A/N: Toward the end here, we get a bit of something I've never written before. Read on to find out.

I love my ghost readers, but I'm just curious as to how many people have stuck along for the ride—shoot me a review, even just a "still reading." It would be a lovely holiday gift :)

Wreckless heart, take over the wheel; we're headed for a fall
Torn apart, it's how you feel; but it's all for love

Gonna ride that river to the sea
Gonna cry that river out of me

There's no cure for time separated, but I'm holding on
You can be sure the time heals the pain, what's done is done

TWENTY-ONE

"God, I feel like I'm going to throw up," I said as we weaved through the massive crowd outside of the Venetian. I wasn't sure if it was the concussion, the anxiety, or both, but I was unwell all the same.

"I feel alive," Iggy said.

Next to me, Fang was far too casual about all of this. Growing up, he'd always been on the same page as me about these situations—uncomfortable in a group of people, jumpy at loud noises, and twitchy at bright lights—and though his jaw was a bit tight and his eyes were darting about the street as if searching for a threat, his shoulders were relaxed and he was smiling.

Out of the corner of my mouth, I said, "How on earth are you okay with this?"

Fang looked at me and smiled bigger. "Do you know how many of Nudge's All-State chorus concerts I had to go to before I stopped putting random strangers in headlocks? Or how many times someone called the cops on me at Angel's soccer games for dropping somebody who looked at me the wrong way?"

Soccer? All-State chorus?

Before I could interrupt with questions, Fang was shrugging and shoving his hands in his pockets. "I swear, that's the only way Angel's abilities got as advanced as they are. She bailed me out at least once a week."

We walked into the Venetian to book a room—just like that, easy as freaking pie—and when the clerk at the desk said credit cards only, Angel stepped forward and encouraged her to let us pay in cash for one night. I watched Iggy hand over the hundred-dollar bills as if they were nothing; it gave me an odd feeling, remembering all the times we'd dumpster dived and hacked ATMs.

Iggy, blind as a bat but the most perceptive one out of us, wrapped an arm around my shoulder at the desk as the clerk processed our receipt. "Don't look so distraught, Max."

"How do you even—"

"I swear, it's like your emotions are loud," he said with a chuckle. "We suffered enough, didn't we? Look at the cards we were dealt." He patted a hand against my wings, which were folded tightly against my back beneath my windbreaker. "All of us worked our asses off for years. We deserve this."

"And the free house from the government," added Gazzy.

"And the free house from the government," Iggy repeated. "Thanks, Obama."

"Oh," said the desk clerk in an oddly airy voice, cocking her head at her computer. "It appears we have the Chairman Suite available at a discounted rate tonight."

"Really," said Gazzy in a flawless impression of a British accent. "What luck!"

My head swiveled from the clerk's glassed-over eyes to Angel, who stood half-concealed behind Nudge. In the past, I might have narrowed my eyes at her, disappointed in her eagerness to take advantage of unknowing strangers, but now—especially after Iggy's short speech about hard work and deserving things—I offered a sly grin.

The clerk handed over three room keys and Iggy, Fang and I all pocketed one before leading the flock to the elevators.

I don't know what I thought might be in the Chairman Suite that set it apart from other rooms—perhaps a jacuzzi tub or a mini bar—but when the door slid open my jaw hit the floor and stayed there for the remainder of our walkthrough.

The living room alone was worth more than I was, wings and all: a massive flat screen television hung from the wall in the center of the room, surrounded by huge, plush furniture. To the right of the sofa was a massive baby grand piano that Iggy immediately made a beeline for.

He sat and started to play, and I stopped in my tracks.

"Excuse me?" I said, gesturing to where he was flawlessly playing a very complex song.

Nudge, Angel, and Gazzy had already scattered, ignoring my surprise and the fact that Iggy was suddenly a concert pianist.

"Hello?" I said, turning to Fang with what must've been a look of complete shock on my face.

"Their school needed a volunteer pianist for the after-school vocal groups," Fang said with a smile. "Iggy and I went to pick Nudge up one day and they overheard him at the piano…"

"He's never taken a lesson in his life," I said. "How—?"

