Allie could see in Nick a kind of peaceful resolve, but also a certain sorrow deep in his eyes. Or maybe it was just a reflection of her own sadness at having to give Mikey over to the light. Both she and Nick lost someone they loved today, but in very different ways.
“I’m sorry,” Allie said.
“Don’t be,” Nick told her. “You know what they say—what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, right?”
“Well, sure,” said Allie. “But being that you’re already dead, I don’t know if that applies.”
Nick laughed. “You don’t have to worry about me. The light didn’t take me, but it did give me some pretty cool door prizes.”
“It took away the chocolate, for one,” Allie said.
“Yeah, but that’s only part of it. I remember now, Allie. I remember everything! Who I was, who I am, and even who I will be.”
“Oh, so now you can see the future?”
“Not exactly,” said Nick. “But I know my place in it.”
“And that would be . . . ?”
Nick smiled at her. It was a genuine smile. “I’m the new Mary.”
Allie leaned away from him and the sofa shifted treacherously on the pile. “That’s not funny,” she said.
“No, I’m serious,” Nick told her. “That’s why I felt so connected to her. It was in her heart to help and protect everyone who came to Everlost, but she couldn’t separate herself from her calling. Once it became all about her, it got sick and twisted until it destroyed her and almost destroyed the world.”
“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 manner, Jix did not get high marks.
“Listen,” said Allie, bridging a little bit of the distance between them and Jix. “It’s gonna be okay either way. And if you decide to stay in Everlost as skinjackers, well, maybe it was meant to be that way.” Then the questions started flying. All the things they wouldn’t ask Jix, they now threw at Allie.
“Can I skinjack someone skinny?”
“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 funny?”
“Not as funny as the way I always complained, and the way you always bossed me around!”
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 stunningly beautiful, and hauntingly dark. And she was saying good-bye to Mikey. I’ll be waiting for you, he had said. . . . Well, if he was, maybe she wasn’t really saying good-bye at all.
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 beginning to forget that she is a girl. She does not want to consider the misery that she has been put through these many, many weeks. The slop she has been served to eat, the stench of the pen, and the massive immobile weight of her own bloated, porcine body.
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.
The sow doesn’t move. It couldn’t if it wanted to, so instead, it stares into the leopard’s eyes as the leopard slowly moves forward, opens its mouth wide, and digs its powerful fangs deep into the sow’s neck. . . .
A few minutes later, at the sound of a strange roar, the farmer grabs his shotgun and heads out toward the pigpens, where his worst fear is realized. A wild animal has gotten into the pen. The strangest animal he’s ever seen in these parts. His prize sow is dead, and somehow locked in the pen with its body is a huge white cat, furiously bouncing around the pen, unable to escape.
“Now I’ve seen everything,” he says.
. . . But in truth, he hasn’t seen everything. Because he doesn’t see the two invisible spirits embracing right beside him, then racing off into the Everlost night.
Picture this:
A hospital on Valentine’s Day in Memphis, Tennessee. A sparse gathering of families have remembered their silent loved ones today, including the parents of the girl in room 509, who arrive shortly after work and tape a Valentine’s Day card up on the wall. It storms outside, icy rain hitting the window, making it rattle. Not the most inviting of Valentine’s Days; not the most inviting of settings.
Still, the couple do their best to make the most of it. The mother paints the girl’s nails, for her sister is in college and can’t be there to do it. The father goes through his ritual of massaging her muscles to keep them soft and supple, for there’s still a faint and far-off chance that she’ll need them again someday. The mother reads yet another chapter from Sense and Sensibility, and then when melancholy sets in, the father goes to pull up the car, for he doesn’t want to make his wife walk in the storm.