A/N: OOF. Life is HARD. Please continue to forgive and forget my typos.
Disclaimer: James Patterson owns the characters and any recognizable canon info. Thanks JP, for this chaotic universe you gifted us.
M
I had thought Fang had been the only one to know where I was going today. When I get home, I am informed that is not the case.
"Angel ditched school today and it was too late before I realized so we didn't call yet because I'm not a guardian," Iggy says, sounding rehearsed, standing in the entrance the moment I open the door.
I glare past him at Angel, who smiles at me from the kitchen breakfast bar, waving her spoon at me before dipping back into the pupping cup in her hand.
"Fang's a guardian, where is he?"
Iggy shrugs.
I blink. I don't think I have any texts from him. I feel like he would've told me if he wasn't going to be here.
"Why did you skip school?" I say pointedly, narrowing in on Angel.
Angel rolls her eyes. "Because I knew you would get home and dive in without me. I got to school and mind-controlled the nurse. Don't yell at me, I know it was wrong."
My mouth flaps open and closed like a fish. Not sure why I thought Angel wouldn't know my plan already. But I hadn't expected her to be diving into my head that frequently... since we'd settled down, she had started digging in our minds on a daily basis less and less.
I guess that's out the window. She grins, following my train of thought. I curl my fingers into fists.
"I get to yell at you!"
Iggy butts in, excitement lightly his face, "Where were you, Max? Dive in? Did you get it?"
"Max, just breathe," Angel says airily. I am so close to unraveling, probably closer than I could've imagined, and I try to actually do what she says.
When I'm done, I say, "If I could even try to ground you, I would."
She wiggles her wings at me in response. "Kinda hard to ground me."
I huff. "I know. Someone find out where Fang is."
"Why don't you?" Iggy asks, sauntering back into the kitchen to his own pudding.
"I don't want to, and I asked one of you to do it," I mumble. I try not to show my feelings on my face too much, but it doesn't matter; Iggy can't see, Angel is reading my own thoughts better than I am, and my voice portrayed a lifetime's worth of annoyance without my permission already.
Iggy reaches for his phone on the counter and Angel says eerily, "Don't bother."
I look at her, alarmed. A moment later, the door opens and Fang ducks in, looking up at the three of us and making absolutely no facial expression.
"Did you follow me?" I blurt, taking in his windswept hair and the way his wings keep curling forward and back, slow and calculated stretches we do after long flights.
"Follow you where?" he retorts. I fume. The original plan was for him to pretend not to know what I did, so that it wasn't both of us keeping the kids out of it—it would just be me keeping everyone else out of it.
I spin away from him, annoyed even more because he knows how to do that.
"Max, calm down," Angel says, still holding onto that careless, reckless façade. "He only followed you halfway."
"Okay," I finally explode, slamming my hand down on the counter. "This 'Watch out for Max' bit stops now. Let's not forget the chain of command."
Fang won't even meet my eyes and Iggy doesn't feign trying, because he absolutely thinks he's the one seeing through my bullshit right now. It's been like this since the discovery of the lab. Since Fang announced himself out of the mission. Everyone around me has been trying to take care of me, and I personally cannot stand it for one more second.
Angel rolls her eyes again.
"If you roll your eyes at me again, I will figure out a way to ground you! Go to your room, please. Everyone get out of my face."
I'm not sure any of them expected that explosion. My anger has just become palpable, and I see their movement happen all at once. Angel frowns and turns to go upstairs, thankfully refraining from trying to get the last word. Probably because she's still picking my brain apart.
Stop.
Fang retreats upstairs as well, not a single word to me or anyone. He's probably angry Angel ratted him out, but that will fade easily. As if I wasn't going to find out he was trailing me? How much of this mission is he going to do while trying not to do it? Trying to protect me?
I turn back to look at Iggy and he was out of his seat, but not heading out of the room. He's casually heading to the office with the bag.
"Iggy, what are you doing?"
I follow him toward the office, pulling the bag off his shoulder like a child. He makes an annoyed face down in my direction.
"You're not doing this part yourself. Stop."
I'm quiet for a second, twisting my fingers and staring at the black bag I'd dropped on the desk.
"I don't know if I want to do it yet."
Iggy's eyes soften a little. He shrugs, and pushes a finger through his hair. Realizes he can't start without me. "I guess we should wait, anyways." Immediately his mood shifts, and he turns to leave the office and make his way seamlessly back to the kitchen. I follow him, surprised by how easy that was.
"Your mom and Ella get in tonight," he says, pulling ingredients out of the refrigeration by the armful. "Angel and I went to the store this morning. Should we make chicken enchiladas or the carbonara?"
I give him a look, which is wasted. "Enchiladas or pasta? Any reason those are the only two choices?"
Iggy's lip twitches, but he says nothing.
I grin. "In that case, the enchiladas. Those are her favorite. And did you get—"
He laughs. "The worst wine in the world? I did. Not sure why her taste is so basic. Good God. I got some the rest of us will stomach."
I roll my eyes, deciding he's got this covered. He apparently thought about it all day, but I'm not having that conversation right now.
"I'll be right back."
He doesn't even answer me. I find Fang's door closed when I go upstairs, and frown. I knock gently, but don't even hear him inside. I sigh and turn down the hall to my own bedroom.
I yelp a little when I open the door and see Fang sitting comfortably on my bed with his laptop.
"Hello."
He looks up at me. Grins a little. I give him a halfhearted glare. "Stop making this harder."
"I could say the same thing to you."
I take my jacket off and crawl onto my bed, sitting next to him. He shuts his laptop.
I roll over, laying halfway on him, spreading myself out and stretching my wings until I feel my feathers brush the roof, thankfully missing the ceiling fan.
