Everfound (Skinjacker 3)

“And,” added Nick, “it will show up as a dead letter at that post office Milos made cross in San Antonio!”

Allie could have stood there saying good-bye forever, because it was more than Nick she was saying good-bye to. She was leaving behind four years of half-life in a world that was both stunningly beautiful, and hauntingly dark. And she was saying good-bye to Mikey. I’ll be waiting for you, he had said. . . . Well, if he was, maybe she wasn’t really saying good-bye at all.

Nick hefted the backpack on his shoulder, “Shouldn’t you be heading off to Memphis?” he said. “You’d better hit the road . . . Jack.” Then he chuckled at his own joke, and walked off.

And although he was just an ordinary Afterlight, Allie couldn’t help but notice as he strode down the street, that he wasn’t sinking into the living world at all.

CHAPTER 52

Portraits

Picture this:

A farm in west Texas. It’s night. Animals in the barnyard are on edge. Something has them spooked and the farmer doesn’t know why. He double-checks the pens, but loses concentration for a moment, then goes inside, never realizing that in that moment of disorientation, his hands, under someone else’s control, had unlocked the pen of his prize breeding sow.

In the pen, the sow awakes. Not the sow, but the girl within the sow, who is beginning to forget that she is a girl. She does not want to consider the misery that she has been put through these many, many weeks. The slop she has been served to eat, the stench of the pen, and the massive immobile weight of her own bloated, porcine body.

Then she hears the gate of her pen slowly creak open. She is hit by a new sharp smell, and adrenaline fills her, for the instinctive mind of the pig knows the smell means grave danger. She turns her head enough to see bright eyes looking at her, reflecting the distant porch light like yellow marbles.

A snow leopard.

The leopard’s white, spotted fur seems to glow in the waning gibbous moon. The cat is hungry, but it does not attack. Instead, it reaches with its paw, grabs the gate of the pen and pulls it closed until it latches, making sure it couldn’t get out if it tried. Only then does the leopard bare its fangs at the sow.

The sow doesn’t move. It couldn’t if it wanted to, so instead, it stares into the leopard’s eyes as the leopard slowly moves forward, opens its mouth wide, and digs its powerful fangs deep into the sow’s neck. . . .

A few minutes later, at the sound of a strange roar, the farmer grabs his shotgun and heads out toward the pigpens, where his worst fear is realized. A wild animal has gotten into the pen. The strangest animal he’s ever seen in these parts. His prize sow is dead, and somehow locked in the pen with its body is a huge white cat, furiously bouncing around the pen, unable to escape.

“Now I’ve seen everything,” he says.

. . . But in truth, he hasn’t seen everything. Because he doesn’t see the two invisible spirits embracing right beside him, then racing off into the Everlost night.

Picture this:

A hospital on Valentine’s Day in Memphis, Tennessee. A sparse gathering of families have remembered their silent loved ones today, including the parents of the girl in room 509, who arrive shortly after work and tape a Valentine’s Day card up on the wall. It storms outside, icy rain hitting the window, making it rattle. Not the most inviting of Valentine’s Days; not the most inviting of settings.

Still, the couple do their best to make the most of it. The mother paints the girl’s nails, for her sister is in college and can’t be there to do it. The father goes through his ritual of massaging her muscles to keep them soft and supple, for there’s still a faint and far-off chance that she’ll need them again someday. The mother reads yet another chapter from Sense and Sensibility, and then when melancholy sets in, the father goes to pull up the car, for he doesn’t want to make his wife walk in the storm.

could see in Nick a kind of peaceful resolve, but also a certain sorrow deep in his eyes. Or maybe it was just a reflection of her own sadness at having to give Mikey over to the light. Both she and Nick lost someone they loved today, but in very different ways.

“I’m sorry,” Allie said.

“Don’t be,” Nick told her. “You know what they say—what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, right?”

“Well, sure,” said Allie. “But being that you’re already dead, I don’t know if that applies.”

Nick laughed. “You don’t have to worry about me. The light didn’t take me, but it did give me some pretty cool door prizes.”

“It took away the chocolate, for one,” Allie said.

“Yeah, but that’s only part of it. I remember now, Allie. I remember everything! Who I was, who I am, and even who I will be.”

“Oh, so now you can see the future?”

“Not exactly,” said Nick. “But I know my place in it.”

“And that would be . . . ?”

Nick smiled at her. It was a genuine smile. “I’m the new Mary.”