Zack became aware of the sun on his left hand and woke up. He stayed still for a moment, then yawned, stretched luxuriously, and almost fell off the branch. He caught himself just before he would have lost his balance altogether and froze, a sheepish smile on his feline features for nobody’s benefit. Ethan was not in his tree and Alexander was not below; even Colin had left his perch across from Zack. He dropped down from the tree, landing silently in a shock-absorbent crouch, and saw where his friends had gone.
While they slept, the changes had accelerated. All five of them sported features of distinctly different animals, familiar in shape but disconcerting as much by the colorations of each as by the effect that combining human features with them produced. Still, he recognized Alexander immediately as the small spiky island floating facedown in the middle of the pool, blowing a slow stream of bubbles. On the shallow end of the pool, directly across from where the waterfall plunged in, Ethan enjoyed a cool soak, his massively muscled, black-furred body buoyed by the water, his round-eared head resting on the grass, ursine features turned up to the sun. Scott was lying on the bank, facedown and dripping, idly kicking with powerful legs a tapered muscular tail, sun-drying his damp fur. Colin was nowhere to be seen until Zack remembered what he reminded him of, and sure enough there he was, a golden leathery delta high overhead, wheeling slowly under the vast blank blue dome of the morning sky. Zack himself had already noted the way his fur had grown in to become a smooth coat of black-spotted golden red, complete with tufted triangular ears and fine white whiskers. Reflecting on how strange it felt to have retractable claws, he went and sat down on the bank next to Scott.
“Morning.”
Scott nodded. He was almost falling asleep again, the warm sun blanketing him in golden comfort. Zack looked into the pool: Alexander had paddled closer to shore, while Ethan’s huge obsidian form rippled like a shadow underwater. His head emerged from the water; when he saw Zack, he swam back to the shallows and stood up, bringing half his body dripping out of the water, with the fur soaked and sticking to his body and showing the huge muscles of his arms as he brought them up behind him and swept the water forward into a great wave that soaked the grass and the base of a tree and Scott. Ethan’s grin turned into a look of surprise when he spotted Zack crouching on the lowest branch of the tree directly in front of him, completely dry. Zack leaped to the ground and returned to his place next to the once again dripping Scott, lowered himself to a crouch, balanced on his toes, and told Ethan, “Don’t do that again, okay?”
Ethan nodded once, looking at Zack in a curious way, then turned to wade back into deeper water. Zack’s speed had thoroughly surprised him; he hadn’t even seen him go up the tree. It was as if he had simply appeared there.
Something brushed past his leg. Ethan froze and looked down, but he saw nothing more than the smooth sandy bottom of the pool, through crystal-clear water and sparks of sunlight. There were no weeds or plants growing in the pool, so it couldn’t have been a plant, and Alexander was once more drifting out to the middle of the pool, so it couldn’t have been him. Carefully, Ethan slid into the water and paddled over near Alexander, who lifted his head for a breath, gave him a glance, and dropped his face back into the water. Ethan took a breath himself and ducked under, facing the bank. He forced his eyes open, even though the water made them sting a little, and looked around. The pool was very deep under him; the bottom dropped away just beyond his depth, dropping several meters straight down, the sand almost covering a stratum of rock. A large hole gaped in the rock, an irregular black splotch where light did not reach.
Just then he saw something slither out of the hole, something large and dark. He pulled himself toward it, still underwater and starting to feel the urge to breathe. He tried to concentrate on the dark shape, which was hovering in the water very near the shelf of rock. He drifted silently behind it and in a rapid movement seized it with one hand by the neck and, planting his foot on the edge of the shelf, lifted it out of the water. It struggled uselessly in his iron grip while he slogged up the beach towards Scott and Zack, both of whom were watching him with astonishment.
“Hey, guys! Look what I caught,” Ethan said breathlessly, shaking the water out of his eyes.
“Let me go — !”
Ethan was so surprised that he very nearly did. His hold slipped just enough to let it twist away, and it would have escaped altogether if Scott hadn’t slammed into it from behind, knocking it right into Zack’s swift stranglehold. Zack pinned it to the ground, face up, and started to growl at it; but when Zack’s jade-green eyes met its verdigris ones, both of their faces registered surprise simultaneously, and Zack slowly let go and stood up.
The newcomer was a human boy expressed as an otter, his dark gray fur clinging to his muscular body and thick, tapering tail, whiskers drooping from the weight of beads of water strung onto them. His entire underside, from his belly to his throat and striping his face, was white, but the rest was the color of wet limestone. His small round ears lay flat against his head in the same manner as Zack’s, but as their shock waned, they relaxed.
“You’re — ” Zack began.
“Are you — ” the otter began at the same instant, broke off as Zack did, and both couldn’t help laughing.
“Yeah, us too,” Zack said between chuckles. “I’m Zack.” He extended his hand to the otter, who squeezed it between his webbed fingers.
“Micah,” the otter answered in turn. “You guys are all … something.”
“Look,” Ethan said. “I’m sorry I went and did that to you. It’s just —”
“No, I know. Things haven’t been terribly peaceful around here, either.”
“Huh?”
Micah made a face. “I had to fight off this big black … thing … in the middle of the night,” he explained, gesturing with his hands. “Not like you, of course,” he added hastily to Ethan, who shook his head in agreement. “It was more mean than it was big.”
“Yeah, I know.” Scott reappeared suddenly at Micah’s side, forcing a startled twitch out of him. “Zack and I fought one off, too.”
“No kidding?”
Ethan nodded this time. “I had a tough time getting rid of mine. It kept jumping me from trees.” He stopped and blinked, then looked directly at Zack. “Hey — ”
“Oh, no. It wasn’t me, you know that,” Zack said, his hands up in self-defense.
Ethan dropped his snout to his chest and sighed. “Yeah, I do.” He looked up then and asked, “Hey, did we each fight one or — ”
“I don’t think so,” Zack said, “because Scott and I fought one together. I don’t know about Alex and Colin … ”
“Who?” Micah asked, curious.
“Them,” Zack answered, pointing behind him. Micah turned to see Alexander and Colin coming toward him together.