CHAPTER THREE

The cave we entered was large and spacious. There was a lot of room for us, as the ceilings were tall and the walls far apart. The lighting was dim, the sunlight through the waterfall fractured on the ground. Stalactites hung from the ceiling here and there, although the few stalagmites on the ground were small. There were smaller caves, so shallow they were more like hollows, really, leading off to the sides in the walls of the cavern, and a few larger tunnels that I assumed led to more caves. At the far end of the cavern, there was a medium-sized rock.

Something stirred in my memory. This place looked vaguely familiar. I furrowed my brows in concentration, trying to recall where I had seen this cave before, but was interrupted by Ryan calling, "Annie! Are you coming?"

He and Sam were already on the far side of the cave, about to duck into the tallest of the tunnels. I shoved the nagging thought of recognition into the back of my mind and followed them.

The tunnel was tight, but it wasn't very long and we could walk through it bent over, not crawling. Soon it opened up into a cave much smaller than the previous one, but still tall enough to stand up in. I straightened, grateful to be able to stand all the way.

Unlike the previous cavern, this one was dripping with stalagmites and stalactites. Still, the majority of the cave was taken up by a sizable pool. Other puddles of water were scattered around the area, but the pool that drew my eyes was the largest. Sunlight shone down from a crack in the ceiling onto the pool, and I narrowed my eyes to reduce the glare.

Sam was crouched down beside the pool with a finger trailing through the water. "This water is really cold," she said.

I rolled my eyes. "It's mountain water, Sam, what did you expect?"

She shrugged.

I frowned. That nagging feeling was back. It was almost as if I had been here before.

"I keep getting the weirdest feeling of déjà vu," I confessed. "But it's a little more than that, actually. It keeps coming back."

To my surprise, Ryan nodded, wearing a frown of his own. "Yeah, me too. I keep thinking that I've seen this place before, but I've never been hiking in the Fircrest Mountains before."

Sam gave both of us an odd look. "Well, I have no idea what you're talking about," she grinned. "But this is kind of fun." She took her finger out of the water. "My finger's starting to go numb," she admitted, making a face.

I exchanged a long look with Ryan. There were a lot of possibilities. Since we had obviously never been here, something weird was going on. And when weird things started to happen in my life, uninvited things follow. Usually things that have to do with turning into a cat and saving the Warriors world.

We were interrupted in our thoughts by a loud "WOAH!" from Sam. She had stood up, slipped on the slippery floor, and fallen into the pool.

Gasping in concern, I carefully but quickly made my way over where she was floundering the water. She had not been fully submerged, but had gotten very wet and was spitting water out of her mouth and blinking to clear her eyes.

"You all right?" I asked, concerned.

"Yes," she said through a mouthful of water, bobbing up and down. "But this water is really cold! And surprisingly deep!"

I leaned over, reaching out my hand to help her out of the water. However, the ground in this spot was wetter and slipperier than I had anticipated, and with my already clumsy balance plus Sam's weight caused me to slip and fall and... tumble into the water myself.

The water was shockingly cold, and I winced at the thought of hiking back down the mountain in these sopping wet clothes, especially as evening wore on. It was, as Sam had said, surprisingly deep—my feet didn't touch the bottom of the pool, and I was five feet, eight and a half inches tall.

In my accidental fall, Sam had completely submerged in the water, and for a few moments where I was spluttering and trying to tread water, I didn't notice that she didn't re-emerge. Once I realized that, I shouted, "Sam!", looked hastily at Ryan, then dove beneath the water as I heard my husband shout, "Annie! Wait!"

Immediately I realized my mistake.

The feeling of being soaked to the bone with cold instantly vanished. I heard a faint splash behind me, telling me that Ryan had also jumped in, but that was not my main worry.

My main worry was the familiar tingling sensation all over my body and the faint sparkling orange mist that began to cloud my vision. I heard a faint poof, and then the mist surrounded me so I was unable to see anything else through the murky water.

Having your molecules pulled apart and rearranged into a different body isn't actually all that painful.

I felt a tingling sensation all over my body, and my vision blurred. When my eyesight cleared, I was standing in exactly the same place I had been sitting—except I was a cat.

Two other cats stood next to me, blinking in confusion. One was very clearly Sam. She looked exactly the same as she had when she was Wolfstar, with a thick, long smoky gray pelt and very yellow eyes. The other was also very clearly Lionblaze. Golden fur, amber eyes—yes, that was the Lionblaze I knew and loved, not the Ryan I had married or the Thunder I had had kits with. Still, something was off about his appearance—he looked to be about apprentice age! He was smaller and, dare I say it, fluffier, and quite clearly younger.

Wolfstar looked to be about the age of a typical new warrior—older than Ryan's current form, but still pretty young.

When I glanced in the pool next to me, I got quite a shock: what with Lionblaze and Wolfstar looking as they had in the forest, I had assumed that I would look like I had when I was Gingerstar, with ginger fur and blue eyes.

Instead, I was a pure white she-cat with fur of middling length—it was longer than my pelt as Gingerstar, but shorter than my fur as Shadow. My eyes were yellow—not as deep and dark as Wolfstar's eyes, but still yellow.

"Annie?" Ryan asked anxiously, looking at me in concern. "Is that you?"

"Yes," I replied, confused. "Although I don't know why I look different when you two look the same."

"I don't know either," Sam admitted. Her voice was slightly shaky and there was a wild look in her eyes, but other than that she seemed fine. There was a pause. Then:

"What happened?" Sam asked.

I shook my head as Ryan answered, "I don't know."

As I looked around the room, I realized that I did, in fact, recognize this place. It was the Cave of Pointed Stones in the Tribe's home, the Cave of Rushing Water! StarClan (or maybe the Tribe of Endless Hunting) had sent us to the Tribe! I wondered what time period we were in: before the Clans came to the Lake? The same time I had been leader? A long time afterward?

Sam sat down. "Okay," she said firmly, "Lionblaze, Annie, please explain what happened in Dawn of the Clans, since apparently you were part of it."

"All right," I began. "It started on a trip to my cousin's house. Ryan was my boyfriend, and he and his foster brother Jeff came to visit us because Jeff and my cousin Macks were friends. My other cousin, Josie, and I went exploring in the nearby quarry with Ryan, and..."

Eventually, keeping our voices hushed so that if there were cats in the larger cave, they wouldn't hear us, I explained what had happened. Ryan jumped in from time to time to explain things that had happened to him and not to me.

We had just reached the end of our tale when, padding on soft paws, a cat found us.

Sam opened her mouth to say something about our story, when suddenly, her eyes widened in disbelief, causing Ryan and I to whirl around to see the cat behind us.

The cat was a gray tabby tom with clear, piercing blue eyes. There was no thin veil of blindness over them, which momentarily confused me. But all in a flash, I realized who this cat was, and I cried out in shock, along with the other two cats:

"Jayfeather!"