School's Out - Forever

  But no. Instead, she was sashaying inside the fancy house, thinking she was perfect, better than anyone, better than him.

  The one fun thing of the last forty-eight hours had been Max’s expression when she’d seen he was alive. She’d been shocked. Shocked and horrified, Ari remembered proudly. He wanted her to look like that every time she saw him.

  So, fine. Get some R&R, Maximum, Ari thought acidly. Your time is coming. And I’ll be there waiting for you. I’ll always be there.

  The hatred coiled in his gut, twisting his insides, and he felt himself morphing, his facial bones elongating, his shoulders hunching.

  He watched as the coarse hair covered his arms, lightning fast, and ragged claws erupted from his fingertips. He wanted to rake these claws down Max’s face, that perfect face. . . .

  Anguish welled up and choked him, turning his world black, and without thinking, he sank his fangs into his own arm. Clenching his jaw hard, he waited for the physical pain. Finally, gasping, he sat back, his mouth red with blood, his arm coldly numb with pain. Ah. That was better.

  PART 2

  PARADISE OR PRISON?

  22

  Guess how many bedrooms Anne’s little country shack had. Seven. One for her, one for each bird kid. Guess how many bathrooms it had. Five. Five bathrooms all in one house.

  “Max!” The Gasman pounded on my bedroom door.

  I opened it, my hair still wet from my long, incredibly hot shower.

  “Can I go outside?” he asked.

  “Gee, I had forgotten the natural color of your skin,” I told him. “I was convinced you were kind of dirt colored.”

  He grinned at me. “Call it camouflage. Can I go outside?”

  “Yeah, let’s all go together, give Iggy some landmarks.”

  “What is that, like, a plane hangar?” Nudge asked.

  A grove of trees had hidden the big red building from the house, but now that we were doing recon, we were finding all kinds of things.

  “It’s a barn,” said Fang.

  I was keeping an eye on him. As soon as he started to look tired, I was going to send him back to the house.

  “A barn with animals?” asked Angel excitedly.

  Just then, Total started barking, as if he’d picked up something’s scent.

  “Yep, guess so,” I said, scooping Total up in my arms. “Listen, you,” I told him. “No more with the barking. You’re going to spook somebody.”

  Total looked offended but stayed quiet as long as I held him.

  “That first one is Sugar,” said Anne, coming up behind us. She’d given us free rein of the place after she’d shown us our rooms and stuff.

  We stood in the open barn doorway and watched Sugar, a pale gray horse who was looking back at us with interest.

  “He’s beautiful,” Nudge whispered.

  “He’s big,” said the Gasman.

  “Big and sweet,” said Anne, opening a box and taking out a carrot. She handed it to Nudge and nodded at the horse. “Go on. He likes carrots. Hold it flat in your hand.”

  Cautiously Nudge stepped forward, holding out the carrot. This is a kid who could break a man’s ribs with a well-placed kick, but she was almost trembling as she approached the horse.

  Sugar very delicately lipped up the carrot, then crunched it with satisfaction.

  Nudge turned to me, her face glowing, and my heart caught in my throat. It was like we were inner-city kids getting a week on the farm as part of a social service program. We were surrounded by beautiful scenery and fresh air, there were animals, and—

  “You guys have another half hour,” Anne said, turning to go back to the house. “Dinner’s at six.”

  And, I was going to say, plenty of food. It was amazing.

  Where was the catch? ’Cause I knew one was coming.

  23

  “Oh, yeah!” said the Gasman, looking at the pond. “I am so there!”

  Anne’s pond was about as big as a football stadium, with a small, rocky shore edged by cattails and daylilies.

  I stared at it suspiciously, waiting for the Pond Ness Monster to rise out of its depths. Okay, call me hopelessly paranoid, but this whole place was starting to seem creepily idyllic. Like, my bedroom was charming. Charming! What did I know about charming? I’d never called anything charming before in my life.

  And now here I was, eyes narrowed at a picture-perfect pond. Was this some new freakish test?

