Everlost (29 page)

“Can't you just take it easy?”
Allie yelled to her, in her mind.
“It's not like I'm going to hurt you. I just need to
borrow
you a little.”

—Steal me, you mean.—

“Stealing,”
said Allie,
“means that I'm not giving it back.”

—No, stealing is taking something that doesn't belong to you without permission, and you don't have my permission!—

Their body limped and jerked along the Atlantic City boardwalk as the two willful spirits fought for dominance. Allie really didn't have the time or patience for this.

“We could do this the easy way,”
said Allie,
“or we could do this the hard way.”
But, like Allie, this girl was a fighter.
“All right then, you asked for it!”

Allie forced her eyes closed, and concentrated all her will on the task of usurping … possessing … controlling. Allie
imagined her spirit like a hammer pounding, pounding, pounding until the jogger girl was no more than a tremor in the tips of her fingers.

When she opened her eyes, her body was no longer jerking around. It was Allie's to use as she pleased—and although she didn't particularly like the idea of being a skin-jacker, it was a means to an end. Allie had to admit that being in this girl's body was tempting. She was attractive, and in good shape, even if she was a few years older. It would be easy to stay here, and make this body home. Were Allie a different kind of person, she might have done it, but Allie's strength of will also gave her plenty of resistence to temptation. This girl was merely a vessel to transport her home, nothing more. The jogger girl was wrong—Allie was not stealing her body, she wasn't even borrowing it—she was
renting
it—because the girl would get paid for her trouble. Her payment would be the absolute knowledge that there was more to the universe than living eyes could see.

Allie found a set of keys in her pocket, and the key chain said “Porsche.”

“Where's your car?”
Allie asked the girl, but she was still being uncooperative, responding in a whole slew of foul thoughts.
“Fine,”
said Allie.
“I'll find it myself.”
Allie began searching one hotel parking structure after another, hitting the alarm button every few seconds. It took a while, but finally she heard the car alarm going off.

The biggest problem now was that Allie did not know how to drive.

Had she lived, she most certainly would have had her learner's permit by now, but things being what they were,
when she started the Porsche, it was the first time she had ever turned a key in a car ignition. It was also a stick shift, and although Allie knew something about gears and the working of a clutch, she had no practical experience. Just pulling out of the parking lot became a nerve-racking experience of sudden starts, stops, and loudly grinding gears.

—My car! My car!—
cried the jogger girl from deep inside.
—What are you doing to my car?—

Allie ignored her, determined to tool around side streets until she got a hang of it.

Driving, however, was not as easy as she thought, and “getting a hang of it,” was going to take much longer than Allie realized. It was past noon now, and Allie felt no closer to being capable of driving the Porsche than when she started. Allie supposed she could ditch the car, and find other transportation—a bus maybe, but then, all the buses from Atlantic City went to New York or Philly. None went down to Cape May.

—Please—
said the jogger girl, much calmer now.
—I've heard your thoughts and I know where you want to go. Let me have control of my arms and legs so I can drive—

Distracted, Allie ran a red light, and slammed on the brakes, coming to a stop right in the middle of the intersection. Angry horns blared, and cars swerved around her.

—Please—
said the jogger girl again.
—Before you get us both killed—

Since Allie had no desire to experience death again, she relented, and backed off—not entirely, but enough to let the girl control her arms and legs, so she could drive. To Allie's relief the girl didn't fight. She simply pulled the car out of
the intersection, and headed back to the main road that would take them out of Atlantic City.

Allie relaxed, like the captain of a ship letting the first mate navigate.
“Thank you,”
she told the jogger girl. The jogger girl said nothing.

All was fine until they reached the bridge that connected Atlantic City with the mainland. Halfway across the bridge, the first mate mutinied. The jogger girl launched a sudden mental offensive that caught Allie completely off-guard.

