"I have an idea. "

I explained what I wanted to do and the five of us flew off, out of range of the shooters.

When we were far enough away, we went into a steep dive, down, down, faster and faster toward the trees.

I thought I was scared, diving from high up. Now I was diving at lower altitude, aiming directly at the trees. This was a whole new level of terror. With my eagle's eyes I could see the bark on the trees. I could see ants on the bark of the trees. It was like those trees were right in front of us.

I hoped the eagle knew when to pull out of the dive. If I slammed into one of those trees at sixty miles an hour, I was Spam.

Then, at just the right split second, like a perfectly trained squadron of fighter jets, we opened our wings and swooshed into the trees.

Unbelievable!

"Ah haaaah!" I heard Marco yell. "I don't know if that was fun or just insane!" It was like some video-game nightmare. We kept most of the speed from the dive and now we were zooming through the trees so fast that tree trunks were just a brown blur all around us.

Tree! Bank left.

6 Tree! Bank right.

Tree!

Dozens of feathers made the slightest individual adjustments. Muscles in my wings trimmed the angle of attack a millimeter one way, a millimeter back.

Tree! Tree! Treetreetreetreetree!

"Yaaaaaaaaah!" I yelled, half from terror and half from the total, out-of-control thrill of it.

In and out. Around and through. Zoom.

ZOOM!

Suddenly, there they were, just ahead in a clearing. Two teenage creeps sitting in the back of a pickup truck. One guy had a blond ponytail.

The other one wore a baseball cap. They were a hundred yards away, like being all the way down a football field, but my eagle eyes were so good I could count their eyelashes.

The guy with the ponytail had the rifle. The other guy was drinking a beer. They were still scanning the skies, looking for us.

Guess what, morons? I thought as we raced at them. We're not up there anymore. We're right here . . .

In ...

Your. . .

FACE!

They didn't even have enough time to look surprised before we struck.

As a bald eagle, I was the biggest of the five of us. I could carry the heaviest load.

I raked my talons forward.

I opened them wide.

"Tsseeeeeer!"

Tobias's hawk let loose an intimidating shriek.

My talons hit the gun barrel and closed on it.

Tobias slashed the ponytail guy's head with his own talons. Ponytail shouted in pain and surprise and loosened his grip on the rifle.

"Hey!" the second guy yelled.

7 Zoom!

I was out of there with the rifle in my talons.

With the additional weight of the rifle, it was a struggle getting any altitude.

"That bird has your gun, Chester! And that other one stole my beer!"

I glanced over and saw Marco. At least I think it was Marco. He had the beer can in his talons, half-crumpled.

"They're way too young to be drinking," Marco said in his most parent-like voice.

I heard the ponytail guy complaining down below.

"That ain't right. It ain't right that no bird should take my rifle like that."

I caught a little breeze and gained just enough altitude to get above the trees. But I was having a hard time. My wings were beating the still, dead air of the woods and not getting very much lift. I scraped the top of a tall pine tree and emerged from the woods, still flapping hard to carry the weight of the rifle, I made it out toward the beach, over the low cliffs at the water's edge.

The blessed thermals were there. They lifted me up, up and out over the water. I relaxed, letting the warm wind carry me higher.

I dropped the rifle about a mile out in the ocean. I figured any jerk who would shoot at a bald eagle didn't need a gun. Marco dropped the beer with amazing precision right into a trash barrel. He looked as proud as he would have if he'd just thrown the winning basket in the NBA championship.

"lt's been almost two hours," Cassie warned us as we lazily drifted back toward shore.

Two hours is the time limit. If you stay in a morph for more than two hours, you're trapped.

Forever.

8 Chapter Two

There's an old, run-down church no one uses anymore not far from the beach. It has a bell tower, although the bell is gone. We flew there. That's where we had started from. Our clothes and shoes were still piled there.

Four pairs of shoes for the five of us.

Cassie, still in her osprey body, peered down at her watch lying on the floor. "Good. An hour and a half. We should try never to go over an hour and a half. " We began to morph back into our human bodies.

Morphing takes concentration. When you're going from human to animal, it's harder. You really have to focus. But going back to human is easier.

I focused on my human self. I formed a picture of myself in my mind -- tall, thin, with blonde shoulder-length hair. I focused especially on the hair, because I didn't like my last haircut. It was uneven at the bottom. Not that it mattered. I just wished I could do something about the hair when I morphed. Unfortunately, morphing doesn't work that way.

The changes began quickly. The feathers that covered me began to melt. They ran together like hot wax. In some places when my skin reappeared, it would have this beautiful feather pattern for a few seconds.

My yellow bill sucked back into my mouth to become white teeth. That part sort of itched. It made me want to grind my teeth a few times.

My lips grew out around my teeth. My eyes went from pale gold to my normal blue. My legs grew quite a bit, from about three inches to normal size.

I looked over at Jake and saw the same things happening to him. Let me just tell you -- watching someone morph is not a pretty sight. It's the kind of thing that would give you screaming nightmares if you didn't know it was going to be all right.

When Cassie morphs, she always does it kind of artistically. Like when she changes into a horse, she does it so it doesn't look totally creepazoid -- she has a natural talent for morphing.

If there is such a thing. The rest of us just let it happen however it happens. The results can be disturbing.

I happened to see Marco at the moment where his hairy boy legs came shooting out of this little bird body and I yelped. "Yahh! Gross."

"Ay, nyew donk luk so good yourself, Rachel."

His mouth was morphing even as he spoke, so the first few words were garbled and the last were normal.

I think what he said was "Hey, you don't look so good yourself, Rachel." He was probably right. I was glad I didn't have a mirror.

9 My tongue grew fat in my mouth. My eyesight became faded and dim. The eagle's mind evaporated, leaving me all alone in my head.

My wings became arms. My talons became toes. The scaly yellow eagle legs became my own legs, only they were still all scaly at first.

"Nice look, chicken legs," Marco said. "Do those come in extra crispy, too?"

I smiled at him. "You're not one to talk, Marco." I pointed down at the floor. See, his legs had changed back, but he still had huge osprey talons instead of feet.

As my skin began to appear, so did my morph ing outfit. Fortunately, after a few tries, we had all learned to morph some very minimal clothing.

Usually nothing more than skintight workout clothes or leotards. Not enough to go walking around in, but enough to keep us all from dying of embarrassment when we morphed in front of each other.

I checked out my friends. They were mostly normal again, with just a few remaining hints that they'd been birds a minute earlier.

Jake is kind of a big guy, strong-looking, with brown hair and serious, dark eyes -- although at the moment, his eyes were shining with excitement. Sometimes being in a morph just totally breaks you out. Jake was a lizard once, and he still hasn't gotten over the fact that he ate a live spider. But I guess he enjoyed being a falcon, be cause he was babbling on and on about how great it was.