Maximum Ride Forever (6 page)

ANGEL’S EYES WIDENED. “That’s not allowed.”

“What?” I said, still reeling from Iggy’s attack. “You mean because the flock isn’t supposed to ever break up again?”

“No, not because of that,” Angel said, and grabbed Fang’s arm. “I said he has to leave. Every second you stay here, you’re a bigger threat to the world’s survival.”

Fang shook his head. “I love you, Ange, and I get that you’re still sore about this Save the World crusade. But news flash: We lost.” He kicked a warped can across the room, and the clang echoed in the small space. “The world already ended, and I sure didn’t have anything to do with it.”

I felt a pang. Fang could separate himself from it—no one had told
him
he could stop it—but my conscience still said
my fault, my fault, my fault
.

“You’re a threat to Max, too,” Angel continued in her patient parent voice. “We each have a role. I’m supposed to lead…”

“And I’m supposed to die, right?” I felt how tense Fang was next to me, how the air itself seemed to pulse. “Are we back to this again?”

Angel shrugged her slight shoulders, but her gaze never wavered. “You can’t continue being selfish, Fang,” she said, and his eyes hardened.

“Angel, come on,” I cut in. “I think we’ve all had enough right now.”

But Fang held up his hand. “No, it’s fine. Doesn’t faze me anymore. She’s been saying this for, what, two years? At first it was kind of spooky, but at this point, she’s just the girl who cried wolf. And as for her leading…” He stared down at her, meeting her eyes with a look of pity. “That only seems to happen when you weasel your way into people’s heads and make their decisions for them, doesn’t it, sweetie? No one
wants
to follow you, Angel.”

He let that hang in the air for a second. Angel glanced at Gazzy, and her brother wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Angel’s nostrils flared, but she held her composure. “I know you can’t understand. I’ve had to make sacrifices. To spare you all the burden—”

“Sacrifices.” Fang nodded, pursing his lips. “Seeing the future and doing nothing. Not a word until the freaking sky actually caught on fire.
Sacrificing
all those innocent lives. You’re a real martyr, aren’t you?”

“You think I want this?” she shrieked, her eyes brimming with tears. “I tried to warn you. I tried to prepare you. But I guess I’ll have to show you!”

Her eyes turned a milky white, and I sucked in a breath. We all looked alarmed as Fang’s expression started to change. He stared straight ahead at Angel, but it was like he was watching a movie. I saw the sweat pricking above his lip, the color draining from his face.

Suddenly the pressure changed in the room, pressing agonizingly in on my skull, making my eardrums pop. Fang’s nose started to bleed. Nudge, Iggy, and Gazzy each sank to their knees, holding their heads and moaning.

“Angel, stop it now! That’s enough!” I shouted.

Fang jerked his head sharply from side to side, winced painfully, and then collapsed.

I sank to my knees next to him, pinching his nose to stop the blood. He didn’t seem to see me. His eyes were haunted, and he was muttering. When I took his hand in mine, I felt it trembling.

“What did you do?” I demanded. “What did you do to him?”

When I looked up at Angel, her white wings seemed to fill the room, and despite her young face, her expression seemed as old as time. She wasn’t a little kid at all. Maybe she never had been.

“I showed him the truth,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, Fang, but you can’t change it.
It’s your fate.
”

“FANG!” I SHOUTED, trudging along the path he’d cut through the high brown grass sloping up behind the cottage. “Fang, answer me!”

I found him farther up the hill in a clearing hidden by brambles and dead-looking eucalyptus. He held a thick branch with both hands like a baseball bat and was hitting one of the trees again and again.

I leaned against another tree, studying him. His expression was as unreadable as ever, but his flushed skin suggested the fury boiling just beneath the surface. “Are you really going to let Angel do this to you?” I said after a few seconds.

In response, Fang continued swinging. Strips of bleached bark fluttered to the ground each time he
connected with the tree, the
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
echoing against the hollow trunk. When his makeshift club broke in half, Fang’s face went as still and closed as marble.

“Hey!” I protested as he started smashing what was left of the stick against the ground. I grabbed his arms from behind, pulling against the momentum of straining muscles. “Come on, stop it.”

He finally chucked the stick and whirled around. “Angel’s right,” he choked. His eyes were haunted, his pupils still dilated. “I’m a danger to you and everyone. It’s the reason I left before, and I never should have come back.”

“What?” I said, gaping at him in disbelief. “What on earth did Angel tell you?”

Angrily he shook his head.

“Fang, this is me! We can tell each other everything!”
Can’t we?

I waited and after a full minute realized he
wasn’t going to tell me
. He actually was not going to let me know what Angel had showed him. I gave him another minute to apologize and realize what a douchebag he was being.

