“Go right! Right there!”
“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.
“No KEEP 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. “All right, Bonnie,” she said. “Stop it! Now! It’s not going to do any good here!”
Bonnie didn’t think she could 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 you run, 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 key chain 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.
Damon! Damon! We’re trapped at Caroline’s house and she’s gone crazy! Help!
It flowed out of her like an underwater well that had been suddenly tapped, releasing a geyser.
Damon, she’s got me by the ankle — and she won’t let go! If she pulls Meredith under, I don’t know what I’ll do! Help me!
Vaguely, because the trance was good and deep, she heard Meredith say, “Ah-hah! It feels like fingers, but actually it’s a vine. It must be one of those tentacles that Matt told us about. I’m — trying — to break one of the loops — off…”
All at once there was a rustling from under the bed. And not just from one place, either, but a massive whipping and shaking that actually bounced the mattress up and down, even with poor little Mrs. Forbes on it.
There must be dozens of those insects under there.
Damon, it’s those things! Lots of them. Oh, God, I think I’m going to faint. And if I faint — and if Caroline pulls me under…Oh, please come and help!
“Damn!” Meredith was saying. “I don’t know how Matt managed to do this. It’s too tight, and — and I think there’s more than one tentacle here.”
It’s all over,Bonnie sent in quiet conclusion, feeling herself start to go at the knees.We’re going to die.
“Undoubtedly — that’s the problem with humans. But not just yet,” a voice said from behind her, and a strong arm went around her, taking up her weight easily. “Caroline, the fun’s over. I mean it. Let go!”
“Damon?” Bonnie gasped. “Damon? You came!”
“All that wailing gets on my nerves. It doesn’t mean—” But Bonnie wasn’t listening. She wasn’t even thinking. She was still half in trance and not responsible (she decided later) for her own actions. She wasn’t herself. It was someone else who went into rapture when the grip on her ankle loosened, and someone else who whirled around in Damon’s grip and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth.
It was someone else, too, who felt Damon startle, with his arms still around her, and who noticed that he made no attempt to pull away from the kiss. That person also noticed, when at last she leaned back, that Damon’s skin, pale in the dim light, looked almost as if he had flushed.
And that was when Meredith straightened up slowly, painfully, from the other side of the bed, which was still jouncing up and down. She hadn’t seen anything of the kiss, and looked at Damon as if she couldn’t believe he was really here.
She was at a great disadvantage, and Bonnie knew she knew it. This was one of those situations where anyone else would have been too flustered to speak, or even stammer.
But Meredith just took a deep breath and then said quietly, “Damon. Thank you. Do you think — would it be too much trouble to make the malach let go of me, as well?”
Now Damon looked like his old self. He gave a brilliant smile aimed at something no one else could see and said sharply, “And as for the rest of you down there — heel!” He snapped his fingers.
The bed stopped moving instantly.
Meredith stepped away, and closed her eyes for a moment in relief.
“Thank you again,” she said, with the dignity of a princess, but fervently. “And now, do you think you could do anything about Caro—”
“Right now,” Damon cut in even more roughly than usual, “I have to run.” He glanced at the Rolex on his wrist. “It’s past 4:44, and I had an appointment I’m already late for. Come around here and prop up this dizzy bundle. She’s not quite ready to stand by herself.”
Meredith hastened to switch places with him. At that point, Bonnie discovered that her legs were no longer wobbling.
“Wait a minute, though,” Meredith said rapidly. “Elena needs to talk to you — desperately—” But Damon was gone, as if he’d mastered the art of simply disappearing, not even waiting for Bonnie’s thanks. Meredith looked astonished, as if she’d been certain that the mention of Elena’s name would stop him, but Bonnie had something else on her mind.
“Meredith,” Bonnie whispered, putting two fingers to her lips in amazement. “I kissed him!”
“What? When? ”
“Before you stood up. I — don’t even know how it happened but I did it!”
She expected some kind of explosion from Meredith. Instead, Meredith looked at her thoughtfully and murmured, “Well, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to do, after all. What I don’t understand is why he turned up in the first place.”
“Uh. That was me, too. I Called him. I don’t know how that happened either—”
“Well, there’s no point in trying to figure it out in here.” Meredith turned toward the bed. “Caroline, are you coming out of there? Are you going to stand up and have a normal conversation?”
There was a menacing and reptilian hiss from under the bed, along with the whipping of tentacles and another noise that Bonnie had never heard before but which terrified her instinctively, like the snapping of giant pincers.
“That’s answer enough for me,” she said, and grabbed Meredith to drag her out of the room.
Meredith didn’t need dragging. But for the first time today they heard Caroline’s taunting voice, lifted childishly high.
