"MORPH!" I screamed as I closed in on them.
Thought-speak is like regular speech. It gets harder to hear the farther away you are.
"Morph back! Now!" Maybe the clock in the truck was off. Maybe five minutes one way or the other wouldn't matter.
There! I saw them. Four wolves moving relentlessly toward the distant city.
"Morph! Now!" I screamed as I shot like a bullet over their heads.
"How much time do we have?!" Marco demanded.
"None."
That got them going. I landed, exhausted, on a branch.
Cassie was the first to begin the change. Her fur grew short. Her snout flattened into a nose.
Long, human legs swelled and burst from the thin dog legs.
Her tail sucked back in and disappeared. She was already more than half human by the time the first changes began to appear on the others.
"Come on, hurry," I urged them.
"What time is it?" Jake demanded.
"You have about two minutes," I said. It was a lie. According to the clock, they were already seven minutes too late.
Too late.
And yet Cassie was continuing to emerge from her wolf body. Skin was replacing fur. Her leotard covered her legs.
But the others were not so lucky.
"Ahhhh!" I heard Rachel cry in my mind. Her morph was going all wrong. Her human hands appeared at the end of her wolf legs. But nothing else seemed to be changing.
I looked, horrified, at Marco. His normal head emerged with startling suddenness from his wolf body. But the rest of him had not changed. He looked down at himself and cried out in terror. "Helowl. Yipmeahhh!" It was an awful sound, half human, half wolf.
34 This was worse than I had feared. I figured they could be trapped as wolves, like I had been trapped as a hawk. But they were emerging as half-human freaks of nature.
They were living nightmares.
Cassie ran from one to the next. "Come on, Jake, concentrate! Focus! Rachel, bear down, girl. Picture yourself human. See yourself like you're looking in the mirror. Fight the fear, Marco!"
I saw Marco roll his human eyes up and stare at me. His gaze locked on me. It was like he hated me. Or feared me. Both, maybe.
I didn't move. If Marco needed me to concentrate, that was fine.
But it sent a shiver of disgust through me. I suddenly saw myself as they all must see me: as something frightening. A freak. An accident. A sickening, pitiable creature.
Slowly, slowly, Marco began to emerge. Slowly, slowly, the human body appeared.
Rachel, too, and Jake. They were winning their battle.
"That's it, Jake," Cassie urged. She held his hand tight between both of hers. "Come back to me, Jake. Come all the way back."
I watched Rachel. She still had a small, shrinking tail. Her mouth still protruded. Her blond hair was still more like gray fur. But she was going to make it. The clock must have been fast. A matter of five minutes one way or the other had determined their fates.
I was glad they had made it. They were all human again.
"We did it," Jake gasped weakly. He lay on his back on the pine needles. "We made it."
"That was close," Rachel said. "That was way too close. It was so hard. It was like trying to climb up out of a pool of molasses."
"I'm human again," Marco muttered. "Human! Toes. Hands. Arms and shoulders." He checked himself all over.
"Ha ha! That was close!" Cassie exulted. She gave Jake a hug. Then I guess she felt self-conscious, because she ran over and hugged Rachel and Marco.
They were all laughing, all giggling with relief.
"We're okay," Jake sighed.
I was happy for them. Really I was. But suddenly I didn't want to be there.
Suddenly I desperately didn't want to be there. I felt an awful, gaping black hole open up all around me. I was sick. Sick with the feeling of being trapped.
Trapped.
Forever!
35 I looked at my talons. They would never be feet again.
I looked at my wing. It would never be an arm. It would never again end in a hand. I would never touch. I would never touch anything . . . anyone . . . again.
I dropped from the branch and opened my wings.
"Tobias!" Jake shouted after me.
But I couldn't stay. I flapped like a demon, no longer caring that I was tired. I had to fly. I had to get away.
"Tobias, no! Come back!" Rachel cried.
I caught a blessed breeze and soared up and away, my own silent, voiceless scream echoing in my head.
36 CHAPTER 12
It was late when I returned to what was now my home.
After I was first trapped in my hawk body, Jake had removed an outside panel that led into the attic of his house. I flew in through the opening. It was a typical attic. There were some dusty old cardboard boxes full of Jake and Tom's old baby clothes. There were open boxes of Christmas lights and decorations. There was a chest of drawers with a top that had been scarred by something or other.
Jake had opened one of the drawers in the chest and packed it with an old blanket.
It was nice of him. Jake has always been a decent guy. In the old days he used to protect me from the punks at school who liked to beat me up.
The old days. When I still went to school. How long ago had it been? A few weeks? A month? Not even.
There was a Rubbermaid dish in a corner where no one was likely to see it. I was hungry. I clutched the dish with my left talon and pried the lid off with my hooked beak.
Meat and potatoes and green beans. The meat was hamburger. I don't know how he arranged to get the food. His mom probably thought he was sneaking scraps to his dog, Homer.
I hadn't told him yet, but I couldn't eat the vegetables or the potatoes. My system couldn't deal with much except meat. I . . . the hawk . . . was a predator. In the wild, hawks live on rat and squirrel and rabbit.
I ate some of the hamburger. It was cold. It was dead. It made me feel bad to be eating it, but it filled me up.
But it wasn't dead meat that I wanted. I wanted live meat. I wanted living, breathing, scurrying prey. I wanted to swoop down on it and grab it with my razor talons and tear into it.
That's what I wanted. What the hawk wanted. And when it came to food, it was hard to deny the hawk brain in my head. The hunger I felt was the hunger of the hawk.
I flopped and hopped up into my drawer. But it was soft. And what my hawk body wanted was not the warmth and comfort of the blanket.
Hawks make nests of sticks. Hawks spend their nights on a friendly branch, feeling the breeze, hearing the nervous chittering of prey, watching the owls hunt.
I hopped up out of the drawer. I couldn't stay there. I was so tired I was past being able to rest. I was restless.
I flew back out into the night. Hawks are not usually nocturnal. The night belongs to other hunters. But I wasn't ready to rest.
I flew aimlessly for a while, but I knew in my heart where I was going.
37 Rachel's bedroom light was still on. I fluttered down and landed on a birdhouse she had deliberately nailed out there for me to land on when I came over.
I rustled my wing softly against the glass. I scratched with one talon. "Rachel?" A moment later the window slid up. She was there, wearing a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.
"Hi," she said. "I was worried about you!"
"Why?" I asked. But I knew the answer.
"We weren't very sensitive this afternoon," she said. She spoke in a whisper. We couldn't let her mother or one of her little sisters overhear her having a one-sided conversation with no one.