Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

“I’m not cold,” Bonnie said, although she didn’t try to shrug off his arm. “It’s warm tonight. I just — I don’t like it when you say things like ‘I’ll probably die right’—watch out!”

“Matt, look out!”

“Whoa—!” Matt pumped the brakes, cursing, both hands wrestling with the steering wheel as Bonnie ducked and Meredith braced herself. Matt’s replacement for the first beat-up old car he’d lost was just about as old and didn’t have airbags. It was a miscellany of junkyard cars pieced together.

“Hang on!”Matt yelled as the car skidded, tires screaming, and then they were all flung around as the back end swerved into a ditch and the front bumper hit a tree.

When everything stopped moving, Matt let out his breath, easing his death-grip on the steering wheel. He started to turn toward the girls and then froze. He scrabbled to switch on the map light, and what he saw held him frozen again.

Bonnie had turned, as always in moments of deepest distress, to Meredith. She was lying with her head on Meredith’s lap, hands locked onto her friend’s arm and shirt. Meredith herself was sitting, braced, leaning as far as possible backward, her feet stretched to push against the floor beneath the dashboard; her body bowed back in the seat, head flung backward, arms holding Bonnie down tightly.

Thrusting straight through the open window — like a knobby, shaggy green spear or the grasping arm of some savage earthen giant — was the branch of a tree. It just cleared the base of Meredith’s arched neck, and its lower branches passed over Bonnie’s small body. If Bonnie’s seat belt hadn’t let her turn; if Bonnie hadn’t flung herself down like that; if Meredith hadn’t held onto her…

Matt found himself staring directly into the splintered but very sharp end of the lance. If his own seat belt hadn’t kept him from leaning that way…

Matt could hear his own hard breathing. The smell of evergreen was overpowering within the car. He could even smell the places where smaller branches had broken off and were oozing sap.

Very slowly, Meredith reached out to break off one of the twigs that was pointed at her throat like an arrow. It wouldn’t break. Numb, Matt reached over to try it himself. But although the wood wasn’t much thicker than his finger, it was tough and wouldn’t even bend.

As if it’s been fire-hardened, he thought dazedly. But that’s ridiculous. It’s a living tree; I can feel the splinters.

“Ow.”

“Can I please get up now?” Bonnie said quietly, her voice muffled against Meredith’s leg. “Please. Before it grabs me. It wants to.”

Matt glanced at her, startled, and scratched his cheek against the splintered end of the big branch.

“It’s not going to grab you.” But his stomach was churning as he fumbled blindly for his seat belt fastening. Why should Bonnie have the same thought as he had: that the thing was like a huge, crooked, shaggy arm? She couldn’t even see it.

“You know it wants to,” Bonnie whispered, and now the slight shivering seemed to be taking over her whole body. She reached backward to undo her seat belt.

“Matt, we need to slide,” Meredith said. She had carefully maintained her painful-looking bowed-backward position, but Matt could hear her breathing harder. “We need to slide toward you. It’s trying to get around my throat.”

“That’s impossible….” But he could see it, too. The freshly splintered ends of the smaller branch had moved only infinitesimally, but there was a curve to them now, and the splinters were pressing into Meredith’s throat.

“It’s probably just that nobody can stay bent backward like that forever,” he said, knowing that this was nonsense. “There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment….”

“The glove compartment is completely blocked by branches. Bonnie, can you reach to unfasten my seat belt?”

“I’ll try.” Bonnie slid forward without raising her head, fumbling to find the release button.

To Matt it looked as if the shaggy, aromatic evergreen branches were engulfing her. Pulling her into their needles.

“We’ve got a whole freakin’ Christmas tree in here.” He looked away, out through the glass of the window on his side. Cupping his hands to see better into the darkness, he leaned his forehead against the surprisingly cool glass.

There was a touch on the back of his neck. He jumped, then froze. It was neither cool nor warm, like a girl’s fingernail.

“Damn it, Meredith—”

“Matt—” Matt was furious with himself for jumping. But the touch was…scratchy.

“Meredith?” He slowly moved his hands away until he could see in the dark window’s reflection. Meredith wasn’t touching him.

“Don’t…move…left, Matt. There’s a long sharp bit there.” Meredith’s voice, normally cool and a bit remote, usually made Matt think of those calendar pictures of blue lakes surrounded by snow. Now it just sounded choked and strained.

“Meredith!” Bonnie said before Matt could speak. Bonnie’s voice sounded as if it were coming from underneath a featherbed.

“It’s all right. I just have to…hold it away,” Meredith said. “Don’t worry. I won’t let go of you, either.”

Matt felt a sharper prickle of splinters. Something touched his neck on the right side, delicately. “Bonnie, stop it! You’re pulling the tree in! You’re pulling it on Meredith and me!”

“Matt,shut up!”

Matt shut up. His heart was pounding. The last thing he felt like doing was reaching behind him. But that’s stupid, he thought, because if Bonnie really is moving the tree, I can at least hold it still for her.

He reached behind him, flinching, trying to watch what he was doing in the window’s reflection. His hand closed over a thick knot of bark and splinters.

He thought, I don’t remember seeing a knot when it was pointed at my throat….

“Got it!” a muffled voice said, and there was the click of a seat belt coming undone. Then, much more shakily, the voice said, “Meredith? There are needles shoved all into my back.”

“Okay, Bonnie. Matt,” Meredith was speaking with effort, but great patience, the way they’d all been talking to Elena. “Matt, you have to open your door now.”

Bonnie said in a voice of terror, “It isn’t just needles. It’s little branches. Sort of like barbed wire. I’m…stuck….”

“Matt! You need to open your door now —”

“I can’t.”

Silence.

“Matt?”

Matt was bracing himself, pushing with his feet, both hands locked around the scaly bark now. He thrust backward with all his strength.

“Matt!” Meredith almost screamed. “It’s cutting into my throat!”

“I can’t get my door open! There’s a tree on that side, too!”

“How can there be a tree there?That’s the road!”

“How can there be a tree growing in here?”

Another silence. Matt could feel the splinters — the slivers of broken branch — biting deeper into the back of his neck. If he didn’t move soon, he would never be able to.

Elena was serenely happy. Now it was her turn.

Stefan used a sharp wooden letter opener from his desk to cut himself. Elena always hated to see him do this, use the most efficient implement that would penetrate vampire skin; so she shut her eyes tightly and only looked again when red blood was trickling from a little cut on his neck.

“You don’t need to take a lot — and you shouldn’t,” Stefan whispered, and she knew he was saying these things while he could say them. “I’m not holding you too hard or hurting you?”

He was always so worried. This time,she kissed him.

And she could see how strange he thought it was, that he wanted kisses more than he wanted her to take his blood. Laughing, Elena pushed him flat and hovered over him and went for the general area of the wound again, knowing that he thought she was going to tease him. But instead she fastened herself on the wound like a limpet and sucked hard,hard, until she had made him say please with his mind. But she wasn’t satisfied until she made him say please out loud as well.