Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure (11 page)

Okay, what is it?
Fang thought.
What do you want?

It’s time to go, Fang
, the Voice replied.
She does need you now, more than ever.

Who needs me?
he asked, but he already knew the answer.

Go home to Max.

36

“IS SHE IN trouble? Are the others okay?” Fang demanded aloud, sitting up, alone in the darkness.
What’s going on?
he screamed inside his head.

But the Voice stayed silent, in that incredibly annoying way it had. It was gone. For how long, he didn’t know.

Go home to Max.

He had no idea if something was really wrong, but he couldn’t exactly ignore the Voice, either. When Max heard her Voice, she pretty much always listened to it. His Voice was saying that Max needed him more than ever.

He pretended he didn’t feel the way his heart was speeding up with excitement and anxiety, just thinking about going back.

No doubt his replacement would still be there, being all
Dylan-rific and glaring at Fang with narrowed eyes. Well, too bad. What choice did Fang have? None. He would’ve liked to have just taken off right then, raced back to the flock. To Max. To see that she was all right. But Fang’s wing had been bothering him more and more, and he definitely wasn’t in flying shape yet.

So he’d be patient. He’d find the nearest town and then get on the Internet. He would do some research before he went racing back to the person he kept trying to leave.

Two hours later the sun was just beginning to rise, and Fang was seated at a computer in an Internet cafe. He sipped from a Styrofoam cup of coffee as the Google home page loaded.

Then he typed in two words:
Maximum Ride
.

37

INSTANTLY, RESULTS POPPED up on the screen—1,704,890 of them in 0.43 seconds. The very first one was an article titled “Winged Children Attend Private School!” Oh, great. Looked like more of that successful “keep a low profile” stuff was going on.

Fang clicked the link and began to read.

As it turned out, the article was a piece from the private school’s own online newspaper, the
Newton News
. It spewed out a bunch of glorified info about the flock, accompanied by a hilariously cheesy photo of them posed around the school’s marquee, beneath a banner welcoming “Maxine and Co.” Fang almost snorted—and then he saw that Dylan had his arm casually thrown around Max.

It was surprising how much that hurt. Especially on
top of the news that Gazzy had blurted out in Paris—that Dylan had been “designed” for Max, and that they were eventually supposed to go out and create little Maxes and Dylans. The concept was still impossible to swallow. Still tasted like crap in his throat.

Fang logged off the computer and dumped his half-finished coffee in the trash. It may have been corny and lame, but the
Newton News
article had given him one thing: the exact location of the flock.

His Voice had told him to go to Max, even though it sure didn’t seem like she needed him, all safe in her cushy new digs, with her new boyfriend. Didn’t the Voice know how much it hurt Fang to see her? Didn’t it know how much he hurt her every time he left?

Maybe it did. Maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe something bigger than just the drama of Max and Fang was happening.

At any rate, he knew he had to listen to his Voice.

He had to go back to Max. Whether she wanted him there or not.

38

FANG DIDN’T WANT to admit to the little surge of exhilaration he was feeling at the idea of actually going back to the flock.
Home.
He had tried to put Max out of his head for so long, but for him, “home” would always mean wherever Max was.

It was still barely light. It galled him that he couldn’t fly, and instead actually had to hike out to where the main highway passed the town.

He shook his head, thinking of Ari and his cronies. He wouldn’t be surprised if the price on his own head was so high that it had infiltrated the backwoods of Middle America, too—Fang knew any driver on the road could be a threat, and it was incredibly stupid for him to hitchhike. But with his painful wing, what choice did he have? He
was in the middle of No and Where, and he had no hope of catching a plane or a bus—or even of stealing a car—in this place. He had to get back to Max, so hitching it was.

After an hour and a half spent trudging along with his thumb in the air, Fang’s head snapped up at the sound of wheels far down the road. A yellow convertible was speeding down the highway, music blaring.

