Wally pauses for a moment to catch his breath and give Allie a chance to catch up. As he inhales deeply, he looks up at the sky. Gaps in the canopy reveal dark clouds gathering overhead, and he feels a tiny drop of rain hit his face and slide down his cheek. Should’ve checked the weather, he thinks. He had been so eager to head out and formulate their plan, he had even skipped lunch. Needless to say, he hadn’t brought an umbrella.

He turns around, watching as Allie slowly closes the distance between them. Her eyes are downcast, her face scrunched in a look of intense concentration, and her arms are crossed over her stomach. She must be worried about tomorrow, Wally surmises. She is the centerpiece of their scheme, after all. Not only would she be acting as the bait, but if their confrontation becomes physical, she would be the one to overpower their would-be assailant.

Suddenly, Allie’s eyes widen and she inhales sharply. She stops walking and frantically begins rubbing her arms, hugging them tightly against her torso. “Allie? Is something wrong?” Wally asks. He notices that the rain has begun to pick up, now a steady pitter-patter against the leaves instead of a light sprinkle, and he wonders if that’s the cause of Allie’s strange behavior—her first encounter with precipitation. Wally almost chuckles at the thought of the naïve alien being scared of a few raindrops.

“F-fine,” she splutters in delayed reply. Seeing that she’s started violently shaking, Wally’s amusement quickly gives way to grave concern.

He walks toward her, trying to discern what’s wrong. “You don’t look fine,” he says. “Here, let me—” Allie’s head jerks up, and Wally’s words die in his throat. As if a switch has been flipped, the panic and desperation in Allie’s eyes have been replaced by predatory hunger. Her feral gaze bores deep into him, making the hairs on his neck stand on end. In the blink of an eye, her arms have transformed into writhing tentacles.

“Agh!” Wally cries, throwing up his arms as a futile defense. Every fiber of his being is urging him to run, but his legs are glued to the spot. Besides, he knows Allie would catch him in an instant. He squeezes his eyes shut, bracing for the excruciating pain of being impaled in every vital organ. His mind detaches, flashing back to the first time he saw Allie transformed, feeding on a deer carcass. He recalls the note he wrote that night on his phone—his desperate plea to whoever finds what’s left of his body. I should’ve never trusted her, he thinks, fully convinced that he is about to die. But at least I kept that video.

The pain never comes. Instead, he feels a light whoosh of air as Allie darts past him and into the forest beyond.

***

When I finally came back to myself, my face was transformed, buried in the flank of my fallen prey. My clothes were soaked, stained a deep crimson which even the steady rainfall couldn’t wash away. I was kneeling in a pool of blood, ripping away at the half-eaten entrails of my latest victim—a juvenile buck. Though I was now fully conscious, I continued to tear off and devour strips of flesh from the body. The rich, metallic taste of fresh game was too enticing to resist. My hunger had finally subsided, and for a moment I was blissfully content. Then I heard the crunch of trampled foliage and the stomping of approaching footsteps.

“Jesus, Allie!” Wally shouted, pushing branches out of the way as he approached. “We didn’t come here so you could slaughter some innocent woodland creatures. Could you at least try not to act like a monster?!”

I lifted my head and hastily reverted to my human form. Looking guiltily up at him, I said, “S-sorry… I was just so hungry.”

“What do you mean ‘hungry’? I’ve been giving you food all week!”

I rose to my feet and began to explain the strange symptoms that accompanied my hunger, describing how, even after I stuffed myself with meat that morning, I still wasn’t satisfied. After what had just transpired, it became clear to me that the unhealthiness of the meal was not the issue. “I’m not sure why,” I concluded, “but I think my food has to be… freshly caught.”

Wally looked understandably shaken by the revelation. He took a moment to process everything I’d said, then asked pointedly, “When did this start happening?”

I shifted my eyes downward, unable to meet his scrutinizing gaze. “This Monday,” I admitted.

Wally’s face reddened even further, and a vein on his forehead began to bulge out. “You’ve been hiding it from me this whole time?”

“I know I shouldn’t have but I… I was just so scared that if I told you, you’d never trust me.” It was a poor excuse, but it was all I had.

“Well, you sure did a stellar job with that, Allie,” he said, every word dripping with venom. “Back then, you were so adamant that you were on my side, that you were being completely transparent, that you had nothing to hide. But clearly you were full of shit, so now I definitely don’t trust you. What other secrets have you been—”

A wicked blade of light split the sky behind Wally, followed shortly by the rumbling boom of thunder. For a brief moment, I thought I could make out a long-haired silhouette hiding among the trees. When I blinked, it vanished. I raised my palm signaling Wally to stop before he could continue his emboldened rant. “What,” he growled.

“I think I saw someone behind you,” I replied in a hushed voice.

Wally glared daggers at me, unconvinced. “Are you seriously trying to change the subject? If you think you can get out of this by trying to scare me with shitty ghost stories, you’re sorely mistaken.”

I opened my mouth, about to argue, but even I wasn’t confident in what I had seen. Perhaps it was merely a trick of the light, or an eerie shadow cast by some otherwise unassuming vegetation during the flash of lightning. With the storm drowning out my hearing and washing away any scents in the air, I had no way of detecting the presence of another person. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being watched.

Undeterred, Wally continued to berate me, even as the drizzle of rain progressed to a torrential downpour. “I was actually starting to trust you, y’know that? Even though you’re an alien that’s controlling my best friend’s corpse and hunts wild animals in the woods, I was almost willing to look past all of that. Maybe I didn’t consider you a friend, but I did start to think of you as a genuine ally. But now—”

Wally was drowned out in an instant by the roar of thunder as a bolt of lightning struck so close behind him, it shook the ground beneath us. We rushed to shield our ears as the deafening blast of sound reverberated through our bodies. Then, wide-eyed and pale as a sheet, Wally swiveled around to face where the lightning had struck. His jaw moved up and down, but the ringing in my ears obstructed whatever he was trying to scream to me. Still, even through the heavy downpour, I could see it. A massive tree behind Wally was tipping dangerously forward, about to fall. And he was directly in its path.

As it accelerated downward, I jumped in the way, desperate to stop its descent. I transformed my arms and held them above my head in hopes of catching the tree before it smashed us into the ground. As soon as they made contact, I wrapped my tentacles around the trunk and was forced into a crouch under its immense weight.

Struggling to keep something so massive suspended in the air, I felt an intense burning in every part of my body as my cells rapidly multiplied. Within seconds, my muscles were reinforced enough to hold up the toppled tree without much trouble, and I carefully guided it to the ground beside us. I was too preoccupied to notice it then, but after that latest burst of growth, almost all of muscle tissue in my body was truly mine—my cells were beginning to outnumber and overtake Anna’s.

Wally fell to his knees, sinking a little into the mud. “Holy shit…” he muttered, looking up at me in both terror and awe. “Allie… how did you do that?”