But if I could hear the catch in my voice, I knew Fang had picked up on it, too.
He had moved closer. We were nose to nose now, our wings almost overlapping as each stroke took us up ten feet, then down again. We’d been flying together our whole lives, and keeping in perfect rhythm was second nature to us. My arms were crossed over my chest, my elbows almost brushing against him, and Fang reached out and held my arms, below my shoulders. He let his thumbs brush against my skin, slowly.
I shivered. Fang’s touch was so familiar. How many times had he done this? Old times and new all jumbled together. Emotions and memories became indecipherable. The only thing I knew was that we’d grown and changed. It was almost like he was a new Fang. I felt almost like a new Max. Could we still… fit together?
“Max.” He said my name like it was a life raft. Like it was a religion. His warm fingers stroked up and down my arms.
“What?” I whispered. Or had I even said it aloud? I didn’t know what to do, so I stared into his eyes for the answer. And I let them rest there. I didn’t want to be the first to look away.
I reached out and put my hands on his shoulders, felt his strong, light bones under his skin. I remembered what he had carved into a cactus once.
MAX + FANG—4EVER.
58
TEARS POURED DOWN Dylan’s face. He dashed them away angrily with the back of his hand, flapping his wings powerfully and putting as much distance between himself and them as he could.
He’d been in a tree a good half mile away from them—not spying, just… seeing. Seeing his past going up in flames, his future crumbling into dust. He wasn’t about to stick around to watch Max and Fang finally have their little private reunion party.
He’d thought what he and Max had was starting to grow into something… real. She’d let him sleep in her room. And that night in the tree house… He remembered the feel of Max’s skin under his fingertips, her wildly tangled hair brushing against his cheek, the look she gave him just before their lips met….
He could live and die inside that single look.
Dylan shook his head, flapped his wings harder. Faster. He took the next turn too tightly and lost control, dropping hundreds of feet before he could level himself. He saw the forest ahead. Tall trees, growing thickly together. He narrowed his eyes and dove down.
He wove crazily in and out of the trees, at top speed. He scared birds, startled a group of deer, and still he went as fast as possible, so fast that the wind would dry his tears.
Again and again he flipped sideways to fit through narrow openings. His sneakers smacked against tree trunks. Bark raked the skin on his hands and face raw. Branches caught at his feathers, and he felt some get yanked out, but he didn’t even wince.
It felt good, the pain. He wanted more.
All this time he’d tried to be good. He’d followed the rules—or at least the rules Max had set. He had learned to fly and to fight, had followed her lead. He had given her space, and then pressed a little closer when she seemed to want it. He’d done everything he was supposed to, when he was supposed to. He had thought if he could just be perfect, Max would love him.
But she loved Fang instead. Fang, who seemed to break every rule in the book. Dylan set his jaw. Fine, he thought. She wants a bad boy like Fang, I can do that.
Bam!
He brought his feet down, hard, on the roof of a car that was driving toward town, making a huge dent.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Three more cars suffered the same fate. Dylan felt a rush of thrill and fear: This was the best he’d felt since Fang had come back.
On the next car, Dylan dropped down even lower. Snap! One quick kick took the side mirror right off. Crash! A rear windshield was smashed to smithereens.
It was an incredible feeling of power, a power he’d never felt before.
He rose a bit and banked sideways dramatically, hearing car horns honking, people shouting. He wheeled around the store on the corner, then swooped down and grabbed the store’s banner with one hand, ripping it from where it had hung across the sidewalk. It landed on a car driving underneath it, causing the driver to lose control and crash into a telephone pole.
But Dylan was already halfway down the street, ripping street signs from their posts and hurling them like Frisbees. People were yelling at him now. A baseball whistled past his head. He could hear sirens behind him.
Over and over, he dropped down suddenly, kicked over a mailbox, a trash can, a trellis. But the pain in his chest was returning. He reached up and ripped the electrical wires strung along the street from their poles. Sparks shot everywhere as the live wires fell to the ground, igniting the bulging trash bags that lined the curb.
At last Dylan realized he was weeping again. He could hardly see. What was happening to him? Nothing was making sense—least of all his behavior.
He rose gracefully, powerfully into the air, leaving behind a roiling fire that was beginning to streak through a destroyed neighborhood.
This isn’t the answer, Dylan, said his Voice. You know what your job is. You know what you have to do. Dylan shook his head, as if he could shake the Voice loose, make it go away forever.
A thought flitted through his brain like the light fingers of a practiced thief. He turned around slowly and tasted bile in his throat.
No. He couldn’t. Could he?
It was the answer to so many of his problems. What he couldn’t do was what the science teacher had demanded on that awful day in the lab at school—he couldn’t turn Fang over for the whitecoats to experiment on, no matter how much he hated him at that moment. He would never condemn anyone to such a fate.
But if he didn’t turn Fang in, someone else would. And if what Dr. Williams had said was true, they would hurt—possibly kill—Max as a result.
He couldn’t let that happen.
Dylan’s mind spun. Maybe this awful thought… maybe this was the right thing to do in the end. It would spare Fang from a horrible life of tests and scalpels and torture. It would save Max’s life. She would be grateful; maybe she’d even come to love him for it… someday.
Dylan swallowed. The Voice was right. He did know what he had to do. He had known all along.
He had to kill Fang.
59
“OH, MY GOD, it’s Dylan.”
My head swiveled sharply at Gazzy’s words and I practically ran to where he sat on the couch. He was pointing at the TV screen.
“What ‘oh, my God’?” I demanded. “What ‘Dylan’?”
“He’s… he’s… gone wacko,” said Gazzy.
I turned my attention to the news broadcast, which was showing a grainy, shaky cell phone video… of a bird kid rampaging through town. My mouth dropped open as I saw Dylan—and he was totally, prosecutably recognizable as Dylan—smashing windows, ripping down signs, kicking cars, knocking over mailboxes.
“It doesn’t seem like him at all,” said Gazzy. “He’s always so laid back. Maybe it’s, like, a clone or something?” he offered.
“No,” I murmured, anxiously watching the screen. “No, I think it’s really him.” But why was he on this insane destructive streak? What had happened since I last saw him? I tried to think when that was….
He’d been with me all day, right up until—oh. Suddenly it all became horribly clear, and my stomach clenched. Dylan had been near the door when I’d gone outside to be alone. He must have seen Fang follow me, which meant he’d seen Fang and me fly off, out of earshot of the house.