”
He heaved and gagged again, but there was nothing to come up.
“Why are you here? What did you do to get punished?”
He shook his head. I reached down, grabbed his balls, and squeezed. “What. Did. You. Do?”
“Lost control and killed a little girl! She smelled soooo good, and she was in the yard without her parents!”
“How old are you?”
He shook his head again, and I reached for his balls.
“Nineteen!”
So now they wanted me to lose control and kill him. I had to hand it to them, it was a fitting punishment. Unfortunately, I wasn’t going to be able to help them out with this.
I stared at him, debating my best course of action. He was a dead man walking, no matter what. The slayers weren’t going to let him back into society. If the Concilio got him, they’d turn him into a sex slave, and that wouldn’t do him any favors, either.
I looked up to the camera while keeping the python in my peripheral vision. “What are my parameters?”
“If you kill him to make him less enticing to eat, we’ll just send someone else in.”
