Everfound (23 page)

To which Mikey said, “Only if they find you.”

Clarence thought about it. “You know, I’m beginning to
like you. And that scares me.” A breeze blew in the living world, knocking loose one of the sparsely spaced ornaments. It fell to the ground and shattered with a dainty tinkle. The attendant went to clean it up.

“So this friend of yours—is she an incubus, or a succubus, or a poltergeist, or a ghoul?”

“None of those things. She’s just a girl.”

“And you’re in love with her.”

That caught Mikey by surprise. “How did you know that?”

“We talked about it, remember? And besides, that glow you’ve got—when you talk about her, it turns a little bit purple.”

“Right. So the first thing I need you to do is read me some newspapers. Living-world things are too blurry to read in Everlost.”

“What are we supposed to be looking for?”

“Accidents,” Mikey said. “Accidents in Texas.”

Clarence took a long time to consider it, scratching his beard stubble. Then he held out his Everlost hand to Mikey. “It’s a deal. Let’s shake on it.”

Mikey instantly backed away. This was a scar wraith. He had to remember that. If the legend was true, he could be extinguished by a single touch.

Clarence still held out his hand, waiting. “A gentleman’s agreement requires a handshake. Didn’t your mother teach you manners?”

Mikey considered telling him the truth, but instead he said, “I’m unclean! Yeah—I’m an unclean spirit. And out of respect for you, I shouldn’t touch you.”

Clarence looked at him, but didn’t drop his arm just yet. “How does a spirit become ‘unclean’?”

Once the lie had been launched, Mikey found it hard to change its trajectory. “It’s not my fault—I had a curse put on me by . . . uh . . . by a graveyard ghoul. That’s why I walk the earth.”

“Graveyard ghoul, huh?” Finally Clarence put his hand down. “In that case, we’ll skip the handshake. Because, you know what they say . . .”

“Yeah,” said Mikey. “Yes, I know what they say. Boy, do I know what they say!”

As it turned out, they didn’t need newspapers. Over the next few days Clarence scoured the Internet from the computer in Hollow Oaks’s recreation room. What Clarence found confirmed Mikey’s suspicions. San Antonio, Texas, had become a center of bad luck. Not just the car pileup, but a school fire and a bleacher collapse, and a freak electrocution. Although Moose and Squirrel never appeared again in any of the news clips, the circumstances were all similar. There was always a suspect or two, who had been seen by reliable witnesses—once even caught on surveillance video—and yet each suspect claimed to have no memory of what happened.

There was no question in Mikey’s mind that this was where the ghost train went—which meant Allie was there too. More than anything, Mikey wanted to find Allie, but he also knew he had to stop these random crimes against the living.

Mikey had no particular love of the living world, but
he did not despise it the way his sister did. He tried to tell himself that Mary wasn’t the one behind all these terrible things—but he had to accept the truth: Milos, Moose, and Squirrel were now working for her. Alone, they had been just a nuisance, but in the hands of someone like his sister—someone with vision—they were incredibly dangerous, and could manipulate the living world in ways too frightening to imagine. Yes, they were Mary’s weapons, whether she was standing there with them or not.

So how does one fight against weapons that powerful? By having one’s weapon: a weapon could wipe out the very existence of Mary’s skinjackers. Clarence would be Mikey’s weapon—his “balance of power.”

Of course Mikey couldn’t tell Clarence that. If he knew, he’d be gone in a heartbeat. That’s why Mikey had to lie about why they couldn’t shake hands. It wasn’t the worst of lies, Mikey figured. In fact it was bound to help everyone. And besides, Mikey had turned over so many new leaves, the ground before him was practically carpeted green. He could afford to turn one back. He could afford one simple white lie.

Only much later would he realize that he was very wrong. Not only couldn’t he afford it, but there weren’t enough coins in all of Everlost to pay the cost.

W
hile Allie was freeing the innocent, and Mikey was preparing his ultimate weapon, the Neon Nightmares were hunkering down in their lair, lying low.

With the threat of the Chocolate Ogre somewhere in the city above, the Neons had set their security alert on red. All lookouts were given orders to sink themselves if spotted, rather than lead the monster back to the Alamo again. They had been lucky the first time, but would not escape detection a second time.

