The Return: Nightfall tvd-5 Read online

  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.

  10

  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.

  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 sti
ll 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.

  But look at her! He slipped out from beneath her as he sometimes did and just gazed, feeling his heart pound just at the sight of her. Her hair, true gold, fell like silk down to the bed and pooled there. Her body, in the light of the one small lamp in the room, seemed to be outlined in gold. She truly seemed to float and move and sleep in a golden haze. It was terrifying. For a vampire, it was as if he’d brought a living sun into his bed.

  He found himself suppressing a yawn. She did that to him, too, like an unwitting Delilah taking Samson’s strength away. Hyper-charged as he might be by her blood, he was also delightfully sleepy. He would spend a warm night in — or below — her arms.

  In Matt’s car it only got darker as the trees continued to cut out the moonlight. For a while they tried yelling for help. That did no good, and besides, as Meredith pointed out, they needed to conserve the oxygen in the car. So they sat still again.

  Finally, Meredith reached into her jeans pocket and produced a set of keys with a tiny key chain flashlight. Its light was blue. She pressed it and they all leaned forward. Such a tiny thing to mean so much, Matt thought.

  There was pressure against the front seats now.

  “Bonnie?” Meredith said. “No one will hear us out here yelling. If anyone could hear us, they would have heard the tire and thought it was a gunshot.”

  Bonnie shook her head as if she didn’t want to listen. She was still picking pine needles out of her skin.

  She’s right. We’re miles away from anybody, Matt thought.

  “There is something very bad here,” Bonnie said. She said it quietly, but as if every word was being forced out one by one, like pebbles thrown into a pond.

  Matt suddenly felt grayer. “How…bad?”

  “It’s so bad that it’s…I’ve never felt anything like this before. Not when Elena got killed, not from Klaus, not from anything. I’ve never felt anything as bad as this. It’s so bad, and it’s so strong. I didn’t think anything could be so strong. It’s pushing on me, and I’m afraid —” Meredith cut her off. “Bonnie, I know we can both only think of one way out of this—”

  “There’s no way out of this!”

  “—I know you’re afraid—”

  “Who is there to call? I c
ould do it…if there were someone to call. I can stare at your little flashlight and try to pretend it’s a flame and do it—”

  “Trancing?” Matt looked at Meredith sharply. “She’s not supposed to do that anymore.”

  “Klaus is dead.”

  “But—”

  “There’s nobody to hear me!” Bonnie shrieked and then she broke down into huge sobs at last. “Elena and Stefan are too far away, and they’re probably asleep by now! And there isn’t anyone else!”

  The three of them were being pushed together now, as branches pressed the seats back onto them. Matt and Meredith were close enough to look at each other right over Bonnie’s head.

  “Uh,” Matt said, startled. “Um…are we sure?”

  “No,” Meredith said. She sounded both grim and hopeful. “Remember this morning? We are not at all sure. In fact I’m sure he’s still around somewhere.”

  Now Matt felt sick, and Meredith and Bonnie looked ill in the already strange-looking blue light. “And — right before this happened, we were talking about how a lot of stuff—”

  “—basically everything that happened to change Elena—”

  “—was all his fault.”

  “In the woods.”

  “With an open window.”

  Bonnie sobbed on.

  Matt and Meredith, however, had made a silent agreement by eye contact. Meredith said, very gently, “Bonnie, what you said you would do; well, you’re going to have to do it. Try to get through to Stefan, or waken Elena or — or apologize to…Damon. Probably the last, I’m afraid. But he’s never seemed to want us all dead, and he must know that it won’t help him with Elena if he kills her friends.”

  Matt grunted, skeptical. “He may not want us all dead, but he may wait until some of us are dead to save the others. I’ve never trus—”

  “You’ve never wished him any harm,” Meredith overrode him in a louder voice.

  Matt blinked at her and then shut up. He felt like an idiot.

  “So, here, the flashlight’s on,” Meredith said, and even in this crisis, her voice was steady, rhythmic, hypnotic. The pathetic little light was so precious, too. It was all they had to keep the darkness from becoming absolute.

  But when the darkness became absolute, Matt thought, it would be because all light, all air, everything from the outside had been shut out, pushed out of the way by the pressure of the trees. And by then the pressure would have broken their skeletons.