Maximum Ride Forever (Maximum Ride 9)

“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.”

19

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.

20

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.