After the first few days in lockdown, Jill went through a sort of skinjacking withdrawal, aggravated by the adrenaline rush infused into them all by the vortex above. It was like being wired on caffeine twenty-four hours a day, and since sleeplessness was the normal state of Afterlights, it only made things worse. In the Alamo basement, everyone was an insomnoid.

Knowing how hard it was on Jill, Jix decided to give her a gift.

The Crockett Street tunnel was guarded by two Neons
whose routine involved endless knock-knock jokes. Unfortunately they only knew about twenty, and so they just kept repeating the same ones over and over.

“I’ll tell you a new knock-knock joke,” Jix told them, “if you let Jill out the back entrance, and let her return without telling Avalon.”

The two Neons agreed that it would all depend on the joke . . . and so Jix introduced them to the Interrupting Cow, which is perhaps the only knock-knock joke in existence that is actually funny.

The joke sent the guards into a giggling fit that lasted the better part of an hour, and it bought Jill the right to come and go as she pleased. When Jix told Jill, she was thrilled by the possibility of escaping the dungeon, if only for a while.

“Why don’t you come with me?” Jill asked, but Jix had inserted himself into so many of the Neons’ routines, he knew his absence would be noticed.

“Go skinjack,” he told her, “but I see no need for you to reap.”

“I’ll do what I want,” she answered.

Jill left first thing the next morning for her day on the town, and once she was gone, Jix went about his own day; the same games, the repeated conversations. In this way he maintained a foothold in the routines of as many Neons as he could—because by becoming a cog in the routine, it gave him the power to bring the gearwork to a grinding halt if he wanted to.

After he made his obligatory rounds, he took some
time to visit the root cellar, which was the farthest, darkest room in the maze of the Alamo underground. Few places were actually dark down there, because there were so many Afterlights that their glow illuminated most spaces—but this room was where they put all the Interlights captured from the train—those sleeping souls waiting to be born into Everlost. The Interlights gave the Neons the creeps because they didn’t glow, so Jix could go there and not be bothered.

He found the girl he had inadvertently killed, and sat beside her. He had no idea what her real name was, so he called her Inez. Inez was his sister’s name, and it comforted him to think of this girl in that way. As he sat there, he thought about Jill. It intrigued him that she felt no remorse for the souls she had intentionally brought into Everlost, but also troubled him. It troubled him enough to find his own Afterlight dousing the room into darkness, just as Jill said a truly bad feeling would. He practiced it, strobing his light on and off. He couldn’t say he enjoyed it, but as stealth was an important part of being a scout, the ability to feel miserable, and douse his afterglow, was a skill worth knowing.

Then, at a point when his light was fully doused, he realized there was still a glow in the room. He looked up to see Jill standing there at the entrance to the chamber.

“I thought I might find you here,” Jill said. She wove through the sleeping Interlights, and noticed which one Jix sat closest to. “What is it with you and that girl?”

“I stole her life. The least I can do is look after her.”

Jill crossed her arms and shook her head. “I still don’t get you,” she said, which was fine. Jix still wasn’t sure he wanted to be “gotten.” Then Jill sat down beside him. “You
promised you would tell me about yourself. So far you haven’t told me a thing.”

Jix
had
promised her that, but he also hoped the opportunity would never present itself. His specialties were reconnaissance, stalking, and observing. Putting himself out in the open and making himself vulnerable was something he just didn’t do.

“Don’t you dare make me say ‘please,’” Jill said. “I don’t do the
P
word.”

“Tell me about your day skinjacking.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Did you reap?”

“I said don’t change the subject.”

“You didn’t come to the chamber to find me,” Jix said. “You came to bring a new Interlight, didn’t you? Where did you leave it, in the passageway so that I wouldn’t see?”

Jill looked at him coldly. “I do other things than just reap,” she said. “How do you know I didn’t go to a ball game or eat a lobster dinner?”

“Did you?”

“No,” Jill admitted. “But I didn’t reap, either.” Then she paused and looked away from him. “Maybe it’s like you said; I have better things to do with my ‘hunting instincts.’” She reached out and touched Inez’s hair. It gave off a dark, smooth sheen, reflecting their afterglows. “She has nice hair,” Jill said. “Not all of us are lucky enough to die with nice hair.”

