“I … I never lied to you.”

“I know.” Lucas ran his hand through his hair, looking down at the floor. “And that’s why I’m here, really. You’re my friend, Stasia. My annoying friend who likes shitty music and never remembers to unload the dishwasher. I’m having a little trouble reconciling it with you also being … that.” He waved a hand vaguely at the streak of green on my arm, indicating and denying it at the same time. “I’m trying.”

“He has to, since we can’t allow him to leave,” said Jeff. “Open the cooler.”

I opened the cooler.

Inside were several bags of red liquid that my brain initially insisted on reading as fruit punch. I picked one up. It was cool to the touch, and squelched oddly in my hand.

Blood, I thought. You’re holding a bag of human blood. Of course it had to be human. If it had been anything else, Mandy wouldn’t have been so pale. Lucas would have been willing to look at me.

Only Graham was still looking at me the way he always had, with love and sincere concern, like he believed I was a human being and deserved to be treasured like one. Or … maybe he’d never believed I was a human being. Maybe I’d been lucky enough to fall in love with one of the only people in the world who understood what it was to tell the truth about your identity, over and over again, until you found the few people who could believe in you.

Well, I was about to test that belief. The blooming wasn’t going to stop, and if it was going to give way to the flowering—whatever that was; if it was a more extreme form of what I was already going through, I couldn’t imagine it was pleasant either to experience or to watch. The blooming hadn’t hurt so far. It was pins and needles and itching, and the sensation of my humanity—which I’d never asked for but had always been able to count on—dropping away to reveal the invader underneath. Jeff said we would always look vaguely human, the consequence of sprouting and growing to maturity in these forms, but how did he know? Honestly, how could he know? He had as much information as any of us: his own experiences and whatever he’d been able to glean from talking to people in the forest. But they knew as much as we did. It was a vicious cycle.

What was coming might hurt or it might not. Might leave me recognizable and might not. Honestly, my real concern was whether it would make me dangerous … and whether it would drive away the people who’d been willing to come this far to help me. So I looked at the first bag of blood, and then I looked at Graham, and finally I turned to Jeff.

“If this is what I need, I guess I don’t have much of a choice about that,” I said. “What do I do?”