"Watch it," Fang says halfheartedly, scolding my use of outdoor stretches on top of him. I let my wings fold, resting on top of us as a fluffy blanket. Fang's fingers stroke through my feathers gently.
"How far did you really follow me?"
"All the way." He says softly, squeezing me hard. And I realize in that moment, in the tip of his voice and the way he holds me, that I'm not the only one scared here. He's on edge just as much as me, so my internal thought that he's sitting back, no problem, watching me flail alone handling this—that's not true. It's just not true. It's more complicated than that.
"She didn't say anything about it," I say quietly. "You could've just come with me."
Fang is quiet for a second. "I think they'll come after me eventually," he says quietly. "I think they're going to uncover the magnitude of just what Jeb was doing, and they're going to eventually need all of us."
He adjusts under me, turning to look down at me across my pillow. I turn onto my side, curling into him. His hand spreads out and holds my lower back, thumb brushing slowly between the base of my wings.
"None of us will stay out. The more they find out—they're going to finally understand how much he's capable of. I'm worried about being involved with the FBI, I'm worried about getting dragged into this, when the time comes."
He stops, having said enough already. I chew on this idea, silent too, because he's not that far off. If the house really held all the dirt on Jeb, it was only a matter of time before this blew up in our faces.
"It's inevitable," I say finally, gently. "And I'm terrified as hell, but I'd rather see it coming any way I can than hide until it finds me."
Fang scoffs. Our open and honest zone is halted as I feel his mood change. His hand drops from my back.
"Fang."
He frowns at me. "I'm not going to keep trying to prove to you that my decision was valid."
I roll my eyes. "Oh, my God, why are we doing this?"
"Quit it, Max," Fang says, sitting up. We fully disconnect now, and he gets up. I sit on my bed, missing his warmth, wondering what I said. "I'm not hiding."
Oh, Jesus.
"Aren't you?" blurts out of my mouth before I can stop it, and Fang's face settles into hard, unforgiving lines.
"Wait, Fang—" but he's already out of my room, heading far away from me. I realize I should give him a moment before I chase him down and make him listen to my apology. I realize, on top of that, that I need time to actually mean my apology as much as I meant what I said to him.
Because I'm a stubborn, grudge-holding monster.
I head back downstairs, hoping that isn't where Fang is, and see Iggy hard at work in a kitchen he's transformed into an enchilada factory. He has four pans spread out and is systematically filling them full of saucy wonderfulness.
I sit down across from him on one of the stools at the island. He tilts his head in my direction as he continues to seamlessly fold and stuff enchiladas.
"Are we doing too much?"
Iggy snorts. "We haven't even started yet."
"Once we do, there's no turning back."
Iggy shrugs. I'm getting really annoyed by how casually he can take life-changing chaos in stride. "Max, there's already no turning back. We were brought into this fucked up world, and immediately there was no turning back."
I make a face at him, since that was less than helpful. Shadows shift on the wall behind the fridge, so I turn to peer out onto the patio. The afternoon sun shines in right over the tree line in the backyard, casting the dining room and kitchen in a warm, orangey glow.
Nudge and Gazzy's forms, approaching the patio with wings wide open from landing, were casting the shadows. Long, abstract and ever-changing shapes. They enter the main living room with a sense of urgency, ignoring the alarm system beeping impatiently for the code.
"Angel wasn't at school today apparently?" Nudge says, fear bright in her eyes. "She wasn't there, we waited until all the busses left and everything—"
I take in Nudge and Gazzy's horrified and worried faces and rush out the words, "She's already home, she ditched this afternoon."
Nudge's eyes open in surprise at that information, her shoulders relaxing with an exhale that pushed all her panic away. She frowns. "What the hell, why didn't we get the memo?"
"I didn't know until I got home," I say without thinking, and Gazzy butts in curiously.
"Where did you go today?"
I glance over at Iggy, who isn't even listening. He's focused on his enchiladas.
"I got the first batch of evidence from Alana today," I admit, since everyone else already knows. "We haven't started yet."
Both of them don't say anything right away. Gazzy breaks away first, excusing himself to change out of his school clothes. Nudge goes into the kitchen and sets her bag down, but she has a thoughtful look on her face.
"How is this really gonna work?" she says softly when she sees me watching her. She drops into the chair next to me at the island.
I exhale a laugh. "I have no idea."
Angel comes down the stairs, pulling her curls up into a bun. "Val's going to be here soon, Max!"
"How soon? How do you know?"
I pull out my phone, checking my notifications, but nothing. At that moment, the alarm beeps quickly three times. Someone is requesting to pull into the driveway.
We'd gone all out with the house security system when we were finally able to settle down. Though the house itself could stand to have a few updates, we had really focused on making the lot itself as secure as possible, while still allowing ourselves easy access to come and go as we pleased.
This included a fully-fenced front and back yard, with a secure gate for entry. Usually we don't use the gate. Because we don't drive.
I cross to the front door, activating the code for the gate when I recognize Val's SUV. I cast a glance at Angel, who's grinning at me from the couch. I pull in a long breath, realizing that hashing it out with Fang and starting to dig through evidence all would have to wait.
"Val and Ella are pulling up," I call out, hoping the boys upstairs can hear me. I continue watching as they park and three doors of the vehicle open. Val steps out of the driver's seat and peers toward the house, spotting me at the window and smiling. Ella climbs out of the backseat behind her, pulling her blue duffel bag over her shoulder and scooping all of her hair up and over her shoulder.
A man gets out of the passenger seat. He has a briefcase.
Things just got interesting.
"Scratch that. Val and Ella and New Guy."
Iggy's head pulls up from enchilada-making, way too interested in that new development.
"Who the fuck is New Guy?"
