CHAPTER FIVE: TOBIAS

There wasn't much else to say, other than to choose a time for us to meet-up and go to the Chapman house. Jake and Marco took off right away, Jake looking awkward and Marco looking unhappy. Cassie gave Rachel a hug and whispered, "You sure you're okay?" in her ear before she left.

I looked away quickly and pretended I hadn't heard.

"Oh my god, I'm totally fine," Rachel snapped, but she hugged Cassie back despite her harsh tone. "You don't need to baby me."

Cassie laughed. "Okay, well just be careful."

"Okay, mom," Rachel retorted, and Cassie laughed again and left.

That left me standing there dumbly in the middle of Rachel's bedroom, feeling totally awkward. It hadn't really sunk in that I was in a girl's bedroom until the others left, I don't think; it had just been a room with a bed. Now I couldn't help peering around furtively, feeling out-of-place and almost claustrophobic—but it wasn't the room that felt too tight; it was my skin, my body, screaming at me about how wrong I was in this environment.

I took a deep breath and tried to shake the feeling off. I didn't succeed, but I managed to push it to the back of my mind and ignore it, or at least to tell myself I was ignoring it. "Hey, Rachel…" I said. My voice came out low and gruff, and I cleared my throat.

"What's up?" she asked, flopping down to sit on her bed again. If she felt awkward about having a boy in her bedroom, it didn't show. Then again, she had male cousins; probably I wasn't the first boy who'd been in this room. I didn't think Rachel was the sort of girl who had a lot of male friends, though, so I might have been the first who wasn't related to her…but if Rachel wasn't going to be awkward about it, then neither was I, I vowed to myself. It's just a bedroom, Tobias, I scolded myself. Everybody has one. Why are you being so weird?

I shook my head and forced myself to meet Rachel's eyes. "Look, I just…I was just wondering if anything, you know…if anything else happened today?"

I was glad I hadn't hidden behind my hair again; if I had been looking down at the floor, I wouldn't have seen Rachel's eyes suddenly go wide or her tan cheeks whiten.

"What are you talking about?" she snapped.

"I don't know," I said. I retreated to the desk chair, thinking that I would seem less confrontational if I was sitting down too, but not daring to join her on the bed without Cassie there too. "I just thought, you know…it seemed like maybe there was something else. Something you maybe didn't want to talk about with everyone?" I shrugged. "You don't have to talk about it with me either, if you don't want to, but…"

For a long moment Rachel just glared at me, then her frown snapped and she sagged back onto her elbows. "Okay, fine," she spat. "But you have to promise not to tell the others, okay?"

"Okay," I said.

"It was Chapman."

I blinked. "What?" I said.

"It was Chapman," Rachel repeated. "After the creep ran off, I mean—Chapman gave me a ride home."

I gaped at her, I couldn't stop myself.

Rachel grimaced. "Melissa was in the car, you know? He must have just picked her up from gymnastics, and they passed me on their way home. He offered me a ride, I tried to beg off, he insisted." She shrugged. "What could I do? It would have been totally suspicious if I'd refused. I mean, Melissa and I are friends, it's not like it's the first time he's given me a ride home from gymnastics…"

A frown flickered across her face and she added softly, almost like she was speaking to herself rather than to me, "Although it's been ages since he did. He used to pick Melissa up almost all the time, but lately it'd been her mom coming to get her instead." Rachel's eyes refocused on mine suddenly and her mouth twitched sideways into a crooked half-grin. "I guess Chapman's been too busy with Yeerk stuff to keep his usual schedule," she observed wryly. "Not that anyone would notice, as long as somebody shows up to get Melissa after class ends…"

I nodded thoughtfully, trying to hide how freaked-out I was by what she'd told me. I guess I must have done a pretty bad job of it, or else Rachel was just feeling guilty, because she said, "Look, it wasn't a big deal, okay?" in a sharp voice. "That's why I didn't say anything to the others, because I knew Jake and Cassie would freak for no reason."

"Marco too, probably," I added with a smirk, then blushed when Rachel laughed instead of telling me to shut-up.

"Probably," she agreed. She sobered quickly. "But look, Tobias—it really wasn't a big deal. Chapman didn't notice anything, I'm sure he didn't."

"You mean about…you know…the morphing?"

Now it was Rachel who wouldn't meet my eyes. "Yeah," she said. "I mean about the morphing. They were so far away they couldn't have seen anything. They just saw the jerk go running off, then I guess Melissa recognized me so they stopped and gave me a ride. Nothing sinister about that."

"No," I agreed, although inside my stomach was doing flip-flops at the thought of what might have happened if Chapman had been driving just a little bit faster. "No, you're right, that's totally normal."

"See?" Rachel gave me a bright, dazzling smile. "No sense getting the others worked-up over nothing."

