A/N: FYI—I diverged a bit from canon here—I up-aged Ari. See end A/N for rationale, angry rant, etc.

THREE

My stomach dropped.

I raised my head a fraction to look at him, fighting the bursts of lightning that shot through every muscle, nerve, and tendon. Eraserfied, massive, and ugly—this was the form of the twelve-year-old boy that Jeb had terrifyingly called my "brother." He looked more mutated than he had six months ago, more rugged, but his face was full of fear now, bringing out the features I remembered about him, like his crooked nose and his kind, hooded eyes.

While I reminisced, Fang was preparing to kill him; it was palpable in the air.

The gun clattered to the ground and Ari raised his hands shoulder-high. He was breathing heavily—far too heavily to be healthy. "I'm not trying to hurt you," he managed.

Fang advanced on him, light on his toes, ready to surge forward if necessary. "Had me fooled," he snarled.

Ari raised his hands even higher and kicked the gun away from himself. It skittered to Fang, who picked it up and removed the magazine before throwing both pieces back to me.

This was when I started to notice Ari's physical appearance. An impressive smear of blood trailed down his front. It did not look to be his own. Shredded denim—formerly known as pants—clung to his legs like long, slimy seaweed. Four giant claw marks marred the right side of his face all the way down to his shoulder. The entire right half of his body was crimson. The significance of that was not lost on me—a massive vessel had been severed, probably in his neck, and the blood was a few too shades of vermillion to be venous in nature. It was an arterial bleed. Carotid, probably.

Ari was dying. He had minutes to live.

Fang lunged forward and Ari desperately yelled, "No!" as he took a retreating step, one knee faltering so badly that he could barely stop himself from falling. Fang's eyes flitted to me. By the time he turned back, Ari had fallen to his knees and was seeking my eyes, pressing a large hand against his bleeding neck.

"I'm sorry," he continued in that exhausted, breathy voice. His eyes were absolutely piercing, a heart-stopping shade of sapphire only shared by Jeb. "I had to stop you. I couldn't let you go."

This desperation, this sincerity reminded me of pre-Eraser Ari, the cute, fluffy-haired, blue-eyed boy who had marveled at my wings, who had snuck me extra portions of food when the Whitecoats had their backs turned, who had taught me how to play chess one day through the bars of my cage. I felt a squeeze in my chest somewhere that had nothing to do with the holes in my back.

Fang, who was not nearly as sentimental as me, puffed his wings open massively, another inhuman sound rattling from deep within him.

"No!" Ari said again. "No, I mean—" He forced in a giant breath of air and braced himself against a giant oak. "I'm dying," he blurted.

Neither of us said anything. Wordlessly, Ari turned around, flipped down the collar of his shirt, and gestured to his neck. I could vaguely make out a barcode, a series of numbers, but by the way Fang stiffened, I could tell that whatever he saw there proved Ari wasn't lying.

"My expiration date. It's today. I'm dying."

Despite this revelation, Fang remained an unmoving vessel of coiled rage. "You have thirty seconds before I expedite that process."

"The rest of them—they're dead," Ari said, leaning forward to catch his breath. "The Erasers. I killed them. But they'll send more—the School knows you're here."

"Why tell us?" I squeezed out.

He's only twelve, I reminded myself.A kid. And his life had been full of nothing but hate, inhumanity, and indecency. Jeb was the only person Ari had in the world, and although Jeb had let us all down exponentially, he'd let his biological son down the very most.

He looked near to tears. "I did so many bad things to you. Because I was told to. And I didn't know better. And if I'm going to die, I need to try to make it right, somehow, even if it's nothing—even if it pales in comparison to all the terrible things I've done." He took a deep breath. "You need to leave. Go north. The answer is in Boston. The company is Vector. Take them out, and it's over."

"Why would I ever believe you?" Fang challenged.

"Because I was a pawn in a game I never signed up for, too. And now it's going to kill me. As a twelve-year-old trapped in a wolf-man's body." A pained, deathly laugh broke through his lips, bringing bubbling blood with it. "Truth really is stranger than fiction, isn't it?"