“She’s right,” he repeated instead. “I can’t be a coward. I can’t put everyone I care about at risk.”

Underneath the distress on his face, I saw the rational, calculating Fang I’d always known, and that’s when I started to get scared.

He was serious.

“So, what?” I said scathingly, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “You’re just going to run? You think that’s less cowardly?”

“Not run.” Fang’s jaw was set with conviction. “I’m going to do whatever I can with the time I have left to figure out what happened, to find out who’s responsible, to stop this thing. I’ll go to California, find some of those cleanup crews…”

“You mean you’ll go to California to meet up with BikiniBimbo456, or whatever her name was,” I spat.

It was petty, I admit, but give me a pass, okay? I was feeling pretty bitter at that moment.

“You know that’s not it.” He walked over to me and tried to take my hands. When I crossed my arms, he settled for lifting my chin so I was forced to look at him. “You know you’re it for me. The only one. The forever one.”

I wasn’t willing to budge yet, though those were the most amazing words I’d ever heard from him. “Am I?”

Fang sighed. “Maximum Ride, you’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met, and sometimes it seems like your sole purpose in life is to make mine harder, but I swear, I love you more than I thought I could love anyone or anything.”

“Then stay,” I whispered, clenching my eyes shut just as they started to well up.

I felt Fang’s hands on the sides of my face, his thumbs wiping away my tears. I felt the heat coming off his body, heard the catch of his breath. And when our lips finally
came together, our kisses were urgent, our bodies hungry. As he moved his hands through my tangled hair, I looked up at him. Inhaled. And said, “Yes.”

We sank to the ground, the dried leaves crinkling under us, and time fell away for a while.

I couldn’t tell if our voices rose in pleasure or pain, couldn’t tell if my heart was breaking or bursting open with joy. I only knew I didn’t want to pull away from him for a single second, and it was only when we both gasped for a breath that I realized Fang’s eyes were squeezed shut and his lashes were wet.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered hoarsely. It was the most vulnerable I’d ever seen him.

“It’s okay.” I pulled him closer, cradling his head tenderly. When he kissed me again, I tasted the salt on his lips, but I still found it sweet. “It’s going to be all right.”

FANG AWOKE WITH a start, shivering violently. His shirt was soaked with sweat, clammy against his skin, but the air had grown chillier overnight, and the ground beneath him felt like a block of ice.

He stared out between the brambles at the ash covering the hills like a strange dark snowfall—quiet and eerily beautiful. He concentrated on slowing his breath, trying to shake the vision that had echoed in his dreams, waking him up every hour.

Angel had put it there, playing on a loop, and the fall was like a punch to the gut each time. It was cruel, but he understood why she had done it: He never would have left Max otherwise.

Not ever.

Fang felt her next to him on the bed of dried leaves, and was so relieved in that moment that his breath left his chest in a long, aching sigh. His body curled around Max in a spoon, the way they slept every night. In sleep, her mouth was open like she was about to say something—to ask him again not to go—and he wanted so badly to tighten his arms around her, to kiss her chapped lips one more time.

That longing was the sharpest, most acute pain he’d ever felt, and he had to bite his tongue until it bled to keep himself in check—he could not wake her.

Instead, Fang wound a strand of Max’s tangled hair around his fingers, breathing it in, saying good-bye. But it didn’t smell like Max anymore. It, like everything else in his world, smelled like ash.

Carefully he rolled away from her, picked his way through the brambles, and crept past the sleeping house, as silent as only he knew how to be.

He wasn’t sure if dawn had broken or not—ash blotted out the sun. Fang spread out his large black wings to their full span. He stretched the muscles, felt the power there. How could they fail him? He wasn’t sure—Angel hadn’t shown him that part.

So this was what it felt like. To be told you had terminal cancer. To be given a death sentence by a stone-faced judge. To know the plane was going down.

He couldn’t see his life as it had been, or the things he still needed to do. All he could focus on was that ground, coming up to meet him. Fast.

Fang doubled over as the vomit rose in his throat.

He staggered to a puddle of water, and his reflection shook him even more. His olive skin was ashen, his cheekbones sharper than ever. Fang had always excelled at being a shadow. Was he now becoming a ghost?

His hand smashed through the image as he splashed the polluted water on his face. Then he stood up and kicked ash over his vomit, disgusted with himself. The awful canned pasta they’d found in the cabin had been the best meal he’d had in weeks, and he couldn’t even keep it down.

Fang ran his fingers through his mop of wet hair and blew out a long breath. He was better than this. He had to be. He had to accept certain things as fact, now.

If he loved Max, he had to let her go.

He was going to die.

Okay.

