'But all kids is Switchers,' said Lizzie. 'Didn't you know that?'

'What do you mean? How could all kids be Switchers?'

Lizzie began to beat flour into the eggs. 'All kids is born with the ability. But very few learns that they has it. You has to learn before you's eight years old, because after that your mind is set and you takes on the same beliefs as everybody else. A lot of kids find out they can Switch, but when their parents and friends say it's impossible, they believes them instead of theirselves, and then they forgets about it, like they forgets everything that doesn't fit in with what everyone else thinks. It's only a few who has enough faith in theirselves to know that they can do it despite what the rest of the world thinks.'

'So was it all just chance, then? Just coincidence?'

Lizzie was beating furiously at her batter. 'Chance?' she said. 'Coincidence? I doesn't know what the words mean.'

A movement in the chimney breast made Tess look up. One crooked nose and four small ones were poking out of the hole, and five pairs of eyes were fixed upon her. 'Grandchildren,' said Nose Broken by a Mousetrap. 'Tail Short Seven Toes telling krools, mammoths, dragons, little ones watching.'

The four small noses quivered in nervous antic.i.p.ation. Tess laughed and, while Lizzie fried the pancakes, she told her story once again.

Tess's parents were astonished to see her arriving home. They had forgone the chance to escape the weather and flee to southern Europe and had stayed in the seized-up city instead, in case Tess returned. When the snow began to melt and the roads were cleared their hopes rose, but by the time she finally knocked on the door they had almost given up on her. They greeted her with tears and laughter, and there was much talk of forgiveness and all being well that ends well.

But they found it difficult to adjust to the changes that had happened to Tess. Because although the date told her that it had not been so long since she left her bedroom window in the form of an owl, by another reckoning it was a year, a lifetime, an ice age. She could barely remember the child that she had been.

Tess had always been aloof, preferring her own company to that of others, but now it was more than that. She had become a stranger to her parents, and in all the years that followed they never learnt more about her absence than they had heard from Garda Maloney's report. All they knew was that she had been away with a boy, and that she would not or could not discuss the matter. It was clear from her withdrawn behaviour that in some way or other it had ended badly, and they believed that she would tell them about it when she was ready.

So, although they noticed that from time to time Tess wore a silver ring that they had never seen before, they didn't ask her about it. They left her alone and tried to resume the family life of old. Tess tried, too, but it was clear to all of them that she was acting mechanically and not from her heart. She made an effort at school, and succeeded in making one or two friends, but that was mechanical, too, and superficial. It helped to pa.s.s the time, but it did nothing to relieve the deep loneliness she felt. Nor did her occasional trips to the park, to join with squirrels or birds or deer for an hour or two. She was not a part of their world, she knew, and nor was she a part of the world of home and school. She was somewhere in between, and all alone.

And her sense of isolation increased whenever she turned on the TV or radio and heard them talking about the famous 'Northern Polar Crisis'. The krools, as she suspected, had retreated back into the ice cap and left no trace of their pa.s.sing apart from the mysterious barren pathways which stretched for hundreds of miles through the vegetation in the Arctic Circle. A thousand theories were put forward, and it seemed that there was a new one getting aired every week. Each was as ludicrous as the last, but what really made Tess's blood boil was the unanimous agreement that General Wolfe and Scud Morgan were the heroes of the day. And no human being apart from herself and Lizzie would ever know the truth.

Tess's parents never reproached her, but she knew that they had suffered a lot when she disappeared. They didn't try to stop her going for her walks in the park, but they made her promise never to be away for more than two hours and never to go out at night without telling them where she was going. Tess knew that in their terms it was a reasonable request and she agreed. She was sure that in time they would come to trust her again, and she would have more freedom, but in the meantime she would have to live without seeing either Lizzie or her friends the rats.

So she had to look elsewhere for comfort. She saved up her pocket money until she had enough to buy the biggest cage in the pet shop and the nicest white rat they had. Her parents were surprised, because Tess had so often expressed her disapproval of keeping animals in captivity, but they didn't object.