"How does Angel read minds? How does Nudge attract metal, hack all those computers, excel in technology? How do any of us have wings?"

"This is different, though," I said under my breath. "Fang, he's a freaking prodigy—"

"I can hear you two, you know," called Iggy from the piano.

"Let it go," Fang whispered at a volume both of us knew Iggy could hear, "his ego's inflated enough."

"Ha-ha," said Iggy over a complex bit of playing.

Fang picked up the backpack he'd brought with him from the cottage and grabbed me by the hand, tugging me toward the hallway.

"What is it with blind people and pianos?" I muttered.

We poked our heads into one of the rooms; it was vacant and had a king-sized bed. I could hear the girls in the bedroom next door, giggling about something as they unpacked.

Fang threw his pack on the floor and I flopped onto the mattress, letting out a moan as I sank into the memory foam.

"This is the most comfortable thing I've ever laid on."

"He gives you all the credit, you know," Fang said as he began to unload clothes and supplies from his backpack.

"Who, Iggy?" I asked. Fang nodded. "For what?" I asked incredulously.

He gestured vaguely toward the living room, where Iggy was now playing a more upbeat song I'd never heard before.

"How on earth is that my doing?"

"You had Jeb buy him that Walkman and all those CDs after we broke out of the School."

I felt a blush creep to my cheeks. "I didn't know he told you that."

"He didn't," Fang said simply, pulling out a pair of sweatpants he'd evidently stolen from the cottage and throwing them my way. He produced another pair from the depths of the bag. "Didn't have to."

"For Christ's sake, are we allowed any secrets in this family?"

Fang ignored me. "Whenever anyone asks how he learned, he always says, 'My older sister.' Nobody else knows you're tone-deaf and have never touched an instrument before in your life besides us, and nobody else shared a room with him besides me. I think he knew every note of that Beethoven one," he said, and then he laughed. "Actually, I think I might know every note of that Beethoven one. He listened to it in bed every single night."

Just like that, I was eleven again, listening to Iggy humming the notes.

Iggy had finished the upbeat tune and had paused. Then, as if he'd heard our conversation—there was no way he had, not through the music and the walls of the hotel—he started the much slower melody to "Moonlight Sonata."

"That's the one," Fang said.

We changed into our sweatpants and returned to the living room, where Iggy had abandoned the piano and joined the rest of the flock around the TV. Our reappearance went largely unnoticed due to the room service menu open on the floor.

Nudge was cross legged in front of the coffee table with the laptop open in front of her. Her fingers were a blur.

"Okay," she said, clicking a final time before turning the screen toward us. "Here's the blueprint, the duct system looks pretty complex—it looks like this building was designed as a factory, so its infrastructure is pretty heavy-duty, so we should have an easy way out if things go south—"

Gazzy was wide-eyed. "How the hell did you find this?"

"She's Nudge," Angel said, leaning forward to scrutinize the image. "When has she ever not found something?"

"You guys act like it's magic or something. Every building has an architect, every architect has some sort of online base for their drafts—"

"And you can access literally anything that's online."

Nudge blushed and pulled the computer back into her lap. "Well, when you put it like that…"

"Okay," said Iggy, "so we show up when they open in the morning, we ask for Emily—"

"It can't be all of us." My words were met with frustrated groans and "not again"s, as I knew they would, but I plunged on. "No, listen—it can't. First of all, some of these people—probably most of these people—are ex-School employees, possibly people from EU."

"I don't know if this is what you think it is, Max," Nudge said from behind the laptop screen.

"Yeah, this place looks pretty clean," Gazzy offered, having abandoned the menu in favor of reading over Nudge's shoulder. "'BioLife is a CLIA-certified laboratory dedicated to understanding the deepest parts of the human genome,' blah blah blah, science, science, microbiology…"

"CLIA?"

"Some FDA certification," Nudge said, fingers flying over the keys again. "Basically means that this place is legit."

