Hawk - James Patterson Page 0,80

and shut her eyes, and I almost jumped when two small wings popped out of her fur. They were each about thirty centimeters long and folded only once, not twice like ours.

A talking dog with wings, I thought in a daze.

“My dad has wings, but my mama doesn’t,” Io said, turning her head to look at hers. “So not all of us have ’em. But I do! Watch!” She fluttered her little wings, then took a jump off the sofa. She stuck the four-paw landing. “See?”

“Oh, that’s… cool,” I said. Had someone put Rainbow in the food? What the hell was going on?

“Okay, Io, my turn to talk,” Angel said, pulling up a chair to face me and Max. “You guys, come over here so I don’t have to shout.” Iggy, Nudge, and Gazzy got chairs, and Fang sat next to Max, their hands immediately intertwining. Io scrambled back up on the sofa and curled up next to me, resting her head on my leg.

“Isn’t this nice?” she whispered up at me again, and I nodded.

“Let’s talk about liberating the city, okay?” Angel asked, and everyone nodded.

I frowned, now positive that they had put Rainbow in the food. Max had mentioned Freedom, their “worldwide group.” But Angel was barely older than I was, and let’s face it, this was a pretty scruffy group of weirdos we were working with, myself included. I mean, they don’t make plans or carry knives so I’m unsure how a worldwide group sprung from all of this.

Angel smiled at me then, and too late I remembered that she seemed able to read minds. Goddamnit.

Still smiling, Angel went on, ticking things off on her fingers. “Now, one, McCallum keeps control of the people by being everywhere, all the time. Two, he uses the Voxvoce as a punishment and warning. Three, he runs the factories that make the dope that keeps a large percentage of the people addicted and docile. Basically, he controls, directly or indirectly, everything. Especially the mass communications equipment.”

Everyone was quiet, digesting this.

I didn’t know how this worked, so I cleared my throat and held up a finger.

“You can just speak, sweetie,” Angel said.

“I know something McCallum doesn’t control,” I said.

CHAPTER 79

“Go on,” Angel said.

“The Six,” I said. “They don’t seem to answer to McCallum. They run a lot of things in the city, but just for themselves.”

“The Six,” Angel said thoughtfully. “Nudge?”

“They’re the six most important families in the City of the Dead, like Hawk said,” Nudge clarified. “There’s the Harrises, the Chungs, the Stolks, the McLeods, the Diazes, and the Paters. Between them they’ve carved up all the import-export businesses, banking, loan-sharking, and drug supply for more than just dope. Like some of the uglier street drugs.”

Had I just betrayed Pietro? I felt a pang in my heart—I’d been purposely trying not to think about him. Was he thinking about me? Had he even realized I was gone?

“They’re run like the old mafia families, from Before,” Nudge went on. “They have the family heads, then captains, soldiers, freelancers. I think the Pater family is the biggest, or at least most powerful.”

I kept my mouth shut, concentrating on Io’s fur so Angel couldn’t read my mind.

“How do they fit in with McCallum?” Fang asked.

“We’re not positive,” Nudge said, “but we assume they pay him a percentage of their profits or help him in law enforcement. We don’t know for sure how it works—it’s just what we suspect.”

“So what are we going to do?” Iggy asked.

“Well, we want to bring McCallum down,” Angel said, as if this was actually doable in some way on some fantasy planet. “And we want to balance out the Six. If they can run the city without doping people or extorting them, we could work with that.”

“‘Extorting’ means making them give you stuff,” Io whispered, squirming closer so she was almost in my lap.

“Okay,” I whispered back.

“So what are our plans?” Gazzy asked.

“It would be great if we could just blink McCallum out,” Angel said, rubbing her forehead. “If I could get close to him, I could take him down. But no one seems to have ever met him in real life.”

“My friend Clete might be able to help you with that,” I said hesitantly. Clete always talked about his big plans—now he had to put up or shut up. I hoped I wasn’t going to embarrass him by putting him on the spot. “He’s a whiz with computers, and he said that he’d tapped into the city’s mainframe.”