"I'm leaving," Elle says. Her voice is as stiff as ever. After listening to Damien sing all day, it's like being slapped by a brick. Never have I heard anyone pull of Damien's inflections, and then, with the ukulele piled atop it... good stuff.

As I'm not a fan of bricks nor Elle, I want to say something like "Okay, cool, your funeral, have a nice day," but Gillian stands up and I get to my own feet. Damien stands too, because everyone else is doing it, and Elle purses her lips like we're about to kill her.

"You're not going anywhere unsupervised without explicit permission from Red or Dylan." Gillian says. She cracks her knuckles. "I smelled you leaving a few nights back. After recent incidents, we're not having any more insubordinates." Her voice has more of a low timbre today, like a growl playing out under the sound.

"I am not Adaline." Elle says. Adaline is off somewhere in a corner with Angel spoon-feeding her lukewarm soup, so I can agree with this statement. "Red and Dylan aren't going to restrain me here." Elle moves a hand tipped with long, delicately painted nails (what's the point, Elle? Who'll se them?) to her side, which probably has several pockets for knives.

I'm very tempted to yell something at Elle or throw my hands in the general direction of her knife pockets and exclaim something unhelpful like 'her thighs are sharp' as she pulls out a 'dangerous implement' and immediately receive a knife to the back of my head. Instead, I yell, "Woah, woah, let's not do a-ny-thing hasty," and both of them look at me like I'm next, because I am.

"Red," growls Gillian. Red appears from the woods, his tan coat swishing in an arc, and it dawns on me that Red is a little bit scary, when he wants to be. He is still as the trees today, arms folded, face sharp. "She's leaving."

"I know." Red says.

"She's been out."

"I... have you, Elle?"

"I don't sleep well." Elle responds. "Gillian snores. Kali keeps touching me."

"Have you... tried moving away from her?" Red says, sucking in a breath.

"I do not understand why she is following me around." Elle confirms. "I do not want to be here all day with the rest of you. Is that not clear?"

"No, you've been fairly... upfront about it? If that's really how you feel about things, I don't think there's anything wrong with you taking a trip every now and then--with accompaniment. I'm sure Gillian can be relatively unobtrusive." Red's voice rises and pitches. It's fun to listen to when he's not going off at us about nothing (why so angry?) or trying to get the group to do something. Red tries really hard, in general.

"Do you not trust me?" Elle asks.

"No," confirms Dylan, shifting from a fox to a man in the time it takes for him to sling his elbow onto Red's shoulder. The two of them are a matched set, despite sharing a resemblance only in that they are pasty, thin-ish men.

"I can't blame you." Elle says. She looks back to us, "Stay far behind me."

"Am I coming too?" I ask, then look to Gililan. "Yes. I mean... I am coming. With you." This is accompanied by the hardest voice crack ever. It's like my whole body is filled with static. Whip-crack. Something going off.

Gillian's pupils rove across her lower eyelid back to me and the air hums with distant animal noise and water and everything except a human heartbeat.

Elle is already going through the thicket. The branches tear at her dress, which regenerates lost thread as if it is living, too, healing at an inhuman rate. Meanwhile, Gillian cuts the brush with something like a stick with a blade, though it is a long blade strapped to the stick that lets her chop the woods to bits. The air smells like grass and the body of the woods goes totally silent except for their breathing and my heartbeat, which is going Alex you're stupid over and over in my throat.

"I kno-o-ow," I whisper back to my heart as the first houses come up. They're more gradual this time, all casual, but past that? Things get messy. This city has big metal trees, the tall kind of buildings, watching us in their grey attire. Cars call out to each other with their long, honking cries as they barrel down streets at intense velocities, and I feel my hair rustle on my head like it doesn't even want to stay on. Elle roams the streets like she is looking for something and Gillian turns into a dark corner where we are alone. I catch eyes from the street but they're all gone by the time she is behind a dumpster, cowering, unaware of the stench.

"What?" I ask.

"We're supposed to be watching her. Not accompanying her." Gillian says. "Red has taught me how to do this. She won't know we're there." Her voice is flat as a dead animal on the side of the road. She shifts into a common pigeon, its red eye disinterested and its plumage dull and dusty. It turns its head at me, disappointed, and I can see the whole world reflected back in... her eyes.

You're dumb, my heart says. This was a bad idea.

