Everwild (Skinjacker 2)

Nick had asked for fifty--and he ended up with almost eighty--which posed a logistical problem, since the train had only an engine, a parlor car, and a single passenger car. That's when Zin, to everyone's amazement, had ripped her first train car from the living world.

Isaiah was true to his word, and just before they left, he gave them pretty good intelligence as to where they could find friendly Afterlights, and which ones should probably be avoided. He also gave Nick a word of friendly, heartfelt advice.

"You need to remember who you were," Isaiah told him. "Because more and more you got that mud-pie look about you. There's more chocolate on your shirt--it's even getting into your hair now. I gotta say, it worries me."

"We can't choose what we remember," Nick said, repeating what Mary had once told him, "but I'll try."

"Well, I wish you all the luck in both worlds," Isaiah said. Then, as a gesture of friendship, they put their hands together, and crushed Isaiah's one unbroken fortune cookie between their palms.

Their fortune read, "Luck is the poorest of strategies."

While Isaiah might have felt insulted, Nick took this as evidence that he was doing the right thing--preparing for his confrontation with Mary as best he could.

That was more than a month ago. Since leaving Atlanta, Nick and his train had zigzagged from town to town, city to city, on any dead rails that would get them there.

"I'd rip us fresh train tracks," Zin said, "but I can only rip things I can actually move."

The "mud-pie" look that Isaiah had spoken of was even more pronounced than before--so much so that Nick had taken the mirror in the parlor car, and spread his chocolate hand back and forth across it until it was too thick with the stuff to show his reflection. He had work to do, and thinking about himself, well, it was just a distraction.

Based on what Isaiah had told him, they traveled to more than a dozen towns and cities in Georgia and the Carolinas, bringing in volunteers everywhere they went. Zin had become a whiz at dazzling audiences with the items she ripped right before their eyes, and once they were wide-eyed with wonder, Nick offered them a feast without being asked, because if there was one thing that was universal in Everlost, it was the absence of, and the craving for, a good meal.

By the time they reached Chattanooga, Tennessee, and added that ninth train car, Nick's anti-Mary fighting force numbered nearly four hundred.

"It's good to be part of an army again," Zin told Nick, as they headed south toward Birmingham, Alabama. "I've been waitin' halfway to forever for someone to fight."

"We fight because we have to," Nick told her. "We fight because it's the right thing to do, not because we want to."

;Ew!" shouted several voices in the crowd, sounding both delighted and disgusted at the same time.

"There," Nick said. "A hot fudge sundae."

The girl and her friends didn't wait for spoons to be ripped--they devoured it with their hands.

"So," said Isaiah, "the Chocolate Ogre isn't a monster ... he's a thief."

Nick didn't deny it. He had thought long and hard about what it meant to rip things from the living world, but he ultimately decided that the needs of Everlost outweighed the needs of the living. "Ever hear of Robin Hood?" he said to the crowd, as much as to Isaiah.

"Sure--he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor."

"Well," said Nick, "the living are rich, whether they know it or not. The way I see it, we deserve a small share of the world that was stolen from us."

Isaiah didn't say he agreed, but he didn't disagree, either.

"Okay," said Nick. "Who's next?"

Almost every hand went up, with shouts of "Me! Me! Me!"

Nick turned to Isaiah. "Get me a list of ten reasonable requests, and we'll see what we can do." * * *

Nick counted on Isaiah to weed out the needy from the greedy, and Nick wasn't disappointed.

"About half of them wanted you to rip them a pet," Isaiah said, when he brought the list of requests to the parlor car. He glanced at Kudzu, who had busied himself licking the chocolate off everything in sight--poison for a living dog, but not a problem for an Afterlight canine.

"I was worried that might happen," Nick said. "What did you tell them?"

"I told them that ripping dogs and cats right out of their lives wouldn't be right."

"I only done it once," Zin told him, glancing at Nick a little sheepishly. "Kudzu here was bein' beaten by his owner. Had to save him from that, and rippin' him was the only way."