“‘Hobbies’ feels like too much a group thing. Anyway, I was talking with him about it not all that long ago, especially over the summer when there wasn’t school, and I remember thinking it would be so nice to do that for a long time. It made so much sense because we had that common ground, right? I kind of fell in love with that idea and I fell in love with him at the same time. Not regular love, it was a bit different this time. Maybe crush-love.”

Ah. So that was what she’d been getting at.

“Aw, hon,” Erin said. She’d returned a minute ago, and I hadn’t noticed.

“He said no, by the way,” Kenzie added. “He said we’d never get along and he’s right.”

“Can I squeeze in there?” I asked Damsel.

She stepped back from the table. I slid across, and took the seat beside Kenzie, putting my arm around her. She leaned into me hard.

“There’s a possibility he needs help,” I said. “I know you guys got the basics from him in group. Normally we’d want him to share it on his own, as he feels free, but he obviously can’t do that now. I don’t know his background, but I think we need to make sure we all have the information.”

“You want his story?” Tristan asked. He leaned back into the cheap food-court seat.

“Please.”

All around us, the seats were empty. The only people were way off to either side, in the spaces where lines would form, walking to the food stalls, where skeleton crews were working.

“I guess since I’m one of the people who knew him best, I’ll cover this?” Rain asked.

Tristan shook his head. “It’s tricky. He’s dropped contradicting details. I think when he did tell us stuff, he changed particulars around. Keep in mind there might be some misleading details in this.”

“Yeah,” Rain said. “Something like that. I think to hide particulars about the people he had to kill on the way.”

“Multiple people?” I asked.

“His first memory, the way he explained it in group, is that he was changing back from one of his other forms. It was a dangerous form, and a third party was reactivating him.”

“Reactivating him?”

“Yeah. Keeping him in a loop of changing into a senseless, dangerous form, letting it start to lapse, and then getting him back in that form by giving him a new target or something before he had his senses again. For a while. A while.”

“Why?”