. . . .

The next night found the five of us crouching behind a hedge that bordered the Chapmans' lawn. They lived in a pretty normal-looking suburban home. It was a nice place, the kind of place you saw in sitcoms and storybooks. The kind of place I used to dream about living in with my mom, someday. You know: two stories, a garage, a neatly-mowed lawn. Nothing to make you think that the person who lived there was part of a huge alien conspiracy to take over the world.

I was a little jealous. How sick is that? These people were slaves to alien slugs, and I was jealous of how nice their house was. I tried to push my stupid, petty envy aside.

Fortunately, the others were there to distract me.

"Let me just ask you this," Marco whispered. "Why did it have to be Chapman? I was afraid of Chapman even before we found out he was a Controller."

"You're not still upset over that detention he gave you?" Rachel scoffed. Somehow she managed to look less out-of-place than the rest of us, like she was only hiding in the foliage for a magazine photoshoot or something. She smirked at Marco. "Look, if you're going to listen to your CD player in math class with an earphone hidden under your hair, you have to remember not to start singing along."

"Yeah, that was only slightly stupid, Marco," Jake agreed, and even I had to smile.

Marco glowered. "I still say Chapman never would have given me a whole week's detention if he was totally human."

"I have a question," Cassie said, interrupting their banter. "How do we get Melissa's cat to come outside?"

We all looked at her.

Rachel grimaced. "Good question," she said.

"I mean, we could hide here in the bushes for a long time. But sooner or later the neighbors are going to notice."

"At least it's an indoor/outdoor cat," I pointed out. "It could be worse. Lots of people don't let their cats roam outside, but you don't have a cat door like that unless you mean for the cat to use it, right?"

"I didn't think of that," Rachel admitted.

Cassie was frowning. "Actually it's not really a good idea for people in neighborhoods like this to let their cats run around outside," she said earnestly. "Not only could the cat get hit by a car, or hurt by some other animal, or even by another cat, but it could get exposed to some really nasty sicknesses. Even worse than that, domestic felines do a huge number on the suburban environment, from the damage of their unnecessary predation on local prey populations to the toxic effect of their feces—"

"Cat poop?" Marco interrupted. "Are we really going to sit here outside Chapman's house and talk about cat poop?"

We all laughed a little, nervously.

"Besides, Cassie, your lecture's wasted on the audience." Marco jerked a thumb over his shoulder in my general direction. "Tobias here is the only one of us with a cat, and I'm pretty sure that orange tub of lard has never been outside a day in his life."

I had to grin. "Actually, Aragorn was a stray when we found him," I said, "but he stays inside now." I waved my hand at the neat houses with their neat little lawns and their neat, empty streets. "This environment may not be great for cats, but my neighborhood would be a dozen times worse."

Cassie nodded sympathetically. "Well, it's good that you keep Aragorn inside," she said. "But Rachel, you should really talk to Melissa about her cat—"

"Is that really what we should be focused on right now?" Jake interrupted gently.

Cassie winced. "I guess not," she admitted. "Sorry."

"You know what we need?" Rachel said suddenly. "We need another kitty. We should have thought of that. Then we could have the second cat call out to Fluffer."

Marco turned to stare at her. "Meowfluffer, comeoutmeow, meow come and play meow?"

"What about Cassie?" Jake said. "She could morph Tobias's cat again…"

Cassie smiled at Jake but she was shaking her head. "It doesn't work like that," she said. "Cats don't work like that, I mean. Cats aren't pack animals. A wolf we could probably lure out with another wolf's howl, but cats? No way. Cats won't even come if you call their name, most of the time."

"Hey what is this fluff-butt's name, anyway?" Marco asked. "Is it seriously Fluffer, or were you just making that up?"

"I'm pretty sure it's actually Fluffer," Rachel said. "Yeah, Fluffer McKitty."

"You're got to be kidding," Marco said. His face was curled up in dismay. I smothered a laugh in my hand.

Jake sighed. "Well what are we supposed to do?" he asked. "We really can't just sit here all night." I could hear the frustration in his voice.

"Let's look around," I suggested. "Maybe the cat's already outside."

"You want to go traipsing around in the dark trying to spot a cat out on its nightly ramble?" Marco asked. "In a neighborhood that not only has probably a half-dozen cats wandering around, but twice that number of nosy old ladies who would love nothing more than the excitement of getting to call the cops on a bunch of juvenile delinquents?"

I ducked my head shyly, but I was grinning. "No," I said. "I was thinking of looking around with some better eyes than what we've got now."

It took the others a minute to get it. By then a feather pattern was already starting to spread across my skin.

Rachel's eyes lit up. "Oh man," she said, "good idea!"

