Read Online The Invasion by K. A. Applegate - Free Book Online

heard at the site.
    But no. No! This was Tom, my big brother. Tom would never, ever have let those slimy creeps into his head. Never.
    “I’ll let you up if you’ll calm down,” Marco said. “Look, maybe I’m wrong, okay?”
    I stopped struggling, and Marco let me up.
    “You have to admit, Jake, it doesn’t look good.”
    “Tom is
not
one of them,
okay?
That’s final,” I said.
    “Whatever,” Marco said. “Just don’t punch me again, ‘cause I might have to hit you back.”
    Just then I heard this fluttering noise at my window. Like someone beating on it very softly. I went to the window, followed by Marco.
    There was a bird there. Some kind of huge bird, like an eagle or a hawk, beating its wings against the window.
    Let me in, all right? I can’t hover here forever!
    Marco’s eyes went wide. He’d heard it, too.
    I opened the window and the bird flew straight in. It landed on my dresser. It was almost two feetlong, mostly brown, with gnarled talons and a sharp, hooked beak.
    “It’s some kind of eagle or something,” Marco said.
    A red-tailed hawk, actually,Tobias said.
    “Is that you, Tobias?” Marco demanded. “I thought we weren’t going to do any more of this morphing.”
    I never agreed to that.
    “Well, morph back, Tobias,” I said. “You know what the Andalite said — never stay in any form for more than two hours.”
    Tobias hesitated. He tilted his hawk’s head and peered at me with an incredibly concentrated gaze. At last, he hopped over onto my bed.
    Let me tell you something, it is beyond weird, watching feathers turn into skin. The brown feathers ran together and merged and turned pink. It was like the feathers were melting. Like they had turned into wax and were being heated up.
    The beak disappeared quickly, and lips grew out of it. The talons split into five and became toes.
    Halfway through the process of changing, Tobias was a lump, half-pink, half-brown, with featherlike patterns still visible on his back and chest. His face was small and mostly human, except that he still had those sharp, alert hawk’s eyes. Two tiny, shriveledarms protruded from the front of his chest with fingers like a baby’s.
    All in all, it was a pretty disgusting sight.
    But the human DNA asserted itself over the hawk’s and he became more normal. About three minutes after he’d started the change, there was a completely normal Tobias, sitting naked on the end of my bed.
    “I haven’t figured out how to morph clothes yet, like Cassie,” he said sheepishly. “Can I borrow some?”
    I loaned him a pair of pants and a shirt, but my shoes were all the wrong size.
    “That was the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Tobias said. His whole face was glowing. “I was riding the thermals.”
    “What’s a thermal?” I asked.
    “That’s when there’s warm air rising up from the ground. It forms this cushion under your wings. You can just float up there. Like a mile up! You just surf the thermals. You guys have got to do it! It is the best thing ever.”
    “Tobias, how on Earth did you do a hawk morph? “ I asked.
    “There’s an injured hawk right there in Cassie’s barn,” he said. “There’s this cool osprey, too, but I decided on the hawk.”
    “How did you fly if the hawk you morphed from was injured?” I wondered.
    Marco shook his head pityingly. “Jake, do you pay
any
attention in biology class? DNA has nothing to do with some injury. The DNA wasn’t broken, just a wing.”
    I ignored Marco. “You’re lucky Cassie’s dad didn’t catch you,” I said to Tobias.
    “He’s so depressed,” Tobias commented.
    “Who’s depressed? Cassie’s dad?”
    “No, the hawk. I mean, I think he knows they aren’t trying to hurt him or anything, but he can’t stand being cooped up there while his wing heals.” Tobias’s eyes darkened. “It’s terrible when birds have to be locked up in cages. They should be free.”
    “Yeah, free the birds,” Marco commented