B22C25/26 - Rattlesnake In Action

David began to morph, but I could not make it out for a while. Not till I saw the diamond-patterned scales ripple and replace his skin. Then his arms and legs began to dwindle away to smoke, and I knew for sure.

He was morphing the rattlesnake.

He was smaller and smaller, but as he morphed, he slithered his coils around me. Brown and tan and black coils looped around me, a fence twice, three times my height.

Sliding over the coils, the head appeared. A forked tongue as long as I was whipped out, tasted the air, and shot back in.

<One wrong move, Rachel,> David said. <Just one wrong move . . .> Then in "loud" thought-speak, he told the others to come down.

Down they came, spiraling through the last gasp of sunlight to land atop the walls that surrounded us. A falcon, a harrier, two ospreys. All deadly enemies of a rat.

<Now, all four of you demorph. One wrong move and I bite this rat here.>

He opened his fleshy jaws, revealed the hollow, poison-delivering teeth, and moved to within an inch of me.

I knew the rat was fast. But not faster than a striking rattler.

I was completely and entirely in his power. And I was afraid.

I was afraid. But the rat, surrounded by birds of prey and with its ancestral enemy the snake just a breath away, was in a state of shrieking terror.


(...)


<That's not part of the plan!> Jake yelled.

<Too bad. You think I'm some kind of an idiot? You think I'm going to go into rat morph and have the four of you waiting around to squash me like a bug? Not a chance.>

<That's it, deal's done,> Jake said.

<Oh, yeah? Then you're going to lose another cousin, Jake,> David said. <You are all going to morph to cockroach. Period. And if there's no deal, I bite Rachel right here and now.>

I knew logically that Jake would go along. I knew that as a human. But the rat brain inside my own mind only sensed greater peril. Suddenly, the rat's body froze. Froze stiff with terror. I could not move a muscle. All I could do was quiver.

<I want your word,> Jake said weakly.

<You have my word, Jake,> David said generously.

It took ten minutes for the others to demorph and remorph. Soon four cockroaches scurried just beyond the snake's coils.

Then David demorphed.