“Now who’s changing the subject?”

She gave him an irritated sigh. “If you must know, I skinjacked a girl in her twenties, which is how old I would be if I wasn’t here. I chose her because she was pregnant,
and I wanted to see what it was like to feel a baby kick.”

Jix never dreamed that Jill would have such a thing in mind when she went skinjacking, but he didn’t show her any sign of his surprise.

“I took a long bath,” Jill continued, “. . . and then I brushed her hair.”

Jix reached out to touch Jill’s hand, but she pulled it away before he could. “Your turn,” she said. “Tell me all the things about yourself that you don’t want me to know.”

Since she didn’t back off, Jix had to keep his word. He wouldn’t lie to her, or tell her half-truths. She would probably know if he did. He told her the truth as clearly and as simply as he could.

“I am the long-distance scout for His Excellency, Yax K’uk Mo’, the Supreme King of the Middle Realm. My mission is to find out if Mary Hightower poses a threat to him, and capture her if I can.”

If Jill was shocked, she didn’t show it. In this way, she was a lot like him. “The Middle Realm?” she asked.

“What you call Everlost.”

“So . . . there are more like you?”

“There are many Afterlights in the City of Souls . . . but only one like me.”

Jill smiled. “Good,” she said, then she got up to leave. “As far as secrets go, I’d give that a six out of ten.” Then she added, “I thought you were going to tell me you were an alien.”

The next day, one of the Neons’ lookouts found a stray Afterlight.

It wasn’t one of the train refugees; it was a
Greensoul
,
a new spirit, freshly woken from some accidental crossing nine months before.

“He was just wandering around, calling for his mama,” the lookout told everyone. The Neons all laughed at the poor kid, and his lip quivered. He couldn’t have been any older than six. He had a runny nose, which would now continue to run for as long as he stayed in Everlost.

Avalon stomped up to him. “Give me your coin!”

“I don’t got money,” the boy said.

Avalon turned to the Bopper—one of the more intimidating Neons. “Take it from him!” But Jix firmly grabbed the Bopper’s shoulder.

“I’ll do it.” Jix said, and since Jix had become a regular in the Bopper’s daily poker game, he politely said, “Oh, sure, Jix.”

“I didn’t ask you!” Avalon snapped.

“But I can grab the coin without going into the light,” Jix reminded him.

Avalon never changed his unpleasant expression. “All right, then.”

Jix knelt down to the boy. “Do I scare you?” Jix asked.

The boy shook his head, then nodded. “Only a little,” the boy said.

“I won’t hurt you,” Jix told him gently, “but
they
might, if they don’t get what they want.”

“Yeah, but I don’t got money, just some tissues in my pocket,” the boy whispered.

“You wanna see a magic trick?” Jix asked. The boy’s answer was a wet sniff. Jix then told him to take out his tissues.

“Now,” Jix said, “unfold them.”

The boy did, and as the tissues spread apart, a coin dropped right into Jix’s open hand. The boy gasped. “Where did that come from?”

“Magic,” Jix said, because indeed it was.

The boy grinned, and wiped his nose.

Avalon had no patience for this, or anything else for that matter. “Put it in my shirt pocket,” he ordered Jix. Jix went over to Avalon and gave him a wide smile.

“Here you go . . .”

Then he grabbed Avalon’s hand and slapped the coin right into the center of his palm, forcing Avalon’s fingers closed over it.

“
What?
No!”

Avalon struggled, but Jix held Avalon’s fist closed. Everyone was so shocked, no one knew what to do.

“No! No!” Avalon shouted. “I’m not ready! I’m not ready!” But apparently he was, because he looked off toward something that no one else could see. No one, that is, but Jix and Jill, for only skinjackers can see someone else’s tunnel. A look of resignation came over Avalon, and he heaved a heavy sigh. “All right, then . . .” And before everyone’s eyes, he lurched forward, and vanished in a rainbow twinkling of light.

There was absolute silence. No one spoke until a kid called Foul-Mouth Fabian declared something holy that wasn’t holy at all.

“He sent Avalon
uptown
!” someone said. “What do we do? What do we do?” But without a leader, no one could agree.