My vision was swirling; flecks of black and white were frosting my periphery. I heard Ari call out an apology and then the field was silent, save for the gentle rustle of the autumn breeze.

Fang said nothing. We both listened for a long moment. Through the trees, from somewhere down by the lake, there was a pained howl. I somehow knew it was Ari's last breath.

Seeming to snap out of some sort of reverie, Fang dropped to his knees again. He cupped my chin with one hand, eyes blazing. "Is anything broken?" The very detectable note of worry in his voice jarred me from my own darkness.

I groaned. "No—but it hurts like a—"

He pulled his hand from my face and shuffled out of view. "Lungs are fine?" He tugged up the back of my shirt and inhaled sharply through his nose. Then his hands, calloused and deft, were assessing. "Didn't hit an air sac, did he?"

"No, I don't think—"

"Bone?"

"A couple of ribs, I think—"

"That would explain the pain."

"You think?"

"Quit moving," he said tersely.

"That bad?"

Fang paused. Because that alone was an answer in and of itself, I braced for a lie. But instead, he said tightly, "Looks like it. Lots of blood. Don't think they hit anything important, though."

My mind was still stuck on Ari, on what had happened. Had he really killed the Erasers for us? Had he truly only shot me to ground me? So he could tell us about this company called Vector in Boston?

Somehow, I knew what he said was true. "I believe him," I gasped to Fang. Because Ari had no reason to lie anymore, no loyalties to keep. I felt it in my gut.

I pushed my hands under me in an attempt to stand up, but he shoved me back down by my shoulders. "Nope."

"Is he—?" I choked out.

"Gone," Fang said, confirming what I already knew. His lips were set in a thin line. "Dead."

Deep down, I felt a sliver of sadness.

The others started to land, because apparently nobody follows the commands of their leader anymore. A cloud of dust swirled up, making me cough. I spent the next ten seconds trying to swallow my shouts of pain as I balled my hands up into the tightest fists that I could manage. I dug my fingernails into my palms. Just a message. Text it back later.

Fang's hands started ripping the back of my soiled shirt open. My wings were half-spread, wilted like a fallen parachute around me, but I didn't think I could move them without crying.

"What the hell happened?" Iggy asked urgently, dropping to his knees by my feet. He sucked in a breath—I assumed he smelled gunpowder and blood. "Where are they?"

"Coast is clear for now," Fang said. He was avoiding the question, I knew. True or not, Ari's dying declaration would change everything, shatter whatever peace we'd had going for us, and this exact second wasn't an ideal time to hash it all out.

"You got shot?" Gazzy pushed through the flock-circle around me, wide eyes stricken with fear and a thirst for revenge. "Are you okay?"

Nudge's voice, timid and young, broke through the chaos. "Max…?"

"Can you feel this?" Iggy said. He was curt and clinical, all business.

This wasn't uncommon for Iggy—when one of us was injured, typically a time of extreme stress for the rest of us, he was a fantastic compartmentalizer. Fang was typically blinded by the anger and resentment that his terrible upbringing at the School had gifted him. I was poorly adjusted, just in different ways, because of the very same upbringing. I was haunted by anxiety, was stubborn to a fault, and was paranoid about losing my flock. I panicked underneath the Leader Mask. I withheld crushing emotions until I was sawing my arm open on a beach. I acted wholly with my heart—never with my brain.

Iggy, though, tended to be level-headed. To be functional. He was also, for whatever reason, a magician with a first aid kit. So it was Iggy who was brushing his fingers over my shins and tapping my toes through the top of my boots.

"Yeah," I forced out. "Not paralyzed. Just kills."

His feathery fingers were on my back now, delicate and sure as they danced over my skin. "Seems like your left lat took most of the hit. This one's low—don't think it went deep enough to hit your kidney, but we'll have to be certain. Who the hell shot you?" Then, before Fang could deflect again: "Where's the gun?"

"Here," Gazzy said. It clacked in his hand.

"What is it?"

"What do you mean what is it? It's a gun!" I cried. I squeezed my eyes shut against the pain—God, it freaking hurt.

"I mean what kind of a gun! I need to know what I'm looking for, here."

