"No, she won't. Come on, Bonnie. Just get Mrs. Forbes' legs and give one big heave...."
"If I get that close to the bed, she'llgrab me!"
"Why should she?"
"Because she knows what scares me! And now that I've said it, shedefinitely will."
"If she grabs you, I'll come and kick her in the face."
"Your leg's not that long. It would bang on the metal bed-frame thingummy - "
"Oh, for God's sake, Bonnie! Just help meheeeeeeere !" The last word was a full-fledged scream.
"Meredith - " began Bonnie, and then she screamed, too.
"What is it?"
"She's grabbing me!"
"She can't be!She's grabbingme ! Nobody has arms that long!"
"Or that strong! Bonnie!I can't make her let go!"
"Neither can I!"
And then any words were drowned in screaming.
After dropping Tami off with the police, driving Elena around the woods known as the Fell's State Park was...well, a walk in the park. Every so often they would stop. Elena would go a few steps into the trees and stand, Calling - however you did that. Then she came back to the Jaguar, looking discouraged.
"I'm not sure that Bonnie wouldn't be better at this," she said to Matt. "If we can brace ourselves to go out at night."
Matt shuddered involuntarily. "Two nights were enough."
"Do you know, you never told me your story from that first night. Or at least, not when I could understand words, spoken words."
"Well, I was driving around like this, except almost on the other side of the Old Wood - near the Lightning-Split Oak area...?"
"Right."
"When right in the middle of the road something appears."
"A fox?"
"Well, it was red in the headlights, but it wasn't like any fox I've ever seen. And I've been driving this road since I could drive."
"A wolf?"
"Like a werewolf, you mean? But, no - I've seen wolves by moonlight and they're bigger. This was right in between."
"In other words," Elena said, narrowing her lapis lazuli eyes, "a custom-made creature."
"Maybe. It sure was different from the malach that chewed my arm up."
Elena nodded. Malach could take all sorts of different forms, from what she understood. But they were siblings in one way: they all used Power and they all needed a diet of Power to live. And they could be manipulated by a stronger Power than they had.
And they were venomous enemies of humans.
"So all we really know is that we don't know anything."
"Right. That was the place back there, where we saw it. It just suddenly appeared in the middle of the - hey!"
"Go right! Righthere !"
"Just like that! It was just like that!"
The Jaguar screeched almost to a stop, turning right, not into a ditch but into a small lane that no one would notice unless they were looking directly at it.
When the car stopped, they both stared up the lane, breathing hard. Neither had to ask whether the other had seen a reddish creature zip across the road, bigger than a fox but smaller than a wolf.
They looked up at the narrow lane.
"The million-dollar question: should we go in?" Matt asked.
"NoKEEP OUT signs - and hardly any houses on this side of the wood. Across the street and down a way there's the Dunstans'."
"So we go in?"
"We go in. Just go slowly. It's later than I thought."
Meredith, of course, was the one to calm down first. "Allright , Bonnie," she said. "Stop it! Now! It's not going to do any good here!"
Bonnie didn't think shecould stop it. But Meredith had that special look in her dark eyes; the one that meant she was serious. The look she'd had before laying Caroline out on Stefan's floor.
Bonnie made a supreme effort and found that somehow she was able to hold in the next shriek. She looked dumbly at Meredith, feeling her own body shake.
"Good. Good, Bonnie. Now." Meredith swallowed. "Pulling doesn't do any good, either. So I'm going to try...peeling her fingers off. If anything happens to me; if I get - pulled under the bed or anything, then yourun , Bonnie. And if you can't run, then you call Elena and Matt. You call until you get an answer."
Bonnie managed something almost heroic then. She refused to picture Meredith being pulled under the bed. She wouldn't let herself imagine how that would look as Meredith, struggling, disappeared, or how she would feel, all alone, after that. They'd both left their purses with their mobile phones in the entryway to carry Mrs. Forbes, so Meredith wasn't saying to call them in any normal sense. She meant Call them.
A sudden radical burst of indignation swept through Bonnie. Why did girls carry purses anyway? Even the efficient, reliable Meredith often did it. Of course Meredith's purses were usually designer handbags that enhanced her outfits and were full of useful things like small notebooks and keychain flashlights, but still...a boy would have his mobile phone in his pocket.
From now on, I'm wearing a waist pouch, Bonnie thought, feeling as if she were raising a rebel flag for girls everywhere, and for just a moment also feeling her panic recede.
Then she saw Meredith stooping, a hunched figure in the dim light, and at the same moment she felt the grip on her own ankle tighten. Despite herself she glanced down, and saw the outline of Caroline's tanned fingers and long bronze nails against the creamy white of the rug.
Panic burst out in her again, full force. She made a choked sound that was a strangled scream, and to her own astonishment she spontaneously hit trance and began to Call.
It wasn't the fact that she was Calling that surprised her. It was what she was saying.