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.