Bullets, Iggy. "There are two—two holes," I gasped instead.

"I know, Max, I'll get them—" I sucked in a quick breath as he found something particularly painful, "—sorry, sorry—Fang, hand me those tweezers, the gauze—thank you—wait, no, the bigger gauze—yep, and the antiseptic—"

Somebody was dumping ice cold liquid all over me and I sank my teeth into my arm and bit as hard as I could to keep from shrieking as it bubbled and burned like acid on my flesh.

Nudge handed me a rolled-up shirt to shove between my teeth. "It's okay, Max," she said, looking scared. "Iggy and Fang are here, you're going to be okay, you're going to be fine…"

"Course I am." I tried to say it in between pants without sounding like I was being tortured. I don't think it worked. "Don't you know who you're talking to?"

Angel was hiding behind Nudge, eyes full of tears. I gave her what was probably a horrifying attempt at a grin. "I'm going to be fine, everything's fine, I just—aaaahhhh." Iggy dug deeper into the first wound and I gnashed my teeth into the shirt and whimpered pathetically.

"Maybe a little gentler?" I growled.

"Describe the gun to me," Iggy barked.

Nobody said anything for a minute. Then Gazzy, timidly: "Should it be bleeding that much…?"

"Somebody describe the damn gun to me!"

"Um, I don't know," Gazzy said nervously. "Uh—it's kind of small, I guess, for a gun, and it's black—"

"Who's letting the ten-year-old play with the weapon?" Iggy shouted. "Fang—?"

Fang rattled off a slew of words I didn't recognize. Apparently, guns have their own language now. America.

"Think it's a nine-millimeter," Fang concluded. I heard some noises that sounded like he was removing the bullets and tossing the cartridge. Then I heard a clinking sound. "Yep."

Iggy withdrew his hands from my back. "Fang, take the tweezers and see if you can get one of these—they're not too deep, they're just stubborn. Hand me the gun. Need to feel it."

"Is this worse than last time?" Fang asked somewhere above me.

In my pain-filled deliriousness, I considered the differences between being shot once in the shoulder (and wing) with a shotgun and being shot in the back twice with a smaller handgun. While neither had been fun, my current situation seemed to take the cake, to my own surprise.

I considered lying. Saying it felt the same. But what good would that do any of us? I was working on having better self-preservation techniques, mostly because I knew Fang would kick my ass into next week if I kept gambling with my own life to protect other people.

So instead, I told the truth. "Worse," I admitted. "This is why—why I don't let us play with—guns," I forced out between huffs of breath. I squeezed my eyes shut as Fang started tugging what had to be a bullet from just beneath one of my wings. "Oh, God, if there's any way we could speed this up—"

"Trying," Fang said, poking around some more.

"Huh. I think this is a Kel-Tec PF9," Iggy said under his breath.

"What does that mean?" said Nudge.

"That whoever shot you wasn't shooting to kill," he said, furrowing his brows. Then he turned to Fang and I with confused, blind eyes. "What the hell happened down here?"

There was an agonizing tugas Fang ripped a bullet free. It felt like he took a chunk of muscle the size of my fist with it. A colorful stream of swear words fell from my mouth.

Fang's voice was confused. "What the…"

I could count on one hand the number of times Fang had openly expressed confusion. The fact that one of the times was now, when I was full of bullets, wasn't particularly reassuring to me. "What?"

"The bullet." Fang said, as if this were an adequate answer.

"What?"

Fang held the bullet between the tweezers in front of me. What looked like a tiny, bloodied grappling hook protruded from the end of it.

"Whaaaaaat?" intoned the Gasman.

Angel peeked over her brother's shoulder, cornflower eyes still rimmed with tears. "What is that?"

"The School is stepping their game up," Fang said. His voice was ominous. "This is cruel, even for them."

"Anyone going to fill me in, here?" Iggy growled in frustration.

Fang quietly explained the bullet to Iggy, who was beside himself with amazement.

