“Give me the list,” I said, trying not to rip it out of her hands. “I’ll deal with it. It’ll be faster, anyway.” Angel pushed the paper over to me. I poured a cup of coffee and sauntered out to the deck.
My chest constricted when I saw Jeb down below. He had a pickup truck with an open-bed trailer hitched to it. Fang was on the trailer, tying down all the ruined, sodden furniture.
Dylan was on the ground, shaking water off books and tossing them into the truck bed. He and Fang were careful not to look at each other.
“Get that lamp, Dylan,” Jeb commanded, checking the hitch of the trailer. Dylan nodded and placed a lamp on top of an armchair. “The dump said they’d take anything.” “Oh, really?” I called down to him. “Do they take reject mutants and scientists too?” It was mean, but Jeb and Dylan didn’t seem to be
They were not our family.
I grabbed my jacket inside and jumped out the front door, over the canyon.
41
GAZZY WAS HOLDING HIS BREATH, cheeks puffed out, belly pushed out, arms at his sides.
“Puffer fish!” Angel guessed. Gazzy shook his head.
“Blister!” said Iggy, poking Gazzy’s cheeks. Gazzy shook his head.
“Knish?” suggested Total. Gazzy shook his head.
“We give up!” Nudge said. “What are you?”
Gazzy let his breath out in a rush. “A grain of rice, cooking!” he said. “
Dylan laughed. “Good one,” he said. “Never would have guessed -”
A high-pitched whistling noise interrupted him and filled the room. Just as everyone was registering the smoking ball on the floor, it exploded.
The explosion was small – a flash of blinding light, followed by a sickening stream of pink smoke. Everyone began coughing, practically retching from the noxious smell.
Then, in the next second, there was a huge crunching noise – from above.
“Scatter!” said Gazzy.
They all fanned out around the edges of the room. Angel motioned to Dylan to keep his back against the wall.
“Oh, God, what is that stuff?” Nudge moaned, coughing into her sleeve.
The shock of the gas cloud rendered them useless as the roof above them was ripped apart with loud splintering noises. Then an inhumanly large, hairy hand grabbed some Sheetrock from the ceiling and tore it away with long, ragged yellow claws.
“Oh, my God,” Nudge breathed. “Is that an Eraser?”
“Everyone, outside!” Angel ordered. It was always better to fight in the air than inside a building, and the smoke felt crippling. But as the flock raced for doors and windows, those doors and windows crashed inward, followed by the hulking, horribly familiar forms of Erasers.
It was like waking up into a nightmare of the past.
“Dinnertime!” one of the Erasers growled, and the others laughed – the same way the flock had heard so many times before. Their wolfish faces were split into ugly yellow-toothed grins, and their small mean eyes glittered with the excitement of the hunt. There were at least ten of them, and they easily weighed more than two hundred pounds each.
The dogs bravely leaped at the wolfmen first. Akila managed to clamp her jaws around one’s ankle and draw blood before he kicked her away. Total took to the air, flitting around like a big black mutant moth, snarling and snapping, occasionally getting a bite of Eraser flesh.
It was a good distraction. The kids had a second to catch their breath as the smoke began to dissipate. Then instinct kicked in, and in moments they had launched themselves at their attackers.
“They still smell like garbage!” Gazzy yelled, as the first blows were exchanged. He felt like he might barf.
“Okay, now I’m mad!” Iggy shouted.
Angel glanced over to see a thin trickle of blood coming from his nose.
An Eraser lunged at Angel, and she dodged, screaming bloody murder. She grabbed a floor lamp and connected with the Eraser’s heavily boned head, snapping it to one side.
Nearby, Dylan was coughing and gagging from the lingering smoke. And yet he was mercilessly pounding an Eraser, his fists flying almost supernaturally fast. The Eraser was doubled over, unsuccessfully trying to block the blows.
So, the new bird kid had been programmed to fight.
The rest of them were even better trained to fight Erasers, but with the desperate impulse to keep their arms in front of their noses and mouths, they started to lose ground.
One Eraser grabbed Nudge and held her in a death grip even though she screamed and kicked with all her might. A second jumped behind her and grasped her wings brutally.
He was getting ready to break them.