She bent over and started to unlace her sneakers, but Jake said, "Hang on. Let's not go overboard. We'll give Tobias a few minutes to look, then if he doesn't find anything, you can join him. But there's no sense both of you looking."

"We could split up and cover more ground," Rachel pointed out.

Jake shook his head. "And what happens when one of you spots the cat? The other one would be off flying in the wrong direction for twenty minutes while the rest of us stand here waiting for you to get back, in which time the cat could run off again and we'd have to start all over."

"Spoilsport," Rachel pouted, but she shoved her feet back into her shoes.

I was hurrying to pull my shirt off over my head before I got trapped in it, or before my hands turned into wings and I lost the ability to use my fingers. Being a bird is unbelievably awesome, but opposable thumbs are nothing to sneeze at either.

Jake helped peel my clothes away as my bones hollowed out and I shrunk toward the dark grass. My skin itched like a thousand mosquito bites as my feathers sprouted, and suddenly I was wobbling forward as my feet curled into talons inside my shabby sneakers. Jake caught me by the shoulder before I could fall flat on my face, but I was still shrinking, and he had to let go quickly. Fortunately by then my wings had formed and I could spread them wide to give myself some balance.

Morphing is always weird and always different. This time, I kept most of my human face—plus feathers—nearly until the end of the process, leaving me a disturbing creature with the body and head of a bird but with an eerily human nose, lips, and eyes peering out. I looked like one of the sketches of an ancient Greek Harpy from this old mythology book my mom had gotten me several birthdays ago back when I'd been going through a phase on gods and goddesses. I would have laughed at that, and at the looks of horrified dismay on the others' faces, but just then my lips hardened and shot forward into a sharp beak, merging with my nose and solidifying with a wicked hook on the end for tearing in my prey.

My eyes changed last, sharpening to the intense glare of a bird of prey, and I pushed off the ground. It was hard work, beating my wings to gain altitude from that dead air, but once I got up above Rachel and Jake's heads, where the soft night breezes were, it became easier.

{Okay,} I said, trying to sound confident, {back in a jiff!}

Flying was harder at night than it was during the day, I discovered. Not that it was all that late yet; maybe eight o'clock? Late enough that everyone was home after a long day of work and school, but not so late that the Chapmans would be asleep yet. If we were going to spy on them, it wouldn't do us much good to go in when they were curled up in bed, would it?

But it was late enough that most of the light was gone, and the air was cooling down. The warm thermals that were so great at lifting anything with wings during daylight hours were gone or going, and my eyes, I discovered, were not nearly as great at in the dark as they were during the day. In daylight, I could see well enough to read a book from a mile up in the air. At night…well, my eyes were still sharp, I just didn't have great night vision to go along with that sharpness.

I guess this explains why the hawk is not considered a nocturnal hunter, I thought to myself.

I flapped for more altitude then let myself descend in a slow, soaring spiral over the neighborhood. It looked just as nice, just as neat, from above and I fought a fresh wave of envy. It was easier to ignore this time than it had been before, when I'd been on the ground; it was hard to sad about anything when I was up in the air, hard to be jealous of anybody when I had wings instead of the clumsy, awkward human body that felt increasingly like a prison and—

Was that a cat?

I flapped across the street, then spiraled back around. It was a cat, but it wasn't Fluffer McKitty—or if it was, then someone had given him one heck of a dye job, because this gray-striped tabby looked nothing like the kitten in the photograph that Rachel had shown us.

I spotted another half-dozen cats and three dogs happily romping in their fenced-in yards before I finally saw the black and white patches of Melissa Chapman's cat. I looked around, getting a fix on the location—things looked different from the air than they did the ground, and it was difficult sometimes to translate directions from one viewpoint to the other—then flapped my way back to the others.

{Got him,} I announced. I settled on a branch over their heads, not wanting to put myself through the struggle of lifting-off from ground level again if I didn't have to.

"You're kidding," Rachel said. I couldn't tell if she was impressed that I'd done it so fast, or disappointed that she now had no excuse to use her eagle morph and join the search. "You found Fluffer?"

{Hey, it's easy,} I said, unable to resist the urge to brag a little. I so rarely got a chance to show-off at anything that mattered to anyone. {Spotting prey is what I do. Or what a hawk does, anyway. Actually, there are maybe six or eight cats running around the neighborhood. Also, three dogs and an amazing amount of rats and mice.}

"Rats?" That got Marco's attention. "Rats? Here? This is suburbia. I mean, it's a lot better than where I live. They have rats?"