But the rat turned out to be a terrible disappointment. It was terrified of the brown rat that she turned into, and terrified to leave its cage. When she did finally tempt it out into the room, it was timid and clumsy and slow, and no amount of persuasion would bring it to attempt the stairs. The worst of it, though, was that the poor, stupid creature could not even speak Rat. It had been born and brought up in a cage like its parents and grandparents, and it had never been allowed, much less encouraged, to use its intelligence. It had a few basic words-images, but beyond that it was mute, and no effort on Tess's part succeeded in teaching it. The white rat was a mental infant, and would remain that way all its life.

It was company, nonetheless, and quite often Tess would lie awake at night, listening to it exercising itself on the wheel and talking baby-talk while she mulled over her experiences and thought about the decision which would face her in another year or so, when she turned fifteen. Time after time she dreamed of the possibilities, weighing the peaceful lives of dolphins and whales against the briefer but more thrilling lives of rats and goats. Time after time she seemed to reach a satisfactory decision, only to remind herself of how heart-broken her parents would be if she were to disappear from their lives for ever, without explanation. And on a particular night a few days after New Year, she had just reached the point, once again, of deciding to stay human, when something happened that was to make her think all over again, in an entirely different way.

It was the white rat's sudden silence that pulled her out of her reflections and alerted her to the change in the atmosphere. She watched it sniff the air, then turn around and gaze steadily into the darkness outside her window. The hairs p.r.i.c.kled on the back of Tess's neck as she got out of bed and crossed warily to the window to look out.

There, on the same tree that the owl had once called from, was the most beautiful bird she had ever seen. It was familiar to her, somehow, and yet she was sure that she had never seen it before, or any other like it. Its bright feathers glowed in the light cast out from her room, and its tail hung down below it, way longer than its body. Then, suddenly, Tess remembered the page of the book where she had seen the bird pictured, and even before she noticed that it had only three toes on its right foot, she knew that it was Kevin. She knew that he had learned, in the nick of time, to find for himself the invisible path which lies between what is and what isn't. As he had fallen, burning, that autumn night which was the eve of his birthday, he had made his final, irreversible Switch, and become the only creature, either of this world or not of it, that could survive that raging fire. And when the helicopters had left the following morning, he had appeared again, rising from his own ashes; a beautiful, golden phoenix.

Tess's heart leapt, racing ahead of her into the night skies where she would soon be flying beside her friend. With a silent apology to her parents for breaking her promise, she reached for the latch and pushed open the window.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fict.i.tiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1998 by Kate Thompson.

Cover design by Michel Vrana.

978-1-4804-2420-3.

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media 345 Hudson Street.

New York, NY 10014.

www.openroadmedia.com.

Midnight's Choice.

The Switchers Trilogy, Vol. 2.

Kate Thompson.

CHAPTER ONE.

THE WHITE RAT WATCHED as the two golden birds rose up into the night sky and disappeared from view. A few minutes ago, one of them had been his owner, Tess. Then she had seen the other bird on the tree outside her window, and she had shimmered, changed, and flown away. For a moment or two the rat remained still, staring into the empty darkness in perplexity, then he twitched his whiskers, washed his nose with his paws and jumped back on to his exercise wheel.

As she soared up high above the park, Tess had no thought of what she had left behind her. In her young life, she had used her secret ability to Switch to experience many different forms of animal life, but she had never been a phoenix before. All her attention was absorbed by this new and exhilarating experience, and until she had become comfortable with it, she could think of nothing else.

She followed the other bird faithfully as he rose through the night sky, higher and higher. Each sweep of her golden wings seemed effortless, and propelled her so far that she felt almost weightless. Behind her, the long sweeping tail seemed to have no more substance than the tail of a comet. It was as though the nature of the bird was to rise upwards; gravity had scarcely any power over it at all.

Up and up the two of them flew, not slowing until they had risen well clear of the city's sulphurous halo and into the crisp, cool air beyond. Then the three-toed phoenix began to drift upwards in a more leisurely way and eventually came to a halt. Tess slowed down and began to hover beside her friend, using her wings to tread the air as a swimmer treads water. But when she looked at him, she noticed that he wasn't using his wings. He was merely sitting on the air, floating without any effort at all. With slight apprehension, she followed suit and stilled her wings. It worked. The two of them floated there, weightless as clouds, looking down on the city of Dublin below.

