Chapter One

Heat

"Don't waste my motherfucking time." – Al Pacino, Heat (1995)

The heat was killing me. Sweat ran down my body from every pore, making my growing fur sticky, drops of salty water clouding my vision as I ran. Morphing while running required a lot of concentration. If you took your mind of running for just a second, you'd fall down, flat on your face, and be roasted by Dracon fire. If you took your mind of morphing you were just a hideous freak, a revolting cross between a huge Siberian tiger and a gangly teenager. So I did my best to stay focused, even as the heat became unbearable. My heart pounded like crazy, still absorbing the shock of the attack. In my head echoed the questions.

Why? How? How?

To think that less than 30 seconds ago, I had been in bed, asleep, Homer scratching himself with his foot behind his ear at the edge of my bed. Now Homer was nothing but a pile of smoking fur. My room was a smoking crater. I had been lucky to survive in the shower of Dracon fire. The pain stung in the scorched stump that had once been my right arm.

You're probably thinking right now, "That's pretty shitty Jake, doesn't it feel horrible to think that you'll never be able to jack off again?" Well, my life is currently so insane that a burnt-off limb is just a minor nuisance. See, there's this little thing called morphing. It gives me the power to change into animals. Literally, become other animals. Don't ask me how it works. Ax could explain it to you, if you have two hours to kill.

Anyway, this ability completely transforms my human DNA into that of an animal. When I morph back to human, my arm will be there again. DNA has nothing to do with severed limbs.

Running clumsily through the pizza oven that was once my home, sprouting new limbs, a tiger's paw where my arm had been, and a tail, there was simply no time to figure out why the Yeerks were scorching a middle class home in the middle of an American suburbia. When you're in the heated rush of panic, you don't think. You react out of instinct. Battle morph. Tiger. Claws. Teeth. Muscle. I needed to kick ass. Not that a tiger has anything on a Blade Ship's Dracon fire.

I heard screams and shouts from upstairs. My parents were awake. Mom sounded hysterical. Dad mainly sounded pissed off. Breakfast in bed definitely beats having half the floor in your bedroom burst into flames.

Tom! Was Tom home? Couldn't be. The Yeerks wouldn't attack a home where one of their top gun Yeerks' host lived.

Would they?

I had only one thing on my mind: to get out of the house. I was too scared to call for help. The hot air welled into my eyes, my mouth, muting me. I couldn't scream at my parents to get out of here. All I could do was run.

The kitchen. I'd take the kitchen door, hide beneath the hedges, morph something small. Hide until the Yeerks decided they'd killed Jake, the Might Yeerk killer. I was completely tiger now. The dark of the night was a summer day to my eyes. I could see every detail of the darkened kitchen, hear the humming of the fridge and the near-unhearable sound of a housefly grooming its legs under the table. My tiger claws slipped across the polished floor.

The sky exploded into a shower of blinding light. The unmistakeable sound of Dracon fire filled my sensitive ears, blocking out everything else. Scorched pieces of the roof fell around me. Debris singed my striped fur. I roared in pain and anger. The tiger didn't like getting fucked with.

The kitchen, furniture being licked by flames, had turned into a planetarium. Above me was the night sky, the full moon glaring down on me, a shadow looming in the dark. A Bug Fighter.

The scene was almost too complete, too perfect. Too theatralic. Maybe I was dreaming.

No such luck.

I threw myself at the kitchen door. Locked!

My parents had been so eager to protect expensive belongings, they'd accidentally written off their own son.

Tseeew!

I felt the fire before I heard it. It was pain beyond what anyone could imagine. My vision, my strong tiger vision, was blurred. I couldn't see. Couldn't feel. My nerves exploded. My body was on fire. Then… just gone. Dissolved by the heat of the Dracon fire.

Somehow I was still alive. I lay there on the kitchen floor, observing the scene of destruction through tired, running eyes. The kitchen table was in pieces. Smoking debris lay across the floor like the chocolate chips in cookies. The fridge had burst open, food, milk and vegetables were thrown across the floor. The walls were scroched. I could see what was left of me if I turned my head in a way that made my neck crack. If I was human, I'd gasp. The tiger that I was let out an animal's moan of pain and terror.

There was nothing left of me. I was only there from the chest up. Somehow my heart was still pounding. The tiger is a tough animal. But this was too much for even the biggest cat on earth to take. Blood was soaking the floor from the stump that was my top half. My bottom half was split into individual atoms floating through the air. My guts were half-burned, shrunken little things, like buns left too long in the oven, leaking out of me. It was a sight no one should have to see: your inner organs slipping out of your body.

And troughout all this pain and fear, I was still alive, one half of me, every cell in my body screaming for me to turn back into human. But I couldn't. Fatigue was the only thing I could feel. I couldn't form an image of my old self in my mind. It was a blurred, creepy mix of tiger, gorilla, grizzly bear, wolf and hawk.

Marco. Rachel. Cassie. Tobias.

The scorching heat of the Dracon had disappeared. The soothing, cool winds of the summer night swept across my singed fur. I couldn't hear the humming of the Bug Fighter anymore. From outside that tricky kitchen door, I heard someone. Something. Please be Cassie. Please be an Animorph. Please save me.

Now, on the small staircase outside the kitchen door, a clopping. A familiar clopping.

Thank God. It was Ax. Ax would save me. He'd know what to do.

Again, no such luck.

There was the crack of a whip and the door was split in two. The strange shape of an Andalite stepped in, half-human, half-deer, completely bizarre.

It wasn't Ax.

Animorph scum!>

So they finally figured it out.

Hi, Visser>, I murmured dumbly, too tired to think, too tired to do anything but accept what was going to happen, no matter how bad it was. It still couldn't be any worse than being half a tiger on a kitchen floor.

Not a muscle in my body moved. My heart pounded slower…slower…

There was a sharp sting and adrenaline pumped through my body. I felt alive again. Shit.

I looked up. The Visser's tail blade was buried, deep in the scorched flesh that marked the end of my body. It was pain beyond pain. Terror beyond terror. I just couldn't take it. How'd we come to this? How could this happen?

Two, maybe three minutes ago, I'd been asleep in my bed. Homer had been scratching his ear at my feet. It had been a dark and quiet night. I had been whole.

(Demorph, Jake.)

Cassie?

(Demorph, Animorph scum!)

Oh. Not Cassie.

I turned a tiger's eye upwards. Looked into that hateful, sneering Andalite face. I couldn't believe he'd won. Visser Three had won. It was impossible.

I'd never give him the others. Never.

(Demorph to human.)

The tip of the blade moved further into my flesh.

(I know this hurts.)