1
TAILSPIN
As a general rule, Simon Thorn didn’t brag.
He didn’t like it when other people bragged, and he figured they wouldn’t like it much if he tried, too. Besides, he usually didn’t have much to brag about. He was an average twelve-year-old with average grades and average looks, except for his shorter than average height. He didn’t stand out in a crowd, at least not for the right reasons—he had faced a greater than average number of bullies and thought there must have been some reason they picked on him, even if he wasn’t sure what it was.
But as he flew a hundred feet above Central Park, the wings of a golden eagle stretched out on either side of his feathered body, he suddenly had something to brag about after all.
A red-tailed hawk clawed through the air nearly fifty feet behind him, struggling to keep itself in the sky. It was failing miserably, and anyone watching would have thought it was the hawk’s first time flying. As it happened, it had flown at least three other times before, but had yet to get the hang of it. Simon had mostly managed the first time he’d flown, and considering the hawk had dragged Simon out of his warm bed so they could see the fresh blanket of snow that had fallen overnight, he was feeling decidedly smug about the whole thing right now.
“Simon, slow down! You’re flying too fast!” shouted the hawk.
“And you’re trying too hard,” called Simon as he swooped over to it. “You don’t have to flap your wings all the time. Just let the wind carry you and your instincts take over.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve been flying for months,” grumbled the wobbling hawk. It dipped suddenly, and Simon could hear its frightened gasp. It would have been funny if Simon weren’t worried the hawk would crash into the frozen ground below.
“We should take a break,” said Simon. “See that tree down there? The tall one?”
“There are dozens of trees down there.”
“Just follow my lead.” Simon slowed so the hawk would be able to keep up, and he flew to a low branch, his wings fanning out to stop the rest of his body as his talons caught the icy wood.
The hawk wasn’t so lucky. It didn’t even make contact with the branch. Instead, as Simon watched helplessly, it plowed head-on into a snowbank below.
“Nolan!” Simon immediately flew to the hole the bird had created, his pulse racing as thoughts of the worst ran through his head. “Nolan, are you—”
A boy with blue eyes identical to Simon’s stuck his head out of the snow, sputtering. “That was awesome.”
Simon let out a curse that would have made their uncle Malcolm thwap him over the head. Shifting into his human form, he slumped backward against the frozen ground, his arms stretched out on either side of him like they were still the wings of a golden eagle. “I thought you were dead.”
“Nah, can’t kill me that easily.” His twin brother brushed the snow from his light brown hair, which had been trimmed last weekend. That haircut was the only difference between the two boys: Simon’s hair, also light brown, was shaggy after months of not seeing the sharp end of a pair of scissors. Malcolm had tried at first, but after Simon had refused three times in a row, he’d stopped pushing.
Simon sighed. The pink sky was beginning to brighten to gold as the sun rose over the Manhattan skyline. “We need to get back before the pack starts to howl.”
“We have plenty of time,” said Nolan, and he stood, rolling his shoulders in a stretch. “I want to fly some more.”
“You want to crash some more, you mean,” said Simon. “You need to learn how to land first. There won’t always be a pile of snow to soften your—Nolan!”
His brother had already begun to shift. His thin body shrank, and brown feathers sprouted from his skin and clothing as his arms turned into wings and his feet curled into yellow talons. In the space of a heartbeat, his human brother turned into a golden eagle, the same form Simon had taken earlier.
“Race you!” chirped the eagle, and before Simon could argue, he clumsily took off from the snow, teetering and unstable as he flapped his giant wings.
Frantically Simon looked around, hoping no one was close enough to see what had happened. Two boys appearing from the snow was one thing, but a boy turning into a bird wasn’t as easily explained. Most of the people in New York City were normal humans, but Simon and his brother were Animalgams—a secret group of people born with the ability to shift into an animal. While the city wasn’t exactly the most obvious place for them to live, it was the location of the most prestigious Animalgam academy in the country: the Leading Animalgam Institute for the Remarkable, or the L.A.I.R., which was hidden beneath the Central Park Zoo. Predators from all five kingdoms attended, and while they learned about history, zoology, and how to fight in their Animalgam form, they also learned about the laws of their world. And the most important was to make sure no human ever found out about them. If anyone had spotted Nolan shift, both boys would be in a world of trouble.
The few people who populated the park this early weren’t anywhere near them, though, and Simon thanked his lucky stars. Shifting back into a golden eagle, he caught a frigid breeze, climbing into the sky until he caught up to his brother.
“Where are you going?” he called. They were headed straight for the Central Park Zoo, where he could make out several gray wolves prowling the empty pathways, but they were too high to land safely.
“Where do you think?” Nolan let out a peal of laughter and flew even higher, dangerously unsteady in the headwind. Simon could barely breathe as his brother flew over the edge of the park, away from any soft landings. Instead he soared toward a skyscraper a few blocks away. A glass-domed roof reflected the rays of the early-morning sun, and Simon’s heart plummeted.
Sky Tower.
“Nolan, no,” he shouted, but his cries were lost to the wind. His brother stretched out his talons and miraculously managed to grasp on to the edge of the roof, where he swayed for one terrifying moment before finally gaining his balance.
“See? I’m getting it,” said Nolan proudly, walking toward the slope of the dome. Simon landed beside him, skidding on the icy glass.
“We can’t be here,” he panted, his eagle head twisting as a lump of fear rose in his throat. “Orion—”
“Orion isn’t here.” Nolan ruffled his feathers, but at least he had the good sense not to turn back into a human. Not when they were forty stories above the pavement. “And if he were, I’d kill him.”
Simon shifted his weight nervously. Orion was the lord of the bird kingdom and, unfortunately, their maternal grandfather. Despite this familial connection, he had once thrown Simon off the roof of Sky Tower, and while Simon had managed to shift for the very first time midair, saving his life in the process, that wasn’t the only awful thing that had happened on that roof.
For most of Simon’s life, he had been raised in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, right across from Central Park, by his uncle Darryl. Darryl had been an Animalgam, too—a huge gray wolf—which Simon had only discovered when his mother was kidnapped by an army of rats, and Simon had been forced to run away to the Central Park Zoo to try to find her.
Ultimately his search had brought him here: to the roof of Sky Tower, where Orion had murdered Darryl in front of Simon. As he perched there shaking in the freezing wind, he could see the exact spot where his uncle had died. Almost four months of rain and snow had washed away any trace of blood, but Simon could still imagine his uncle’s lifeless body.