Two Schools Out - Forever

68

"What's wrong?" Fang had been acting a little off all night. Now we were flying high over the lights of DC, and he kept wiping his forehead and rolling his shoulders.

"I'm way hot," he muttered. "But I don't feel sick. Just-way hot."

"Like I did?" I raised my eyebrows. "Huh. Give it a week; you'll be flying like the Concorde. I think. Or, you know, you're dying." I shot him a grin, which he didn't return. "What? You feel really bad?"

"No. But I just thought of something. I have your blood in me."

I looked at him, his wide, dark wings moving smoothly, powerfully through the night air.

"So? It was just blood."

He shook his head. "Not our blood. The red cells have DNA, remember? I got transfused with your DNA."

I thought. "Uh, so?"

He shrugged. "So maybe that's why this is happening. Maybe it wasn't supposed to happen to me."

"Hmm," I said. "And we don't know if that's bad or good or nothing."

"Guess we'll find out," he said.

Turns out there are practically hundreds of freaking tall church steeples in the DC area. Though finding the right one tonight seemed amusingly unlikely, we cruised around, looking for a steeple in a residential neighborhood. We dropped down more than a dozen times, but once I had scanned all the close-by houses, we took to the air again.

After three hours of this, we were hungry and tired. We didn't even have to speak-just looked at each other, shrugged, and turned in unison to head back to Anne's place.

It was around 3:00 a.m. when we got back to Anne's. We headed toward the window we'd left open, in a little-used storeroom on the second floor.

"Fang." He looked at me, and I gestured at the house with one hand.

We could see Anne's silhouette clearly in the window of her room. She was awake and looking for us at 3:00 a.m. Didn't that woman ever sleep?

Was Anne just a spy? For the FBI or someone else?

Suddenly I felt exhausted. We coasted down to the house, tucked our wings in at the last second, and zipped through the window. We stacked hands and tapped them, then went to our separate rooms. I kicked off my shoes and fell into bed in my clothes. I didn't expect Anne to come to my room.

She'd already seen everything she needed to see.