Tamara woke up.

"Are we alive?" she asked wildly, shooting to her feet.

Nobody was able to answer her. Evan had collapsed from exhaustion, and the Hollowgast was staggering around in a jumble of electrified thoughts.

Tamara blinked. Was she still hearing the Hollow?

Yes, she was. But it didn't seem to hear her.

His POV

The electric blast kind of scrambled me.

I might be understating it. It was more like, THAT FOOD JUST BLASTED ME AND NOW I'M GOING TO EAT IT NO MATTER WHAT.

And it didn't help that the girl seemed to be electrocuted right out of my mind.

Now I had no anchor to sanity. My remaining patience and humanity was gone.

I growled. (I don't know if you know this, but Hollows generally do not growl. The point of invisibility is stealth, and growling isn't very stealthy.)

The Food was knocked out. Easier for me.

Meanwhile, the other Food, the girl, was coming to. She looked up, almost straight at me, and I heard her voice.

Stop it. Right now.

But the electrocution made me frazzled. I lashed out my tentacles, grabbing the boy and pulling him to me. Finally, after a century of agonizing hunger, I was getting a meal.

STOP IT!

I halted. No, I thought back to her.

But yes. She stared above my shadow, and I stared back, unable to move. I could feel her mentally searching my mind for something.

A memory.

She dragged it to the front of my mind, where I could see it.

The memory was calming. Back when I was a living person, a human. It drew my human side from the corner of my brain and put it in charge.

I dropped the boy. Quick as lightning, the girl pulled him back into the corner with her.

She looked at me.

I wanted desperately to get her to help me. The scientific part of my brain wanted to understand what happened, but sometimes things are just left unexplained.

That's not how the girl felt, though. Casting a desperate look at the unconscious boy, she said in human and in my mind, "We need to go somewhere safe. And we need to talk."

Probably the shortest chapter ever, I know. But next chapter Will Be Longer. And things will be revealed, of course!