I snorted. "Yeah, okay. I'm not buying it. The School got away with what they did for years. Same with Itex, same with EU. Don't think it'd be that hard for this place to do it, too."

"The School and all those places were underground, though," Iggy pointed out.

"No, they weren't."

"Not literally, Gazzy," said Fang. "He means unregistered, unknown. It's not like they had a website or anything. Definitely not an address that would ping on Google Maps."

"Itex wasn't unknown, remember? Their label was on everything."

"Still, they weren't advertising that they specialized in genetics or recombinant lifeforms or anything. Nobody knew the School or EU existed until they blew up."

"Literally."

My head was starting to hurt again. All of this was irrelevant information to me—there was no way the six of us were going to walk into this laboratory together, like, hi, it's the six mutants you've been trying to re-imprison for ten years, how the heck are ya?

"This isn't a discussion. We are not all going in there. We're recognizable enough on our own, let alone in a group. We already don't know what we're dealing with here. We have no clue how Emily ties into this, or who the guy who even wrote the note on the receipt is. All we know is they knew we'd go to Death Valley, and then with everything that happened at lunch today—"

"So, what?" Iggy said, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back. "Is this going to be the classic Max-and-Fang-save-the-day-while-the-incompetent-children-wait-uselessly-behind? Because I'm pretty sick of that one, to be totally honest with you."

"Iggy," Fang said in warning.

"This isn't about that, and you know it's not," I snapped back. "Come on, the six of us together are way more recognizable than just one or two of us. And it's me they want, so if shit's gonna hit the fan, I'd rather them just be able to take me."

Iggy threw his hands into the air. "For the love of fucking God…"

"You don't get to do this. It's not you're decision. We're going," Nudge said firmly, and Gazzy and Angel nodded alongside her. Fang said nothing, showed nothing, but I knew he was on their side.

I was outnumbered. It was a strange feeling.

I didn't like it.

I sighed and sat on the floor next to them, rubbing a hand to my aching forehead. "Okay, fine," I said, although it was very unfine. "So you guys hide in the duct work and I'll just walk in."

"No chance, Max."

"They'll recognize you in a second."

"Okay," I said, giving Iggy and Fang an annoyed glare, "then I'll have Angel come with me, if they recognize me she can just—"

"That won't work," Angel said with a frown. "If they recognize you, I can't alter that—recognition is one of the strongest parts of memory, it's why we have the déjà vu phenomenon. I'll be useless to change that."

A look of surprise must've washed over my face, because Gazzy chuckled.

"Angel did a lot of self-educating on neurology and the inner machinations of the mind over the past few years," he said. "Resident genius, over here."

"If anybody's going in the vents, it's you," Fang said, glancing at me. "If there's even a chance any EU employees are there, they'll know who you are right away. Same with old Whitecoats."

"And before you try to go behind our backs and sneak off in the name of self-sacrifice for the greater good, if they recognize you and come after you, then the whole plan is blown to pieces, and they'll come after the rest of us and take us anyway," Iggy pointed out.

My stomach dropped. He was right. And I was out of ideas.

"Fang, you stand out like a sore thumb anywhere you go," said Angel. "Iggy, you too. So the three of you are out. It should be me; I can try to confuse them if—"

"Angel, it was you they came after all those years ago in Colorado," I said. "And didn't we just establish that if they know it's us, we're screwed anyway because there's nothing you can do?"

"I probably look the most different out of all of us," said Gazzy, which was a gross understatement—he'd grown over a foot and filled out despite his gangly limbs. But he'd been captured with Fang and I, and when I reminded him of such he seemed disappointed that he couldn't play the hero.

It left only one of us, and I was entirely unhappy about it, although I would've been unhappy no matter what way it shook out.

"Me," said Nudge with a fearless, determined nod.

"Nudge," I said quietly, but I stopped myself before I continued. I'd tried to baby her since I'd gotten back, but I knew she was a young woman now, beautiful and intelligent and strong, just as I always knew she'd be.

I still didn't have to like it.

