The Predator by K. A. Applegate Read Free Book Online

lobster … and I’m probably forgetting a few. Gorilla was fun. Dolphin was fun. Osprey was fun. Ant? Not fun. Basically, bugs are a bad idea.”
    Jake shrugged. “I was a flea. That was no big thing.” He grinned like he’d made the world’s funniest joke. “Seriously, it was like nothing. I couldn’t see anything. I could barely hear anything, just vibrations. All I knew was I liked warm bodies, and whenever I got hungry I just poked a hole in some warm skin.”
    “And sucked blood.”
    He looked a little uncomfortable. “Well, it was Rachel’s blood. Kind of. I mean, okay, it was cat blood, but Rachel was morphing the cat.”
    “Jake? Do you ever listen to yourself?”
    “I try not to think about it,” he admitted. “But look, we want to try and give Ax a chance to gethome. And if he stays here he’s a danger to us. We’ve got this big Anda —” He looked around to make sure no one could hear, and lowered his voice. “We have this big Andalite running around Cassie’s farm. What if someone sees him? Any Controller is going to know what he is. And they’re going to wonder why he’s on Cassie’s land.”
    I nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. But I almost died the other day. I was almost boiled alive. I know you’re the big hero type, Jake, but I’m not.”
    I grabbed my book out of the locker, slammed the door, and headed down the hall. Jake kept pace.
    “You know what next Sunday is?” I asked him suddenly. I hadn’t planned to say anything.
    “Sunday? I don’t know. What?”
    “Two years, to the day. Two years since my mom died. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know whether I should talk to my dad about it, or just let it pass. But I know one thing—this would be a really bad week for me to turn up dead.”
    I kept walking. He didn’t follow me.
    Two years.
    She’d taken the boat out of the marina. She’d sailed it out into a rough sea. No one knew why. She’d never done it before. We’d always gone out together, the three of us.
    That night, after the high winds had blown past,
    they found the boat driven up onto the rocks. The hull was shattered. There was no sign of my mother, except for a frayed safety rope.
    They never found her body. The Coast Guard guys said that was not unusual. The ocean is a big place.
    So is space,
a voice in my head said.
    Somewhere, very, very far away, a mother and father wondered what had become of their children.
    For a long time, I made up stories about how my mom had survived. Maybe on a desert island or something. But I’m a realistic person, I guess. After a while I accepted it.
    And after a while, Ax’s parents would accept that he and his brother, Prince Elfangor, would not be returning. That they had been lost forever in space.
    Lost fighting to protect Earth. To help the human race.
    To help me.
    I spotted Cassie up ahead, walking with some of her friends. She smiled vaguely when she saw me. We were supposed to kind of ignore each other in school, so no one ever figured out that Jake and Cassie and Rachel and I were hanging out a lot.
    As I brushed past her I muttered, “Tell Jake I’ll do it.”
    Sometimes I really hate having a conscience.

CHAPTER 11
    I wonder why these people moved?” Cassie said.
    “Maybe they didn’t like living next door to a Controller who is part of a conspiracy to take over the world,” I said. “Or else maybe they just don’t like assistant principals. I could understand that.”
    We were standing in the backyard of the house next to Chapman’s. It was empty. There was a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. It did make you kind of wonder why these people had decided to move. Not that Chapman ever acted strange. That’s the big problem with Controllers—you can never tell who is or who isn’t.
    “It’s convenient for us, anyway,” Jake said.
    It was night. The moon was high and full and bright, so we were hiding beneath a tree. There was a high wooden fence between us and Chapman’s.
    Ax was