Everfound

“So how do you know that won’t happen to you, too?”

Nick shrugged. “Because I turned to chocolate. Because I was melted and got put back together again. Because I saw what happens when you believe you’re the most important person in the universe. It all sort of humbed me, you know?”

Allie thought about that, remembering how helpless she felt inside the coyote. She had always been an ambitious girl, but that awful experience had taught her that there were more forces at work in a balanced world than her own willpower; there was nature, there was wisdom, there was knowledge and understanding. Without life’s humbling experiences, Allie could have been just like Mary Hightower.

Allie looked off to where Jix talked to the skinjackers. Not just SoSo, Sparkles, and the lot, but the new ones that Mary had so successfully created too. Twenty-three of them, to be exact.

“Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?” Allie asked Nick, as she watched them.

Nick sighed. “I looked right into the light and I still have no idea.”

“Well,” said Allie, starting to climb her way down from the mound of sofas. “Just in case, I’m going to treat everything like it does.” Then she went to join Jix.

“We’ll go back to your towns, and find your sleeping bodies,” Jix told all the skinjackers, as Allie approached. “Some of you will choose to skinjack yourselves and go back to your lives. But some of you I think will be brain-dead, or too badly broken, and you’ll choose not to.”

The new skinjackers stared at him in total shell shock, and understandably so. When it came to comforting words and bedside ma

“Listen,” said Allie, bridging a little bit of the distance between them and Jix. “It’s go

“Can I skinjack someone ski

“Will I turn into a cat?”

“What if I skinjack a movie star?”

“Can we skinjack one anothers’ bodies?”

“Will I turn into a cat?”

“Am I still lactose intolerant if I skinjack?”

“Will I forget who I am?”

“What if I turn into a cat?”

“Hijole!” said Jix, throwing up his hands. “Look what you’ve started.”

“All questions will be answered,” Allie told them. Then she added, “And for those of you who end up staying in Everlost, there are some pretty amazing things you can learn to do. You can be like guardian angels, and really do some good in the world.”

“Or,” mumbled SoSo, shamefully looking down, “you can destroy it.”

“Somehow,” said Allie, “I don’t think that will be a problem anymore.”

They all walked together to the town of Alamogordo, and there, on a corner as ordinary as any in the world, they said their good-byes.

“We’re staying here in town for a day or two,” said Jix. “I want to teach the new skinjackers the basics, in case they decide to stay. Mary’s skinjackers could use some training too.”

Allie gave him a hug, feeling the velvet softness of his fledgling fur, now a little bit thicker than when they first met. “Thank you for freeing me from the train.”

“Sorry about the coyote,” he said. “It was all I could find at the time. Now that I know you, I would say that you are an eagle spirit, and eagle spirits do not do well in canine bodies.”

“I really should come with you,” Allie said. “You shouldn’t have to train them alone.”

Then Jix gave her a sly, feline smile. “Who says I’ll be alone?” he said. “Sparkles told me where I can find a highly skilled skinjacker . . . although I hear she’s quite a pig.” Then he went off with the other skinjackers to the rodeo, an excellent place to practice soul-surfing.

Nick had found himself a backpack at the Trinity vortex, which he filled with odds and ends he might need in his travels. He also picked up a vintage leather jacket that he now wore over his dressy shirt and tie. “If the Supreme King of the Middle Realm can wear gold over his loin cloth, then I can wear this.”

Allie took a long look at him. “So what now?” she asked.

“Well, there’s a whole bunch of Afterlights in Atlanta, and I hear Mary left a church full of them in Eunice. In fact there’s got to be Afterlights all over the world, not to mention the ones arriving every day. And if any of them lost their coins, I know an empty Mayan city, where there’s a bottomless bucket of them.”

Allie shook her head, impressed by this brave vision of his own future.

“I remember the first time I saw you,” Allie said.

“I thought you smelled me first.”

“Right,” said Allie. “The chocolate. But then I saw you as I sat up in the dead forest, thinking I knew you. At the time, I thought I must have seen you through the windshield when our cars crashed. . . . But that wasn’t it. I think, way back then, I was seeing you as you are now. Isn’t that fu

“Not as fu

They embraced and held each other for a long time.

“Don’t forget me,” Nick said. “No matter where your life goes, no matter how old you get. And if you ever get the feeling that someone is looking over your shoulder, but there’s nobody there, maybe it’ll be me.”

“I’ll write to you,” said Allie, and Nick laughed. “No really. I’ll write the letter then burn it, and if I care just enough, it will cross into Everlost.”

“And,” added Nick, “it will show up as a dead letter at that post office Milos made cross in San Antonio!”

Allie could have stood there saying good-bye forever, because it was more than Nick she was saying good-bye to. She was leaving behind four years of half-life in a world that was both stu

Nick hefted the backpack on his shoulder, “Shouldn’t you be heading off to Memphis?” he said. “You’d better hit the road . . . Jack.” Then he chuckled at his own joke, and walked off.

And although he was just an ordinary Afterlight, Allie couldn’t help but notice as he strode down the street, that he wasn’t sinking into the living world at all.

CHAPTER 52

Portraits

Picture this:

A farm in west Texas. It’s night. Animals in the barnyard are on edge. Something has them spooked and the farmer doesn’t know why. He double-checks the pens, but loses concentration for a moment, then goes inside, never realizing that in that moment of disorientation, his hands, under someone else’s control, had unlocked the pen of his prize breeding sow.

In the pen, the sow awakes. Not the sow, but the girl within the sow, who is begi

Then she hears the gate of her pen slowly creak open. She is hit by a new sharp smell, and adrenaline fills her, for the instinctive mind of the pig knows the smell means grave danger. She turns her head enough to see bright eyes looking at her, reflecting the distant porch light like yellow marbles.

A snow leopard.

The leopard’s white, spotted fur seems to glow in the waning gibbous moon. The cat is hungry, but it does not attack. Instead, it reaches with its paw, grabs the gate of the pen and pulls it closed until it latches, making sure it couldn’t get out if it tried. Only then does the leopard bare its fangs at the sow.