This time, the car pulled to a slow stop just ahead of him, and he jogged up to it. Three beefy-looking guys peered out of the convertible at him, and Fang felt a twinge of anxiety.

This is stupid
, a voice inside him said, and he couldn’t tell if it was
the
Voice or just his own rational thought.

“Need a ride?” the driver asked gruffly over the metal music thundering out of the speakers.

Fang glanced down the road. Not a single other car in sight.

“You heading west?” he asked the driver, frowning.

“Yeah.”

Fang sighed. The next city was at least twenty miles. It was now or never.

“Then yeah, thanks,” he said, hopping into the backseat. Before he’d even sat down, the driver jammed the pedal to the floor. Fang surged backward into the seat, his wing throbbing.

“Hey, watch it!” Fang snapped irritably, but the driver just stared straight ahead with a tight-lipped grin.

The guy in the passenger seat and the guy beside Fang
both stared at him intently, their muscles bulging in their tight T-shirts, their faces twisted into weird expressions.

They looked… hungry. Almost like—Fang’s mind balked at the possibility—Erasers?

Or was he just seeing things? It was hard to tell. He didn’t trust his own judgment anymore. After Star and Kate’s betrayal, everyone seemed suspect.

He stared into the pockmarked face next to him, at the thick neck running up to a crew cut.

No.

They didn’t have the right amount of feral wolfishness marring their features to be Erasers. These guys were definitely human. Ugly as all get-out, but human.

So why were they acting so funny? Maybe they were just ’roid heads, Fang thought—crazed on testosterone. He was just being paranoid, that was all.

It’s called
careful
, you moron
, he imagined Max chiding him.
Always trust your instincts. Paranoia is our way of life.

But Fang’s wing hurt, and he was tired, and at the moment there wasn’t a better option than these shady characters. Shady
human
characters, who he could surely take if it came down to it.

Barely five minutes later, the convertible skidded to a stop. “Wow! A scenic overlook!” the driver shouted with over-the-top enthusiasm. “Whattaya say, boys? Should we get a closer look?”

Fang’s eyes snapped open. Something was off.

These guys didn’t exactly seem like the postcard type.

39

THE THREE GUYS hopped out of the car and strode toward the signs warning pedestrians to keep back from the railing.

“Check out this wicked cliff, fellas,” the driver said to his two grinning buddies. They laughed as if he’d just told the most hilarious joke they’d ever heard. “Hey, kid,” he called to Fang, “why don’t you come over here? I think you’ll really wanna see this. You know, up close and personal.”

Fang, leaning against the convertible, shook his head. “Nah, I think I’m fine right here, thanks.”

He assumed a more defensive position and crossed his arms, but even that small gesture made him wince as his wing bone bent awkwardly. What was
wrong
with him?

The driver grinned. “How’s that wing, Fang? Must be giving you some real trouble if you’re stooping to hitchhiking. Really slumming it.”

“I’m sorry, do I know you?” Fang asked as casually as possible, but he eyed the trio warily. His instinct had been right. They knew who he was, and they were out to get him. But he could take these guys. If he could fight Erasers, he could definitely handle a few juiced-up punks.

“We’re not important, Fang,” the driver said soothingly, still looking starved with those hollow eyes. “We’re just part of the Plan. But
everybody
knows
you
.” He took several steps toward Fang. “You’ll be the first, after all.”

“Let me guess,” Fang said, his dark eyes narrowing. “The first to die.”

They charged him then, and relying on instinct rather than thinking, Fang snapped out his wings, his mind calculating rapidly. He’d do a quick up- and-away and jump behind them. He would knock their heads together, leave them sprawled on the asphalt, and beat it out of there.

But that’s not what happened at all.

Instead, with that careless wing snap, his injured wing bone ground against itself. Fang groaned in agony and involuntarily hunched over, scrunching his eyes shut as the pain vibrated through him.

And that’s all it took.

In the next second they were on him, wrenching his arms backward and digging their elbows into his neck. The driver was violently twisting his hurt wing behind
him, and he saw black spots at the same time he felt his knees buckle.