Back in Tess's bedroom, the white rat's wheel was spinning so fast that its bearings were getting hot. He didn't understand what had occurred when Tess had Switched and taken flight but it excited him, and the only way he had of expressing that excitement was in movement. So he ran and ran, the bars of the wheel becoming blurred as they pa.s.sed beneath his racing feet, again and again and again.

A faint breeze moved the curtain and reached the rat's cage. He paused in his stride, then stopped so abruptly that the flying wheel carried him right round inside it three times before it fell to swinging him back and forth and finally came to rest. The white rat was frozen to the spot, every nerve on edge as he strained his senses to understand what that mysterious breeze had brought with it. He waited, and was just about to return to his futile travels when the message came again. There was no mistaking it this time. Somewhere in the city streets, someone or something was sending out a call which Algernon had no power to resist. He hurled himself against the side of the cage, scrabbling with his paws and biting the bars. When this failed he began to dig frantically against the metal floor, throwing food and sawdust and water in all directions in his desperation to escape. But the cage was too well made. The message grew weaker until at last the white rat resigned himself and curled up, exhausted, among the disordered bedding in the corner.

Once Tess had become accustomed to the strange sensation of floating, she turned her attention to her friend. Everything had happened so quickly that she hadn't even greeted him yet; not properly, anyway. There was so much she wanted to know, so much news to catch up on. There was no need for them to recount their adventures in the Arctic when they had fought the dreadful krools; nor was there any need to remember the awful moment when Kevin had Switched just a moment too late and got caught by the flying napalm. The last time she had seen him he had been a small bird, burning, tumbling into the flaming forest below, and there had seemed no possibility of hope.

She could understand the leap of imagination that had enabled him to escape by turning into a phoenix and rising again from his own ashes, but a lot of time had gone by since then and she was impatient to know where he had been and what he had done.

She turned to look at him, but when she caught sight of his golden eyes, all her questions suddenly seemed to be without meaning. Her mind stilled and became peaceful, merging into his in a kind of featureless calm. All at once, Tess felt that she knew all there was to know about the nature of the phoenix. It was ageless, timeless, the essence of all that was pure and beyond the reach of mortal concerns.

Far below, the life of the city continued despite the lateness of the hour. The last buses returned to the station and parked; taxis picked up party-goers and brought them home; lovers stretched the evening on into the small hours, strolling slowly home. Beneath the roofs, nurses worked night-shifts, presses rolled with the morning's newspapers, babies and small children woke and cried, bringing their parents groggily from bed. And still further down, in their own subsystem of homes and highways, hundreds of thousands of city rats were awake and going about their business. From her great height, Tess perceived it all happening. It was her city, her home, and yet she was so detached from it that she might as well have been looking down on an ants' nest. She sank into the ecstasy of the experience and all her cares melted away.

When Tess returned to her bedroom shortly before dawn and resumed her human form, the sense of joyousness remained with her. It was as though all the worries of the last few months had vanished and been replaced by a calm certainty that the future was a.s.sured. The choice of the final form that she would have to take when she reached her fifteenth birthday seemed to have been made for her. Nothing that she had ever been before could compare with the serene, weightless existence of the phoenix, and she could not imagine ever wanting to be anything else. Already she was beginning to miss it.

Although she wasn't particularly tired, Tess got into her pyjamas and s.n.a.t.c.hed a couple of hours' sleep before breakfast. So it wasn't until her father woke her and she began to get into her school uniform that she noticed the state of the white rat's cage. There was always a certain amount of clearing up to be done there in the mornings, but Tess had never seen anything like this before. The water bowl had been knocked over and the floor was a mess of soggy food and sawdust. The top of the chest of drawers where the cage stood and the carpet underneath it were both littered with debris that the rat's scrabbling feet had thrown out, and the shredded paper of his bedding had been pulled out of the nest-box and slung over the wheel like festive streamers.

'What on earth have you been up to, Algernon?' said Tess.

In reply, the white rat hopped into the wheel for a morning stroll, but before he had done two turns the paper strips caught up in the axle and jammed it.

Tess tried to speak to him in the visual language of the rats that she had learnt during her adventures with Kevin.

'Sunflower seeds and shavings all over the place, huh? White rat digging, huh? White rat angry, huh?'

Algernon twitched his nose in bewilderment. Tess finished dressing, then took him out of the cage and put him on the floor while she sorted out the mess.

