had been secretly glad when Meredith took her by the shoulders and more or less forced her to drink hot milk with vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and when Bonnie had helped her into her pile of sleeping blankets and then held her hand until she went to sleep.
Matt had stayed late, and the sun was setting as he drove home. It was a race against darkness, he thought suddenly, refusing to be distracted by the Jaguar's expensive new-car smell. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was pondering. He hadn't wanted to say anything to the girls, but there was something about Stefan's farewell note that bothered him. The only thing was, he had to make sure it wasn't just his injured pride speaking.
Why hadn't Stefan ever mentionedthem ? Elena's friends from the past, her friends in the here and now. You'd think he'd at least give the girls a mention, even if he'd forgotten Matt in the pain of leaving Elena permanently.
What else? There definitely was something else, but Matt couldn't bring it to mind. All he got was a vague, wavering image about high school last year and - yeah, Ms. Hilden, the English teacher.
Even as Matt was daydreaming about this, he was taking care with his driving. There was no way to avoid the Old Wood entirely on the long, single-lane road that led from the boardinghouse to Fell's Church proper. But he was looking ahead, keeping alert.
He saw the fallen tree even as he came around the corner and hit the brakes in time to come to a screeching stop, with the car at an almost ninety-degree angle to the road.
And then he had to think.
His first instinctive reaction was: call Stefan. He can just lift the tree right off the ground. But he remembered fast enough that that thought was knocked away by a question. Call the girls?
He couldn't make himself do it. It wasn't just a question of masculine dignity - it was the solid reality of the mature tree in front of him. Even if they all worked together, they couldn't move that thing. It was too big, too heavy.
And it had fallen from the Old Wood so that it lay directly across the road, as if it wanted to separate the boardinghouse from the rest of the town.
Cautiously, Matt rolled down the driver's side window. He peered into the Old Wood to try to see the tree's roots, or, he admitted to himself, any kind of movement. There was none.
He couldn't see the roots, but this tree looked far too healthy to have just fallen over on a sunny summer afternoon. No wind, no rain, no lightning, no beavers. No lumberjacks, he thought grimly.
Well, the ditch on the right side was shallow, at least, and the tree's crown didn't quite reach it. It might be possible -
Movement.
Not in the forest, but on the tree right in front of him. Something was stirring the tree's upper branches, something more than wind.
When he saw it, he still couldn't believe it. That was part of the problem. The other part was that he was driving Elena's car, not his old jalopy. So while he was frantically groping for a way to shut the window, with his eyes glued to thething detaching itself from the tree, he was groping in all the wrong places.
And the final thing was simply that the beast was fast. Much too fast to be real.
The next thing Matt knew, he was fighting it off at the window.
Matt didn't know what Elena had shown Bonnie at the picnic. But if this wasn't a malach, then what the hell was it? Matt had lived around woods his entire life, and he'd never seen any insect remotely like this one before.
Because it was an insect. Its skin looked bark-like, but that was just camouflage. As it banged against the half-raised car window - as he beat it off with both hands - he could hear and feel its chitinous exterior. It was as long as his arm, and it seemed to fly by whipping its tentacles in a circle - which should be impossible, but here it was stuck halfway inside the window.
It was built more like a leech or a squid than like any insect. Its long, snakelike tentacles looked almost like vines, but they were thicker than a finger and had large suckers on them - and inside the suckers was something sharp. Teeth. One of the vines got around his