"Could we go pick strawberries after breakfast?" Zane asked over the sounds of chewing and swallowing and forks clinking against plates. "I believe they should be ripe by now."
"We should totally do that," Kai agreed. Then he smirked. Never a good sign.
"What's that look on your face for?" I asked suspiciously.
Kai arranged his face to look as innocent as possible. "What? I'm not doing anything."
That's when I smelled it. My nose wrinkled automatically. "Kai! Gross!"
"I'm not doing anything, because I already did something," Kai gloated with all the pride of an unashamed nine-year-old as the rest of us gagged and plugged our noses.
"We should all go pick strawberries," Nya said bluntly. "You know, so we're not in an enclosed space with my little brother, his messed-up digestive system, and all the gas they produce."
"Yup, let's all go," I said, trying to sound firm, but it came out incredibly nasally since I was clamping my nose shut with one hand.
As soon as we finished eating, we grabbed whatever buckets and baskets we could find and headed out, leaving the breakfast dishes still on the table to be cleaned up later. Like I said, there weren't any adults to tell us otherwise, so sometimes we let messes be for a little while.
We stepped out into a sunny day. Now, I wasn't the type to gush over the weather, but with the sky bright blue with just a few wisps of cloud and the air fresh and gently breezy, it felt like the perfect day to me.
We followed Zane as he showed us the way to a big wild-strawberry-filled clearing in the mountain's forest. Swinging his bucket, he remarked happily, "I read a recipe for strawberry shortcake the other day. Do you think we could make it?"
"I can try," Cole offered.
"Yeah, if we want the house to explode," I heard my own voice scoff, and then continue, "Nya and I can make the shortcake, Zane."
"Hey!" Cole objected. "Take that back, Lloyd, I wouldn't-"
"It wasn't me," I interrupted, shooting a glare at Kai.
He laughed, completely unabashed. "It was me, Cole."
"Should've known," Cole grumbled, but he was smiling as Jay and Zane started to laugh. "Your mimicking gets harder and harder to tell from the real thing, Gasman."
It was true. Kai had always had a knack for imitating all sorts of sounds, most of all voices, and lately he was almost perfect at it. I couldn't count all the times any of us had fought, sometimes physically, at things Kai has said as if he were each of us, especially Cole and Jay. It was his own little weird ability, like Zane's mind-reading and Jay's rambling for multiple minutes without taking a break to breathe. We didn't know what these abilities were, exactly, but they certainly kept us on our toes.
In front of me, Zane froze in place. He started looking around wildly, left, right, forward, backward, just looking all around.
"Zane?" I asked in confusion, coming up beside him.
"We need to leave," he whispered.
I blinked. "What? You're the one who wanted to come pick-"
"We need to leave," Zane repeated loudly, almost screaming and getting everyone else's attention. "I hear them, I hear their thoughts, we need to-"
That's when the first man raced out from among the trees, followed by a whole, whole, whole lot of others, each with the same scaly face and huge fangs. I recognized them instantly. They were Serpentine. And this time, I wasn't dreaming.