"I can handle this, Max," she said softly, reaching for my hand. "I know I'm still one of the kids to you, but I promise—I can handle this."

Her eyes flitted to Fang and the two of them shared some sort of significant look before he nodded and offered a proud, approving half-smile.

Nudge cracked her knuckles and bent back over the keyboard. "Let's get to work."

It didn't take long to formulate a plan, considering all we needed to really do was sneak into the duct system (this would require some trick work by Angel), let Nudge enter the building, meet with this woman to decide whether or not she was an enemy, and know our escape routes in case things got crazy.

Within the hour, I was huddled under the Egyptian cotton sheets of one of the king-sized beds. I had been under the impression Fang was going to crash with me—there was more than enough room for the two of us to sprawl out separately, and after he'd stayed with me that first night back in Massachusetts, it would've been nothing—but when he hadn't come in I'd assumed he was either up on his laptop or snoozing on one of the massive pull-out couches in the living space.

I had been tossing and turning for the better part of four hours when there was a knock at the door and I rifled into a seated position, ready to attack.

"Just me," came Fang's voice, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw him flash a half-smile. "Can't sleep either?"

"How is this possible?" I moaned, throwing the covers off and sitting at the edge of the bed. "I'm absolutely exhausted."

Fang leaned against the edge of the doorframe. "Pretty par for the course that everyone else is asleep except you and me."

"Old habits die hard," I grumbled.

"Wanna go for a fly?"

I angled my head up to meet his gaze and popped an eyebrow after casting a quick glance to the clock. "Now?"

Fang let loose a quiet laugh. "What was that you were saying about old habits?"

A short fly later, we were back at our old perch. I drew my legs to my chest and hugged them there, resting my chin on my knees as I watched the hawks circling in the early sunrise over the canyon. They were just as graceful as I remembered them.

Watching Fang fly over the past few days had made me realized he'd only built upon the skills that we'd picked up from them all those years ago. The rest of the flock seemed to as well. I looked like an overweight pigeon compared to them in the air.

Fang reappeared from inside the cave where he'd stowed his bag, cracking open a can of Mountain Dew and handing it to me as he settled at the edge next to me. He brought his own can of soda to his lips, a Cherry Coke.

"You remembered," I said, gesturing to the Mountain Dew. I took a long sip and almost choked—I'd forgotten how painful carbonated beverages could be—but continued to drink it anyway.

"What do you mean, 'you remembered?'" Fang said incredulously, though a smile crept to his face. "I remember everything."

"Not going to fight you on that one. If it happened, you remember it."

"You could've been gone for thirty years, and I'd still remember everything about you."

I felt a blush creep to my cheeks at those words. "Lucky you," I said weakly.

He was staring straight at me; I met his eyes and blushed more, so I looked away, but I could see in my peripheral vision that he was leaning closer, eyes blazing with a heat that I barely recognized.

"The only thing I couldn't remember, no matter how hard I tried," he said huskily, face inches from mine, now, "was the way you smelled."

A shiver of electricity shot through me, like lightning.

"Iggy washed all the sheets after that first week, but he didn't know I'd taken one of the pillowcases."

This was a development. I turned to face him to find a painfully vulnerable expression; there were years of pain and longing and something else in his eyes, his lips, his furrowed eyebrows.

"There were a few days, at the beginning, after we'd searched high and low for you, where I couldn't pull myself away from that fucking pillowcase," he said quietly. "Angel and Gazzy thought I was doing research. Iggy was beside himself as it was. Nudge was the only one who knew how fucked up I was. She took care of Angel and Gazzy—and Iggy and I—for a week. Then she found the pillowcase."

He was quiet a moment while he two of us watched the hawks swoop deep into the canyon. One of them, the largest one, returned to the air with something dangling from its beak. A desert rat, I guessed.

"I thought she would cry. Or try to keep it for herself," Fang said, wringing his hands together over his knees. The sunrise was a violent, blood red, making his eyes look black in its light. "But she didn't. She put it in the wash."

The look he'd shared with Nudge earlier suddenly made sense; if anyone knew how strong-minded and capable she was, it was Fang.

