Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure

over what I’d just been doing, what I’d just been feeling. My face was hot, my hands were trembling, and my lips were all tingly.

“Nudge? Is something wrong?” Dylan said, instantly on the alert.

Slowly Nudge’s face edged around the green cloth curtain. “Um, sorry.” She coughed, looking at me in fascination. “Nothing’s wrong. I was just surprised. ’Cause I, uh, fell. Off a branch. Er… pretend I was never here.”

I stood up, mortified, but also angry. It had been hard enough to take the leap to kiss Dylan without having the entire world know about it. “Were you spying on me? On us?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

“I’m not the only one!” she protested sheepishly. “It’s not what you think! Look, hold on.” Nudge ducked outside for a moment and called out, “Gazzy! Ig! Get in here—the jig is up!”

“ ‘The jig is up’?” I repeated. “Gazzy? Iggy?” Dylan came to stand next to me, his hand warm on my back. I suppressed the memory of what we had been doing a minute earlier, and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Way to be a traitor, Nudge,” I heard Gazzy say. Then both he and Iggy (who was still wearing his bow tie) entered the tree house behind Nudge.

The three of them stood there, fidgeting and looking anywhere but at me and Dylan.

I went for the classic interrogation technique: Hit the weakest link first. Nudge had never been good at lying to me. “Nudge,” I said, pointing, “explain what’s going on. I thought you guys were at home. Obviously.”

She squirmed.

“Nudge,” I pressed. Leader Max was back in business. Romancey Max had been squashed for the time being.

“Um,” she said, moving her hands out from behind her back. She was holding some sort of box-type thing, silver and black….

A video camera. A freaking video camera.

I gaped. I felt like my face had spontaneously burst into flames at the same time as my legs had melted into a puddle. “Were you filming us?”

Nudge nodded uncomfortably.

I strode forward to plant myself right in front of the three conniving little thugs, nearly hissing in rage. “Why on earth would you film that?”

“YouTube?” Iggy suggested totally unhelpfully, and I had to actually mentally count to ten to restrain myself.

“I’m s’posed to record everything,” Nudge mumbled.

“What? Why? What are you talking about?”

She didn’t answer. I rounded on Iggy and the Gasman. “And you! What were you two doing?”

“Sitting in the trees outside,” Gazzy replied in a small voice. Good to know I hadn’t completely lost my touch. “Making sure.”

“Making. Sure. Of. What.”

“Um… that you were safe?” he squeaked.

I made a half-shrieking, half-choking sound. “Since when can I not take care of myself? I was with Dylan, for Pete’s sake! We were”—I faltered slightly but kept on truckin’—“eating dinner! What were you three thinking?”

They all remained silent.

“I can’t believe you,” I spat. “Give me the video camera, Nudge.”

Nudge didn’t move.

“Nudge. Camera. Now.”

“I can’t!” she cried, putting it behind her back again. “It’s my job! I have to!”

That was when I really lost it. I snarled and, without thinking, shot out my foot in a sideways kick. Luckily, I didn’t kick Dylan, Iggy, Gazzy, or Nudge. Unluckily, I kicked the table.

Which had candles on it.

It all happened before I could even blink.

The tall tapers fell sideways, and hot wax ran across the table and onto the floor.

Instantly the wax ignited, sending trails of flame through the tree house.

The fire zipped along seams in the wood at lightning speed.

Then it sparked at the spiky needles of the fir tree, which were poking in through one of the windows, and in the next instant the dried twigs and vines overhead caught.

“Crap,” I said in miserable awe, as suddenly we were caught in a living torch, the tree going up in flames all around us. Well, let’s just assume I said “crap.”

“Everybody out!” Dylan shouted, and the five of us jumped through the doorway, one after another, unfurling our wings and flapping until we were all hovering in the cold mountain air above the forest.

I looked at Dylan and felt utterly helpless as we both watched his beautiful creation go up in flames—the tree house he’d spent who knows how many hours to make, just for me.

A perfect gift for a perfect evening, and I’d destroyed it.

“I’m so sorry, Dylan,” I whispered miserably, my voice breaking. “It was beautiful. I didn’t mean to. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

He gave a little smile at that, the rise and fall of his wings in perfect timing with mine. “No,” he said softly. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

My heart surged and I started to smile, but just then the tree gave a terrific crack, as the fire hissed its way through the wood. And as I watched the thick plume of smoke billowing upward, I heard the echo of the Voice’s words in my head, and I couldn’t shake the icy feeling that the burning tree was some sort of horrible omen.

45

YOU’D THINK THAT would be enough excitement for one evening—the pinnacle of romance in my life, my unintended destruction of same—but no. I was awakened in the middle of the night by wailing alarms that made me bolt upright in my bed.

Don’t ask me how Iggy and the Gasman got the supplies to make the alarms, or when they rigged the entire house; I’ve been asking myself those same dang questions our whole lives together, and I still don’t know the answers. I jumped out of bed, wide-eyed and ready to rumble.

Out in the hall, Gazzy stumbled out of his bedroom. “Whuzzappenin’?” he mumbled. His blond hair was scruffy with bedhead. “We under attack?” He stifled a huge yawn.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I replied tightly. “Head count! Iggy? Nudge? Total? And Dylan?” Note to self: Stop blushing at any mention of Dylan. Total giveaway.

“Yeah, yeah,” Iggy said irritably, making his way to us with unerring accuracy. Nudge was behind him, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. Iggy pulled a small black remote from the pocket of his sweatpants and clicked a button. The alarms instantly went silent.

Dylan arrived just then, looking like a freaking pajama model. We glanced at each other briefly before I chickened out and looked away. You know your life is sad when possibly being under attack is more appealing than facing the guy you made out with just a few hours earlier.

Thankfully, that was when Total showed up to make the little midnight powwow complete, so I had a good distraction.

“I was right in the middle of a dream about my lovely lady,” Total growled, flopping down on the floor with his head on his paws. “This better be good. Is it the whitecoats? Erasers? Flyboys? Mr. Chu monster things? Land sharks? Mini-Godzillas?”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t know. Iggy, where were the alarms set up? What were they rigged for?”

“They’re around the perimeter,” Iggy said, shrugging. “Nothing small would set them off, like a squirrel. It’s something big.”

Nudge dropped down and crawled to a window, where she rose a tiny bit and peered out, squinting. “It’s too dark. I can’t see anything.”

“Okay, everyone—get ready for whatever it is,” I said grimly. “Let’s wait thirty seconds, and then we’ll hit the