Everlost (Skinjacker 1)

“Free my friends.”

“Five years of study,” the Haunter said.

“What?”

“You have shown your skill. Now you must develop it, and discover what other skills you have—because where there is one skill, there are more. Study with me for five years, and then I shall free your friends from their barrels.”

Allie took a step back. “That wasn’t our agreement.”

The Haunter showed no expression. “I said I would free them. I never said when.”

This time, instead of coming up with a clever, well-thought-out approach to the situation, she found herself lunging for the Haunter, which of course did no good, because his goons were there to hold her back. Their strength seemed unnatural, even for Everlost spirits—and in a moment she found out why. In her struggle, she grabbed at the scarf covering one of their faces, and what she saw terrified her. She should have known something was wrong from the beginning. If Afterlights all wore the clothes they died in, what were the chances of finding a team of goons, all shrouded in black? These weren’t Afterlights at all. They were shells—and when Allie peeled back the scarf from the face, she saw nothing behind it—just cloth curving around the back of a head that didn’t exist.

Allie screamed, reached for the other faces, and one after another, she revealed them as empty, soulless soldiers. This trick was part of the Haunter’s skill;

wrapping clothes around empty air, creating soldiers out of nothing. The more Allie screamed, the louder the Haunter laughed.

Handless gloves gripped her tightly, and carried her to the door. “Come back when you are ready to learn,” the Haunter said.

Then they pulled open the heavy iron door, and hurled her out into the street, slamming the door behind her.

She tried to push herself up on her elbows but found she couldn’t, and realized she was sinking into the middle of the living-world street. She struggled to free herself, but only became more deeply embedded in the asphalt, which seemed more like tar trying to take her down. A garbage truck rolled over her, its wheels rolling straight through her head like it wasn’t there, and it only made her angrier. Angry enough that one of the rear tires blew as it crossed through her.

The truck slammed on its breaks, and pulled over to the side of the street up ahead.

Did I blow out that tire?

But if she did, she didn’t care. Not now. With a heavy force of will, she pulled herself upright. Now standing waist-deep in the asphalt, she worked her legs, and pressed with her hands until she had pulled herself out of the street.

She ran to the door of the Haunter’s lair. For a quick moment she forgot that it was not a living-world door, and slammed into it with full force, as if she could pass through it. She bounced off the solid steel, almost landing back in the street.

She pounded on the door over and over, ramming her shoulder against it. She tried to climb in through windows, but they were eternally blocked with security bars that had crossed into Everlost along with the rest of the building. For hours she tried to find a way in, and by dawn she was no closer to freeing her friends than she had been when she started.

As the jet-dark sky became the motley gray of a stormy morning, the rain turned to sleet, and the pinpricks of rain passing through her became sharp darts of ice. Discomfort, but not pain. Never pain, which just fed her rage. This dead/not-dead state robbed her of her right to feel with her body, and that made the anguish of her soul all the more severe.

Come back when you are ready to learn, the Haunter had said, but Allie already knew she would never be his student. She was no monster, and neither would she study under a monster. She would be back, though. She would come with a force of three hundred kids. Mary’s kids. They would tear the place down brick by brick if they had to, until there was not even a ghost of a ghost of a building.

Allie ran all the way back to the great marble plaza that marked the boundaries of Mary’s towering domain, and hurtled straight through a revolving door, ignoring the surprised looks of the kids on lookout. She raced into the elevator with such speed that she hit the back wall. The entire elevator shook, the doors closed, and in an instant she was surging upward.

She and Mary might have had their little differences, but Allie had enough faith in Mary to know she would sacrifice herself for the safety of the kids in her care. Together they would take on the Haunter, and who knows, perhaps it would forge some sort of bond between Allie and Mary.

She began at the top floor, but Mary wasn’t there. There were kids in the foodless food court, playing their morning games. “Mary! Where’s Mary? I have to find her!”

Allie went to the arcade floor, the publishing room, the TV room, and everywhere she went kids followed, her commotion actually drawing kids right out of their routines, like a speeding train pulling a swarm of leaves behind it, caught in its draft.

Mary was nowhere.

Vari, however, seemed to be everywhere. Everywhere she went, Vari seemed to find a way to get there first.

“Mary knows where you went last night,” Vari announced. “Everyone knows.”

Allie looked around at the other kids, and Allie knew from the way they looked at her, and from the distance they kept, that she had suddenly become an outsider. Someone to be feared. Someone who could not be trusted.

“Mary doesn’t want to talk to you,” Vari said. “Ever.”

“Listen, you little weasel, you tell me where Mary is, or I swear I’ll take you straight out into the living world, and stomp you down so hard, you’ll sink clear to China!”

When Vari didn’t talk, Allie took things into her own hands. Allie had heard that Mary liked to wander the unused floors when something was troubling her. A quick trip to the elevator control room found all the elevators on the usual floors, except for one. There was a single elevator waiting on the fifty-eighth floor.