"The other ones are still shaped like normal bullets," Iggy said in wonder, rolling one of them between his fingers. He tapped its tip, but nothing happened. "This is fascinating. It must be some sort of mechanism that deploys after the bullet penetrates the skin; it opens to imbed in the—"

I hissed as Fang started probing again. "Fascinating may not be my word of choice. God, Fang, can you hang on for a—"

Fang was relentless. "We don't know what else these things can do once they're in you, Max. It's gotta come out."

I felt the tweezers grip on the second bullet; this one was a lot deeper and a lot closer to something painful. "God dammit," I said through my teeth, squeezing my eyes shut as tightly as I could. "Fang, give me a second. Shit, this hurts."

Fang stopped moving. "Think of the turkey leg. Gather up all that womanly strength."

Before I could come up with some snappy comeback, Fang was yanking, the bullet was out, I was gasping for breath, and tears were leaking out of the corners of my eyes.

What could only be Iggy's gentle fingers prodded where the bullet had been. I moaned pitifully. "Well, it didn't hit your kidney."

"Joy of joys," I muttered.

Fang dumped more antiseptic on my back, dabbing tenderly at it as he went along. Then he smeared some ointment on both wounds, covered them with a generous amount of gauze, and taped me up. By the time it was all said and done, every inch of me was throbbing.

"Sorry," Fang said softly.

His hands were covered with blood—my blood—and he nonchalantly wiped them off on his thighs. Then he leaned back on his heels and eyed the flock. When he caught my exhausted nod, he let out the tiniest of tired sighs.

"It was Ari," he said to the flock finally.

Yeah, that went over well.

Nudge blinked. "Ari?"

"Ari?" Iggy was incredulous.

Fang helped pull me to a sitting position. I clenched my teeth together so tightly that I was certain they'd shatter, but altogether managed to keep myself from crying like a little bitch. I leaned against a pine tree and pressed my head back against it, fighting the dizziness that threatened to take me.

Fang produced a shirt from his pack. With some difficulty, we pulled my destroyed one off and replaced it with his dry, clean one. My sports bra and entire back were saturated with blood. So were Fang and Iggy's shirts. But now that the bullets were out and the holes were dressed, I felt like I could breathe.

"What did Ari want?" Iggy asked. He opened a bottle of water and poured it over Fang's hands so he could scrub the blood off. Fang then did the same for Iggy. "Another shot at Fang?"

"Apparently, another shot at Max," Gazzy muttered.

"Where the hell did he go?" Iggy asked. "You finish him off?"

I felt that squeeze again in my heart. "He's dead. Expiration date." I couldn't bring myself to explain the gorefest.

Little whoops and cheers met this statement, but it felt wrong, so wrong.

"He said he turned on the Erasers that were after us. Killed them all. He warned us the School knew where we were and that they'd send more Erasers once they realized the other ones weren't coming back."

Fang started shoving first aid supplies in his backpack. "Said something about a company named Vector in Boston. Implied they were the heart of the hydra, told us to go."

"The heart of the huh?" said Gazzy.

Iggy ignored him. "And why are we believing him?"

Fang looked to me. I knew he didn't trust Ari as far as he could throw him, especially not after Ari almost killed him in Maryland last year.

He gestured with his head in the general direction of where we'd initially heard the Erasers. "Gonna check it out." Before he disappeared into the forest, he shot me a look that said, We'll discuss this later.

I turned to Iggy and sighed, feeling entirely too tired to justify myself. "You have to remember that Ari is one of us." Iggy opened his mouth to talk, but I cut him off. "He was a normal little kid once, too. He wanted a normal life. They turned him into a weapon." I thought about what he said: I was a pawn in a game I never signed up for, too.

"He chose to be evil."

"They chose to make him evil. They raised him to fight. They made him into a monster, Iggy. Remember him? Before?"

"Exactly," Iggy said. He pulled off his soiled, tattered t-shirt and replaced it with a slightly less soiled, less tattered one. Then he pulled his windbreaker on over it. "That was before."

"He said he wanted to try to right some wrongs, however small, before he died."

Iggy looked completely unconvinced. "Was this before or after he shot you?"