  “We don’t have time right now, Gazzy,” I said, clamping down on my rising fears. “But maybe we can go swimming tomorrow.”

  “It’s just so beautiful here,” Nudge said, gazing at the untrustable rolling hills, the dark, secret-concealing orchard, the pond (see above rant re pond), the small, literally babbling brook that ran into the pond. “Like the Garden of Eden.”

  “Yeah, and that turned out so well,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Look, there are more animals over there,” said Angel, pointing.

  No doubt tidy, Martha Stewart, heirloom pedigree animals enclosed in chintz pens.

  “Okay, we can swing by ’em on the way back to the house. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m starving.” I glanced over at Fang, who was starting to look a little pale. Tonight after dinner I would try to get him to take it easy in one of the too-comfortable recliners by the horribly cozy fireplace.

  “Sheep!” Angel cried, catching sight of some fluffy brown wool.

  “Anne is quite the animal lover,” Fang said to me as we followed Angel. “Horses, sheep, goats. Chickens. Pigs.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I wonder who’s for dinner?”

  He flashed one of his rare smiles at me, and it was like the sun coming out. I felt my cheeks get hot and strode on ahead.

  “Pigs, look,” said the Gasman excitedly. “Come here, Ig.” Gazzy guided Iggy’s hand down, and Iggy scratched a small brown pig behind its ears, sending it into ecstatic squeals.

  “Pigs are so lucky,” said the Gasman, as images of bacon danced in my head. “No one cares if they’re dirty or live in a pigsty.”

  “That’s because they’re pigs,” I pointed out. Just then, Total leaped out of my arms, scratching me.

  “Hey!” I said, and then saw a large black-and-white shepherdy-looking dog bounding up. Total braced his front legs and barked loudly, and the other dog barked back.

  “Total!” I called, clapping my hands. “Stop it! It’s his yard. Angel!”

  Angel was already trotting over, and she grabbed Total’s collar.

  “Since when does he have a collar?” I asked.

  “Okay, Total, calm down,” Angel said, stroking his head. Total stopped barking, then shook his head in disgust and said, “Putz.”

  I blinked in surprise and opened my mouth—and then saw Gazzy loping up, hands in his pockets, whistling. I absolutely refused to give Gazzy the satisfaction of freaking out over his latest voice-throwing trick and didn’t say a thing.

  “Come on, guys,” I said. “Let’s go chow.”

  24

  “Okay, let’s see what we have here,” I muttered. The six of us were in “my” room. The notes we’d gotten from the Institute in New York were spread out on my bed. When we’d found the files in the computer and printed them out, some of the information had been readable. Now those pages were gone, leaving us with lines of numerical code. What had happened to the readable pages? Dunno. Was it another test?

  So basically, we were looking at reams of numbers. Every once in a while a real word leaped out at us. Some of the real words were us, our names. Somewhere in these pages was info about our parents.

  “How about we each take two pages and comb through them,” I suggested. “Figure out what we can. See if anything about the numbers looks familiar or has a pattern.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Iggy. “Except for me.”

  “I’ll read you out some numbers,” said Fang.

  Iggy nodded, and I passed out the sheets. Fang started reading softly to Iggy, who conce
ntrated hard, nodding every so often.

  I took my two sheets and sat at the desk. For the next hour, we tried every basic code-breaking technique we knew. We looked for patterns, hexagons—and came up with nada, nothing.

  Another hour later, I dropped my head into my hands. “This is impossible,” I said, ready to scream in frustration. “This is probably a computerized code. If it is, we’ll never break it.”

  “But isn’t everything a test?” the Gasman asked, his small face tired. It was almost ten. I had to get these guys into bed. “Didn’t Jeb tell you that everything is a test, back at the School, when we were rescuing Angel? So that would mean we’re supposed to be able to break this somehow.”

  “I thought of that,” I said. “That’s what’s so irritating. I’ve tried everything that would occur to me. So I guess I’m flunking this test.”

