Focus!

I struck!

An incredible rush of excitement surged through me. I was ecstatic! Ecstatic! That's the only word for it. It was intense beyond anything I had ever experienced.

Talons hit warm flesh. My razor claws squeezed. The rat squirmed in my grip. But it was helpless! Helpless!

I was in a frenzy.

I hooded my wings around my kill, shielding it from any other predator that might try to steal it away.

"NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!"

I fell back.

I looked down at my talons. They were red with blood.

46 Rat meat dripped from my beak.

In my panic, I forgot what I was. I tried to run away. But I no longer had legs and feet to run with. I had killing talons. Bloody talons.

I fell in the dirt.

No, I cried voicelessly. But I could still see the dead rat. And I could taste it. And no matter how many times I said "no," it would always be "yes."

47 CHAPTER 15

I flew.

I flew as fast and as hard as I could. I wanted to go so fast that the memory of killing and eating the rat would be left way behind me.

But not even I can fly that fast.

Human! I am human! I am Tobias!

I don't know why it was Rachel I wanted to see right at that moment. Maybe she was just the closest thing I had to a real friend. Maybe it was the way she had seemed so sure of who and what I was.

I needed someone to be sure.

Down below I saw the huge, irregular rectangles of the mall. I saw a glass door. People streamed in and out. Rachel. That's where she was.

"Tseeeeer!"

I screamed in rage and frustration and terror as I stooped. I shot toward the door like I'd shot toward the rat.

But I wasn't going to stop. I wasn't going to slow down. I was just going to end this right now. I would hit the glass at full speed and maybe that would awaken me from this nightmare.

The speed just kept building. The door rushed up at me. The earth itself was jumping up to hit me.

A guy, dark hair, short, stepped to the door. He opened it.

Shwoooop!

I must have been doing eighty as I hurtled through the open door.

A second set of doors, but these were open, too.

No impact.

No awakening.

Colors and bright lights all around me. Like a high-speed kaleidoscope.

The Gap. Express. The Body Shop. Easy Spirit. Mrs. Fields.

Zoom!

I was a bullet, blazing inches over the heads of the shoppers. I heard screams. I heard cries of amazement.

48 I didn't care. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to fall to the ground because my wings had disappeared and been replaced by clumsy legs and flailing arms.

I wanted to be me again.

I am human! I am human! I am Tobias!

Nine West. Radio Shack. B. Dalton. Benetton. A world I knew. A world where I belonged.

Places I had been. Foods I had eaten. The world of human beings.

Zoom!

Suddenly, in seconds, I was at the center of the mall.

A crowd was standing around in a circle. In the middle of the circle blue mats were on the floor. Girls in leotards were doing midair flips and graceful backbends. People on the upper level were crowded around the railing to look down.

Rachel was on the balance beam. She was just raising one leg, balancing on the other.

I was a brown and gold and red missile shooting past her.

"Tobias!" she cried.

Straight ahead, a wall. A blank wall where they were going to put a new shop. I was still moving fast. I could still hit it and wake myself up from the nightmare.

"No!" Rachel cried.

I flared and shot straight up. The wall scraped my stomach. The ceiling was glass, a skylight.

I was there! A last-second turn, almost too late. My shoulder hit the glass. I bounced off and began to fall down toward upraised faces staring at me with horror and amazement and pity.

I saw Rachel's face in that crowd. Her eyes pleaded silently. No, she mouthed. No.

I fell, stunned and dazed. Rachel, still balanced on the beam, caught me as I dropped. She fell off and the two of us tumbled onto the mat.

"You have to get out of here!" she muttered tersely.

"I killed," I cried. "You don't understand, Rachel. I'm lost. I killed!"

"No. As long as you have me and the others, you aren't lost, Tobias."

Helping hands were clawing, trying to save Rachel from the crazed, out-of-control bird. She gave me a heave. Just enough to get me into the air. Anyone watching would have thought she was trying to get me off her.

I flapped up, just out of reach of a dozen hands that clawed the air trying to grab me.

Someone threw a shopping bag at me. I dodged.

49 But there was no escape. Overhead I saw the skylight. Blue sky.

The hawk in my head wanted the sky. It knew safety was up in the high blue. The hawk powered straight up. Straight up at the glass that he didn't understand. The glass that would be like a brick wall.

But I couldn't fight it anymore. The hawk had won. I had killed. I had killed and eaten. And I had loved it. The ecstasy of the hunt.

Ecstasy!

In a second it would all be over. One more stroke of my powerful wings and the glass . . .

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a familiar face on the upper level. Suddenly, something shot past me. Small, white, stitched.

CRASH!

The baseball hit the glass just inches ahead of my beak. Just where Marco had aimed it. Glass shards fell around me. I shot through the hole.

Sky!

The hawk flew fast and straight.

I let it go. I surrendered.

Tobias, a boy whose face I could no longer remember, no longer existed.

50 CHAPTER 16

The next few days were like a long, slow dream. I stayed away from Jake's house. I did not communicate with my friends. I disappeared.

I found a place for myself. It was perfect red-tail territory - the place where I had made my first kill. A nice meadow surrounded by trees. Not far off there was a marshy area that was good, too. Although there was another red-tail who had a territory over there, so I couldn't hunt there often.

I spent my days hunting. Sometimes I would ride the high hot winds and watch the meadow.

Sometimes I would sit in a tree and watch till some unwary creature ventured out. Then I would swoop down on it, snatch it up, kill it. Eat it while the blood was still warm.

Days were easier than nights. During the day I was hunting almost all the time. It keeps you busy, because most of the time you miss. It can take quite a few tries before you make a kill.

Nights were worse. I couldn't hunt at night. The nights belong to other predators, mostly the owls. At night my human mind would surface.

The human in my head would show me memories. Pictures of human life. Pictures of his friends.

The human in my head was sad. Lonely.

But the human Tobias really just wanted to sleep. He wanted to disappear and let the hawk rule. He wanted to accept that he was no longer human.

Still, at night, as I sat on my familiar branch and watched the owls do their silent, deadly work, the human memories would play in my head.

But other memories were there, too. I remembered the female hawk. The one who had been in the cage. I knew where her territory was. Near a clear lake in the mountains.

So one day I flew there. To the mountain lake.

I saw her down on a tree branch. She was watching a baby raccoon, preparing to go for a kill.

She would have to be very hungry to go for a raccoon, no matter how small. Raccoons are very tough, very violent creatures.

As I watched, unnoticed by her, she swooped.

The raccoon spotted her. A quick dodge left, and the hawk sailed harmlessly past. The baby raccoon ran for the edge of the woods. His mother was there.