We got to the nearest gas station and I sat in the owner's office while he let me use his shitty fuzzy sounding landline.

  "Green??" Singleton answered the phone, he had given us all the number for his SAT phone before we left to fight the dragon.

  "Easy, Cheese boy, the target has been neutralized."

  "Bullshit." He chuckled

  "I'm telling the truth and I'm stuck in Romania...a little town in the mountains called Busteni...do me a favor?"

  Singleton paused, "...what?"

  "Just bring the guys and an APC or a helicopter, apparently this place is like Point Nemo for people like us, everything weird ends up here eventually and retrieval efforts in the past have ended in casualties."

  Singleton was silent for a bit before he spoke, "Alright, we'll do that...where is the body of the creature?"

  I look at sister Madelyn, "Bone chips in a crater on one of the mountains, I broke the bones apart and filled the cracks with brick mortar."

  Singleton chuckled, "alright...we'll need a picture of the crater before we can go...do you remember where it is?"

  "Yeah, I can get you there but you have to promise it's just the guys and you."

  There was a short silence before he spoke again, "It's a deal, we'll roll out in 2 hours and see you when we see you."

  "That's good to hear," I say, "Can I get an ETA?"

  Singleton murmured somewhere away from the phone for a second, "Two days "

  I close my eyes, "Great...I'll be staying in a nun convent in the mountains, right near the crater, it's called Pietra Nonia.".

  Singleton grunted and affirmative and hung up, I look back at Sister Madelyn, "and that's how you keep casualties to a minimum."

  She crossed her arms, "You do not know that yet."

  I shrug, "They said two days, so let's get back to the convent...at least if im up there, even if they dont make good on their promise, the townspeople wont be in danger."

  Her brow furrowed for a second and then her eyes widened, "youre right! With you at Pietra Nonia there is no danger to the people of this town!" She sighed, obviously heavily relieved.

  She drove me back to Pietra Nonia and I volunteered to help with chores to pass the time.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  There were still a few eager postulates who ogled me as I raked leaves, mowed the grass, and swept and mopped the corridors, though considerably less than there had been. I suppose the novelty of the boy who fell from the sky had worn off.

  I helped snuff the candles in the chapel and went to bed only to find another nun sitting on my bed, "Hello."

  I blinked and my look of confusion must have been funny because this new nun began to laugh, "How forward this must appear...no, I'm not here for that, I am a nun after all."

  I gesture towards her, "Ok but surely you must have known I would assume..."

  She waved a hand and presented me with a plate of dinner, "You didn't eat at dinner...here."

  I take the food and sit next to her, the meal was some sort of grey flank steak with peas, carrots and mashed potatoes, "Thank you, sister...what meat is this?"

  She looks at me, a suspicious glint in her eyes, "mutton."

  I looked down at the rare meat, the suspicious side-eye made 3 scenarios go through my head all at once.

  1. She was trying to poison me, which wouldn't work but would imply some things about her I wasn't comfortable contemplating at this time.

  2. She had cooked with consecrated ingredients in a roundabout way of finding out if I was demonic in origin, this would be the most logical of the 3 scenarios

  3. She had no ill or nefarious intentions and was simply a good Samaritan giving me food when I had forgotten to go to dinner.

  At any rate, I was hungry and the worst thing she could have done was poison me.

  Right?

  The mutton wasn't mutton though, mind you I'd never had mutton before, but I'll tell you what I had eaten as a child before Trigram took me.

  Alligator nuggets.

  The smell and taste were unmistakable, of course without the Cajun twang of the holy trinity, the flavor and mouth feel of the meat was all I had to go on.

  There were no alligators in Romania, I look at the Nun, her smile widened to inhuman proportions and her eyes began to luminesce, "How does the flesh of your kill taste?"

  My brow furrowed and my stomach churned as I stood up, "What meat is this??"

  The nun shrugged, "It fell out of the sky, I can only assume that it came from the beast..."

  I retched as I felt the meat squirming in my esophagus, I lunged forward and grabbed her by her front, Green growled at her, "T-take me to the rest...NOW!!" I can feel my insides wiggling as the meat flexed within me, it was trying to escape.

  She effortlessly removed my hands with a slowness that made my heart sink and, my wrist in hand, took me into the kitchen where a single leg attached to a quarter of a section of the Dragon's tail was twitching all by itself, the leg freshly grown, baby toes flexing, laying on the cutting board, bleeding actively from a grown over burn scar.

  I knew I hadn't seen all of it in the crater.

  In the middle of my puzzling on how to get rid of it, Green or something else made me grab the length of tail and start taking bites, my teeth shearing through the tough, stringy, raw flesh and bony scales as I swallowed without really chewing. Driven by nothing more than some sort of primal instinct to do away with all of it!

  I could feel the meat trying to wriggle away as I chewed it, the sinew trying to wiggle out of my teeth as I tore chunks away from the bones.

  Before I knew it I was munching on those bones, crunching and then swallowing the vertebrae, and the more I ate the better I felt.

  Finally the tail had been consumed entirely, I looked down at my belly to see if I looked like I'd just consumed a quarter ton of meat, but no, there was nothing but a full feeling.

  It was then that I heard a dark chuckle in the back of my head, once and then it was gone, and then my body was wracked by horrific pains, all the muscles in my body flexing in unison as I screamed.

  Eyes luminescing in the dark, the nun vanished around the corner as I clawed at the flesh of my stomach as I felt it writhe, a deep anguished roar coming from my throat as I headbutted the nearby wall, I felt the stone crack as my skull burst through!