Okay, thanks, I say this time, right away. Shut up.

If I could only stop listening to myself when I have dumb ideas... I can only think about all the time it would save me. I regretfully change into a pigeon, which is the worse, and follow Gillian out onto the roofs. She moves with purpose, meanwhile, I'm just thinking that man, my phone could be taking in that sweet, sweet, easily hackable public Wi-Fi right now, and where does my phone go when I'm not human, anyways?

I keep my eyes trained ahead on Gillian anyways because she'll be gone in a second if I'm not careful, and Gillian dives for it, landing on a wire above a store. She dives again towards the ground and peers into a shop, holding me back with a wing. I look back at a pedestrian who is watching us and try to make pigeon noises at Gillian that properly signal Gillian they're watching us and we're really bad pigeons but Gillian is in crazytown right now and I just missed the last train aboard. I am the sole person on the platform, waving at the tracks.

Gillian returns to normal pigeon motions, halfheartedly, but those red eyes are fixed on the door, and there's no bread for us to pick at here. We scatter every so often when pedestrians pass, and Gillian finds a new perch on a fire hydrant. Someone snaps a picture of her with a phone, laughing, and I make a disgruntled pigeon noise. From the store, Elle comes out and a man turns the other way, wiping mauve from his lips. Elle trails over him as he passes, looking almost regretfully, and draws her bare arm across her mouth. She looks the pigeon dead in the face and Gillian flutters away, up towards me. I've been watching things from away from both of them, up on a pole, which is way safer.

Elle keeps walking, faster, and I am looking for some way to describe the purpose of the way she walks. She would be crushing daisies in a meadow with each click of those heels if we were back out on the woods. She digs her heels in like she might want to crush something under it. Dead animals. Dead plants. Her hair billows out behind her as she breaks into a graceful, controlled run, and people's hands dart out, asking, wondering, wanting, people have phones and people have ways of knowing, guessing, where is the lady going, why does she look so afraid?

Gillian takes a faster form and Elle runs towards the suburbs, turns to the shadowed lee of a building, where she is almost away from us. She looks up at the sky with hate in her eyes and a knife launches through the air, propelled by inhuman force, and I see the beginnings of inhuman something on her face. Elle's skin is peeling open to reveal something underneath, carapace poking out of her mouth and grasping at the air, and dozens of knives surround hands becoming progressively less human.

(Gross.)

I stop gaping because it registers ah shit, about to die and Gillian dives. Elle catches the bird in the air, since Gillian is now something closer to a falcon but fledged with feathers and the form of both, and Gillian lets out a guttural bird cry that stops in her throat. Elle throws her aside and readies a knife. "Go back and tell him that I don't want to play his games." Elle says. "You could have stayed right behind me." Her voice peaks like the curved edge of a blade. It is so pretty but so, so terrifying.

"We know that now," I say, turning back, cowering as Elle draws a knife on me. "We're sorry. We're..."

"It's fine." she says.

Gillian rises with a hand close to her neck. With the same emotionless, controlled tone of voice, she says, "We will be less covert next time. Who was that man?"
"I've kissed humans. It is..."

"Are you in love with a human?" asks Gillian.

"No." Elle confirms. "There is nothing more to love in a human than in one of us. It's only something I had wanted to try. I do not want you concerned in my affairs, given that there is no reason for concern." Her voice raises and I feel sleepy.

Elle sounds like that. She sounds like... she sounds so...

what words.

"You'll meet me later. You will go back and not follow me, I will be back at dusk, and you will report there was no suspicious activity. The conversation will have been an unpleasant blur for both of us." Elle says.

"Of course." Gillian says, holding my hand, and she swings me around the corner like Mary. The motion jerks me back to life (you gotta be like that, Gillian?) and I take a deep, shuddering breath.

"At least nothing happened. She just walked around." I say, even though the last few minutes aren't adding up. How did we find her again? Weren't we behind her? She was running, but I don't remember why she was running or why we were after her so quickly. We were just getting back, I think. It's been a long day. I came along because Gillian told me to-- Gillian. "She would only be dangerous if you provoked her.. Were you trying to provoke her? She's like Mary. If you had managed to--"

"Nothing happened." Gillian confirms, still walking. "It's not a problem."