Fang swore through clenched teeth as they started to drag him. He cursed these guys, cursed being alone, cursed the Voice for putting him in this position. This was a perfect storm of crap, all flying through the same fan, right at him.

The three of them worked together to pull Fang to the stone ledge beyond the safety barrier. He felt a singing panic in his veins as he neared the edge of the cliff. This was usually where he would show up to save someone, or someone would show up to save him.

But no one was coming—that was horribly clear. He was more alone than he’d ever been in his life.

The three of them heaved Fang up onto the ledge, kicking and swearing, realizing with growing horror exactly what would happen if he didn’t escape
right now
.

He gave another sudden jerk, surging against their grips with all of his strength, and… they let go.

Suddenly, he was free.

Free-
falling
, that is, hurled into empty space, toward the crashing waves of Lake Michigan, broken wing and all. Right off the edge of the cliff.

40

ANGEL SCREAMED FOR what felt like eons, until her own wordless howl hurt her head so much that she shut up. Her throat was raw, her eyes like sandpaper and still unseeing.

She’d had another horribly real nightmare—this time,
Fang
was the one who was dead. She’d seen him falling, falling…. Just like she’d seen Maya.

And now Maya was dead.

Angel winced, pressing fingers to her throbbing temples. She lived her own nightmare while she was awake, and she lived others’ nightmares when she slept. There was no escape. No escape, ever…

Fang.

Angel concentrated, but she couldn’t figure out the
ending. She wanted to see,
needed
to see what happened next, even if it was as bad as she feared it was.

But she couldn’t.

In her vision, Fang was in a different place than last time. Instead of an empty red desert, the scene had been misty and chilly looking. Instead of the two girls from his gang, there had been three guys there, guys she didn’t recognize but instinctively hated. There had been a car. A sunshine-yellow convertible.

And there had been a cliff, dropping sharply and hopelessly down.

Angel felt tears prick her eyes as she relived the last part of the vision. What stuck with her most was the way they’d smiled, those three guys. They’d been beaming like lunatics as they hurled Fang over, leaning over the ledge to watch him fall.

Angel had waited impatiently for Fang to spread his wings and soar away—grinning triumphantly at the evil humans who’d thought they could hurt a
bird kid
by tossing him into the open air.
Ha, ha, morons! Eat my wind!

But… he hadn’t.

Hadn’t smiled, hadn’t taunted them.
Hadn’t
spread his wings and soared away.

He’d just dropped, his body twisting and turning awkwardly in the air.

He’d looked broken.

Angel had screamed herself awake from the nightmare right before Fang hit the ground.

But maybe…
A tiny part of her whispered, even as she tried to block it out.

Maybe it hadn’t been a nightmare after all. Maybe it had been a… vision.

No. No way. She squeezed her eyes shut. “It was a
nightmare
,” she said aloud. “It wasn’t real.”

Like now
, she thought. Like the nightmare she was in the middle of living.

Right then a screeching, grating sound filled Angel’s ears, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

“Not real, not real,” she whispered, even as she shrank back into the shadows of her dog crate.

Moments later, the door to her crate swung open. She pulled herself against the back wall as tightly as she could, ready to come out kicking and punching and screaming.

She expected to feel human hands clenching her, but the sensation was cold, hard, and flat—terrifyingly mechanical. Two large metal paddles had reached in with an awful, gear-grinding sound. They practically filled the crate—there was no way to avoid them. Angel ducked high and low, but eventually the paddles closed in on her, clamping onto her body firmly, leaving her no room to writhe or wiggle free.

With more metallic grinding, the paddles began to retreat, dragging Angel out of the dog crate roughly. Then she found herself suspended in midair, held up by what must have been two warehouse cargo-moving forceps. She shouted and twisted this way and that as she moved
through empty air. Then she was dumped unceremoniously on a hard surface. She felt the crisp sheets crinkle against her legs and almost wept with defeat.