Page 33 of Countdown to Murder (A Paranormal Halloween #3)

Mira

When Ryan showed up on our porch, I knew he was coming for me. We were supposed to have a few more days, but I hadn’t expected the Concilio to allow it.

He came at three in the morning, when I was already ravenous.

“When did you last eat?” He asked while I put clothes on. Apparently, I wasn’t allowed out of his sight once he came to retrieve me. I even had to pee with him in the room, but my trainers had required it of me as well, so it wasn’t like I’d never had to before.

“It’s been four hours. I’m starving.”

“Feeding you now will only prolong your captivity. It’s why I prefer to gather subjects at this hour. I’m sorry, but you’ll need to go into shackles for transport, and they’ve been magicked so you can’t shift. Standard protocol.”

I nodded and let him put the metal cuffs on my wrists, ankles, and waist. Chains kept my wrists near my waist, and my feet close together.

I’ve been bound before during stress training, so I focused on relaxing and controlling my responses.

No fear. No reactions. No emotions. I found the pieces of the wall in my brain everything had been behind before Panda shattered it, and I began to rebuild it.

Panda hadn’t shattered it — I had, by having an orgasm. Panda had helped with that, but if I hadn’t responded, I’d still be closed off from who I really am.

And we’d shattered it once, we could do it again. I turned to Panda and my heart broke for him. He looked angry, sad, and frustrated. He wanted to rescue me, but he knew I had to do this, and it was tearing him apart.

“I’ll be fine. You aren’t required to do anything while I’m away. I won’t need rescuing, remember? I’ll pass their tests, and then I’ll come back to Chattanooga. You should go home to wait for me.”

“She’ll be closer to Chattanooga than here, actually,” Ryan told him. “She’s right about you going home. I’d offer to fly you down, but I’m going to follow protocol to the letter on this, so the Concilio can’t argue with the results.”

“Not a problem. I can arrange a flight. Take care of her, Slayer.”

“I intend to.”

* * * *

Mira

A long flight, a long ride huddled in a small cage in the back of an SUV, and then the cage was carted into an underground fortress. It felt as if we were in the bowels of the earth, fifty levels below the surface.

I was fine until they put me into the silver-lined room, though. Every wall was silver. Even the ceiling. The section of floor around the door also shimmered with silver flecks, but the rest of the floor, thankfully, didn’t.

But I couldn’t escape the burning pain, and my very aura seemed to smolder and slowly disintegrate. I felt like a candle, and the silver was the flame that burns the wax, but it happened from every direction.

I curled into a ball in the center of the room. The silver hurt as badly as when I’d been injected with it during training, when I’d nearly died from silver poisoning.

I’m not as sensitive to it as most shifters. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if one of them was put into this room. The cell was about six feet by three feet, so I could’ve stretched out if the silver wasn’t present — but it was.

The shackles were off, meaning I could change, but I needed to stay human.

Ten minutes of the silver and I thought I’d do anything to escape it. But then a voice came through a speaker. One word.

“Change.”

It was spoken with power, but I managed to resist.

And then a mist came from the ceiling. Acid.

No, Silver. My skin burned. My lungs were on fire.

My sinuses felt as if they melted away, and my brain burned inside my skull.

I changed to my snake form and somehow slithered sideways, out from under the water, but it was just water by then.

No more acid. No more silver falling from the ceiling, but it was still all around us.

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 smelled delicious. 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.”

Damn. This would be easier if I didn’t have to worry about him changing to snake and trying to kill me.

“If he shifts to snake, I’ll probably have to kill him.”

“He won’t shift.”

I looked at the python. “Is that true?”

He nodded. “They did something to me. I cccc...cccc...cccan’t change.”

A vampire had drunk from him and was in his head, probably.

“I’m Mira. What’s your first name?”

“KK. KK. KKKKevin.” The stuttering was on my last nerve, but talking about it would probably make it worse, so I ignored it.

“Okay, Kevin. We’re going to sit on the floor together, in the middle of the room.

We’re going to play twenty questions until we think of something else to do to occupy our minds.

I’m weak and probably only a few hours from passing out.

They’re going to have to ramp things up for me over the next couple of hours.

If you aren’t enough, they’ll replace you with something else.

So, I’m thinking of something. You ask questions first.”

He stared at me, and I shrugged. “If you don’t play twenty questions with me, I’ll occupy myself by torturing you. Your choice.”

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

We’d made it through eight rounds of twenty questions when the door opened and a copperhead snake slithered in. The door closed, and I opened my mouth to get a better sense of the snake.

At first, I planned to shift into my usual snake, eat the copperhead, and get some energy, but then my Jacobson’s organ told me this was a shifter. A person who happened to be a snake at the moment.

Fuck.

I lunged, caught the snake behind the head, and sat back down before I fell. The lunge had used my last reserve of energy. Black spots floated before my eyes.

I closed my eyes and spoke, assuming the cameras and microphones were of good quality, because I didn’t have enough energy to speak loudly.

“I’m not going to eat the copperhead shifter.

Put a real one in and I’ll shift and eat it, but I know nothing about this person’s life.

The silver is making me weak, not to mention all the shifts.

The silver will take me, soon. I can feel death’s grip.

My heart doesn’t beat in a normal rhythm, and my kidneys aren’t filtering as they should.

Toxins are in my muscles. If I pass out and the copperhead bites me, there’s a good chance my already weakened body won’t be able to fight the venom off, but you know what?

” I opened my eyes, looked at the camera, and used my last reserves to raise my voice enough I was certain they’d hear me.

“I’ll die, and that will be okay, because I’d rather be dead than back under the Concilio’s control. ”

I looked to the boy who’d killed a child. He might be nineteen years old, but I knew ten-year-olds who were more of a man.

“I’ll hand you the copperhead so you can hold it, or I’ll let it go. Totally up to you, but I’m going to pass out soon, so decide fast.”

The door opened, someone walked in and looped the copperhead into a net, and I passed out.