—Steal my body, will you? Invade my space? I DON'T THINK SO!—
Then the jogger girl began to push—but she wasn't pushing down, she was pushing
out!
Allie felt herself being hurled out of the girl's body like a bad buffet lunch. She couldn't feel a heartbeat anymore, or air moving in and out of her lungs. She was disconnected, and losing her grip.

Allie fought back, hoping it wasn't too late, trying to dig her spirit in like a grappling hook, refusing to be cast off. She pulled herself back inside, and as they fought for control, the car began to swerve wildly on the bridge.

They sideswiped a car to the left, bounced off of it, and headed for the guard rail above the bay.

Do you see what you did?
screamed the jogger girl.

“What
I
did?”

They smashed into the guard rail, and Allie had a horrifying moment of déjà vu. The sound of crashing glass and metal. She was flying forward, she hit the windshield, and in an instant the windshield was behind her….

… and yet this wasn't the same as her fatal crash, for when she looked back she saw the jogger girl still in the
driver's seat, behind an inflated air bag. The girl got out of the car, frightened, bruised, but very much alive.

Only then did Allie realize what had happened. The crash had thrown Allie clear out of the girl's body. Now Allie was a spirit again, and on the hood of the Porsche, sinking right through it.

Desperately she tried to find something to grab on to, but everything here was living world—there was nothing she could grasp. She felt the heat of the engine inside her as her body passed through it, and in a second she plunged through the car, which hung out over the edge of the bridge, and then she was falling through the air.

“Oh no! Oh no!”

She didn't even feel the difference as the air became water—only the light around her changed. She was falling just as fast, and the dimming blue light of the bay became the charcoal darkness of the earth as she hit bottom. She could feel the mud of the bay inside her, and then solid bedrock. The density of the earth slowed her, but not enough. Not enough. She was going down, and nothing could stop it now.

Stone in her heart, stone in her gut. Soon it would get hot. Soon it would be magma, and still she would fall until years from now she would find herself trapped in the center of gravity waiting for the end of the world. Allie was doomed.

Then she felt something grab her arm. What was that? She couldn't see a thing in the solid stone darkness, but a voice, faint and muffled said, “Hold on to me, and don't let go.”

And then she heard, of all things, the whinny of a horse.

On Everlost coins, Mary Hightower's books have only this to say: “They do not sparkle, they do not shine, and they contain no precious metals. These so-called ‘coins' are nothing more than useless, leaden slugs, and are best discarded along with one's pocket lint, or better yet, tossed into a fountain for luck.”

A
t Mary's insistence they had returned to Atlantic City to search for Vari, but he was nowhere to be found. In the end, Mary had to accept that something horrible had befallen him. Either he had slipped off the pier, or he had been captured by the McGill's returning crew, and taken out to sea aboard the
Sulphur Queen,
which was also gone.

She could have gone after the ship, but it wasn't even on the horizon anymore, and there was no telling in what direction it had gone. As it had been when Nick and Lief were captured by the Haunter, Mary had to put her children ahead of her own desires. She had a thousand refugee Afterlights aboard the airship, and her first responsibility was to them. Vari was lost, and it weighed heavily on her, for, it had been her fault and her fault alone.

With mournful resignation, she ordered Speedo to take the
Hindenburg
aloft, and the ship of refugees resumed its journey north. Once they were airborne, Mary took to the stateroom she had claimed for herself, closed the door, lay down on the bed, and cried. Then she did something she hadn't allowed herself to do for many years. She closed her eyes and slept.

Nick, however, did not sleep. He was emotionally exhausted, and should have, at the very least, taken some time to rest, but there was too much on his mind. There were things that simply weren't sitting right, and he knew he wouldn't be able to relax until he figured them out.

High up in the girders of the airship, Nick sat on a catwalk, in front of the bucket of coins that Mary had left in his care.

Lief found him up there, and sat across from him.

“They're mine, you know,” Lief said. “I found them.”

“I thought you didn't care about things like that anymore.”

