Stefan locked his arms around her, and barely waited for her to back off a little, before deliberately taking her lower lip in his own teeth and…after a moment of tension that seemed to last forever…biting down hard.
Elena almost cried out. She almost then and there unleashed the still-undefined Wings of Destruction on him. But two things stopped her. One, Stefan had never, ever hurt her before. And, two, she was being drawn into something so ancient and mystical that she couldn’t stop now.
A minute of finessing and Stefan had the two little wounds aligned. Blood surged from Elena’s bleeding lip and, in direct connection with Stefan’s less serious wound, caused a backflow. Her blood into his lip.
And the same thing happened with Stefan’s blood; some of it, rich with Power, rushed into Elena.
It wasn’t perfect. A bead of blood swelled and stood gleaming on Elena’s lip. But Elena couldn’t have cared less. A moment later the bead dropped down into Stefan’s mouth and she felt the sheer staggering power of how much he loved her.
She herself was concentrating on one single tiny feeling, somewhere in the center of this storm they’d called up. This kind of exchange of blood — she was sure as she could be — this was the old way, the way that two vampires could share blood and love and their souls. She was being drawn into Stefan’s mind. She felt his soul, pure and unconstrained, swirling around her with a thousand different emotions, tears from his past, joy from the present, all open without a trace of a shield from her.
She felt her own soul lift to meet his, herself unshielded and unafraid. Stefan had long ago seen any selfishness, vanity, over-ambition in her — and forgiven it. He’d seen all of her and loved all of her, even the bad parts.
And so she saw him, as darkness as tender as rest, as gentle as evensong, wrapping black protective wings around her…
Stefan, I…
Love…I know…
That was when someone knocked on the door.
After breakfast Matt went online to find two stores, neither in Fell’s Church, that had the amount of clay Mrs. Flowers said she’d need and that said they’d deliver.
But after that there was the matter of driving away from the boardinghouse and by the last lonely remains of where the Old Wood had been. He drove by the little thicket where Shinichi often came like a demonic Pied Piper with the possessed children shuffling behind him — the place where Sheriff Mossberg had gone after them and hadn’t come out. Where, later, protected by magical wards on Post-it Notes, he and Tyrone Alpert had pulled out a bare, chewed femur.
Today, he figured the only way to get past the thicket was to work his wheezing junk car up by stages, and it was actually going over sixty when he flew by the thicket, even managing to hit the turn perfectly. No trees fell on him, no swarms of foot-long bugs.
He whispered “Whoa,” in relief and headed for home. He dreaded that — but simply driving through Fell’s Church was so horrible it glued his tongue to the top of his mouth. It looked — this pretty, innocent little town where he had grown up — as if it were one of those neighborhoods you saw on TV or on the Internet that had been bombed, or something. And whether it was bombs or disasterous fires, one house in four was simply rubble. A few were half-rubble, with police tape enclosing them, which meant that whatever had happened had happened early enough for the police to care — or dare. Around the burned-out bits the vegetation flourished strangely: a decorative bush from one house grown so as to be halfway across a neighbor’s grass. Vines dipping from one tree to another, to another, as if this were some ancient jungle.
His home was right in the middle of a long block of houses full of kids — and in summer, when grandchildren inevitably came to visit, there were even more kids.
Matt just hoped that that part of summer vacation was done…but would Shinichi and Misao let the youngsters go home? Matt had no idea. And, if they went home, would they keep spreading the disease in their own hometowns? Where did it stop?
Driving down his block, though, Matt saw nothing hideous. There were kids playing out on the front lawns, or the sidewalks, crouching over marbles, hanging out in the trees. There was no single overt thing that he could put his finger on that was weird.
He was still uneasy. But he’d reached his house now, the one with a grand old oak tree shading the porch, so he had to get out. He coasted to a stop just under the tree and parked by the sidewalk. He grabbed a large laundry bag from the backseat. He’d been accumulating dirty clothes for a couple of weeks at the boardinghouse and it hadn’t seemed fair to ask Mrs. Flowers to wash them.
