James Patterson - Maximum Ride Forever

“I showed him the truth,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, Fang, but you can’t change it. It’s your fate. ”

“Fang!” I shouted, trudging along the path he’d cut through the high brown grass sloping up behind the cottage. “Fang, answer me!”

I found him farther up the hill in a clearing hidden by brambles and dead-looking eucalyptus. He held a thick branch with both hands like a baseball bat and was hitting one of the trees again and again.

I leaned against another tree, studying him. His expression was as unreadable as ever, but his flushed skin suggested the fury boiling just beneath the surface. “Are you really going to let Angel do this to you?” I said after a few seconds.

In response, Fang continued swinging. Strips of bleached bark fluttered to the ground each time he connected with the tree, the CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! echoing against the hollow trunk. When his makeshift club broke in half, Fang’s face went as still and closed as marble.

“Hey!” I protested as he started smashing what was left of the stick against the ground. I grabbed his arms from behind, pulling against the momentum of straining muscles. “Come on, stop it.”

He finally chucked the stick and whirled around. “Angel’s right,” he choked. His eyes were haunted, his pupils still dilated. “I’m a danger to you and everyone. It’s the reason I left before, and I never should have come back.”

“What?” I said, gaping at him in disbelief. “What on earth did Angel tell you?”

Angrily he shook his head.

“Fang, this is me! We can tell each other everything!” Can’t we?

I waited and after a full minute realized he wasn’t going to tell me . He actually was not going to let me know what Angel had showed him. I gave him another minute to apologize and realize what a douchebag he was being.

“She’s right,” he repeated instead. “I can’t be a coward. I can’t put everyone I care about at risk.”

Underneath the distress on his face, I saw the rational, calculating Fang I’d always known, and that’s when I started to get scared.

He was serious.

“So, what?” I said scathingly, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “You’re just going to run? You think that’s less cowardly?”

“Not run.” Fang’s jaw was set with conviction. “I’m going to do whatever I can with the time I have left to figure out what happened, to find out who’s responsible, to stop this thing. I’ll go to California, find some of those cleanup crews...”

“You mean you’ll go to California to meet up with BikiniBimbo456, or whatever her name was,” I spat.

It was petty, I admit, but give me a pass, okay? I was feeling pretty bitter at that moment.

“You know that’s not it.” He walked over to me and tried to take my hands. When I crossed my arms, he settled for lifting my chin so I was forced to look at him. “You know you’re it for me. The only one. The forever one.”

I wasn’t willing to budge yet, though those were the most amazing words I’d ever heard from him. “Am I?”

Fang sighed. “Maximum Ride, you’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met, and sometimes it seems like your sole purpose in life is to make mine harder, but I swear, I love you more than I thought I could love anyone or anything.”

“Then stay,” I whispered, clenching my eyes shut just as they started to well up.

I felt Fang’s hands on the sides of my face, his thumbs wiping away my tears. I felt the heat coming off his body, heard the catch of his breath. And when our lips finally came together, our kisses were urgent, our bodies hungry. As he moved his hands through my tangled hair, I looked up at him. Inhaled. And said, “Yes.”

We sank to the ground, the dried leaves crinkling under us, and time fell away for a while.

I couldn’t tell if our voices rose in pleasure or pain, couldn’t tell if my heart was breaking or bursting open with joy. I only knew I didn’t want to pull away from him for a single second, and it was only when we both gasped for a breath that I realized Fang’s eyes were squeezed shut and his lashes were wet.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered hoarsely. It was the most vulnerable I’d ever seen him.

“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.”

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.