“You lost many friends today, didn’t you?”
The boy nodded.
“I want you to close your eyes, make a wish for them . . . and once you’ve made your wish, kiss the bank, and hand it to me.”
Little Richard did as he was told. He made a silent wish, kissed the bank, and put it in Mary’s hands.
Then she cast the piggybank full of all the Greensouls’ coins into the sea.
CHAPTER 33
Creature Discomforts
Jix had plunged to the bottom of the bay. He had seen the others helplessly disappear into the ocean floor beneath him. There was nothing he could do to save them, but he knew he might be able to save himself. It would take split-second timing, the sum of his skills as a skinjacker and the largest amount of luck he had known. He knew it was his only chance. As he fell, nearing the ocean floor, he spread out his arms wide and kept his eyes open for something alive, but there was nothing.
Then, just at the moment of impact on the ocean floor, he felt it: a sea slug not much larger than his finger, squirming in the mud. He leaped toward it, bringing his arms together and squeezing his spirit in upon itself like a collapsing sun, until he found the primitive nervous system of the slug and invaded it, flooding its tiny consciousness with his soul.
Darkness. Numbness, an emptiness of all thought and feeling, and absolutely no sense of time. It was the hardest thing he ever had to bear, to hold his full consciousness in the primitive flesh of a tiny spineless creature. But he did it. He did it long enough to sense a passing crab and he quickly leaped into that. Jix’s consciousness was so great that he killed the sea slug the moment he left it.
Now he was held in the exoskeleton of the crab and it felt no better than the slug. But he had some sensory awareness now. There was a fish swimming by him. He could feel it on his antennae. And so he leaped to that. Again, the crab died from the weight and loss of his consciousness.
Now inside the fish, he swam away from the school and, seeing a large shape moving in front of him, he leaped directly inside its mouth and found himself inhabiting a harbor seal. The seal was able to hold his spirit without dying, and at last, he had enough familiar senses to navigate his way to the surface.
When he broke surface, he looked around with the eyes of the seal. Mary and all her children were long gone, as he suspected. This desperate journey through small creatures had taken him much longer than it seemed, for those creatures were unable to comprehend something as complex as time. He had no clue if this was even the same day.
There was a challenge before him now, and although he lived for challenge, he needed to truly prepare himself this time. So he swam close to shore, leaped from the seal to a human, then skinjacked his way all the way to the Corpus Christi Zoo.
There, he furjacked himself the most majestic jaguar he could find, releasing it out into a stormy twilight.
The smells, the sights, and sounds of life through the senses of the cat rejuvenated him, and brought him back to his true self. Independent. Alert. Knowing his needs and knowing how to meet them.
He killed a deer in the nearby woods and ate its sweet meat, relishing every bite. Then, when he was full and satisfied, he rested and took stock of his entire situation. His existence had always been comfortable, he had always held a clear picture of himself, his duties, and his place in a world. He saw that world as a place so full of turning gears he had no hope of comprehending how things fit together, so why even try?
Now things were different, however. Now he wasn’t just looking out from inside of the clockwork. Instead, he was actually seeing the final motion of the escapement—the ticking hands of the clock itself.
And it was a doomsday clock.
Both his feline and human instincts told him to let it be. It was not his problem, or his place to interfere. If the living world was destined to fall, let it happen, let it pass into history once and for all. Who was he to try to save it?
But on the other hand, if the living world were lost, then there would never again be great cats to furjack . . . and couldn’t it be that hearing the actual ticking of the clock gave one the responsibility to stop it?
Chasing Mary, however, would lead to another confrontation, which he knew he would lose. He was not so proud to think that he could best her alone. She was master of what she did. Smarter. Slyer. If he were going to face her, he was going to have to have more cards stacked on his side. He’d have to set a new plan in motion.
He raised his nose to the air, and sniffed in the night—more out of habit than anything else. . . . He never expected he’d pick up the wet-lightning scent of skinjacker in the air. It couldn’t be Moose or Milos—they were long gone, and this scent was coming from the city itself. He followed the scent into Corpus Christi, and tracked it back to where he least expected. The city zoo.
Jill knew this was the closest she would ever come to being with Jix again: hiding within the flesh and fur of a jaguar. She was ashamed of it, but at the same time it gave her comfort. She knew the longer she stayed in the cat’s body, the more she risked being bound to it, but she didn’t care. Let it happen. She had no desire to leave or to be anyone or anything else anymore, and, as Jix had guessed, her spirit was in perfect tune with the cat. Wearing fur made her feel more complete than wearing skin.
