OUT OF SIGHT - A Maximum Ride Future-Fic, post-FANG
Rated T for violence, language, and mild sexual content
Summary
Eight years have passed since the Flock brought down Itexicon. It's been long enough that the quiet of safety finally feels normal. When Max slips back into paranoia, convinced she's being watched, Fang works hard to talk her out of it; they've all got battle scars, and he won't stand by and let hers rule her life. But when his family begins to disappear, Fang is forced to face old wounds to find all the missing pieces. Will he be able to let go in order to save the Flock? To save Max?
Prologue
She was in the sky, high above the clouds, with the cold night air filling her lungs and her blood coursing wild through her veins. She didn't remember taking off, but it didn't matter. There was just flight, and freedom, and she really felt she could fly free forever. Wind whistled through her feathers as she shot through the atmosphere like a rocket, streaking over the mountains outside Denver at inhuman speeds, over the lakes and the trees and high enough that she couldn't make out the details below her. She was alone, but not lonely, and she knew as soon as that changed, she'd just turn around and go home to Fang. He'd be warm under the covers and he'd groan when she wedged her ice cube toes between his, but then he'd pull her close and kiss her warm.
She closed her eyes and grinned into the rushing wind stream until her teeth were numb and then peeked up at the stars, wings stilling for a beat and a half. They were nothing short of brilliant. A lacy wash of glittering pinpricks rippled across an inky canvas, illuminating the deepness of the night and nothing else. Her lips parted at the sheer, unadulterated beauty of it. Her stomach sunk to her toes, the magnitude of the expanse of the sky curling like a fist around her heart, and she felt like the smallest giant there ever was.
Something washed over her right wingtip just then, some wisp of a shadow. The tightness in her gut twisted into a flash of panic and Max pulled up with a great beat of her tawny wings, whipping around in the air to hover with heavy flaps and a heaving chest.
There was nothing there.
She let out a breathy laugh, rolling her eyes at the boogeyman scare. She was a few thousand feet above ground, too high even for owls and bats. Of course she was alone. She hitched her shoulders and flexed her wings, tilting into a gentle descent back towards the city. She told herself she wasn't running, not really, she was just tired and ready to go home.
And then the shadow dragged over her left wing, standing her feathers on end, and she found herself beating her wings against the air just to get home faster. She could see her little apartment from here, and through the window, her husband sprawled across the bed. But the harder she flapped, the further away he looked and the further she felt from him. The knot in her stomach forced its way up into her lungs and she wanted to scream. The shadow became Shadows that scraped sticky tendrils of terror across her wings, down her back, locking her joints and making her fall into a tailspin. Her wings still flapped but they were useless, dragging through the air like a sieve full of sand, and when Max looked up from the dizzying rush of the ground coming to meet her, she saw that the stars had turned away from the sky and werelookingat her, silver glitter eyes whispering death.
Max was just short of crying out when she woke, light-headed from panting and blinking unseeingly in her dark bedroom. She shivered and felt something rough before placing it as Fang's stubbly chin digging into her shoulder blade. His spicy hot breath made the back of her neck sweat, sticky and uncomfortable and exactly what she needed to come back down from the nightmare.
She took one belly-deep, shuddering breath and took hold of Fang's wrists where they were crossed loosely in front of her stomach to pull his arms tighter around her. He hummed deeply in his sleep and curled around her trembling body with a sigh, locking her in. She felt her heart calm as the dream faded, skittering off into the edges of her memory where she knew she probably wouldn't remember in the morning. The moonlight was cool, Fang's arms were warm, and she fell back asleep to the rush of the wind against the window and the faint scuffling of bat wings in the dark.
Author's Note
Can I just start by saying that I am so, so so so excited to share this with you? I've been excited since I had this little brainchild back in December. It all started with the idea to write a teensy little one-shot in which Dylan shows up to apologize to Fang and Max for the way he behaved when he first met them. I scribbled it out on notebook paper at work when the idea grew too big to keep in my head, and then it dug its little hooks into my brain and begged to be made into something bigger. That little one-shot is now the second chapter of the 25 I have planned. It's an alternate universe mystery/action/adventure story, set 8 years after "Fang" in the original series if you just ignore the crummy second epilogue when Fang leaves Max. Fang never left, Dylan went MIA, everyone moved on. Well...almost everyone. Bwahahaha.
This is the most complicated story I've written, which maybe isn't saying much considering my only other chapter story was a novella-length romance, but know that the amount of planning that's happened has not been insignificant. I've been working hard on this sucker since before Christmas, plotting it out meticulously, making sure I'm dropping solid clues and holding up continuity while keeping it interesting and suspenseful and throwing in a heavy handful of action scenes that I've decided are now my favorites to write. Every single chapter is integral for where the story goes next, filled with hints and important events and foreshadowing. I'm really hopeful that it reads as well as it played out in my head.
I want to hugely thank my beta-reader, the lovely KLoves2Read, for trudging through everything ahead of you, whether it was just half-baked or almost there. She's kept my writing focused and driven and without her input, this poor story would be a heckuva lot more confusing. Thank you for being such a fantastic writing partner!
I also want to thank everyone who's read any of my stories so far, especially those of you who took the time to review. Your words are the most wonderful reward for all the work I've put into my writing (I seriously go back and reread your notes like, all the time. All the time), and they're truly the main reason my author account expanded past that first raunchy one-shot. An extra thank you to the stragglers who've read my stories after they were complete and still took the time to leave a note behind. Each one has brightened my day. 3 I'm really hopeful that you'll love this, too, even if it doesn't follow the trend of most of my other stories. I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts, your questions, what you hope is going to happen, what you hope doesn't happen. All of it.
As I said, the story will have at least 25 chapters, and here's the awesome part: 20 of them are already written! This means you, dear reader, will get a steady stream of regular updates 2-3 times a week until the story comes to a close at the end of April. So subscribe and review, my friend, because we're only just beginning.
First chapter will go up on Monday!