gentle as evensong, wrapping black protective wings around her...
Stefan, I...
Love...I know...
That was when someone knocked on the door.
Chapter 18
After breakfast Matt went online to find two stores, neither in Fel 's Church, that had the amount of clay Mrs. Flowers said she'd need and that said they'd deliver. But after that there was the matter of driving away from the boardinghouse and by the last lonely remains of where the Old Wood had been.
He drove by the little thicket where Shinichi often came like a demonic Pied Piper with the possessed children shuffling behind him - the place where Sheriff Mossberg had gone after them and hadn't come out. Where, later, protected by magical wards on Post-it Notes, he and Tyrone Alpert had pul ed out a bare, chewed femur.
Today, he figured the only way to get past the thicket was to work his wheezing junk car up by stages, and it was actual y going over sixty when he flew by the thicket, even managing to hit the turn perfectly. No trees fel on him, no swarms of foot-long bugs.
He whispered "Whoa,"in relief and headed for home. He dreaded that - but simply driving through Fel 's Church was so horrible it glued his tongue to the top of his mouth. It looked - this pretty, innocent little town where he had grown up - as if it were one of those neighborhoods you saw on TV or on the Internet that had been bombed, or something. And whether it was bombs or disasterous fires, one house in four was simply rubble. A few were half-rubble, with police tape enclosing them, which meant that whatever had happened had happened early enough for the police to care - or dare.
Around the burned-out bits the vegetation flourished strangely: a decorative bush from one house grown so as to be halfway across a neighbor's grass. Vines dipping from one tree to another, to another, as if this were some ancient jungle.
His home was right in the middle of a long block of houses ful of kids - and in summer, when grandchildren inevitably came to visit, there were even more kids. Matt just hoped that that part of summer vacation was done...but would Shinichi and Misao let the youngsters go home? Matt had no idea. And, if they went home, would they keep spreading the disease in their own hometowns? Where did it stop?
Driving down his block, though, Matt saw nothing hideous.
There were kids playing out on the front lawns, or the sidewalks, crouching over marbles, hanging out in the trees.
There was no single overt thing that he could put his finger on There was no single overt thing that he could put his finger on that was weird.
He was Stilluneasy. But he'd reached his house now, the one with a grand old oak tree shading the porch, so he had to get out. He coasted to a stop just under the tree and parked by the sidewalk. He grabbed a large laundry bag from the backseat. He'd been accumulating dirty clothes for a couple of weeks at the boardinghouse and it hadn't seemed fair to ask Mrs. Flowers to wash them.
As he got out of the car, pul ing the bag out with him, he was just in time to hear the birdsong stop.
For a moment after it did, he wondered what was wrong. He knew that something was missing, cut short. It made the air heavier. It even seemed to change the smel of the grass.
Then he realized. Every bird, including the raucous crows that lived in the oak trees, had gone silent.
All at once.
Matt felt a twisting in his bel y as he looked up and around.
There were two kids in the oak tree right beside his car. His mind was Stillstubbornly trying to hang on to: Children.
Playing. Okay. His body was smarter. His hand was already in his pocket, pul ing out a pad of Post-it Notes: the flimsy bits of paper that usual y stopped evil magic cold.
Matt hoped Meredith would remember to ask Isobel's mother for more amulets. He was running low, and...
...and there were two kids playing in the old oak tree. Except they weren't. They were staring at him. One boy was hanging upside down by his knees and the other was gobbling something...out of a garbage bag.
The hanging kid was staring at him with strangely acute eyes. "Have you ever wondered what it's like to be dead?"he asked.
And now the head of