Hawk - James Patterson Page 0,108

her neck and she went down.

We weren’t so lucky with the third one. He’d seen the other two hit the deck and was scanning the skies. He spotted us and held up his rifle, looking enraged.

“It’s an old gun!” Phoenix yelled. “It still works!”

Quickly Gazzy whipped out an IED and hurled it down. “So does this!”

The explosion made the rest of the Pater cadre flood out of the house like bats at dusk, but we were ready, armed, and skilled at chucking Gazzy’s bombs as fast as snowballs. By the time my feet hit the ground, there was only one guy standing: Giacomo Pater.

He grabbed an old automatic rifle and sprayed a round of bullets at us. But there’d been a reason all those guns had been replaced—after decades of use, the dang things didn’t shoot straight.

When Giacomo saw that he’d missed all of us from thirty meters away, he screamed in fury and threw the gun as hard as he could. Because that works. Sure. Throwing a fit should always be the last resort.

“Your term of service just expired, you piece of shit!” I yelled after him.

CHAPTER 109

Hawk

The Flock was ice under pressure. They just knew stuff. How to coordinate attacks, how to take out snipers. It was all of them, working together. A well-oiled machine.

“Go, go, go!” Max shouted, already pounding up the steps of the club. She pointed to the right and left as she ran, and Fang and Iggy took off, I guess to circle the building.

That left me, and I jumped up the stairs after Max. She yanked the door open—there were cowering servants inside—and tore through the building. I was fast on her heels, ready to go into battle with my mother. But we were finding… nothing. She threw a look at me, and I started back through the rooms, roaring orders, kicking guns away, scanning each room for hidden doorways, nooks, crannies, little hidey-holes, anything.

“Phoenix!” Max yelled, and I ran to the hallway. With one hand, she held a cook’s assistant by the neck—I saw the pink marks her fingers were making. In her other hand she held one of Gazzy’s bombs. This one had a fuse, and it was sparking and crackling. I tried to keep extreme panic and a what the almighty hell expression off my face.

Watching me, Max nudged the poor sap with her elbow. He made no sound but looked down at one of the carved panels of the hallway. Silently, Max raised her eyebrows at him.

Gulping, the guy flashed a glance at a wall sconce that was a fat baby in a tiny diaper holding a light bulb. Max shoved him away from her, strode forward, grabbed the wall sconce and pulled, all while I was trying not to shriek, “Get that thing away from me!” I’d seen what Gazzy’s bombs could do to people.

Sure enough, the wooden paneling slid to one side, revealing an opening that I couldn’t believe fat Giacomo Pater fit through. Max motioned to me, and I dropped to the floor and slid through without question. She followed behind, tossing the bomb back into the room just as the panel slid shut again, leaving us in darkness. Everyone screamed, there was a muffled pluff! sound, and Max turned on her shoulder lamp.

“Glitter bomb,” she said, “Gazzy likes to throw a few of those into our packs in case we decide to throw a party.”

Together, we doubled over and started crab-walking through the low tunnel. We came to a four-way intersection where we could almost stand, and I held up one hand.

“Gimme a sec,” I whispered, closing my eyes. I hadn’t been under here in ages, and it was dry—no convenient wet footprints to follow. Breathing in, I figured whether the air was colder or warmer, stale or staler, thick with factory fumes or full of street-cooking smells.

Then I smelled… Pietro. Pietro’s clothes—the detergent. I opened my eyes and smiled at Max, my mother: Giacomo’s clothes would smell the same.

“This way,” I said, and started heading down the tunnel.

“Faster to fly,” Max said.

Confused, I slowly extended my wings, which were about half a meter too wide for this tunnel. I knew Max’s wings were wider than mine.

Shaking her head, she demonstrated: straight ahead on the foreswing, then pull them in enough to push back hard, then pull in again to go straight on the foreswing. It was amazing—a way to fly through tunnels too narrow for regular flight!

But could I even do it? It seemed