“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.
An operating table.
Again.
She was too exhausted to struggle. What was the point? They would find a way to make her cooperate. She had no more tears left, so she lay dry-eyed as her arms and legs were clamped to the sides of the table.
“This is for your own good,” someone told her—a whitecoat whose voice she didn’t recognize. “We need to make sure there’s no way you can escape these tests.”
Angel’s heart clenched. More tests. What could they possibly do now? Hadn’t they already taken samples of skin, bone, blood, and feathers? How could they not know every square inch of her, down to the cellular level?
Another pair of cold metal forceps moved along her shoulder blades. They reached under her back, then forcibly unfurled her wings, pulling them out from beneath her. Her wings, too, were clamped to the operating table.
She tried to fight the nausea, but felt bile rising in her throat.
They’d never done this before. Never.
A whole new level of fear streaked through Angel’s body. She realized what was coming right before it actually happened.
Small snipping noises filtered into her brain, followed by a pinching sensation at her primary feathers.
“Done,” the whitecoat said. “Good little mutant.” He left the lab, his footsteps fading away as the door closed, leaving Angel clamped to the operating table. She remained silent the entire time, mute with shock and horror.
They’d clipped her wings.
41
EVERYTHING IS ABOUT to change, the Voice said. Prepare yourselves.
Every single member of the flock heard it.