{There are rats everywhere,} I said sharply. I knew the apartment complex where Marco lived, and he wasn't lying about this being a better neighborhood than his. But his neighborhood was still a step-up from mine, and I didn't like being reminded of that—not tonight, when I was surrounded by all these perfect little homes with their perfect little families inside. {Come on, I'll take you to Fluffer.}

I flew off again, a much easier prospect when I could hop out of the tree and let my wings catch air on the way down for a nice smooth glide. I kept low so the others could see me. Marco was carrying the cat carrier we had brought along—borrowed from Aragorn, who liked to nap in it when we weren't shoving him inside to drag him to the vet—and Jake had my clothes and shoes under one arm.

I realized quickly that even flying at my slowest, I was still too fast for them to keep up with using their clumsy, earth-bound human legs. I flew in lazy circles instead, perching on occasional fences or tree limbs to give them a chance to catch up.

"This doesn't look too strange," I heard Cassie joke. "The four of us running down the street looking up in the sky." Her voice was distant, but hawk's have good hearing; the hard part for me wasn't staying near enough to overhear, it was tuning out all the other noises that the hawk part of me cared about more than some human talking. I had thought it was quiet before, in my human body; now I realized that I just hadn't been listening right. The night was alive—and I could hear all of it. From the rustle of leaves against the faint breeze to the swish of grass as some other predator or prey ran through it, to the noises of those creatures themselves, I could hear it all! It was glorious…and also distracting.

I barely remembered to direct the others to turn at the right street.

{There,} I said quickly. {See that yard with the two trees?}

"Yeah," Jake said. "Just to our left?"

{That's the one,} I told him. {The cat you're looking for is stalking a mouse, right behind the trunk of the nearest tree.}

Rachel grinned up at me, then said, "Okay, we can't all go traipsing over some stranger's yard. I'll go with Cassie."

"Do you need this?" Marco asked, holding up Aragorn's cat carrier.

"Not yet," Rachel shook her head. "I'll grab Fluffer and bring him back over here. You two—three—guys just wait here, looking casual."

"Oh right," Marco said under his breath as Rachel and Cassie walked away around a thick green hedge, "just us with our cat carrier, spare clothes, and pet hawk. Yeah, we look totally casual."

Jake laughed.

I settled down on a tree branch over their heads. {Careful,} I teased. {Your "pet hawk" may decide he needs to let nature call, and guess who's stuck underneath?}

Marco looked up at me and winced. "You wouldn't," he said.

{Try me,} I teased. It was so much easier to talk to people in my hawk body! I didn't have to worry about what to do with my hands, or whether I was shuffling my feet too much, or smiling the wrong way. I didn't have to worry about forcing myself to meet anyone's eyes; as a red-tailed hawk, I had the fiercest gaze in the group. Other people had trouble meeting my eyes, rather than the other way around! If I'd had lips, I would have grinned.

Then I jerked my head sideways, the unmistakable noise of an angry cat issuing a threat catching my sharp ears. From my high perch I could see over the hedge with ease, and what I saw didn't look good. {Uh-oh,} I said in quiet thought-speak to Jake and Marco, {it seems like Fluffer doesn't like this plan.}

They looked up at me, then Jake edged forward a little and cupped his free hand to his mouth. "How are you guys doing?" he asked in a sort of stage-whisper that would carry to Rachel and Cassie, but not much farther.

"Wonderful." Rachel's retort sounded strained. "I'm bleeding and Fluffer is up the tree."

Marco started to giggle, then Jake joined in. I laughed too, but only inside my own head.

"This was supposed to be the easy part," Rachel complained in a low voice. "I figured, okay, we go and acquire Fluffer's DNA, and then the hard stuff begins."

"We have a cat up a tree," Cassie said dolefully. "You know how hard it is to get a cat down out of a tree?"

"I have a plan," Rachel announced. "Tobias, are you up there?"

{Right above you,} I said balefully from my perch. {But I'm not going to try and snatch an angry tomcat down out of a tree.}

"That's not what I was going to ask," Rachel reassured me. She took a deep breath then said, "What I need is a mouse."

{Oh man,} I said.

"Mouse barbecue," Marco whispered, and started giggling hysterically. I heard Jake give him a shove, but he didn't stop laughing. It didn't matter; I was hardly listening. My little hawk heart was pounding. In spite of myself, I was excited by the prospect. After all, what was a red-tailed hawk made for, if not hunting?

{Okay,} I told the others. {Okay, no problem. I can do this.}

Rachel just nodded, her gaze fixed on Fluffer, but Jake and Cassie were both looking up at me with expressions of matching uncertainty. Marco was too busy laughing at his own joke to pay attention as I flapped my wings and soared out of the tree.

No big deal, I repeated to myself. It's just a mouse. How hard can it be for a hawk to find a mouse? Just trust the instincts and let the bird do the flying. No big deal.

Now if I could just stop the hawk from doing what it did best before it actually killed the mouse I was hunting, we would be golden.

Yeah. No big deal.