Trickster s Girl - By Hilari Bell Page 0,12

who really had almost drowned. Living color flooded his face, and the last of the silver sheen vanished.

"Jehoshaphat! You almost killed me!"

Kelsa's mind began to function, and she realized that the terrible transformation had taken only a handful of seconds. Even as she watched, the bruises on his temple faded and the cut healed - but the blood was still on his skin. Kelsa reached out and touched it. His skull was firm; his flesh held only the normal cold of someone who'd been swimming in a freezing river. His clothing had not magically reappeared with his human form, but Kelsa was too shocked by the rest of it to care.

"Could I have killed you?" Her voice was too calm. She should have been screaming. Part of her was screaming, but either she was crazy, or she had to accept the evidence of her eyes.

She didn't think she was crazy.

He coughed again before he answered. "Yes, you could have killed me. Transformation takes time, and I have to be conscious to do it. I can be killed. I can be hurt too!"

He rubbed his temple and glared at her, and for some reason the simple human irritation in his expression brought the world back into focus. The sun was warm on her back, birds twittered in the brush, and Raven had no clothes on. She tried to keep her eyes on his face, but they crept down anyway. He looked human.

Kelsa yanked her gaze up again and handed him his shirt. Her cheeks were hot.

"I didn't mean to kill you. Though you probably deserved to get hurt. But now..."

She took a deep breath. If she was crazy she was crazy. She might as well go with it.

"...I'm ready to listen."
CHAPTER 3
"YOU WANT ME TO ROB a museum?" Kelsa asked incredulously. "No way!"

Raven had put on the cotton shirt she'd retrieved and the rain pants Kelsa kept in her hiking pack. The combination looked a bit odd, but not enough to draw the attention of passing hikers to the shade of the tree where they'd settled. Because, Raven said, it was likely to be a long discussion.

It was going to be shorter than he thought if he didn't say something more sensible than that.

"It's not really robbery," he told her. "They don't even know - "

"Is the museum going to be locked?" Kelsa demanded.

"Well, yes. But I can take care of that."

"Are we taking something without permission, and with no intention of returning it?"

"Yes, but they won't care - "

"Then it's robbery. And no way."

The dark eyes met hers directly. "Not even to stop the tree plague?"

"There's no excuse ... The tree plague?"

It had begun over two years ago, when a small group of terrorists had released a mutating bacterium into the South American rain forest, promising to provide the antidote when their demands were met.

Given the importance of the rain forest to the planet's slowly recovering ecosystem, the authorities had taken them seriously: they'd captured the terrorists' compound and all their scientists' notes, along with the scientists themselves, and offered them a chance of parole - someday, maybe - if they produced the antidote right now. And the terrorists had. But it hadn't worked.

"Only about a third of the trees have been affected, outside of the initial kill zone," Kelsa told him. "And it was just detected in Mexican forests a few months ago. They still think some trees will develop natural defenses and fight it off. And every botanist on the planet is looking for a cure."

"Only a third of the trees in the Amazon rain forest have died," Raven corrected. "They're all infected. And they're not fighting it off, and no one's going to find a cure, because the real source of the problem isn't that vicious little bacterium at all."

Because of her father's interest in the tree plague, Kelsa knew more about it than most, and she'd heard nothing of this. "Then what is the source of the problem?"

The dappled sunlight leaking through the pine boughs cast irregular patches of light over Raven's face and hair. "Magic."

"That's ridiculous!"

He said nothing, but a not entirely suppressed smile tipped up one side of his mouth.

Kelsa had seen him change from a fish into a man. Seen it. In a place and from a distance that left no possibility that it had been faked. Still...

"That's crazy! It was started by bioterrorists!"

"Oh, the bacterium's exactly what you think it is," the dark-haired boy told her. "But the reason the trees aren't