Hawk - James Patterson Page 0,98

vee, with Fang taking lead. “This isn’t a game though, guys,” he said, speaking mostly to Gazzy and Iggy. “This is war. We might be up here dropping bombs like B-17s, but down there, they’re going to figure out how to shoot us and how to kill us. So keep your guard up. They might be sitting ducks, but don’t forget that the only difference between them and us is that we’re flying ducks.”

“Okay, that’s it for the shit list,” Nudge said, raising her voice so we could all hear. “We hit the dope factory, the death hospice, that horrible empty Children’s Home, a lot of the prison, a whole bunch of the government buildings… what next?”

“I say we join the people below,” Gazzy said. “For one thing, as much as we’ve done, we seem to have missed McCallum’s headquarters. He’s still yapping.”

It was true. Far below us, huge vidscreens showed McCallum’s purple, furious face, as he railed against the protesters and shook his meaty fists at nobody. “I am just like your father!” he was shouting now. “Like your father, you can trust that I know best! And like your father, I’ll be punishing the wrongdoers!”

“Pretty sure he’s talking to us,” I said.

“Can’t believe we missed him,” Fang said, flying over me, touching my back with his cool hands. “We hit just about every place we thought he could be.”

“We gotta find Phoenix,” I said flatly. “Either her or her body. I need to know what happened to her. And, dead or alive, I want her back.”

Of course everyone nodded, happy to follow my lead. Hell, most of them liked her more than I did. But she was still my kid, and there was zero chance that I was going to lose her again. So all we had to do was comb an entire freaking city, thousands of bodies, tons of wreckage…

“Okay,” Angel said. “You want to do that now, or—”

I looked at her, her unfamiliar grown-up face, her sharp, wise eyes. Long, long ago, she’d been like my baby, my child. Like Phoenix, she’d grown up without me. I hadn’t been there for either of them.

“Maybe we should storm the castle first?” said Gazzy, gliding closer. “If we help the Paters fall, that’ll spell the end for the rest of the Six.”

“I vote Paters, too,” Angel said.

“There’s a huge crowd heading up the avenue toward their estate,” Fang said.

I was a mom and a member of the Flock. I wanted my child back, but I also wanted to finish what the Flock had begun. The two sides were having their own battle, one in my mind to match the streets below. I shook my head, told myself I needed to concentrate.

“Let’s go blow up the Paters,” I said slowly, and angled my wings to turn east-northeast. “Let’s reduce their castle to rubble!”

And that decision, right there, was the turning point for everything.

CHAPTER 98

Hawk

I was in the bowels of the Pater homestead, locked in a room. For all of the thousands of fights I’d been in, I’d never, not ever, been trapped. Never been without an escape route. I knew this whole city from the air and underground, and I’d memorized escape routes from every possible place I could be cornered.

I’d just never counted on being cornered under the Pater mansion. The City of the Dead was a wrecked place where you could count on rot and rust to help you out of a tight spot, punching your boot through a weak spot.

But this was different. This place was built to hold people. There was the one heavily planked door, double locked, and one weensy window way up high that was too narrow even for a tall superthin bird-kid to slip through. That was it.

I’d paced patterns into the dusty floor—circles, like a chained dog, my blood mixing with the dirt to create filthy footprints. There were two places where the plaster was broken away down to the skinny wooden laths, and I’d tried punching through them. My knuckles were scraped and raw. It would have taken about a thousand more punches to get into the next room, which for all I knew looked just like this one, with another locked door. Besides, I didn’t have the strength to break through a wall. My sides ached, my breaths coming in gasps.

The only other thing in here was a fireplace—not a huge, ornate one big enough to roast an ox, but a small one, big enough to almost warm mistreated