Everfound

“We deserve better than this,” he told Charlie, who just smiled and continued to sing his song.

It was late the next day that Joh

“Is that a deadspot?” asked Joh

“Charlie, you gotta see this!” But right now Charlie, was all about killin’ the old red rooster when she comes.

Joh

And that’s when Joh

TheHindenburghad passed many deadspots; buildings that had crossed over, intersections where accidents had occurred. None of them, however, were big enough to land a bull’s-eye from theHindenburg. This deadspot, however, was so big, you couldn’t help but land a bull’s-eye!

The idea of jumping thousands of feet from an airship was not exactly Joh

“Get up, Charlie, we’re going!” But when he turned to look for Charlie, he was gone. “Charlie?” He could still hear Charlie’s singing, but it wasn’t coming from the starboard promenade anymore. He was somewhere else in the ship.

“Charlie, get back here!”

The airship crossed into the airspace over the strange deadspot, and Joh

With the sudden spi

Finally Joh

“What the heck are you doing here?”

Then Charlie pointed up. Joh

“It can’t blow up again, right?” said Joh

He practically dragged Charlie down from the infrastructure and back to the starboard promenade, opening a window. “I know it’s scary,” Joh

But suddenly the air changed again, and the static sparks stopped, and when Joh

“Nooooooooo!”

The airship stopped spi

Joh

But Charlie just smiled and sang,“Camptown ladies sing this song; Doo-dah! Doo-dah!”

Joh

Fu

CHAPTER 19

Roadkill

Three weeks.

Allie lived the sordid life of a coyote for three weeks—although to her, the time was immeasurable. All she knew was that the days were many. Each moment was a nightmare for her because she never forgot who she was, or what she needed to do—but the senses and biological demands of the animal’s body held her in an iron grip.

Allie had never suffered from an addiction. Yet as she suffered through this, she’d come to know what it must be like; how a person could be unable to resist, knowing full well the depth of the consequences, yet still traveling that path to one’s own doom.

She had always been a willful person, but resisting this was like trying to stand firm against a tsunami. Humbling couldn’t begin to describe it. She didn’t think Jix intended this when he gave over the coyote for her to skinjack. How could he have known that the animal’s base instincts were stronger than her will to resist them?

As the first few hours passed on that first day, she knew that she would be permanently stuck inside the coyote if she stayed much longer—for no skinjacker can separate themselves from their host if they stay there too long—and yet the desire to hunt, to eat, to howl at the moon, made everything else feel trivial. Soon it was too late. After the first day in the animal, she knew she was bound to that mangy, flea-ridden body for the rest of its life. Perhaps someone else—someone with a canine kind of soul—would have enjoyed this, but that wasn’t Allie.

The feral spirit of the coyote would occasionally surface in her mind. It had grown used to its new reality, but Allie knew she never would, and when she gathered with other coyotes, they all bared their teeth and kept their distance, knowing she was not one of them.

Day after day, she suffered the living hell of this existence, until late one night she chased a rabbit across the highway, and was hit by a truck.

The coyote was killed, and Allie was painfully ejected from its body. The animal’s faint spirit leaped into its own particular light, presumably going off to dog heaven, or wherever it is that roadkill coyotes go, and Allie was back in Everlost, sinking butt-first into the living world.

She pulled herself out of the ground, but it wasn’t so easy to pull herself together. Now that she was herself once more, she was wracked with sobs, and she couldn’t stem the tide. She was not a girl given to tears, but this had been too much even for her. Life inside the coyote had been by far the worst experience of her life and afterlife, and such an experience deserved to be exorcised by a violent wave of emotion washing it from her soul.

She let her tears flow until the storm within her calmed. Then, when she was done, she got her bearings and made her way back to the train—or at least where the train had been. She found the spot as dawn began to light the eastern sky. The only sign that anything had happened there was the strange sight of the parlor car on top of the mansion.