Read The Visitor for Free Online Page A

“Rabies.”
    “Wonderful,” I muttered. “Just one more fun aspect of this night.” Actually, I was glad for the warning. The mouse was squirming in terror, trying to get away. I could feel its tiny little mouse legs scrabbling against my palms.
    “You should all get rabies shots,” Cassie said. “Seriously. I already have mine. But if we’re going to be handling wild animals … In the meantime, be careful to keep his teeth away from you.”
    “I wasn’t planning on feeding him my finger,” I said.
    “Hey, wait.” Cassie pried open my hands to get a better look. “That’s not a mouse. That’s a shrew. See the eyes? They’re too small. And the tail is wrong. That’s not a baby mouse, Tobias, it’s a full-grown shrew.”
    
    Cassie shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know it isn’t a mouse.”
    “Wait a minute,” Marco said, beginning to grin. “Rachel is going to become a
shrew?
How will we know when she’s changed? How do you
become
what you already are?”
    Everyone was too nervous to find the joke very funny. We felt kind of stupid, standing around on some stranger’s lawn playing with rodents. I mean,there are times when the whole thing just seems so utterly insane, you know?
    “Okay, I have to concentrate on acquiring, so everyone shut up,” I said.
    Acquiring
is what we call it when we absorb a sample of the animal’s DNA. The DNA is the stuff inside the cells that sort of serves like a how-to manual for making the animal.
    When you acquire, you have to think hard about the animal, focusing on it and blocking everything else out. Then the animal kind of goes limp, like it’s in a trance. It takes just about a minute.
    It was easy to focus on the shrew, what with it squealing in terror and squirming to get out of my hand. But it was gross, definitely gross. I know there’s nothing really wrong with shrews, but still. They freak me out a little.
    When I was done, I opened my eyes. “Okay, little shrew, thanks for your help. You can go now.”
    “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Jake said doubtfully.
    “Really?” Marco was sarcastic. “You’re not sure it’s a good idea for Rachel to turn into a shrew in order to lure a vicious cat down from a tree so she can morph into that cat and sneak into the assistant principal’s house? What worries you about that plan?”
    Cassie looked worried, too. “You know, Rachel, usually a cat will play with a mouse a little bit. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they go right for the neck bite. The mouse — or the shrew—dies instantly.”
     Tobias said.
    He “said” it so only I could hear. I could tell, because nobody else reacted.
    I looked up at Tobias and winked. I knew he would see it. I rubbed my hands together. “Okay, let’s do this.”
    I concentrated once more on the shrew. The shrew was now a part of me. I don’t know how it works, but it does. Somehow, thanks to the Andalite technology, the DNA of that shrew was stored away inside me. It was like having a map to guide me as I transformed. Not that I had a clue how I was able to do it.
    The first sensation was of shrinking. It’s a long, long trip down from being five feet tall to being less than an inch tall. It’s like falling. Except that you can feel the ground under your feet the whole time.
    One minute I was looking Jake and Marco and Cassie in the face. The next minute their faces seemed to be zooming high up above me. I was falling downthe length of their bodies. It was like they were huge skyscrapers and I had jumped off the roof or something.
    My outer clothing fell around me like a big, collapsing circus tent.
    There was a slight grinding noise as my backbone collapsed into a size smaller than my little finger. There was the disturbing, not-quite-pain sensation that goes along with some morphs. Like you knew it should hurt, but it didn’t