A/N So, as the summary says, this is a continuation of the excerpt we've been given for Nevermore. Last we knew, Maya was falling and Fang couldn't move to help her. On Max's end, the flock has been shaken by Angel's death, but what happens when they get an unexpected visitor? Enjoy!

I shivered a little in the afternoon breeze as we pulled into the driveway, swinging my leg over the seat of the motorcycle and making my way through the side gate to the backyard. My neck cracked as I tilted my head to either side to stretch out the muscles, and as I turned around the corner of the house to where I could see the rest of the flock gathered, I heard Dylan coming up behind me. He slowed to match my pace and we walked along the path together, his hand brushing mine with each step. My stomach shifted, and I couldn't tell if it was in pleasure or aversion.

Dylan had that effect on me; he'd been hanging around with us for a while now, never letting up on the idea that he loved me, we were made for each other, he'd wait as long as I needed, the whole ugly business, and my feelings for him were still absurdly conflicted. And it wasn't even the generic mix of a thousand different emotions that you hear about in every teen novel ever written. That would've been easier to deal with. But every time I saw Dylan – every time he spoke to me or came close to me or touched me – all that I felt was a rush of two extremes. So far I'd managed to conclude that I was either completely put off by his advances or entirely taken in, which was great except for the fact that I had no idea which one was right. And the thing is that when you're making these kinds of decisions – the important ones to do with stuff like how you feel about your so-called 'perfect match' – right is kind of what you want to be. Just sayin'.

The flock was sprawled out on the backyard deck. It had been six days since we'd left Paris, and now we were holed up in a house in Oregon, courtesy of our friends at the CSM. We'd thought about going back to my mom's house, since it was just about the closest thing any of us had to a home, but there was so much uncertainty about where my mom was and how she fit into the whole picture that in the end it seemed dangerous to go back there. Besides, it would've been too empty without her and Ella. I'd wanted to start searching for them straight away, to get out there and work out what the heck was going on, find what was left of my family, and beat the crap out of the people who'd taken them from me. But one look at the flock told me there was no way we were going to manage it; we needed time to rest and try to pull ourselves back together. Looking around, I felt another pang in my gut that had nothing to do with Dylan as I did an instinctive head count and momentarily forgot that I was only counting for five now. For a second I almost couldn't breathe as tears threatened to give my pride a second roundhouse kick to the head. No, I chided myself. Breaking down in front of Dylan was bad enough. You are not letting the others see you like that. Again. God knows it's happened enough recently. Suck it up.

'Everything been okay here?' I asked, wincing inwardly at how hollow the question sounded; 'okay' wasn't a word that could be used to describe the state we were in anymore. After everything we'd been through, everything and everyone we'd lost, it looked like we'd finally been pushed to our limits. For what felt like the thousandth time in the past few days, my mind raced through the people we hadn't managed to hold onto: Ari, Jeb, Ella, my mom, Fang, Angel… Some of them had been lost, then found, then lost again. And now it was kind of like my flock had been broken, like we'd suffered one loss too many.

'Yeah, great,' Iggy said dully. 'No one ran away. No one died. It's all been peachy keen.' He sat slumped in a deckchair, his long, pale fingers twitching in his lap. At his words, Gazzy's face crumpled and fresh tears started to follow the old dried tracks down his face. This was a kid who, before everything went to heck, had refused to cry at any number of things, including broken bones, running from genetically-manipulated monsters, and the failure of any kind of father figure he might ever have had. But things had changed; he'd lost his sister, the only blood relative he knew of, and to make things worse, I knew that he blamed himself. In his mind, he'd tried to diffuse the blocks of C-4, he'd failed to get them all in time, and he'd flown away without making absolutely sure Angel was with him.

Nudge sniffed as she put an arm around Gazzy, letting him cry into her shoulder. The corners of her mouth wavered, but no tears fell, and at that moment I realised just how quickly she'd had to grow up. Even when we were on the run from the School, looking for food in dumpsters, or running off to Antarctica, Nudge had still been a child; an almost-teenage girl who redesigned her military uniform to make it more fashionable and tried to pass herself off as 'Cinnamon Allspice La Fever'. Over the last few days I'd watched her harden, and now she was stoic, quiet.

It broke my heart to see them like this, so in pieces and dejected and melancholy. Or at least, broke it more than it already was, somehow. So this is what's become of us. I felt anger welling up inside me; anger at myself for letting this happen, for allowing things to reach this point. Despite everything we'd been through before, every sucky, awful, whacked out thing, my flock had never given up, never stopped fighting. And what kind of a leader was I that I was letting everything fall apart now? The old Max would have known what to do. The old Max would've found a way to get them up off the ground and into sky and on their way to being something resembling okay again. But I wasn't her anymore. Instead, I was this pathetic, weepy mutant with no clue how to fix all the crap that had gone wrong. I swear to God or whoever turns out to be running this messed up joint, if me last year could see me now, she'd think that someone had tried to pull the old replacing-Max-with-a-clone stunt, and made an awful job of it, too.

I took in a breath to say something, anything, but before I could get a word out, a shrill yelp came from inside the house. We all tensed, five heads snapping towards the large doors that led out from the house to the yard, and a small part of me – the part that wasn't busy wondering whether or not I'd be able to kick an attacker through the wall surrounding the backyard if need be – registered relief at the others' reactions to the sound; at least they weren't so far gone that they didn't even respond. Maybe there was hope. I relaxed a little as Total came racing through the doors, yelping again in what was possibly the most genuinely dog-like sound I'd ever heard him make.

'Total? What's up?'

'Get through here. You're going to want to see this,' he said, not giving me a chance to reply before turning around and tearing back into the house. Wholly confused, I shot a glance towards Dylan, whose turquoise eyes were wide and perplexed. The deckchairs scraped across the floor as Nudge and Gazzy jumped up and ran through the doors after Total.

'Be careful!' I shouted. I was pretty sure that Total would have mentioned it if there was a bunch of bloodthirsty axe murderers hanging out in the kitchen, but sadly, in my life, 'pretty sure' doesn't really tend to cut it. Moving quickly, I followed the kids through the living room, preparing myself for any manner of things. As I reached the door leading to the hallway, I heard Gazzy's voice ringing out.

'Holy mother-'

'Gazzy! Wha-' I froze. 'Preparing myself for any manner of things', my ass. Because standing in the hallway, hair messy and face painfully familiar beneath a ton of new bruises and cuts, was Fang.

Of course.

Because this is me we're talking about.

There was dead silence for a moment as everyone took the scene in. I looked at Gazzy and Nudge standing to the side in front of me, their eyes like saucers. I turned to see Dylan and Iggy in the doorway behind me. Dylan's face openly conveyed his surprise and distrust, and Iggy was frowning unseeingly at the floor, probably listening hard to make sure he really had identified Fang's breathing correctly. Turning back towards Fang, it kind of felt as though my body wasn't my own as I took one, then two slow, heavy steps in his direction. My limbs were numb, and the realisation that I could still move them at all felt like a surprise. Fang's face didn't change as I moved towards him, and I made damn sure that mine didn't, either.

I stopped in front of him, close enough that I needed to tilt my head back to be able to meet his eyes. Once again, I looked over my shoulder to see the flock clustered together behind me, utterly motionless, looking for all the world like some kind of crazy still life; I'm not even sure that there was a lot of breathing going on there. Taking a deep breath of my own, I looked back at Fang, staring right up into his face. His mouth opened, as if he were about to speak.

And that was when I punched him.