When he turned to face me, I said nothing, instead mapping his face with my eyes, committing it to memory, knowing that if I was ever taken from him again that I would never forget the way he was looking at me in this moment.

"I exploded—I saw red, I couldn't breathe. I lost my mind. I—I don't remember much," he admitted. "She and Iggy pinned me to my bed, and I had this moment of clarity where it all hit me, and then I lost it."

He paused and kept staring at the horizon. I almost thought he was done, until finally: "I cried until I couldn't see anymore."

I inhaled deeply and tried to force back the tears that were pricking in my eyes. I knew that feeling of hopelessness, of loss; I had lived it in high definition for so many impossibly long years. But it was something I'd never seen in Fang, and the thought of him suffering so much because of me, thinking I was dead—it was too much for me to process.

"You were gone," he whispered into the dawn. "And there was nothing I could do, no one I could kill, not a sliver of evidence to find."

"Fang…" I started, but there was no way I could finish—what could I possibly say?

His eyes met mine again and he looked at me in a way he never, ever had before, and said, in almost a whisper, "I love you, Max. I've loved you for as long as I've known what love is."

It wasn't cheesy or scripted or overboard—it was matter-of-fact, scientific, calculated: as if he were reminding me the sky was blue.

He shifted his gaze from me back to the hawks. Every part of his body language was open, free. Something about this—and maybe, too, about the way the muscles of his arms stood out against his tee shirt, and the how the line of his jaw was highlighted in the rising sun, and how he'd just admitted to loving me—flicked a switch in me.

I leaned forward and cupped my hand around his chin. As I angled his face toward me, I tried to tell him everything I'd ever felt about him in the single act of crushing his lips against mine.

This was the third time we'd ever kissed, the second in the last five years, but it was very different from the tame peck we'd shared at the lakeshore weeks ago. No, there was a fire inside of me, one id never felt before, in places id never felt before, and in moments my entire body was covering Fang's, pressing his back into the dusty, sandy surface of the cliff face.

We were inches from the edge but just as I began to consider this fact, Fang's tongue forced my lips apart and my body was a live wire, writhing and pulsing on top of him. He rolled us away from the cliff face so he was on top of me, not breaking away for a moment as he did.

He pulled his lips from mine and trailed his mouth across my cheek, down my jaw, to my neck—then he was biting, licking, kissing the skin there, and I was making sounds I'd never made before and grabbing fistfuls of his shirt in my shaking hands.

"Fang," I breathed.

He froze immediately, pulling himself from my neck and meeting my gaze. Everything about him, usually so hard and impenetrable and stoic, was soft and pliable, and he cradled me in his gaze like something fragile.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"God, yes," I said in a guttural moan.

"Are you absolutely positive?"

In lieu of answering, I grabbed him by the back of his head and slammed his lips to mine.

We were attached at the mouth but somehow, without stopping, he pulled us to standing and carried me backward into the cave. My legs wrapped around his waist and something deep inside me was roaring, throbbing, begging for something more as I felt parts of him I'd never felt before hot and solid against my jeans.

Fang was panting as he moved his mouth back to my neck and I was moaning and throwing my head back in an embarrassingly unhinged way but I couldn't stop—and when his hand found my bra over my shirt I let out a sound that could only be classified as a scream of pleasure.

I waited for Fang to stop, but when he didn't, the monster inside me only grew more powerful.

My hands trailed down to the back pockets of his jeans; I squeezed, and he let out a groan into my collarbone. Blindly, I moved my hands around the front of his jeans and repeated my movement.

Fang's knees buckled, and we almost went down. He caught himself at the last moment.

"Jesus fucking Christ." His voice was husky and deep and nearly a growl. "Can't do that."

He lowered me to my feet and I wrapped one leg around him, desperate to be as close as possible, the centimeters between us forced by our clothing feeling like miles that kept us apart. One of his hands found the back of my jeans and pulled me closer to him, a low, pleasured sound rolling from somewhere deep in him. Then he was grabbing at my hips, my shoulders, my jaw, and his mouth was everywhere, so much so that I could barely return the favor—I decided shoving my hands into the front of his pants would suffice, head thrown back as his mouth assaulted my neck, unsure of how long we'd be able to remain vertical before one of us collapsed with pleasure.