Nudge, predictably, agreed with me. "I think Max is right," she said quietly. "We didn't ask to be made into birdkids. But at least we have each other. At least Jeb got us out. Ari didn't ask to be left there, didn't askto be turned into an Eraser. They made him so evil, and since he had no one to guide him or teach him right from wrong or stand up for him, it was all he knew… I know you hate him, but think about it, Iggy."

Iggy is full of hard-to-find soft spots, though he'd never admit it. But it had been clear to me since we were young that his biggest soft spot of all was for Nudge. Their crates had been next to each other. And with the Whitecoats often taking Fang and I together for more invasive, more inhumane experiments, Iggy and Nudge were typically left to their own devices. The Gasman and Angel were still little kids, then. So Iggy took Nudge—no pun intended—under his wing, and Nudge became his eyes.

So while he'd stubbornly rejected every rational thing I'd said, he actually listened to Nudge. I could practically see the cogs of his mind whirring as he considered her words.

"It could be a trap," he said finally.

"It could always be a trap," I said. I pushed myself up against the bark of the tree, gasping pathetically as I did. "Once we clear out of this area, log a few hundred miles, we'll look up this company on the laptop."

Fang reappeared from the tree line, shaking his head. "Well, they're definitely dead," he said. He saw me struggling to stand and grabbed my arm, hauling me up with scrutinizing eyes.

From his back, he produced his pack, which looked near to bursting. "Grabbed as much of our stuff as we could take with us."

The tents would have to be left behind. And the sleeping bags. The tarps. I sighed. Starting over, on the run, desperate. Again.

But now was not the time to think that way. We needed to go. Immediately. When I said as much, I was met by five very nervous faces.

"Max…" Nudge said, wide eyes looking me up and down. I was still sticky with half-dried blood and probably a ghostly shade of pale.

Fang held out a water bottle and I washed my hands. My pants were filthy, but I'd deal with them later.

"I'm fine," I said. "I feel better than I did ten minutes ago. But we can't hang here—even if Ari was lying, we can't chance it."

"You can't fly," Fang said. His tone indicated that it was not up for discussion.

I gritted my teeth and spread my right wing, holding my breath against the pain. But when I tried to spread the left one, it actually doubled me over.

Fang hooked an elbow under my armpit, apparently concerned I was going to collapse. I wasn't entirely convinced I wasn't.

"Okay," I panted. "So that's not going to work. We could try to go by foot…"

Fang sighed and held his arms open pointedly. When I didn't move, he sighed harder.

"Let's go," he said to the flock, jerking his thumb in the air. Then he scooped me into his arms too quickly for me to dodge or protest.

Iggy took off first with Total in his arms, then Angel, then Gazzy and Nudge. Fang managed a decent jog and catapulted off a rock, unfurling his wings and beating them powerfully through the fog. His face showed no signs of strain, but I knew it had to be difficult.

"Always too proud to ask for help," he quipped once we were at an acceptable cruising altitude. "It'll be the death of you."

"Showoff," I muttered. I caught a glimpse of the smallest of smiles on his face, radiant in the morning sun.

A/N: I diverged from canon again a bit here. I mentioned my qualms with the flock's ages. Don't even get me started on Ari. To be brief:

James Patterson's Ari is seven years old. He has been grafted with lupine DNA and made into an Eraser. Great. He is still supposed to be seven years old—why the hell does he act like a homeless 24-year-old withdrawing from heroin? There's no logical explanation for any of this in the novels. Like, picture a game of soccer being played by seven-year-olds. Now picture Ari, excelling in hand-to-hand combat. In book two, James Patterson has the nerve to write self-harm content—Ari BITING himself because pain feels good—about a SEVEN-YEAR-OLD.

Secondly, if Ari is only seven, that means he was only three when the flock escaped the School. That doesn't leave a lot of room for Max to have established much of a relationship at all with him.

Pardon my language, but give me a fucking break. There are SO many parts to these books that frustrate me to no end (Max's hair color is probably number one, I'm not even capable of discussing this without losing my cool), but I can't even express the rage this concept makes me feel.

Thank you for all the story followers—PLEASE review if you are enjoying! Seriously, just a little "I'm reading" is enough to keep me cranking out chapters.