Fang wasn’t going to cower from it—that wasn’t his style—but he wasn’t just going to wait for death, either. Instead of trying to shake the vision Angel had shown him, he began to focus on understanding it.

“This is your fate.”

In his mind’s eye, he saw the flakes gathering in his hair. He could feel them on his face, melting on his eyelashes. It wasn’t ash, like he’d first thought; it was snow. Angel hadn’t told him when this horrible
thing
would happen, but it was close to the end of May now, which meant winter was over in the Northern Hemisphere, where he was headed.

Maybe he had another year to live. Maybe he had several. Maybe he even had enough time to catch this Remedy maniac.

He’d start with the H-men, like his gut had first told him to. He’d start with California.

FANG FELT THE heaviness in his body as he flew away from the cabin and tried to focus on his breathing. It was impossible to shake the sense that each wing stroke carried him closer to his end, but he was determined to hold back his panic.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Keep going.

But when he inhaled deeply, he smelled something strange. The air carried smoke from the ash cloud and salt from the distant ocean, but there was something else, too—something sour and stinking.

Like death itself.

Fang dropped low over leafless trees and abandoned houses, scanning the valley for what he expected would be another mass grave.

Instead of the stillness of death, though, he detected movement. Even from above, he instantly recognized the hulking backs and long, thick necks hanging low.

Cryenas.

And they were swarming toward the small cabin he’d just left.

Fang wrenched his right wing downward sharply, starting to make a U-turn to warn the flock, but then paused. He hovered over the slinking shapes, considering.

Two, four… only ten of them.
Fang chuckled darkly. Ten to one wasn’t exactly stellar odds, but he would deal with these monsters himself. It would be his parting gift to the flock.

After all, it wasn’t like the Cryenas were going to
kill him
. Not unless Angel was very wrong.

Fang brought his knees to his chest and then kicked sharply up at the sky, surrendering to his bird instincts. His wings folded tight against his back, his hands cut downward as he gained speed, and he zeroed in on his prey with calm precision as the ground rushed toward him.

The second before he smashed into the earth, Fang pulled up his head and grinned. “Gotcha.”

With all the momentum of his dive, he plowed into the leader of the pack, sending it knocking into the other Cryenas like a perfectly spun bowling ball.

It was almost cartoonish the way the stunned creatures were flung outward on impact, and Fang might’ve laughed, but he was pinned under one of them, and his mouth was full of dirt.

Fang reached his arms around the Cryena that was crushing him. The hairless skin moved over powerful muscles as the animal squirmed in his grasp, and Fang was disgusted to feel rough, scabby sores beneath his fingers. He hurled the creature off him and jumped to his feet.

The other Cryenas were already moving in on him now. Their tongues hung out of their mouths, already salivating as they started to circle him, herding him. Up close, the foul smell was overwhelming.

“You guys reek.” Fang hid his nose in the crook of his arm.

These Cryenas were in much rougher shape than the ones they’d seen in Sydney. Some of their spots seemed to be actually melting off, and their skin looked thin and grayish, almost as if they were rotting from the inside out.

Fang knew he’d have a much better shot striking from above, so he shook out his wings and leaped into the air, taunting his pursuers as he zigzagged just above their heads. They loped around him, trotting closer and moving away.

“Come on, you cowards!”

Each time he struck one on its humped back or flat head, four more would hurl themselves at him, nipping at him and whining as Fang rose again.

Blood was seeping from a dozen bites on his legs, but there was freedom in the pain. It meant he was still alive, still feeling, and he felt invincible.

Whatever they did to him, however hard they fought, in the end, he would win.

Then one jumped higher than the rest, and Fang stifled a scream as the skin on his left forearm was torn away. The pain was shocking, stunning, and as Fang dipped for just a moment, they pulled him down.

Their target felled, pack mentality kicked in, and the Cryenas swarmed all at once. Claws dug at his chest, teeth sank into his shoulder, and wet muzzles nuzzled in, ready to feast on his insides. The weight of all the bodies pushed in and in and in on him, and Fang would have gagged from the smell if his chest wasn’t being crushed.

You will not die today
, Fang repeated to himself.
Angel showed you where you would die, and it’s far from here. A world away from Max.

A tense grunt escaped him at the thought, and all the hurt and frustration and bitterness he felt rushed to the surface. Just
knowing
his fate was more painful than the most gruesome death he could imagine.

Maybe he should let these monsters just kill him now.

But then a strange light caught Fang’s eye—something slowly blinking green behind one of the Cryena’s ears. Frowning, Fang let his eyes trail to the scabs he felt at its sides.

And in the place where the tawny skin had torn, Fang saw the dull shine of metal poking through. And he understood: They were robots.

Someone sent them here. Someone is tracking the flock.