Hawk - James Patterson Page 0,84

didn’t know if his father had gotten off a successful shot or not. We reached the fire exit and took off, shooting up into the sky like rockets. We hovered over the greenish-gray clouds for a couple minutes and were quickly joined by Angel, Iggy, Gazzy, Max, and Fang.

Angel looked breathless. They all had smears of red or blue powder on their faces.

“Okay,” she told me. “You know how I said you were there to learn?”

I nodded.

She pointed down, where we could barely see faint wisps of colored smoke coming out of the building. “Yeah. Don’t do it like that.”

CHAPTER 83

Max

Yeah, that had gone well, if you call a total failure “well.” I was surprised—the Angel I knew could pretty much make anyone do anything. Ten years later, I’d figured her personal power had only increased, but it definitely hadn’t worked this time. God, it was so weird to see everyone ten years older. And the first time I’d seen my unhealthy, bony, but clean face in a mirror—well, let’s just say it had been a shock. Fortunately, ten-years-older Fang still loved me. And ten-years-older Fang was hot, hot, hot.

Oops, I realized the Flock had left me behind while I spent too much time thinking about how hot Fang still was—we were circling and changing altitudes a bunch of times to make sure we weren’t being followed by drones. Okay, come on, Max. Use your remaining brain cells. I’d been briefed on the City of the Dead and the people involved. And I was glad that Hawk had brought useful intel.

I glanced over at her, flying in Gazzy’s slipstream. She didn’t fly well. I mean, she was fine, she wasn’t a rock dropping out of the sky, but she wasn’t that smooth or graceful, and it kind of hurt to see my kid struggling instead of just being a natural at flying. Just then Gazzy told her to roll her shoulders back and use those muscles. I saw her try it, then cursed myself for not giving her the tip on my own.

We were here, the three of us: me, Phoenix, and Fang. We were flying together, like I’d dreamed we’d do ever since she was born. I should be bursting with happiness, but instead I was almost rigid with tension. I’d been apart from the Flock for ten years. Once we had been a finely tuned guerrilla unit. I felt we could slip into those roles again, given time. But Phoenix? The last time I’d seen her, she was five years old. If she’d lived with Fang or the Flock this whole time, she might be ready to take her place in our unit. But not like this. She was street-smart and knew the City of the Dead really well, but she didn’t know our ways, and the street was clearly where she belonged; not the sky. At this point, she was basically tagging along.

When Phoenix was about two, and the memories of how totally heinous childbirth was had sort of faded a little, Fang and I talked about having more kids. But we were still living underground, the world was still deep in a nuclear winter, and it didn’t seem like a good idea. I wondered now if we should have. If having a sibling like her might have helped make Phoenix more… well, more like one of us.

“You know—”

Phoenix’s voice startled me out of my memories.

“You know,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about Giacomo’s paranoia—that he thought Pietro would try to take over the family business. I mean, Pietro is my age. And I know him. We were pretty good friends. I don’t think he’d overthrow his own father, and I don’t think he’d be supported within the family, either.”

Phoenix wasn’t Phoenix anymore—she was Hawk now, only a few years younger than I’d been when I had her. And she was talking to me like a grown-up. And she was taller than me.

“Max?”

She was looking at me, frowning slightly.

“Sorry,” I told her. “Lost in thought. But I’m listening. What about Uncle Felipe?”

“I don’t think the rest of the family would want someone so young in charge,” Phoenix said. “And then there’s all of the Six. Are they McCallum’s bitches, or what?”

My daughter talked super rough. The same way I did when I was her age. Of course, she’d had to grow up rough, on the streets. Alone. Somehow she had survived. Probably by developing the same kind of skills I’d developed as a little kid. No line