“Let’s pin his arm down, please,” Dylan directed quietly, and placed the tip of the needle on the vein. He was like a beautiful, powerful avenging angel.

And yet — he was … scary.

Nudge bit her lip. Angel looked confused. Iggy didn’t look anything.

I suddenly had a flash of myself saying something — it seemed like years ago. Someday we might have only a few seconds to figure out the meaning of life.

“Oh, God, Dylan — don’t,” I found myself pleading. “It’s just — enough. Enough already.”

Dylan stopped. Just like that. “Okay, Max.”

He looked at me, then at Fang, then at the doctor.

Then he plunged the needle into his own arm.

Epilogue

EPILOGUE

AFTER EVERYTHING, we’ve come to this, I thought.

I felt weird in my fancy dress, but even I had to admit it was gorgeous. Someone had come to the house this morning and fixed all of our hair — Angel’s golden halo of curls had never looked so perfect. Or so clean. Nudge looked even more like a teen model than usual, with her long, honey-streaked brown ringlets falling in perfect array around her shoulders. They were wearing matching dresses of russet silk. I glanced down at my cream-colored one, praying that I didn’t get dirt or blood on it before this was all over.

We carried flowers, bouquets of wildflowers that we’d picked this morning among the beautiful Colorado hills.

Nudge came up and stood next to me in the tent, peeking out through the door slit. It was a stunning afternoon, and in front of us, under a natural arch of trees, was a long red carpet with white chairs arranged on either side. Nudge smiled up at me.

“You’ve never looked more beautiful,” she said, and I gave a nervous grin. My hair was pulled back away from my face, and I had a little crown of flowers woven into it. I too was exceedingly clean.

Our various bruises and scrapes had healed completely, and Fang’s injuries were only a bad memory — as was Dylan’s pseudo suicide attempt. He’d suffered no ill consequences of the injection thus far. Plus, we hadn’t seen Dr. Gunther-Hagen again. We’d rolled him kicking and screaming into a giant lab cold-storage room before splitting that day, but I was sure one of his posse would revive and let the doc out of his icebox before he turned into a Popsicle.

“Is that the justice of the peace?” Nudge whispered.

“Yeah. She’s a friend of my mom’s.” I saw my mom and my half sister, Ella, sitting in the second row, looking back to see us. Jeb and Dylan were in the next row, and a bunch of our friends from CSM. Dylan had really surprised me, down in Dr. G-H’s lair. I was gonna keep an eye on him.

“There’s the music,” said Angel.