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and amazing wildflowers—but each stood as a tiny and unique monument to nature. These were primarily for the benefit of the bees, but Grandpa Crawford occasionally brought some around the countryside to sell to local flower shops.
    After the flowers came grazing pastures, with horses on one side of the road and sheep on the other. Jennifer didn’t enjoy riding horses but had to admit her grandfather picked, bred, and raised some amazing animals. There were two or three that she particularly liked: black Arabians with faint white markings on the hooves.
    The sheep, on the other hand, were too numerous and short-lived for her to bother with—hundreds of them, left to roam largely free over the gently sloping hills.
    A brief band of untended grassland lay between the pastures and the modest forest that surrounded both the lake and Grandpa Crawford’s cabin. Bur oak, black walnut, red maple, and Norway spruce trees clustered together at the edges, and then gave way to a small open meadow to the north. Set at the back of this meadow, on the edge of the broad lake beyond, stood the cabin.
    They called it the “cabin,” but it was much larger than any ordinary cabin, with room for at least a dozen guests. It was enormous. Grandpa Crawford had built the place himself, forty years ago, with additions every ten years. The first story of the cabin was lined with stone and covered nearly four acres, for every building was attached—garage, toolshed, supply house, even the barn. The wooden upper-story of the living quarters had a smaller footprint, and was pushed northward toward the lake.
    Jennifer stared out the window at these landmarks for some time before she realized she was seeing them in the dark, in color, with crystal clarity.
Night vision—like a monster
. Her surroundings were so familiar, yet so completely different when seen through these eyes.
    Her mother turned the minivan off of the driveway and drove carefully around the east end of the cabin until they could see the north side. The entrance to the barn was already open, and they drove right in. Jennifer recalled the layout of the house, and how she always thought it odd that everything was attached to each other with big swinging doors. The far end of the barn would lead into a large mudroom, and then into the kitchen, and then into a massive sitting room. The sitting room faced north through double-wide sliding doors onto a patio, and a short-cropped lawn, and the lake beyond.
    It made perfect sense now, she thought as her mother stopped the car and got out, that Grandpa Crawford would have such a large living area, with such an entry. She could tell already that normal-sized rooms, normal-sized doors, and normal-sized porches just weren’t an option for the next few days.
    Elizabeth lifted the minivan’s back door and waited.
    Jennifer stared back. “What?”
    “You need to get out now, unless you want to spend the entire week in the back of the van.”
    “Right…” Jennifer looked warily at her legs. She had no idea how to do this. She measured her mother, up and down. “I don’t suppose you could carry me again?”
    “You’re about a hundred pounds heavier than you were two hours ago,” her mother estimated. “Not exactly portable. Thought about going on a diet?”
    “What a perfect time for fat jokes, Mother. After all, I just turned fourteen and morphed into a gigantic iguana.”
    “Actually,” Jonathan called out from the far end of the barn, where he was working a claw into a deep groove beneath the frame of the double doors, “more eagle than iguana. Like dinosaurs, we weredragons have more in common genetically with birds than with reptiles. Your mother’s actually done some research into this. As you develop your more raptorlike capabilities, you’ll see what I mean…”
    “And my father’s first words come in the form of a biology lecture.” Jennifer groaned. “I can see that I may have changed, but you two are as clueless as