she giggled.
"What? What's funny?"
"The bug," she said. "It gave you a hickey. Unless you did something else last night that you didn't tell us about."
Matt could feel himself flush as he pulled his collar up higher. "I did tell you about it, and it was the malach. It had a sort of tentacle with suckers around my neck. It was trying to strangle me!"
"I remember now," Bonnie said meekly. "I'm sorry."
Mrs. Flowers even had an herbal ointment for the mark the sucker tentacle had left - and one for Matt's scraped knuckles. After she'd applied them, Matt felt so good that he was able to look sheepishly at Bonnie, who was watching him with big brown eyes.
"I know, it does look like a hickey," he said. "I saw it this morning in the mirror. And I've got another one lower down, but at least my collar covers that one." He snorted and reached into his shirt to apply more ointment. The girls laughed - a release of the tension that they'd all been feeling.
Meredith had started back up the narrow stairway to what everyone still thought of as Stefan's room, and Matt automatically followed her. He didn't realize that Elena and Bonnie were hanging back until he was halfway up the stairs, and then Meredith motioned him onward.
"They're just conferring," Meredith said, in her quiet, no-nonsense voice.
"Aboutme ?" Matt swallowed. "It's about that thing Elena saw inside Damon, right? The invisible malach. And whether or not I've got one - inside me - right now."
Meredith, never one to soft-pedal anything, simply nodded. But she put a hand briefly on his shoulder as they entered the dim, high-ceilinged bedroom.
Shortly after, Elena and Bonnie came up, and Matt could tell at once by their faces that the worst-case scenario wasn't true. Elena saw his expression and immediately went to him and hugged him. Bonnie followed, more shyly.
"Feel okay?" Elena said, and Matt nodded.
"I feel fine," he said. Like wrestling alligators, he thought. Nothing was nicer than hugging soft, soft girls.
"Well, the consensus is that you don't have anything inside you that doesn't belong there. Your aura seems clear and strong now that you're not in pain."
"Thank God," Matt said, and he meant it.
It was at that moment that his mobile phone rang. He frowned, puzzled at the number displayed, but he answered it.
"Matthew Honeycutt?"
"Yes."
"Hold, please."
A new voice came on: "Mr. Honeycutt?"
"Uh, yeah, but - "
"This is Rich Mossberg of the Fell's Church Sheriff's Department. You called this morning to report a fallen tree midway down Old Wood Road?"
"Yes, I - "
"Mr. Honeycutt, we don't like prank calls of this sort. We frown upon them, in fact. It takes up the valuable time of our officers, and besides, it happens to be a crime to make a false report to the police. If I wanted to, Mr. Honeycutt, I could charge you with this crime and make you answer to a judge. I don't see just what you find so amusing about it."
"I wasn't - I don't findanything amusing about it! Look, last night - " Matt's voice trailed off. What was he going to say?Last night I was waylaid by a tree and a monster bug? A small voice inside him added that the Fell's Church Sheriff's officers seemed to spend most of their valuable time hanging around the Dunkin' Donuts in the city square, but the next words he heard shut it up.
"In fact, Mr. Honeycutt, under the authority of Virginia State Code, Section 18.2-461, making a false police report is punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor. You could be looking at a year in jail or a twenty-five-thousand-dollar fine. Do you findthat amusing, Mr. Honeycutt?"
"Look, I - "
"Do you, in fact,have twenty-five thousand dollars, Mr. Honeycutt?"
"No, I - I - " Matt waited to be cut off and then he realized that he wasn't going to be. He was sailing off the edge of the map into some unknown region. What to say?The malach took the tree away - or maybe it moved by itself ? Ludicrous. Finally, in a creaky voice he managed, "I'm sorry they didn't find the tree. Maybe...somehow it got moved."
"Maybe somehow it got moved," the sheriff repeated expressionlessly. "In fact maybe somehow it moved itself the way that all those stop signs and yield signs keep moving themselves away from intersections. Does that ring a bell, Mr. Honeycutt?"
"No!" Matt felt himself flush deeply. "I would never move any kind of street sign." By now the