42
THE SUN BEAT DOWN on my shoulders. It felt heavenly to be out flying, my hair streaming back, silence all around. I gazed down at the earth beneath me, the winding streams carved through red canyons, the striated layers of rock revealed by millennia of erosion, my tiny shadow on the ground, barely visible -
And the dark shadow following me, so close, practically right on top of me.
I took a breath, folded my wings down, swung my feet so I was vertical, and snapped my fist up hard. With unerring timing, it connected solidly with a face.
I heard a surprised hiss of breath, felt skin split beneath the force, then dove down, did a somersault in midair, and angled myself to attack from below.
“What the hell is the matter with you!” Fang shouted. One hand was pressed to his face, below his right eye.
“Fang!” I evened myself out till I was flying close to him. Our wings kept us about eight feet apart. “I’m sorry – I didn’t know it was you. Why were you sneaking up on me?”
“Who else would it be?” He sounded cranky and kept rubbing his face.
“Anyone! An Eraser, or a Flyboy, or -”
“There aren’t any more Erasers,” he said, giving me a confused look. “And I don’t think there are any more Flyboys either. We haven’t seen any in ages. Who else is going to be flying after you except one of us?”
We both thought of Dylan at the same time. “Sorry,” I muttered again. “I just reacted.”
His cheek was pink and already swelling – he would have a helluva shiner by tomorrow. “Look, there’s a tree over there. Can we stop a minute?”
A huge pine stood at the edge of the tree line on the mountain. We swooped down, slowed, and landed on a large branch.
“Sorry about yesterday,” Fang said. He leaned his back against the broad, rough trunk. “I let Dylan get to me. It was stupid. I can’t believe I didn’t notice the house almost burning down.” He gave a brief, wry smile.
“It didn’t almost burn down,” I said. “Just the couch, really. Gazzy and Ig were making a new stash of detonators, and ‘something happened.’”
Fang shook his head and let out a breath, then looked deeply into my eyes. I got that hollow, fluttery feeling again. I wanted to melt into him and forget everything, but something still felt like it had changed.
For some reason, Dylan’s face popped into my mind, and it was as though the two of them were side by side: Fang and Dylan. They were night and day. Dylan’s face was more open, wanting to talk, to ask questions, to learn. Fang’s face was closed, secretive, strong, like the most interesting riddle I would ever find.
“Jeb said the others were complaining about us,” I told him. The fresh pine-scented breeze blew my hair around, and I tucked it behind my ear.
“We’re all getting used to the… changed dynamics,” said Fang. He reached out and took a strand of my hair, immediately getting caught in a tangle. “It’s pretty, in the sun,” he said, holding the strand out to catch the sun’s rays. It was mostly brown but had streaks of dark red and even a little blond.
“Still,” I pressed on, “we have to think -”
“No, we don’t,” Fang whispered, and he tilted his head. I barely had time to breathe in before his warm lips were on mine, for the first time in… days. He put his arms around me and angled his head more.
I was so familiar with him that I could feel how swollen his cheek was, right under his eye. I mean, I knew Fang. I’d always known him. Literally always, my whole life. He’d always been my best friend and my second-in-command. I didn’t really know when our feelings had changed. All I knew was that he was the best thing I had in my life.
He held me closer and closer until we were practically glued together. I don’t know how long we stayed there, kissing and murmuring to each other. Finally my stomach rumbled, making us both laugh and break apart, our foreheads still touching.
“I guess I better get to the store,” I said, feeling like everything would be all right again in my world. “You coming?”
Fang nodded, and then a low buzzing sound, like a swarm of bees, distracted me. We both looked up through the top of the tree. Very, very high, higher than helicopters usually go, were four black choppers. We could barely see them, barely hear them. Most humans wouldn’t have been able to spot them, wouldn’t have known they were there.
But they were. And they were headed in the direction of our house.
Without speaking, we let go of the tree and fell outward, then opened our wings as the ground rushed up to meet us.
Time for reality again.
43
DYLAN HADN’T BEEN ALIVE much longer than eight months and didn’t know much about flock taboos, but one thing he instinctively knew: Don’t mess with a bird kid’s wings.
And Nudge’s were about to be snapped. Then they’d throw her out the window.
“Don’t you