  A tap on my door interrupted us. The door opened a bit, and Anne poked her head around it.

  “Hey, guys,” she said with a smile. “Sleepy yet? Krystal? Want to get ready for bed?”

  “Yep,” said Nudge. “I’m beat.”

  Gazzy looked at me, and I nodded at him.

  “Yeah,” he told Anne. “We were just about to crash.”

  “Good,” she said easily. “Anyone need anything? Before you crash?”

  “No, we’re fine,” said Angel, following Anne out. They walked down the hall, and I heard Anne say, “Ariel, how about letting Total out one last time?”

  “Okay,” said Angel.

  I stood in my room, feeling a little bad, feeling as if someone else was taking care of my flock.

  25

  Welcome to another day at Camp Agent!

  To start, a hearty breakfast that Iggy and I made. That’s because on our first morning here, we had discovered that single-woman Anne Walker considered a protein bar and an orange-flavored sports drink to be an acceptable breakfast.

  Which, if we were Dumpster diving or stealing from a 7-Eleven, would be great. But since we were in a seven-freaking-bedroom country château with a Sub-Zero fridge and Viking range at our disposal, it didn’t cut it.

  So it was massive infusions of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, etc., for everyone.

  Next, quaint housekeeping issues. Anne made each of us responsible for keeping our bedchambers tidy and worthy of a photo shoot. And here’s what really ticked me off: The flock actually did it.

  Had I asked them a thousand times to keep their rooms straight at home, when we had a home? Yes. Had they done it? No. However, they were all over the bed-making and shoe-lining-up situation here, for a stranger. Little buggers.

  Then, rousing exercise in the country-fresh air. Flying, sparring, playing, swimming, horseback riding.

  Lunch. Anne got the fine art of making sandwiches down to a science.

  Post-lunch rest, play, etc. Anne occasionally took us aside one by one and interviewed us, had us show her what we could do. She loved to watch us fly—made us feel like marvels, swooping around in the sky.

  She would watch us for hours, with binoculars, and the look of wonder and delight on her face could be seen from two thousand feet away.

  Dinner. Anne really tried. But this was a woman whose main source of nutritional comfort came in single-serve microwavable packages. After the first day, she’d gone shopping and brought home fifteen bags of groceries and a cookbook. With mixed results.

  But you know what? The food was hot and someone was fixing it for us, which made it fabulous in my book.

  After that first day, I tried to start getting the flock ready for bed before Anne could do it. It bothered me, her doing it. Taking over my role. I was still the leader. Soon Anne and her comfy house would be just a memory. Just like Jeb. Just like Dr. Martinez and Ella. Just like everything in our temporary lives.

  One night after we’d been there almost two weeks, I was lying in bed listening to my favorite, favorite singer, Liam Rooney. Liam, Liam, you are my inspiration. The younger kids were already asleep. There was an almost silent tap on my door.

  “Yeah?”

  Fang came in.

  “What’s up?”

  “Look.” He put some of the coded sheets from the Institute on my lap, then hauled a big spiral-bound book onto the bed. He opened it up across my knees.

  “I was looking at this stuff, going nuts, you know? And suddenly it looked like map coordinates.”

  I drew in a breath. As soon as he said that, I could see the possibility.

  “This is a book of detailed street maps of Washington DC,” he said. “I got it out of Anne’s car. Look—each page is numbered, each map is numbered, each grid of each map is numbered. And look at this clump of stuff here, by Gazzy’s name. Twenty-seven, eight, G nine.

  “So I go to page twenty-seven, and it’s a section of town, see?”

  “Yeah,” I breathed.

  “This section has twelve smaller maps. I go to map eight.” He turned pages. “Which is a blowup of one section. Then I go to column G and trace it down to row nine.” His finger slowly moved down the map. “And it’s a pretty specific little chunk of streets.”

  I looked at him. “Oh, my God,” I said. “Did you try any others?”

  He nodded. “This one by Nudge’s name. Same thing—I actually end up with a real place.”

