Everwild (Skinjacker 2)

"Did the world like you ripping when you first started?"

Zin thought back to her earliest days in Everlost. Ripping wasn't easy when she first began. The world held on to stuff like a kid holds on to toys. "No," Zin had to admit. "It was hard at first."

"But the world got used to it, right?"

"I guess ..."

"It got used to ripping, so it'll get used to ... cramming ... as well." They both looked at the half-eaten sucker on the living world counter until the candy store cashier noticed it and eyed it with disgust. He then picked it up, and dropped it into the trash.

"I want you to practice this," the Ogre told Zin. "Practice cramming every chance you get, until you can do it as quickly and as smoothly as ripping."

Then Zin asked the million dollar question. "Why?"

"Does there have to be a 'why'?" asked the Ogre. "Isn't knowing the full extent of your powers reason enough?"

But if there was one thing Zin had come to learn and respect about the Ogre, it was his strategy as a general ... and the fact that everything he did was always a single move in a much larger campaign.

Chapter 23 Severance and Blithe

Doris Meltzer had led a long and productive life. At the age of eighty-three, she knew she didn't have much time left, but she was satisfied with the life she had lived.

For her entire adult life, she wore her wristwatch on her left wrist, but would always glance at her right. She would gently rub it, and convinced herself it was just a nervous habit. The truth of it lay below the threshold of her understanding. At times she touched upon the true meaning of it--at the moment of waking, or the instant before sleep set in--the two places where one's spirit comes closest to Everlost. Never close enough to actually see it, but close enough to sense its existence.

It all began the night of her high school prom. It was a momentous occasion, but not in the way anyone had expected. Her date was a boy named Billy, and she'd had a crush on him since grade school. She had dreams they might be married--and in those days marrying your high school sweetheart was more the norm than the exception.

Billy had just learned to drive and was proud to be doing it, taking her to the prom under the capable control of his own hands and feet, even if he was driving his father's clunky old DeSoto.

He gave her a wrist corsage of yellow roses.

It was a beautiful thing that matched her lemon chiffon dress. She wore it on her right wrist, and lifted it to her face, inhaling its rich aroma all night long. Even then she knew that, for the rest of her life, when she smelled roses, she would think of this night. She would think of Billy.

The prom was spectacular, as a prom should be. It was after they left that everything went wrong. It wasn't Billy's fault. He had obeyed all the traffic laws, but sometimes none of that matters when someone else has been drinking. Such was the case when a car full of drunken classmates ran a red light at the corner of Severance and Blithe.

Billy never felt a thing.

He was gone before the car stopped flipping. He had sailed instantly down the tunnel and into the light. There were no pit stops in Everlost for him--for at the age of eighteen, the walls of his tunnel were already too thick to allow an unexpected detour. For him, his exit from the living world went exactly as it should.

Doris, however, had a harder time of it, for although she also saw the tunnel, it wasn't her time to make the journey. She was merely an observer, watching him go. She awoke in the hospital days later with her family by her side, all of them thanking God for a million answered prayers. She was alive, and would recover.

As for the corsage, it perished in the crash along with the boy she might have married. Doris's spine was severed at the L-4 vertebrae, and she never walked again--but in all other aspects she lived a full and exceptionally happy life. She married, had children, and had her own antique business in a time when a woman's place was still considered to be the home.

She had no way of knowing that the corsage of yellow roses didn't entirely perish.

Because of what it meant to the boy who gave it to her, and because of what it meant to Doris, the corsage crossed into Everlost unscathed. Sixty-five years later, it was still as fresh and bright as the evening she wore it.

In fact, it was still right there on her wrist.

It moved with her, unknown and invisible, holding her right wrist in a gentle grasp, secretly giving her comfort when she needed it. This was the cause of that strange urge to look at her wrist, and to caress it, yet she never made the connection.

Then one day, a boy who had half turned to chocolate noticed the corsage.

He was merely passing by when he spotted it. He was out searching for Afterlights to gather, but instead he found the cluster of yellow roses and baby's breath. So vibrant, so bright--it was clearly an artifact of Everlost, and yet it clung to the arm of an old woman in a wheelchair sitting on a porch.

Nick had never seen anything like it. He had always assumed that when items crossed, they fell free from the living world, but here was a corsage that still clung to the hand of its living wearer, even though it existed only in Everlost.

Nick remembered reading about a sort of spirit that becomes attached to the living. An incubus it was called. He had never met or even heard of a spirit like that in Everlost-- but this corsage--it was a floral incubus, refusing to leave its beloved host behind.

Refusing, that is, until Nick reached out, and plucked it right off the woman's arm--an easy thing to do, as it was part of Everlost.