Everfound (Skinjacker 3)

“Wayne, what the heck—” He tried to grab Milos, but Milos shoved him into a glass display case, shattering it. Milos destroyed everything against the western wall, ripping out bookshelves, looking for the telltale signs of a passageway hidden behind them, but there was nothing but the same coarse stone walls.

He began to doubt himself. Maybe the voices had come from the living after all. Maybe the Neons were elsewhere—the mirror maze or the wax museum. Or maybe that escaping Neon ran to a different part of the city entirely.

Just as he was about to rip down a shelving unit full of paperweights, three more guards came in, grabbed him, and pinned him to the ground. Milos peeled out of Wayne the wayward rent-a-cop, leaving the man to deal with the aftermath of Milos’s rampage.

Filled with furious, yet exhilarating, determination, Milos gathered all the Afterlights in the Shrine where the effect of the vortex was its greatest—knowing he could use the vortex’s power to help rally them.

“The Neons are not here,” he announced. “But we will find them, and when we do, we will show no mercy because they showed no mercy to us!”

And they all cheered, the battle fury of the vortex filling them. “Remember the Alamo!” Squirrel shouted, and Moose smacked him.

“So what do we do until we find them?” someone asked.

And all at once Milos realized what they needed to do. All this time Milos had resisted, but now he was ready to accept his mission—his purpose. He had lost nearly a thousand of Mary’s children. Well, by the time Mary woke up, he would make absolutely sure that there were at least twice that many; maybe three times; maybe ten. It could be done, if they all worked hard enough.

“Mary made it very clear what she wanted us to do,” Milos said.

“Go west?” someone shouted.

“No,” said Milos. “We stay here. We stay here until we find her. And in the meantime we increase our numbers . . . by reaping.”

Milos never enjoyed reaping, but maybe that was because Jill had done it in such a cheap, sleazy manner. But with nearly fifty Afterlights waiting in Everlost to catch crossing souls, Milos’s reaping extravaganzas would not be sleazy at all. In fact, they would be nothing short of epic.

PART THREE

The Gates of Grief

High Altitude Musical Interlude #2 with Johnnie and Charlie

She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes . . .”

Johnnie was more than ready to hurl himself out of the Hindenburg window.

“She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes . . .”

More than once, he thought they were actually beginning to settle back to earth, and he got his hopes up . . . but it wasn’t them coming closer to the ground, it was a living-world mountain rising to meet them.

“She’ll be comin’ round the mountain, she’ll be comin’ round the mountain . . .”

The problem was, in spite of Charlie’s inane singing, they weren’t comin’ round the mountains at all: they were going directly through the mountains. Over and over they were forced to suffer an unpleasant violation of granite and limestone as they traveled sideways through living-world mountains—which wasn’t all that different from sinking into the earth except that you came out on the other side.

“She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes!”

And beyond the mountains and the plains there was always another vast expanse of sea. Johnnie had no idea there were so many oceans, so many seas. Then, when they finally hit land again, he realized that there was something a little bit too familiar about the coastline.

Finally he spotted a landmark in the foothills. A sign on a mountainside said HOLLYWOODLAND, although the LAND part was clearly in Everlost.

“No!” wailed Johnnie-O. “Are you telling me we’ve gone all the way around the world?”

To which Charlie responded, “She’ll be ridin’ six white horses when she comes . . .”

It was enough to make Johnnie-O cry. He knew the world was round, but in his mind it sort of went on forever before coming back around on itself again. There was no telling how many times they had circled the globe and no way to know if it would ever stop.

o;If you don’t go, what I do to you will be much worse,” said Milos. No one else gave him an argument.

They crossed the plaza, then stepped into the main building, a stone church full of arches and iron chandeliers called “the Shrine.” The ground felt strange beneath their feet; one moment soft, the next moment solid.

“We shouldn’t be here. . . . ,” complained the complainer.