Everfound (Skinjacker 3)

“It can’t blow up again, right?” said Johnnie. “This is Everlost.” But there was something about this deadspot that made anything seem possible. He grabbed Charlie’s hand. “C’mon, we’re getting out of here!”

He practically dragged Charlie down from the infrastructure and back to the starboard promenade, opening a window. “I know it’s scary,” Johnnie said. “But we have to jump. We’ll probably just bounce anyway.”

But suddenly the air changed again, and the static sparks stopped, and when Johnnie looked down, he saw the border between the deadspot and the desert moving away from them. They had missed their chance. They were out over the living-world desert again.

“Nooooooooo!”

The airship stopped spinning, and went back to its normal drift—although the interference from the deadspot had shifted its direction by a few degrees to the south—but otherwise, their predicament was exactly the same as before.

Johnnie-O curled his big fingers into oversize fists. “Why couldn’t you have stayed put! We could be out of here!”

But Charlie just smiled and sang, “Camptown ladies sing this song; Doo-dah! Doo-dah!”

Johnnie-O peered sadly, longingly, out of the window at the huge, perfectly round, gray deadspot as it receded on the horizon.

Funny, but from this angle, he couldn’t help but notice how it resembled a giant Everlost coin.

CHAPTER 19

Roadkill

Three weeks.

Allie lived the sordid life of a coyote for three weeks—although to her, the time was immeasurable. All she knew was that the days were many. Each moment was a nightmare for her because she never forgot who she was, or what she needed to do—but the senses and biological demands of the animal’s body held her in an iron grip.

Allie had never suffered from an addiction. Yet as she suffered through this, she’d come to know what it must be like; how a person could be unable to resist, knowing full well the depth of the consequences, yet still traveling that path to one’s own doom.

She had always been a willful person, but resisting this was like trying to stand firm against a tsunami. Humbling couldn’t begin to describe it. She didn’t think Jix intended this when he gave over the coyote for her to skinjack. How could he have known that the animal’s base instincts were stronger than her will to resist them?

As the first few hours passed on that first day, she knew that she would be permanently stuck inside the coyote if she stayed much longer—for no skinjacker can separate themselves from their host if they stay there too long—and yet the desire to hunt, to eat, to howl at the moon, made everything else feel trivial. Soon it was too late. After the first day in the animal, she knew she was bound to that mangy, flea-ridden body for the rest of its life. Perhaps someone else—someone with a canine kind of soul—would have enjoyed this, but that wasn’t Allie.

The feral spirit of the coyote would occasionally surface in her mind. It had grown used to its new reality, but Allie knew she never would, and when she gathered with other coyotes, they all bared their teeth and kept their distance, knowing she was not one of them.

Day after day, she suffered the living hell of this existence, until late one night she chased a rabbit across the highway, and was hit by a truck.

The coyote was killed, and Allie was painfully ejected from its body. The animal’s faint spirit leaped into its own particular light, presumably going off to dog heaven, or wherever it is that roadkill coyotes go, and Allie was back in Everlost, sinking butt-first into the living world.

She pulled herself out of the ground, but it wasn’t so easy to pull herself together. Now that she was herself once more, she was wracked with sobs, and she couldn’t stem the tide. She was not a girl given to tears, but this had been too much even for her. Life inside the coyote had been by far the worst experience of her life and afterlife, and such an experience deserved to be exorcised by a violent wave of emotion washing it from her soul.

She let her tears flow until the storm within her calmed. Then, when she was done, she got her bearings and made her way back to the train—or at least where the train had been. She found the spot as dawn began to light the eastern sky. The only sign that anything had happened there was the strange sight of the parlor car on top of the mansion.

She was free now. She could go back to Memphis and find herself, skinjack her own comatose body, returning to her life and putting all of this behind her. . . . But how could she do that now? She had no idea if Mary was still a danger to the living world.

Feeling more alone than she ever had, Allie sat down on one of the rails, trying to decide what to do. For a moment she thought she smelled chocolate, and it reminded her of Nick.

Poor, poor Nick. He had lost his battle with the chocolate that plagued him. In the end it had completely consumed him, and he dissolved, leaving nothing but a bubbling brown puddle at Graceland. Allie knew it was Mary’s doing. She had lured him to the Graceland vortex, knowing it would accelerate Nick’s strange condition. Even if Allie had been able to escape from Milos, there was nothing she could have done for Nick. In the end, he was just one more of Mary’s casualties . . . and if Mary had her way, there would be many, many more. Mary would bring indescribable grief to the living world—and for what? So that Mary could reign over more and more children, becoming queen over this lonely, bittersweet world between life and death.

. . . Bittersweet . . .

Again, that scent of chocolate came to Allie, and although she was sure it was just her imagination, she looked around her in the growing light of dawn, trying to find its source. There, on a railroad tie was a brown footprint—then another, and another! She knew there had to be some logical explanation for this. She refused to allow herself to hope that maybe, just maybe . . .

She reached down and touched one of the prints, and brought the tip of her finger to her mouth. It was chocolate!

Could it be?

Was it possible?

Could Nick somehow have risen from that molten miasma he had become? Yes! There was only one Nick; only one “Chocolate Ogre.” These prints could be made by no one else!