He was his usual timid self, never straying far from Tess's feet and investigating her school bag with the utmost care, as though something large and aggressive might leap out of it and grab him. By the time she had emptied the contents of the cage into a plastic bag and replaced it with fresh food and bedding, he was standing up against Tess's shoe, sniffing the air above him and longing to get back home.

'Tess!' came her mother's voice from the kitchen.

'I'm coming,' she called back, releasing the wheel from its bearings and starting to unwind the tangled paper. It broke in her fingers every time she tried to pull it clear of the wheel, and looked like taking a lot longer to unravel than she had expected.

'Tess!'

'Yes!'

'Your breakfast is ready!'

'All right, all right, I'm coming!' Irritation was apparent in her voice, and she felt disgusted with herself, aware of how rapidly the righteous mood of a few hours ago had pa.s.sed. She made one more attempt to free the wheel's axle, then threw it down in disgust.

'Cage with no wheel in it,' she said to Algernon in Rat as she picked him up from the floor, a little roughly.

'Huh?' said Algernon. He loved his wheel. Apart from eating and sleeping, it was the only pleasure he had in life. But Tess had one eye on the racing clock and was growing angrier by the minute.

'White rat with no brain,' she said. 'White rat with hairless baby rats in nest.' She shoved him into the cage and closed the door.

'Huh?' he said again. 'Huh?'

Tess ignored him. She tied a knot in the top of the plastic bag and turned her mind to what she was likely to need in school that day. They would be playing camogie: that would mean helmet and hurley ...

'Tess! You're going to be late!'

She ran downstairs and s.n.a.t.c.hed a hasty breakfast, then raced for the bus. As it brought her through the streets of the city she looked up into the sky, hoping to catch a glint of gold; some sign that it hadn't all been a foolish dream. Clouds had gathered since the early hours, and from time to time a ray of sunshine broke through them, but she knew that it had nothing to do with the phoenix.

The phoenix. As she thought about him, and about the time they had spent up there above the city, Tess realised that, although the bird undoubtedly was Kevin, it wasn't the friend she had known. In all their previous adventures together, no matter what form they had taken, they would recognise each other instantly. Rats, goats, dolphins, even mammoths and dragons had not served to disguise the individuality of the person who dwelt within them. But the more Tess thought about it, the harder she found it to identify the Kevin she knew and loved with that lofty, ethereal bird. When she remembered the way it had felt to be with him, the sense of joyous detachment and freedom, she longed to be back there again, away from the smoggy trundling of the traffic and the dreary day ahead. But it was, she realised, because of the delight of the phoenix nature and not because of any sense of companionship. The joy of that experience ought to be sustaining her, but instead it was being nudged aside by doubt. Where was Kevin? Where was all the rest of him, the mischievousness and the moodiness and the flash of anger that came to his eyes? There was no sign of any of those things in the phoenix. It was like some kind of divine being, capable of nothing except existing; just radiating light and goodness.

Her mind wandered and returned to the problem of Algernon and his unusual behaviour. When she remembered how unkind she had been to him, she was sorry. Poor creature. He wasn't very smart, it was true, but he had the sweetest temperament imaginable. He was incapable of an unkind thought. How could she have been so cruel to him?

She closed her eyes and leant her head on the back of the seat. Taking a deep breath, she tried to think herself into the mood of perfect understanding that the form of the phoenix had given her the night before. But the only revelation she received was that she had, after all, forgotten her helmet and her hurley. She was going to be in big trouble.

CHAPTER TWO.

TESS HAD A LOUSY day at school, and not only because she had forgotten her camogie kit. Her mind refused to apply itself to the work in hand, and at every opportunity she sank into euphoric day-dream memories of the previous night. Only when she was ticked off by one of the teachers did she return her attention to the present. Her cla.s.s-mates found her even more strange and dreamy than usual, and one or two of the more cynical ones took the opportunity to tease her.

'Look at Madam Tess with her head in the clouds.'

'Oh. Better than the rest of us, that one. Wouldn't bother trying to communicate with her.'

'You'd need to be on your knees to do that.'

'You'd need a priest.'

'Come on, exalted one, hear us, we pray.'

'Oh, stuff it, will you?' she said at last.

'Stuff it, stuff it. Hear ye, the almighty one has spoken. We must stuff it, one and all.'

