vampire.”
“You’re right — I don’t care! I don’t care about anything, as long as I can be with him. When I was still half a spirit, I knew that nothing could Change me. Now I’m human and as susceptible as any other human to the Change — but it doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe that’s the Awakening,” Meredith said, still quietly.
“Oh, maybe him not bringing her breakfast is an awakening!” Bonnie, said, exasperated. She’d been staring into a flame for more than thirty minutes, trying to get psychically in touch with Stefan. “Either he won’t — or he can’t,” she said, not seeing Meredith’s violently shaking head until after the words were out.
“What do you mean ‘can’t’?” Elena demanded, popping back off the floor from where she was slumped.
“I don’t know! Elena, you’re hurting me!”
“Is he in danger? Think, Bonnie! Is he going to be hurt because of me?”
Bonnie looked at Meredith, who was telegraphing “no” with every inch of her elegant body. Then she looked at Elena, who was demanding the truth. She shut her eyes. “I’m not sure,” she said.
She opened her eyes slowly, waiting for Elena to explode. But Elena did nothing of the kind. She merely shut her own eyes slowly, her lips hardening.
“A long time ago, I swore I’d have him, even if it killed us both,” she said quietly. “If he thinks he can just walk away from me, for my own good or for any other reason…he’s wrong. I’ll go to Damon first, since Stefan seems to want it so much. And then I’m going after him. Someone will give me a direction to start in. He left me twenty thousand dollars. I’ll use that to follow him. And if the car breaks down, I’ll walk; and when I can’t walk anymore, I’ll crawl. But I will find him.”
“Not alone, you won’t,” Meredith said, in her soft, reassuring way. “We’re with you, Elena.”
“And then, if he’s done this of his own free will, he’s going to get the bitch-slapping of his life.”
“Whatever you want, Elena,” Meredith said, still soothingly. “Let’s just find him first.”
“All for one and one for all!” Bonnie exclaimed. “We’ll get him back and we’ll make him sorry — or we won’t,” she added hastily as Meredith again began shaking her head. “Elena, don’t! Don’t cry,” she added, the instant before Elena burst into tears.
“So Damon was the one to say he’d take care of Elena, and Damon should have been the one last to see Stefan this morning,” Matt said, when he had been fetched from his house and the situation was explained to him.
“Yes,” Elena said with quiet certainty. “But Matt, you’re wrong if you think Damon would do anything to keep Stefan away from me. Damon’s not what you all think. He really was trying to save Bonnie that night. And he truly felt hurt when you all hated him.”
“This is what is called ‘evidence of motive,’ I think,” Meredith remarked.
“No. It’s character evidence — evidence that Damon does have feelings, that he can care for human beings,” Elena countered. “And he would never hurt Stefan, because — well, because of me. He knows how I would feel.”
“Well, why won’t he answer me, then?” Bonnie said querulously.
“Maybe because the last time he saw us all together, we were glaring at him as if we hated him,” said Meredith, who was always fair.
“Tell him I beg his pardon,” Elena said. “Tell him that I want to talk with him.”
“I feel like a communications satellite,” Bonnie complained, but she clearly put all her heart and strength into each call. At last, she looked completely wrung out and exhausted.
And, at last, even Elena had to admit it was no good.
“Maybe he’ll come to his senses and start calling you,” Bonnie said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“We’re going to stay with you tonight,” Meredith said. “Bonnie, I called your sister and told her you’d be with me. Now I’m going to call my dad and tell him I’ll be with you. Matt, you’re not invited—”
“Thanks,” Matt said dryly. “Do I get to walk home, too?”
“No, you can take my car home,” Elena said. “But please bring it back here early tomorrow. I don’t want people to start asking about it.”
That night, the three girls prepared to make themselves comfortable, schoolgirl fashion, in Mrs. Flowers’ spare sheets and blankets (no wonder she washed so many sheets today — she must have known somehow, Elena thought), with the furniture pushed to the walls and the three makeshift sleeping bags on the floor. Their heads were together and their bodies radiated out like the spokes of a wheel.
Elena thought, So this is the Awakening.
It’s the realization that, after all, I can be left alone again. And, oh, I’m grateful to have Meredith and Bonnie sticking with me. It means more than I can tell them.
She had gone automatically to the computer, to write a little in her diary. But after the first few words she’d found herself crying again, and had been secretly glad when Meredith took her by the shoulders and more or less forced her to drink hot milk with vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and when Bonnie had helped her into her pile of sleeping blankets and then held her hand until she went to sleep.
Matt had stayed late, and the sun was setting as he drove home. It was a race against darkness, he thought suddenly, refusing to be distracted by the Jaguar’s expensive new-car smell. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was pondering. He hadn’t wanted to say anything to the girls, but there was something about Stefan’s farewell note that bothered him. The only thing was, he had to make sure it wasn’t just his injured pride speaking.
Why hadn’t Stefan ever mentioned them? 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 the thing 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.
