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 neck, and he could feel the suction and the pain all at once.
The vine had whipped around his throat three or four times, and it was tightening. He had to use one hand to reach up and rip it away. That meant only one hand available to flail at the headless thing - which suddenly showed it had a mouth, if no eyes. Like everything else about the beast, the mouth was radially symmetrical: it was round, with its teeth arranged in a circle. But deep inside that circle, Matt saw to his horror as the bug drew his arm in, was a pair of pincers big enough to cut off a finger.
God - no. He clenched his hand into a fist, desperately trying to batter it from the inside.
The burst of adrenaline he had after seeingthat allowed him to pull the whipping vine from around his throat, the suckers coming free last. But now his arm had been swallowed up past the elbow. Matt made himself strike at the insect's body, hitting it as if it were a shark, which was the other thing it reminded him of.
He had to get his arm out. He found himself blindly prying the bottom of the round mouth open and merely snapping off a chunk of exoskeleton that landed in his lap. Meanwhile the tentacles were still whirling around, thumping against the car, looking for a way in. At some point it was going to realize that all it had to do was fold those thrashing vine-like things and it could squeeze its body through.
Something sharp grazed his knuckles. The pincers! His arm was almost completely engulfed. Even as Matt was focused entirely on how to get out, some part of him wondered: where's its stomach? This beast isn'tpossible .
He had to get his arm freenow . He was going to lose his hand, as sure as if he'd put it in the garbage disposal and turned it on.
He'd already undone his seat belt. Now with one violent heave, he threw his body to the right, toward the passenger seat. He could feel the teeth raking his arm as he dragged it past them. He could see the long, bloody furrows it left in his arm. But that didn't matter. All that mattered was getting his armout .
At that moment his other hand found the button that controlled the window. He mashed it upward, dragging his wrist and hand out of the bug's mouth just as the window closed on it.
What he expected was a crackling of chiton and black blood gushing out, maybe eating through the floor of Elena's new car, like that scuttling thing inAlien .
Instead the bug vaporized. It simply...turned transparent and then turned into tiny particles of light that disappeared even as he stared at them.