Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

In the car, in the dimness, Matt and Meredith thought of the idea at the same time. She was faster, but they spoke almost together.

“I’m an idiot! Matt, where’s the seat back release?”

“Bonnie, you have to unfold her seat backward! There’s a little handle, you should be able to reach it and pull up!”

Bonnie’s voice was hitching now, hiccupping. “My arms — they’re sort of poking into — my arms—”

“Bonnie,” Meredith said thickly. “I know you can do it. Matt — is the handle right — under — the front seat or—”

“Yes. At the edge. One — no, two o’clock.” Matt didn’t have breath for more. Once he had grabbed the tree, he found that if he loosened pressure for an instant, it pushed harder on his neck.

There’s no choice, he thought. He took as much of a deep breath as he could, pushed back on the branch, hearing a cry from Meredith, and twisted, feeling jagged splinters like thin wooden knives tear his throat and ear and scalp. Now he was free of the pressure on the back of his neck, although he was appalled by how much more tree there was in the car than the last time he had seen it. His lap was filled with branches; evergreen needles were thickly piled everywhere.

No wonder Meredith was so mad, he thought dizzily, turning toward her. She was almost buried in branches, one hand wrestling with something at her throat, but she saw him.

“Matt…get…your own seat! Quick! Bonnie, I know you can.”

Matt dug and tore into the branches, then groped for the handle that would collapse the backrest of his seat. The handle wouldn’t move. Thin, tough tendrils were wrapped around it, springy and hard to break. He twisted and snapped them savagely.

His seat back dropped away. He ducked under the huge arm-branch — if it still deserved the name, since the car was full of similar huge branches now. Then, just as he reached to help Meredith, her seat abruptly folded back, too.

She fell with it, away from the evergreen, gasping for air. For an instant she just lay still. Then she finished scrambling into the backseat proper, dragging a needle-shrouded figure with her. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse and her speech was still slow.

“Matt. Bless you…for having…this jigsaw puzzle…of a car.” She kicked the front seat back into position, and Matt did likewise.

“Bonnie,” Matt said numbly.

Bonnie didn’t move. Many tiny branches were still entwining her, caught in the fabric of her shirt, wound into her hair.

Meredith and Matt both started pulling. Where the branches let go, they left welts or tiny puncture wounds.

“It’s almost as if they were trying to grow into her,” Matt said, as a long, thin branch pulled away, leaving bloody pinpricks behind.

“Bonnie?” Meredith said. She was the one disentangling the twigs from Bonnie’s hair. “Bonnie? Come on, up. Look at me.”

The shaking began again in Bonnie’s body, but she let Meredith turn her face up. “I didn’t think I could do it.”

“You saved my life.”

“I was so scared….”

Bonnie went on crying quietly against Meredith’s shoulder.

Matt looked at Meredith just as the map light flickered and went out. The last thing he saw was her dark eyes, which held an expression that made him suddenly feel even sicker to his stomach. He looked out the three windows he could now see from the backseat.

It should have been hard to see anything at all. But what he was looking for was pressed right up against the glass. Needles. Branches. Solid against every inch of the windows.

Nevertheless, he and Meredith, without needing to say anything, each reached for a backseat door handle. The doors clicked, opened a fraction of an inch; then they slammed back hard with a very definitive wham.

Meredith and Matt looked at each other. Meredith looked down again and began to pluck more twigs off Bonnie.

“Does that hurt?”

“No. A little…”

“You’re shaking.”

“It’s cold.”

It was cold now. Outside the car, rather than through the once-open window that was now completely plugged with evergreen, Matt could hear the wind. It whistled, as if through many branches. There was also the sound of wood creaking, startlingly loud and ridiculously high above. It sounded like a storm.

“What the hell was it, anyway?” he exploded, kicking the front seat viciously. “The thing I swerved for on the road?”

Meredith’s dark head lifted slowly. “I don’t know; I was about to roll up the window. I only got a glimpse.”

“It just appeared right in the middle of the road.”

“A wolf?”

“It wasn’t there and then it was there.”

“Wolves aren’t that color. It was red,” Bonnie said flatly, lifting her head from Meredith’s shoulder.

“Red?” Meredith shook her head. “It was much too big to be a fox.”

“It was red, I think,” Matt said.

“Wolves aren’t red…what about werewolves? Does Tyler Smallwood have any relatives with red hair?”

“It wasn’t a wolf,” Bonnie said. “It was…backward.”

“Backward?”

“Its head was on the wrong side. Or maybe it had heads on both ends.”

“Bonnie, you are really scaring me,” Meredith said.

Matt wouldn’t say it, but she was really scaring him, too. Because his glimpse of the animal had seemed to show him the same kind of deformed shape that Bonnie was describing.

“Maybe we just saw it at a weird angle,” he said, while Meredith said, “It may just have been some animal scared out by—”

“By what?”

Meredith looked up at the top of the car. Matt followed her gaze. Very slowly, and with a groan of metal, the roof dented. And again. As if something very heavy was leaning on it.

Matt cursed himself. “While I was in the front seat, why didn’t I just floor it—?” He stared hungrily through branches, trying to make out the accelerator, the ignition. “Are the keys still there?”

“Matt, we ended up half in a ditch. And besides, if it would have done any good, I’d have told you to floor it.”

“That branch would’ve taken your head off!”

“Yes,” Meredith said simply.

“It would have killed you!”

“If it would have gotten you two out, I’d have suggested it. But you were trapped looking sideways; I could see straight ahead. They were already here; the trees. In every direction.”

“That…isn’t…possible!” Matt pounded the seat in front of him to emphasize each word.

“Is this possible?”

The roof creaked again.

“Both of you — stop fighting!” Bonnie said, and her voice broke on a sob.

There was an explosion like a gunshot and the car sank suddenly back and left.

Bonnie started. “What was that?”

Silence.

“…a tire blowing,” Matt said at last. He didn’t trust his own voice. He looked at Meredith.

So did Bonnie. “Meredith — the branches are filling up the front seat. I can hardly see the moonlight. It’s getting dark.”

“I know.”

“What are we going to do?”

Matt could see the tremendous tension and frustration in Meredith’s face, as if everything she said should come out through gritted teeth. But Meredith’s voice was quiet.

“I don’t know.”

With Stefan still shuddering, Elena curled herself like a cat over the bed. She smiled at him, a smile drugged with pleasure and love. He thought of grasping her by the arms, pulling her down, and starting all over again.

That was how insane she’d made him. Because he knew — all too well, from experience — the danger they were flirting with. Much more of this and Elena would be the first spirit-vampire, as she’d been the first vampire-spirit he’d known.