Tess moved away, but the harsh laughter continued to ring in her ears long after the other girls had forgotten the incident. She knew that they could never understand what she was going through, but their reaction made her uneasy all the same. Glorious as it was, the phoenix experience seemed to be increasing her sense of loneliness and isolation.

At home that evening, she went straight up to her room. The white rat popped his head out of the nest box where he had been sleeping away a dull day. He looked for his wheel, still bewildered by the change in his circ.u.mstances, then stood up against the bars of the cage, whiskers twitching, pink eyes peering around ineffectually for Tess.

She opened the cage door and lifted him out. He fitted snugly into the crook of her arm as she stroked his sleek coat and apologised to him for her impatience that morning.

'Poor Algernon. It wasn't your fault, was it?' Her mind drifted back to the skies above the city and she turned to the window. It was January and already dark, but she hadn't drawn her curtains yet. Although she could see nothing beyond the black squares of the gla.s.s, she knew that somewhere out there the phoenix was waiting for her. It would be another year before her fifteenth birthday, another year before she had to decide once and for all what form the rest of her life would take. But what was there to say that she couldn't make that decision sooner? Why shouldn't she make it tonight, if she wanted to? She could be free of school and home and all those human concerns that dragged at her existence. She could be out there with her friend and not a worry in the world. Once again the memory of the night before crept back, filling her with that glorious sense of lightness and well-being.

'Tess?'

Tess jumped. Her mother was standing in the doorway. 'Your tea is ready. Are you all right?'

'Yes. Just day-dreaming.'

'Anything wrong?'

'No. Nothing at all.' Tess stood up and slipped Algernon back into his cage, then followed her mother down the stairs.

As soon as she had finished her tea, Tess started on her homework, but when her father came home two hours later she was still struggling with a simple history project, unable to make her wandering mind concentrate. She put it away unfinished and joined her parents for dinner, the one meal of the day when they all sat down together.

The meal seemed to take for ever. Tess pushed her food around the plate and sighed a lot. Her father tried to chivvy the conversation along but it was a thankless task. As soon as she could, Tess made for the peace and quiet of her own room and settled herself to wait; she could do nothing safely until her parents were asleep. She could hear their quiet voices in the room below, and she wondered if they were talking about her, discussing her uncharacteristic loss of appet.i.te or her dreamy mood. She wished, as she had done many times before, that she was not the only child, that she had sisters or brothers to share the responsibility with her.

The night was cold and windy, but Tess opened the window anyway and peered out. The darkness above the park was muddied by the street-lights, whose orange radiance leaked upwards like escaping heat. But beyond it, Tess could just make out a few faint stars appearing and disappearing as heavy clouds moved across the sky. As she watched, it seemed to her that one of them was a little brighter than the others, and golden in colour. She fixed her eyes on it, unsure whether it was drawing closer or whether her imagination was playing tricks. The star seemed to blink and turn. Was it moving? Did it have a tail which streamed out behind it, even a short way?

Tess's concentration was abruptly broken by a loud scratching noise from Algernon's cage. She turned and saw him trying to burrow into the corner where his wheel had been, throwing sawdust all over the cage and out through the bars.

'Poor old Algernon,' said Tess and then, in Rat, 'Wheel, huh?'

Algernon made no reply, but turned his attention to another corner of the cage and continued to scrabble away desperately. It was uncharacteristic behaviour, and it worried Tess. She picked up the wheel and began again to unravel the wound-up paper from around the axle. She had done most of the work that morning, and it didn't take long to free it and clear the last few shreds which were draped between the bars.

'Here you go, Algie. Is this what you want?' Tess opened the hatch in the top of the cage and reached in with the wheel in her hand. Before she could react, before she could even blink, Algernon had run up the bars of the cage, out through the hatch, and down Tess's legs to the floor. Tess stared at him in amazement. She had never seen him behave like that before. Something must have happened to him. His timidity was gone, and instead of b.u.mbling round short-sightedly he was scuttling into the corners of the room and scratching at the carpet with his claws.

Quickly, Tess refitted the wheel and checked that it was spinning freely. Then she tidied up the floor of the cage, picked the stray shavings out of the food-bowl, and replaced the dirty water with fresh from the tap.