Everwild (Skinjacker 2)

Doris knew something had changed the moment it happened, but she couldn't tell what. She wheeled around the porch searching every corner. Surely she had lost something, but what could it be? That's how it was with so many things these days. Half-finished thoughts, forgetting even what she'd forgotten. It was no picnic getting old. She looked to her right wrist, rubbing it, scratching it, wishing the uncanny feeling of loss would just go away.

Meanwhile, in Everlost, Nick went to fetch Zin.

"This corsage crossed into Everlost," he told her. "I think it happened a very long time ago."

"So?" said Zin. "What about it?"

"I'd like you to put it back into the living world."

Zin had been practicing the art of "cramming," as the Ogre had called it, but she sensed that this was a little bit different. She couldn't say why.

She turned the corsage in her hand, put it on her own wrist for a moment, inhaled its rich fragrance--and then it finally struck her why this was different than any of the other things she had crammed back into the living world.

"These flowers are alive... ."

She thought she caught a hint of a smile on the clear side of the Ogre's face. "So they are," he said. "Or as alive as anything can be in Everlost. Now I'm ordering you to put that corsage back into the living world."

She instinctively knew that dealing with something "alive" would be a whole new level of cramming.

"I don't know if I can do that, sir." She didn't always remember to call him "sir," but she did whenever she was basically telling him "no."

"You won't know until you try," he told her, because the Ogre never took no for an answer.

They returned to the porch where Nick had seen the woman, but she was no longer there, because the living are rarely so convenient as to remain where you found them. Nick, however, wouldn't rest until he had tracked her down. Although the living appeared blurry to those in Everlost, a woman in a wheelchair wouldn't be too difficult to spot.

Doris was not at home because she had called her teenage grandson, and asked him to come take her for a walk. She was feeling unsettled. Not quite panicked, but very unsettled.

"Something's missing," she told him.

"I'm sure you'll find it," he said, not for an instant believing that anything was missing at all. Doris's children and grandchildren all thought she was far more senile than she really was, treating everything she said as if it were coming from someplace hopelessly foggy. It annoyed her no end, and they took her crankiness as further evidence of dementia.

Her grandson rolled her through the streets of the town, and when they came to a corner, she chanced to look up at the street signs.

They were at the corner of Severance and Blithe. Although she had passed this intersection a thousand times since the accident, the spot was only painful when she paused to think about it, which she rarely did anymore. But today she felt a strange need to pay her respects, and so she had her grandson pause at the corner before crossing.

It was as she sat there, tallying the cost of a single tragic moment, that she felt a strange gripping sensation on her right wrist. She looked down to see that a yellow rose corsage had been slipped onto her hand. Not any corsage, but the corsage. She knew nothing of Everlost, or of Zin, who had just successfully crammed it into the living world, and had slipped it onto her hand--but Doris didn't need to know. There was no question in her mind that this was the same corsage. In a sudden moment of intuition, Doris came to realize that the corsage had always been with her, then was briefly taken away, only to be presented back to her fully and completely. All these years it had been unable to live, but unable to die. Now it would do both.

Her grandson didn't notice its appearance--his attention had drifted to two girls his own age farther down the street. He only noticed the corsage once the girls had turned the corner.

"Where did that come from?" he asked once he saw it.

"Billy gave it to me," Doris said honestly. "He gave it to me the night of the prom."

;No, I ain't never tried that," said Zin. "But what if puttin' sumpin' back is one of them weird scientifical things that blows up the world?"

"If you blow up the world," the Ogre said, "you can blame it on me."

Which was good enough for Zin. He was, after all, her superior officer. If and when she got to the pearly gates, she could always claim she was following orders.

"Well, all right, then."

She steeled herself, then held the sucker in her ripping hand, and tried to shove it through, into the living world.

It was not an easy thing. Just opening a hole into the living world was different now that her intentions were different. It was like picking a lock. Then when the portal finally began to open, the living world resisted.

"It won't work, sir," Zin insisted. "I think the livin' world's got all the stuff it can stand, and don't want no more."

"Keep trying."