Fireweed

Five

Trigger warning- This chapter contains some mature language and depictions of violence.

The first day Lilly met Colle was the last day she ever saw her parents.

It was a deceptively beautiful day in the heart of spring.  Lilly, eight years old at the time, collapsed under the cherry tree in her yard, panting and giggling.  She and her sister, Rosalinda, had just outran a rather large bee.  Not that it had actually been chasing them.  It had only flown in their general direction on the way to the next flower.  But Lilly had screamed and bolted with little Rosie following suit.

Rose was only three years old, but she was fast.  She had been right at Lilly's heels the entire time.  She might have even been able to outrun her if she hadn't been trying to follow.  Unlike Lilly and Cynthia, Rosalinda hadn't inherited their grandmother's reversed veil.  She had a base form with feline attributes, just like any other tiger animorphite.  Her hair, a deep black like Lilly's, had traces of electric blue highlighting it, and her feline eyes were the same color.  She had the blue and purple ears and tail of a tiger, and she had little claws on her fingers.  Even as a cub, her muscles were toned, her body several times stronger than a human child her age.

When Lilly dropped down under the tree, she only had about two seconds before Rose launched herself into her arms.  The two girls squealed and clung to each other.

"I've never been so scared," Lilly said, a trill of excitement in her voice.  "Ever."

"Me either," said Rose, grinning up at her sister. 

"We have a war story now.  No one will ever believe us."

Not that there was anyone to tell.  Cynthia and Eli, their mother and father, had pulled Lilly out of the small one-room school in town the previous year.  School was very affordable in Willow Creek, but with their ever rising rent, nothing was affordable for the Thompsons.  Cynthia had been homeschooling her, and Lilly had been thrilled.  It wasn't that she disliked school.   Lilly loved learning.  It was the other students that made her so eager to leave.  None of them liked her, and she couldn't understand why.  Everything she did--from answering Miss Sarah's questions to tapping her fingers on her desk--was met with ridicule and rolled eyes, scoffs and hateful laughs.

The only one who wasn't mean to her was Miss Sarah's daughter, Rachel, a pretty green-eyed girl with light brown hair and ears that came to a point.  She and Miss Sarah were wood nymphs, a race known to be kind and easygoing.  Rachel certainly fit this description, but she could be loud and mean if she had to be, like when she saw someone being mean to Lilly.  Every time Rachel spoke up for her, Lilly was struck with an irrepressible grin for the rest of the day.  But she and Rachel never played together.  Not anymore, anyway.  They weren't allowed.  

There had been an incident a few years ago when Lilly was five and Rachel was seven.  Lilly wasn't sure how it happened, but she knew it was somehow her fault.  She and Rachel had been playing in the front yard while Cynthia and Miss Sarah--the dearest of friends back then--watched them from the porch.  Rachel had been making big purple blossoms pop up in the clover patch by the well.  Lilly, excited by her friend's power, grabbed Rachel's arm.  And in the next second, Rachel was face-down in the clover patch.

Lilly had felt a surge ripple through her body that left her dizzy and stumbling backward until she fell flat on her back, staring up at the cloudless sky.  Several moments later, she had been pulled from her daze by the sound of her mother screaming.  Not out of concern or fear, but rage.  Cynthia was such a soft-spoken, affectionate mother, that Lilly didn't even know what a yell was supposed to sound like coming from her.  She turned a wide-eyed gaze in her mother's direction, too afraid of getting in trouble to get up.