It takes everything to leave. Everything that is left in me that is human. I stand and I feel much taller than Ben, even though I’m not, and step back. Ben’s saying something, but my hearing is muffled. I can’t tell if this is a physical thing—that there’s too little blood in my system for me to keep being able to hear—or a psychological thing. Maybe the demon has blocked out all of Ben’s speech to make him seem less human. He just mumbles and grunts like an animal, with a confused expression on his face. At some point, he takes my hands and holds them up, his eyes wide, looking down at the little moon-shaped holes I’ve made in my palms with my nails, which are leaking white liquid. He looks alarmed and he’s trying to get to his phone, saying words I don’t understand and gesturing for me to do something, to go with him somewhere, perhaps. He’s putting on his shoes, struggling to do so without bending down to untie the laces.

I snatch my hands away, and he tries to take them back again, but then I do something I’ve never done before to anyone but myself, in my mirror at home as a teenager, playing out how I might respond to a bully at school. I open my mouth and curl back my lips and flash my teeth at Ben, and he staggers back like he’s been pushed; then I turn around and leave, stumbling on my way to the door, still weak despite feeling like I could run for miles and miles.

Ben doesn’t follow me down the stairs. I hear no movement behind me—nothing, just a widening empty space. I am completely alone, I think to myself; I can never be a human, I can never grow old with a human; I can never sleep with a human and have it mean more than just that. I feel like for the first time in my life, I can sense time and understand properly my place in it. I can feel time like it is space, extending ahead of me, stretching vastly, madly, awfully, out in front of me. I can feel time groping out ahead of my body, its fingers outstretched, connecting to the end of the world, connecting to strange, colorful fires right at the end of everything, all the elements burning, everything charring, the Sun unbearably close as it had been in my dream, my skin burning up, my heart still relentlessly beating. While I grew up, I changed every year. Now, there’s no change, no sense of erosion or weathering, I’m just a thing that reacts in no way to the things around it. And yet, still, hours are the same. Minutes are the same. And seconds. All the same length to me as they are to humans. But my life is different; my life is a completely different thing from a human life.