“What is he doing?” I whimpered. “Oh, Go
d, what is he doing?”
Despite his obviously weakened state, Fang’s will was unstoppable. He dragged the frantic Horsemen toward the edge… and then they were offscreen again.
Afterward, I held my breath as I waited for Fang to stumble back in front of the camera, listening desperately for the sound of his ragged breathing.
There were only snowflakes, though—and silence.
The silence seemed to go on forever.
Dylan started to turn off the video, but then I spotted Jeb, awkwardly dragging something toward the edge.
“Wait!” I squeezed Dylan’s arm. “What is that?”
It was black and oddly shaped, textured and smooth at once.
“Stop it,” I said abruptly. I felt bile rising in my throat as I remembered the screams. “That’s enough.”
It was way more than enough.
It was Fang’s bloody, mangled wing.
“He took the rest of them out with him,” Dylan said reverently. “The best assassins the Remedy had. He was brave, Max. To the very end. I thought you might want this,” he added. “To remember.”
Dylan held out a feather, about a foot long, beautifully black and shiny.
If you’ve ever loved someone like I did, if they made you crazy and happy and exasperated and elated and if you wanted to hold them and shake them and sometimes kick them and if, after all that, they were like part of your family and part of your soul…
Imagine seeing that feather. Imagine what that felt like.
It made it real.
It wasn’t just a punch to the gut; it was a rip, too—like someone had torn all the hope and love, plus all the muscle and bone, right out of my body. I had nothing left to stand on.
I’d fallen to my knees before I’d even felt them buckle, and the nausea finally overcame everything else.
“I’m sorry, Max!” Dylan cried miserably as I retched again and again into the dirt. “I’m so sorry.”
74
I AWOKE FEELING cold again. But this time, the cold felt heavy in my gut, and it didn’t go away.
Angel led us. Harry and Dylan formed the V, and I hung back, riding the slipstream and letting them carry me for thousands of miles. We flew up along the west coast of Canada and over Alaska, and I didn’t look down once. Didn’t want to see the flattened cities and charred forests. Didn’t want to see the landscape as bleak as my mind.
I don’t deal with death well, you might have noticed. I don’t really deal at all—I go on autopilot. The flight to Russia felt like one long hallucination, and I didn’t eat, or talk, or cry.
It seemed like I barely breathed.
I do know that as we flew over Alaska, we were pelted with a blizzard so fierce it almost knocked Harry from the air. The cold made Dylan’s teeth chatter and Angel’s breath come in gasps, but I hardly felt any of it.
My thoughts were as blank as the snow.
Numb.
The Bering Strait was less than a hundred miles across, but the slate-colored water looked like an endless dark hole, trying to suck me down.
Once, I stopped flying completely, letting my body hang limp for a second too long. I folded my wings in and started to drop, imagining myself plunging into the freezing water, having it hit me like concrete at that speed. A fast death.