Everwild

"Yes ... I see ..." her mother said into the phone. "Is that so? ... Don't worry, I'll take care of it... . I said don't worry ... I know ... me, too."

She hung up, and came back toward Allie, but she didn't sit down. "That was my husband," she said. "He just got off the phone with Sarah Wintuck, who's still teaching fourth grade in Cape May, New Jersey."

The slippery ice beneath Allie's feet became the edge of a glacier calving into the sea. She was in freefall now, and deep inside her the cat woman was screaming to be released.

"I don't know who you are, but I want you to leave," her mother said coldly.

"I ... I just ..." But what could she say? What could she tell her that would make any sense? "I have a message from your daughter!"

The hatred in her mother's eyes was so potent, Allie had to look away. "I want you out of my house!" she said. "Now!" And she didn't wait for her to leave. She grabbed Allie by her ski

"Please!" Allie said.

"Help me!" shouted the cat woman.

"You think I don't know about you people!" said her mother. "You prey on people's hopes, telling them what they want to hear, and then you rob them blind! Well, you picked the wrong family to scam!"

Her mother's hand was on the door, ready to slam it, and Allie couldn't allow that. She had to say something to make her understand.

"They were arguing about the radio!"

And it stopped her mother cold. "What did you say?"

"When the accident happened, they were arguing about the radio--he turned it down, and she turned it back up. But it wasn't his fault! She wants you both to know that the accident wasn't his fault!"

Her mother's expression went from shock to horror to fury in the span of a single second, and then she said in a voice lethal with venom, "Whoever you are, I hope you rot in hell!" She slammed the door so hard it almost broke the jamb, and Allie could hear her bursting into tears on the other side.

Allie ran from the house, tears filling her own eyes, her whole body shaking, the cat woman fighting to get out, and there was a pain deep in her back, spreading down her arms.

This wasn't the way it was supposed to happen. She was supposed to bring comfort to her parents, not anguish.

--Let me go!-- screamed the cat woman, and Allie refused, taking out all her anger on her. If the woman had only stayed asleep--if she had only stayed quiet, Allie would have talked her way out of this. Things would have gone differently if she didn't have to fight the cat woman for control.

This is your fault!Allie screamed in her thoughts as she ran. You couldn't just let me do this! You couldn't just let it be! They were on a busy street now--a commercial street full of shops restaurants and cars. Plenty of people to skinjack. Allie tried to peel out, disgusted with the cat woman and her body--but she couldn't do it. She tugged and twisted, but it was as if she was glued to the cat woman's frame. She had stayed inside her too long!

--Get out of me!--

I'm trying!

The pain in her back was moving to her chest. It was intense, and it was hard to breathe. She shouldn't have run so fast. Not in this body. It suddenly dawned on her that the cat woman was having a heart attack--Allie had given her a heart attack, and now she was stuck with her in this feeble failing body!

--what have you done to me?-- the cat woman wailed.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way.

She stumbled in the front door of a restaurant.

--what have you done?--Shut up! I'll get us out of this, Allie told her.

The maître d' looked at her in alarm. "Help me!" she said. It was all she could do to get the words out. "Heart." Restaurants did have emergency kits, didn't they?

The Maitre d' looked like a deer in headlights, then he glanced down at his reservation book as if the solution might be written there. He was useless.

Allie, with pain getting worse by the second, and darkness closing in around her, spied an electrical outlet on the wall. They used electricity to restart a failing heart, right? She grabbed a knife from a table, crumbled to her knees, and shoved the tip of the knife into the socket.

The electric shock sent Allie flying. She seemed to burst apart in all directions, and pull back together a dozen yards away. She fell to the ground and began to sink into the living world. She was herself again, and back in Everlost!

She stood, and turned to the cat woman being helped up to a sitting position. She looked bad, but not as bad as Allie thought she would. A waiter took her pulse, and seemed satisfied. Silverware in a socket wasn't the best way to jumpstart a heart, but at least it had worked.

"She stole me," the cat woman muttered. "She stole me... ."

"Just relax," the waiter said. "You're going to be fine."

Half the people in the restaurant had already dialed 911, and the wail of an approaching ambulance could already be heard. It was out of her hands now, so she soul-surfed out of the restaurant, into a passing car, then another, then another, and didn't stop until she was miles away.

* * * The joy of seeing her mother should have been enough to take away the sting of her reaction. After all, how could her mother react any other way? How could she trust a strange woman who had not only lied to her about her identity, but seemed to know secrets that no one but Allie could have known? Of course she would have been horrified!

But that didn't make it hurt any less. The fact that she had nearly killed a woman barely even registered in Allie's mind. All that mattered to her was home. She still hadn't seen her father--but she knew this craving for home was even deeper than that, because, like skinjacking itself, a little taste of home was not enough. Against all reason, she hungered for it. She needed more than just closure, she needed co

CHAPTER 27 Skinjacker's Lullaby

That night, Allie fell to what may have been the lowest point of her afterlife when she skinjacked a seven-year-old boy at one in the morning.

It had to be someone lighter and more nimble than her, because the only way into her parents' new home was to climb in through an upstairs window. She didn't know what she would do once she got in, all she knew was that she had to get in, and keep getting in until she could make her parents understand that she was not gone, she was right here, and wouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon.

There was a tree in the front yard, and open windows upstairs. Her parents always kept the upstairs windows open on summer nights. The tree was a live oak--a knobby thing, with a double trunk full of random twisting limbs. It was a climbing tree--and although the limb leaning closest to the house was a slim one, Allie reasoned that a child who weighed less than fifty pounds wouldn't break the limb.

She trespassed in neighborhood homes, and finally found the perfect specimen a few blocks away. She didn't have to put the boy to sleep, because he was already in the deep kind of slumber that only young children can reach. She easily seized control, slipped on a pair of velcro SpiderMan shoes, and went downstairs and out into the night.

The moon was a scant sliver in the sky, a scimitar edge that seemed to slice the clouds that crossed its path. The streets were deserted, and no lights were on in Allie's parents' house. This boy was no stranger to climbing trees. Allie knew it the second she scuttled up the trunk. She relied on the boy's muscle memory to take her higher until she was on the branch that stretched toward the house and the open upstairs window. She climbed out toward the edge of the branch, and just as she reached toward the window the branch began to break.