We were frenzied. It was the only way to describe it. I didn't know if it was the 2% animal or the 98% human part of us, but whatever it was, it had taken over, turning us into passionate, disinhibited maniacs.

I wasn't complaining.

Then we were moving again, his mouth to my collarbone, his tongue sliding along my skin and igniting every single nerve ending of my body.

Suddenly, we were slamming into the wall of the cave—I felt the bite of the rock against my lower back, where my shirt had ridden up, and Fang's body was completely pressed against mine, leaving no room for imagination or is that your gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see mes, his mouth found my neck again and we were moving together, and I realized I'd never imagined it was possibly to feel this way, feel this good—

—and just like that another feeling came to me, a familiar one that started deep in the pit of my stomach and rose up like wildfire, contagious and unstoppable and destructive, and with it came the voices—

"Maximum Ride."

It was his voice, thick and gross, and it was cigarettes and pain and seaweed-green eyes—

"I've been so patient."

And that cement room with the sliding metal door, and broken bones and bound wings and I was starving, I was broken, I was dying—

"You are mine."

And my own voice was coming out of me in a panic, and I couldn't breathe, couldn't see—colors speckled my vision and the world was spinning, but I was pinned, I couldn't move—"No, no, no, please, no—"

The force pressing me to the cave wall was gone, and I dropped the few feet to the ground on my ass, scrambling as quickly as I could to the rocky corner. I was breathing impossibly fast and could feel my heart pounding in my chest; at this rate, it would surely explode and cover the walls of this cave with whatever was left of me.

Reality came slamming back. Cave. Hawks. The barely rising sun on the horizon. The drying saliva on my neck and shoulders.

The man on all fours, shoulders trembling, four feet from me.

"Oh, God, Fang—no, no."

I crawled across the ground toward him, ignoring the burn of the pebbles against my knees and palms. Fang didn't look up, but I put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," I mumbled, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—"

A choked sort of laugh came out of him and he shook his head. When he raised his gaze to meet mine, his eyelashes were wet, and his eyes were blazing.

"You're sorry?"

"I liked it," I blurted, "I loved it—I wanted to keep going, I swear."

Any other time, I'd be horrified at the words and how quickly they came out of my mouth, but now I wanted nothing more than to reassure Fang that he'd done nothing wrong, that I could separate him from Mallory and all the other bad things in my past, that I would be okay.

I still wasn't entirely convinced all of that was true, but I could do my damndest to convince him.

"I'm sorry," I repeated sincerely.

"Max. I wasn't thinking, I shouldn't have… not all at once, or so soon. I should've known better than to push you, I got selfish and then I couldn't stop."

His face plainly displayed anger. I knew he was furious with himself and I wanted nothing more than to make him feel better.

"But I—I want to," I said quietly, ducking my head in embarrassment. "I wanted all of that. More, even. I just… I'm fucked up. Maybe forever. My brain just can't differentiate…"

You from the sociopath who raped and imprisoned me for four years.

Nice, Max. Really nice.

Fang's hand cupped my chin and forced me to look at him. His eyes held more emotions than I could separate out, but I saw his apology and more fondness than I knew what to make of.

"I'm sorry," I said again, because I was. Painfully so. Tears pricked to the corner of my eyes and I blinked and let them fall, wondering if I'd ever be anything more than what those years had turned me into.

Fang used his thumbs to wipe the tears. "Still a few hours until we have to be back," he said softly. "Lay with me?"

We settled on the ground a few feet from the cliff face; I laid on my side next to him and he pulled me into him, leaving his arm wrapped around my shoulder. I rested my head on his chest and inhaled deeply, feeling that cedar and cotton and home fill me, sending the anxiety somewhere far, far away.

"Wreckless Heart" – Glen Hansard