“I don't,” said Lief, “I'm just saying.”

Nick pulled out one of the coins. It was so worn there was no way of telling what kind of coin it was, what country it had come from, or what year it was made. They were all like that—even the one he had found in his pocket way back when—the one he had used to make a wish in Mary's fountain. Funny how both the McGill and Mary had a collection of these coins.

As he held the coin, cool in his palm, Nick could have sworn it felt a little different. It felt almost … electrified … like a fuse completing a circuit.

That's when an understanding began to come to Nick—an understanding that Nick instinctively knew was the tip of something very big and very important. He took the coin from his palm, and held it between thumb and forefinger.

“Did you know,” Nick told Lief, “that they used to put coins on dead people's eyes?”

“Why?” asked Lief. “To keep their eyelids from opening and making people scream?”

“No—it was this old superstition. People used to think that the dead had to pay their way into the afterlife. The ancient Greeks even believed there was this ferryman you had to pay to take you across the river of death.”

Lief shrugged, unimpressed. “I don't remember any ferry.”

Neither did Nick. But then, maybe people saw what they expected to see. Maybe the ancient Greeks saw a river instead of a tunnel. Maybe they saw a ferry instead of a light.

“I have an idea,” Nick said. “Give me your hand.”

Lief held out his hand. “Are you going to do a magic trick? Are you going to make the coin disappear?”

“I don't know,” said Nick. “Maybe.” He put the coin in Lief's palm, then folded Lief's fingers around it until the coin was firmly in his closed fist. “How does it feel?”

“It's warm,” said Lief. “It's
really
warm.”

Nick waited and watched. A moment passed, then another, and then Lief suddenly looked up and gasped. Nick followed his gaze, but saw nothing—just the girders and hydrogen bladders of the airship.

“What is it? What do you see?”

Whatever it was, Lief was too enthralled to answer. Then, when Nick looked at Lief's eyes, he saw something reflected in his pupils. It was a spot of bright light, growing larger and brighter.

Lief's expression of wonder mellowed into a joyous smile, and he said, “… I remember now!”

“Lief?!”

“No,” said Lief. “My real name is Travis.”

Then, in the blink of an eye, and in a rainbow twinkling of light, Travis, also known as Lief of the Dead Forest, finally got where he was going.

Mary called the coins worthless, but Nick now knew the truth. He also knew that Mary wasn't stupid. She must have known the coins' true value—their true
purpose—
and it troubled Nick that she would hide something so important.

Lief was gone. Gone forever to some great beyond. The air where Lief had been just a second before now shimmered with color, but in a moment the shimmering faded.

Nick no longer had his own coin—he had hurled it into Mary's wishing well, just as every single kid in her care had done. It was a requirement of admission. But now Nick had an entire bucket of them in front of him.

He reached in and pulled out another coin, placing it in his own palm, feeling that odd current again. The coin was still cold in his hand though, and Nick instinctively knew that while Lief had been ready for his final journey, Nick wasn't. Nick still had work to do here in Everlost, and he had a sneaking suspicion he knew what that work would be.

Hammerhead was happily, if somewhat unsuccessfully, gnawing at a girder when he saw Nick approaching. “What time is it?” he asked.

“I don't know. Noon maybe. Hey, Hammerhead, could you do something for me?”

“Sure. What?”

“Could you hold this for a few seconds?” And he put a coin into Hammerhead's hand. “Tell me, is it warm, or is it cold?”

“Wow,” said Hammerhead. “It's hot!”

“Good,” said Nick. “Would you like to see a magic trick?”

It was late in the afternoon when Mary awoke. When she looked out of her cabin window, she saw the asphalt of the airfield tarmac. They had returned to Lakehurst. Speedo had told her he didn't feel comfortable landing the airship anywhere else. It was hard enough to get him to land on the Steel Pier. She supposed convincing him to take them all the way back to Manhattan was out of the question.