CHAPTER 3 MATT

3

Matt

SHE DIDN'T

MOVE.

Nobody did.

Gabby reached over the counter and clasped Matt's hand.

Somewhere in the room, a throat cleared.

But nobody went to her.

Matt wasn't proud of that fact, and it would haunt him until his dying day. He wasn't the type of person who froze, never had been. Even back in his glory days when he played ball, standing back on his own twenty-yard line with linebackers sailing through the air about to unleash a world of hurt, he didn't freeze. He got the ball off. He sidestepped. He reacted, he acted, but he never froze.

She looked ethereal.

Celestial.

Christ, she looked like a damned angel. There, he said it.

Not any angel, but a fallen angel, and for the briefest of seconds, he was absolutely certain if she turned around there would be tiny nubs at her shoulder blades where her wings had been clipped.

Matt knew how unbelievable that all sounded, hadn't set foot in a church since he was a kid, but there it was. Looking around at the faces around the packed diner, he knew those thoughts weren't solely his own. He even caught Peggy Lockwood crossing herself, and she did go to church. She went at least three times a week.

Matt didn't recognize her. She wasn't a local, and if she'd come in for the weekend with the rest of the tourists, he hadn't seen her before. He would have remembered her.

Matt rose from his stool, and his legs were trembling as badly as Buck's had been. In a fraction of a second, a buzzing in his ears was followed by a feeling like intense air or water pressure. His skin prickled all the way down to a momentary numbness at the tips of his fingers that then tingled with the pins-and-needles sensation of a sleeping limb. In the time it took for him to complete a single step, the world tilted and it was gone. Matt wasn't alone in that, either. All around him, people were rubbing their arms, glancing at each other with a mix of fright and bewilderment.

Someone to his left said in a childlike voice, "I smell ozone. Anyone else smell ozone?" Sounded like Hershel Brown, but also didn't because Hershel Brown was a six-foot-four Black man on the wrong side of fifty who weighed upward of three hundred pounds. His speaking voice was deep enough to rattle the windows, anything but childlike. When Matt glanced at him, the fear in the man's eyes told him all he needed to know.

The girl still hadn't moved. Naked as the day she was born, she stood at the mouth of the diner, one arm bracing the door open, the other hanging at her side. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but no sound came out.

Matt got his shit together.

He crossed the room to the coatrack where he'd hung his jacket when he first arrived with Buck. Snatching it with enough force to nearly tumble the rack, he draped it over the girl's shoulders, quickly scanned her body for visible signs of trauma—cuts, bruises, abrasions—and found nothing except that she was in some form of shock.

With fumbling fingers, nothing but thumbs, Matt pulled the jacket closed and managed to get the zipper going, brought it up to the base of her neck. She wasn't very tall, maybe five foot two; the jacket reached halfway down her thighs, offering her at least some sense of modesty.

"You're going to be okay," he told her softly, and the moment the words passed his lips, he knew they were a lie.

She took a step forward, enough for the door to close, and Matt looked out over her shoulder at Main Street, the commons beyond that. Her feet were caked with mud, but it hadn't rained in nearly a week.

Matt saw the dark shape rocket down from the sky an instant before it slammed into the diner's glass door about a foot above the girl's head with a thump loud enough to make him jump. It hovered there for a second, frozen on the other side of the glass, then slipped and fell lifeless to the sidewalk.

A black crow.

Its beak had cracked with the impact. One of the bird's dark eyes had ruptured, tinging the surrounding feathers with a line of oily jelly.

Matt inched closer and then another hit—this one on the large picture window above the booth holding Mr. and Mrs. Tangway. Several of the women in the diner screamed with that one, a couple of the men, too, but not as loudly as they did when the third bird hit, or the others that followed.