Hey guys! Yeah, yeah, I know! I haven't updated in like...forever. Just deal, okay! Man...geez! College is...college is mucho importante, you know? And I am le busy...

But yeah. Here's another chappie for ya. . Grinses

Stephanie Chapter 3

I limped back into my room, wincing. Stupid lion!

Stupid me for trying to be corny and Biblical and wanting an effing lion morph! What was wrong with me, honestly? Where was my brain most of the time?

"Great job, Stephanie!" I hissed to myself as I sat down on my bed. I tensed as my mom came in in her nightgown.

"Baby," she said in that I'm-your-half-asleep-mom voice, "Did you just come in the door?"

My eyes nervously flashed to the little digital clock beside my bed. "Em...yeah. I did..."

She gave me a weird half-asleep-but-very-concerned-mom look and said, "Well, try to get in earlier, okay?"

I smiled nervously at her, slipping my hand away from my lion-bit calf.

"Um, yeah, okay mom."

She caught sight of my hand moving from my leg. Oh no...ohno ohno ohno!

"What did you do to your leg, baby? Did you sprain it?"

"Umm...yeah. Whatever."

"Here, let me put some ice on that."

"NO!" I yelled. She jumped and gave me a frazzled-mom look.

"Umm...I'm good! I'll get the ice myself!" I slowly got up.

"Oh but honey, you're hurt, let me get it."

"No! No, you should...um...go back to bed. Dad'll wake up." I supplied quickly. My dad has insomnia. If he reaches over and my mom isn't there, odds are he'll wake up and then he won't be able to get back to sleep the whole night. He's gone to work exhausted a lot of times because my little brother Kyle will wake mom up for a midnight snack.

"Yeah, okay. Well, are you sure you'll be fine?"

"YES, mom!"

"Alright, alright." She turned to go, then stopped and gave me a look. Ohno ohno ohno!

"You haven't been doing anything illegal have you?"

"No mom!" I almost broke out laughing from relief. Well, wait...yeah I technically had been doing something illegal.

So that made me a liar...

"Like jumping trains?" Her eyes looked so worried, I suddenly felt sick. When I was in fourth grade, I felt the need to be an idiot and jump onto a train, as it pulled from the station, and then from it to a crowd of my cheering friends and I fractured my ankle jumping from it and landing on the hard gravel by the track. It was a minor fracture, and I didn't even get a cast for everybody to sign ( I wanted a green one SO bad ). I just hobbled around school with a brace for about three weeks. And Mom nearly went crazy when she found out her baby broke her leg being stupid and jumping off a train. She nearly went mental a few weeks ago when she found out Kyle and his friends were doing it.

I nearly spanked the life out of Kyle myself. Or would have. Were it not for that mom doesn't believe in spanking.

"No, mom." I had to laugh though. The idea that I would be out doing something as nice and safe as jumping trains, in the face of the reality that I was hauling butt from very annoyed lions and possibly Yeerks too was just a little bit funny. "I wouldn't do anything so stupid."

Lie. The voice in me said. You're a liar.

What? I reasoned. Fighting isn't stupid...not really...

"Okay...well...If you're telling the truth, I'm going back to bed."

I wanted so to roll my eyes. If you're telling the truth. Talk about a phrase my mom always used to get me to confess when I misbehaved as a kid! Like the time I locked Kyle in a closet for being annoying and she heard him and let him out and Kyle, being Kyle, wouldn't tell on me, but she knew all the same and just said "Well, if you're telling the truth, I guess Kyle did lock himself in there..." And of course, I cracked and confessed.

"K. Love you mom."

"Goodnight."

"Night."

I watched her go with a small measure of guilt. So this is what Cassie meant when she had told me about the personal costs.

As soon as I heard my mom enter her and dad's bedroom and close the door, I closed my door and sat back on my bed to peel my pants slowly up and inspect my leg.

The bite...ugh. I'd never seen anything like it, nor had I ever had such a wound, nor, I hoped, would I ever have one like this again. Luckily, the lion had let go when it found Jake's tiger teeth around it's neck. Cassie told me that normally when a lion bit, it pulled and tore. My leg was still in one piece, but there were four, very large, very deep holes where lion teeth had been.

And I had giggled at my cat's bites...little teensy harmless holes in my arm.

Yeah, imagine that, but large scale. Like 400x maybe. Not even slightly cute or harmless at all...

I quickly morphed, my heart pounding, to seagull, then back to girl. I turned my head to see my cat watching me from under the desk and marveled that I hadn't been killed in seagull form.

"Idiot!" I whispered to myself. You always check a room before you morph Stephanie! You know that! Anybody could be watching...

Of course, my cat wasn't exactly a Yeerk spy, I didn't think so anyway, but he could definitely, if he'd been in the right mood, have bitten my little seagull head off in midmorph.

Nah, he would have. I reasoned. He knew it was me...I guess...

"Hey buddy," I said, wanting to cuddle a fuzzy lump at the moment. Being chomped onto by a very, very big lion's surprisingly strong set of jaws, then having to not scream, then having to run, limping, with no time to demorph, from alerted guards that could very well have been Yeerks, and if they had caught sight of me, could have identified me and infested me, my family, the Animorphs, and Ax within a very few, convenient hours, had definitely made me just a little bit jittery.

He hissed. I backed away, more than a little hurt. My cat never hisses at me.

He was probably being weird because he saw me morph.

He ran to the door and glared at me.

I opened it and he hissed again and ran out.

Hurt, I sat back onto the bed after closing it. I looked at my leg, curiously again. Amazing. It was gone. I hadn't even noticed all the pain was gone as well.

"Cool." I said. It was really amazing if you thought of all the healing possibilities of morphing. A bite that would have taken a bunch of stitches and weeks of healing, as well as probably some shots to prevent infection, and pain that would have taken at least a teeny little bit of morphine, could be healed in a matter of a minute with the morphing technology.

"Awesome." I said. Great, I was so tired, I was talking to myself in one to two syllable answers.

"Time for bed." I said, quickly kicking off my pants and searching for pj's in my drawers. I changed and slipped in between the sheets, feeling totally grungy for not taking a shower, but tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, I would try to not have nightmares about being chased and eaten by very angry lions directed to do so by the pointing paw of my own cat, sitting on a thrown with a crown - lions that kept calling me a "liar."