"It is a problem." I insist. "Do you even care what happens to you? Did you just--"

"Alex. Stop talking."
"Did you just do all of this because Red asked you to?"

"Red prepared a lot of plans in case of any given... any..." she rolls the word around in her mouth. "Contingency." It almost breaks the flatness. Almost. "I follow them for the good of the group. That includes stalking Elle, in case she--" Her voice cuts off. Gillian grips her head with her fingers, which are so broad across that they make my meaty ones look like sticks. She keeps walking, faster.

I continue behind her. "You could die doing stupid things like this someday. D-i-i-i-e." I say, stretching both vowels as far as they'll go without snapping.

"Does that bother you?" Gillian asks under her breath.

"Yes," I say.

Gillian looks at her hands like they are going to catch fire. "Why?"

"Death is the end." I say. "El fin. Whatever people say."

"Oh." she says. "Alex, I don't think that we can die."

"But if you could?" I say, and her mouth opens with the wrong answer already on her tongue. I continue, "We wouldn't need protecting if we couldn't die."

"There are worse things than death." Gillian shrugs. We're almost back into the woods. I don't even know why we're going this way but I know things will be over soon and that's good enough.

"If someone left, or if the group split in two, that would be worse than dying." Gillian says.

"Did Red say that to you, too?" I ask.

Gillian makes a minute, jerking tic with her head. "You wouldn't understand." she stops. "Please. Go the other way and leave me alone. There are a lot of trees. I don't even want to see you."

"Gillian." I say. "I care about you. You can't shut me out."
"I told you to please get out of my way." Gillian says. "I am not going to hurt you. I am not going to hurt you but you should go. Now." Her eyebrows twitch again. I see her hands turn to keratin, dragon forming within her, her red hair turning into the mane that drapes across the dragon's back. "I need to see clearly. Something is wrong."

I go, even though I know that something is missing too. I can feel it all hollow up inside me, the space where something important should be, and when I'm out of her sight, I take a long breath and hide behind a tree, looking for her between foliage. It'll see me long before I see it and then, I'm good as dead, so I should keep moving.

Of course we can die, Gillian.

Stupid. Of course.

I'm almost home when I hear someone singing in the woods and deposit myself next to him, hunched over myself. His big eyes stare into my soul and he reaches for where my phone is before bringing it back, like he just touched a fire. "Can we... bad time?"
"Always a bad time." I mumble. "You think I'm having a good time doing everyone else's dirty work?"
"Oh. You don't have to do this for me if you don't want to, Alex. I have a lot of fun hanging out with you, and it was nice for you to set up... everything... have I gotten any views?" Damien leans over my side. "I don't know if anyone really wants to see me pretending I know how to play the uku- uke... I'm getting it, though. I was practicing all day, but then everyone else needed help, so..."
I click open my phone. "I guess," I say, slung over my chair. "I think I'm going to run out of data on this phone, though. I don't know how to get more. It just cuts me off sometimes and I get a text message from..." Damien might tell people. "The phone sends me something."
Damien nods fervently even though he doesn't and couldn't get it. I open his channel and he peers over with his mouth wide open. "Two people saw that?"
"I think they're just us, amigo." I sigh, leaning back into the grass.

"What's an amigo?" Damien asks.
"A friend. It's just a better word."

"I like it." Damien says, stooped over the phone. His face is pressed into the glass and he has this smile across his face that makes me want to smile, too. It's like sunlight. He turns to me, eyes alight, and asks, "Are you and Gillian amigos?"
Okay, buddy, moment's over now. I watch my feet and shrug it off. Nah. Nah. Quietly, I say, "I don't know what Gillian and I are. We might just be nothing, because she doesn't want to be around me... really."

I run through all my words for idiot-- dumb, stupid, dimwit-- and then loop back around, still angry. Idiot, idiot, idiot!

Damien puts his hand on my shoulder and leans into it a little. "It's okay. I don't know if Mary likes me either, sometimes."

"We're not like you and Mary," I begin, defensively.

"You don't want to be like Mary and I." Damien says.

Some people have it even worse, I tell myself. Some people are Damien.

I am still seething with anger, but I pull a Gillian: all of it goes under the surface, where no one can tell that my entire body is made of molten lava.

(A/N: Sorry this one is a day late. Had to go to bed significantly earlier than usual and had to brush the chapter aside. Hopefully it was worth the wait?)