As he got out of the car, pulling the bag out with him, he was just in time to hear the birdsong stop.
For a moment after it did, he wondered what was wrong. He knew that something was missing, cut short. It made the air heavier. It even seemed to change the smell of the grass.
Then he realized. Every bird, including the raucous crows that lived in the oak trees, had gone silent.
All at once.
Matt felt a twisting in his belly as he looked up and around. There were two kids in the oak tree right beside his car. His mind was still stubbornly trying to hang on to: Children. Playing. Okay. His body was smarter. His hand was already in his pocket, pulling out a pad of Post-it Notes: the flimsy bits of paper that usually stopped evil magic cold.
Matt hoped Meredith would remember to ask Isobel’s mother for more amulets.
He was running low, and…
…and there were two kids playing in the old oak tree. Except they weren’t. They were staring at him. One boy was hanging upside down by his knees and the other was gobbling something…out of a garbage bag.
The hanging kid was staring at him with strangely acute eyes. “Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be dead?” he asked.
And now the head of the gobbling boy came up, thick bright red all around his mouth. Bright red — blood. And…whatever was in the garbage bag was moving. Kicking. Thrashing weakly. Trying to get away.
A wave of nausea washed over Matt. Acid hit his throat. He was going to puke.
The gobbling kid was staring at him with stony black-as-a-pit eyes. The hanging kid was smiling.
Then, as if stirred by a hot breath of wind, Matt felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand up. It wasn’t just the birds that had gone quiet. Everything had. No child’s voice was raised in argument or song or speech.
He whirled around and saw why. They were staring at him. Every single kid on the block was silently watching him. Then, with a chilling precision, as he turned back to look at the boys in the tree, all the others came toward him.
Except they weren’t walking.
They were creeping. Lizard-fashion. That’s why some of them had seemed to be playing with marbles on the sidewalk. They were all moving in the same way, bellies close to the ground, elbows up, hands like forepaws, knees splaying to the side.
Now he could taste bile. He looked the other way down the street and found another group creeping. Grinning unnatural grins. It was as if someone was pulling their cheeks from behind them, pulling them hard, so that their grins almost broke their faces in half.
Matt noticed something else. Suddenly they’d stopped, and while he stared at them, they stayed still. Perfectly still, staring back at him. But when he looked away, he saw the creeping figures out of the corner of his eye.
He didn’t have enough Post-it Notes for all of them.
You can’t run away from this. It sounded like an outside voice in his head.
Telepathy. But maybe that was because Matt’s head had turned into a roiling red cloud, floating upward.
Fortunately, his body heard it and suddenly he was up on the back of his car, and had grabbed the hanging kid. For a moment he had a helpless impulse to let go of the boy. The kid still stared at him but with eerie, uncanny eyes that were half rolled back in his head. Instead of dropping him, Matt slapped a Post-It Note on the boy’s forehead, swinging him at the same time to sit on the back of the car.
A pause and then wailing. The kid must be fourteen at least, but about thirty seconds after the Ban Against Evil (pocket-size) was smacked on him he was sobbing real kid sobs.
As one, the crawling kids let out a hiss. It was like a giant steam engine.
Hsssssssssssssssssssssss.
They began to breathe in and out very fast, as if working up to some new state.
Their creeping slowed to a crawl. But they were breathing so hard Matt could see their sides hollow and fill.
As Matt turned to look at one group of them, they froze, except for the unnatural breathing. But he could feel the ones behind him getting closer.
By now Matt’s heart was pounding in his ears. He could fight a group of thembut not with a group on his back. Some of them looked only ten or eleven. Some looked almost his age. Some were girls, for God’s sake. Matt remembered what possessed girls had done the last time he’d met them and felt violent revulsion.
But he knew that looking up at the gobbling kid was going to make him sicker. He could hear smacking, chewing sounds — and he could hear a thin little whistle of helpless pain and weak struggling against the bag.