  “You are so brilliant,” I said, and he shrugged, looking almost embarrassed, except that Fang never gets embarrassed. “But I thought Nudge was pretty sure she’d found her parents in Arizona,” I added.

  He shrugged again. “I don’t know. The woman we saw was black, but it wasn’t like Nudge was a photocopy of her. You think this is worth checking out?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, swinging my legs out of bed. “Everyone else asleep?”

  “Yeah. Including the Annemeister.”

  “Okay. Gimme a minute to get some jeans on.”

  26

  “Hmm,” I said.

  Fang propped the map book on a fire hydrant and braced it with one knee. He took out the page of code, and I held the penlight so he could see. He double-checked the coordinates, showing them to me. I looked at the street signs at each end of the block.

  “No, you’re right,” I said. “This is it. If those are map coordinates, then this is where we should be.”

  We looked at the building across from us. It was not a cute house with a picket fence, suitable for bringing a baby home to, a baby that would later be turned into a mutant bird kid by mad scientists. No, it was a pizza parlor.

  On this block were a car wash, a bank, the pizza joint, and a dry cleaner. On the opposite side of the street was a park. No houses, no apartment buildings, no place where someone could have lived.

  “Well, crap,” said Fang.

  “I concur with that assessment,” I said, crossing the street. “Maybe there was an apartment building here and it got torn down.”

  We stood in front of the darkened store and peered inside. Hanging on the wall was a black-and-white photo of a bunch of people standing in front of a new, shiny version of the store. “Here since 1954,” the caption under the picture said.

  “So much for that theory,” said Fang.

  “Do you want to swear this time or do you want me to?” I asked.

  “You can,” said Fang, stuffing the page back into his pocket.

  “Well, crap,” I said. “Okay. Let’s try the next one. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  And we did get lucky—in that the next address was actually a house.

  Unfortunately, it was an abandoned apartment house in the middle of a hellhole block inhabited by some of the more scum-sucking members of society—many of whom were conducting “business” right now, at two in the morning.

  “Let’s check it out anyway,” I said, drawing farther back into the shadows.

  We had landed on the tarry roof of the building next door. Half an hour of waiting and watching had shown us that at least two guys, and maybe more, seemed to be squatting in this bombed-out wreck of a building.


  Twenty minutes after the second guy left and didn’t come back, I stood up. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” said Fang, and we jumped across to the other roof.

  27

  “Least favorite place,” I whispered to Fang. “Sewer tunnels of New York? Or abandoned home of squatting crackheads?”

  Fang thought about it, moving silently across the room, staying out of the squares of moonlight coming through the gaping windows.

  “I’d have to go with sewer tunnels of New York,” he whispered back.

  We started on the second floor and moved down, opening doors, looking up fireplaces, tapping walls for hidden compartments.

  Two hours later, I rubbed my forehead with a filthy hand. “We got nothing. This stinks.”

  “Yeah.” Fang breathed out. “Well, get this last closet and we’ll split.”

  I nodded and opened the hallway coat closet. It was empty, its walls nothing but broken plaster, showing the bare laths within.

  I was about to close the door when a thin strip of white caught my eye. I shone the penlight on it, frowning, then reached down to pick at it. Something was wedged in back of a lath.

  “What?” Fang asked quietly.

  “Nothing, I’m sure,” I whispered back. “But I’ll just get it. . . .”

  I pried it out with my fingernails, and it turned out to be a square of paper, about four inches across. I turned it over, and my breath caught.

  It was a photograph.

  Fang leaned over my shoulder while I focused the light on the photo. It was a picture of a woman holding a baby in her arms. The baby was plump, blond, blue-eyed . . . the spitting image of the baby Gasman—cowlick and everything.

  28

  “Holy moly,” I breathed. Just then we heard heavy footsteps coming up to the front door.

  “They’re back,” Fang whispered. “Upstairs!”

  We whirled and ran up the steps. But the moonlight streaming through the windows cast our shadows down the stairs.