She dozed for just a few minutes at a time, licking her emotional wounds. Then when she opened her eyes, she saw another jaguar—a male one—eyeing her curiously.
“Get lost!” she tried to say, but it came out as a halfhearted roar.
Still, the other jaguar just stared at her with eyes that seemed to peer even more deeply than feline eyes should. She thought she recognized something there, and her heart held for a long beat, then pounded powerfully just as the male jaguar pounced, not just knocking her over but knocking her out of her furjacked skin. Now she was back in Everlost, rolling, almost sinking in the living world as she tumbled—and there he was, beneath her, above her, all around her as she rolled.
It was Jix! Jix, hugging and laughing, nuzzling and cuffing her. Jill had to convince herself she wasn’t dreaming inside the cat. This was real, and Jix was truly there!
“How . . . ?” asked Jill. It was the only word she could get out.
“I really do have nine lives, verdad?” he told her, with a wicked grin. Then they pulled themselves out of the dirt of the jaguar pit before the living world left them too deeply grounded. They walked the paths of the zoo alone at dawn, and Jix told her everything. How Milos had caused the yacht to capsize. The way he watched so many of the Neons and poor Inez vanish into the depths. He told her of the slug and the crab, the fish and seal—the boy of so few words now spouted forth more than he’d ever said at one time. Then when he was done, he paused, regaining his stoic composure, and said, as plain and simply as he could, “You must go back to Mary.”
“I won’t!” Jill told him, the suggestion feeling like its own betrayal.
“Listen to me,” Jix said. “Right now we have no eyes or ears among her Afterlights. And her vapor will be growing. You must go back to her, prove to her you are still loyal—even kill more of the living to prove your loyalty if you have to—but you must get back into her inner circle.”
“She has six more skinjackers now,” Jill told him. “She won’t need me.”
“She will. You have experience, the new ones don’t. And your experience makes you very valuable to her. So play her game, do her dirty work . . . and find the real names of all of her skinjackers.”
“I can give you two names right now,” she said with a smirk. “Vitaly Milos Vayevsky, and Mitchell Terrence Moessner: Milos’s and Moose’s real names.”
Jix regarded her with wonder. “You’ve always known their real names?”
“Not always,” said Jill. “But when you’re a skinjacker, it’s a good idea to find out the true identity of your friends, just in case they become your enemies.”
Then Jix said something he had never said before, either in life or in Everlost. “I love you,” he told Jill.
“Then you’re an idiot,” she replied, and kissed him hard enough to hurt the living.
CHAPTER 34
Separate Ways
They furjacked the jaguars once more, and headed northwest by night beside the highway, constantly sniffing the air for the scent of skinjacking and perhaps something even more exotic. They found it at dawn, just twenty miles out of Corpus Christi: a powerful scent indefinable and terrifying, like the deep fumes of tornado-torn earth blended with the bitter noxious tang of imminent death, an unearthly scent that could turn a herd into a panicking stampede. “I believe it’s the smell of a scar wraith,” Jix told Jill.
He convinced Jill to wait out of sight, because he suspected anyone traveling with the scar wraith would know Jill and instantly see her as an enemy. Then he quickly put the cat into a deep sleep, peeled into Everlost, and climbed back up to the highway.
There they were: Allie, the wraith, the Chocolate Ogre, and two others that Jix didn’t recognize. One was a small girl with loose laces, and the other a boy who hung close to Allie, in a protective sort of way. Jix might have been wary if he hadn’t already chosen to be on their side.
They stood in a face-off, the little girl hiding behind Allie. “He’s one of them,” she said.
“Stay back,” said the boy close to Allie, and Jix could swear he began to grow horns, or perhaps antennae. No, definitely horns.
But Allie, who knew, or at least suspected, that Jix’s intentions held no danger for them, asked, “Are you here to help us, Jix, or cause us more problems?”
“We share the same problem,” Jix told her. “Her name is Mary.”
Allie hesitated for a moment, then asked, “So where is she?”
Jix chose not to answer that question because it didn’t matter. “Elsewhere,” he said. “I’m sure she and her vapor circled around to the north just to avoid you. And even if you do find her, you won’t defeat her. She’s too cunning, too smart, too good at what she does. You will not stand a chance against her.”
Allie crossed her arms. “We’ll see about that.”
But Jix took a few steps closer. “How many times have you faced her?” he asked. “How many times have you failed?”
“This time will be different,” the chocolate boy said.
“How will it be different?” Jix asked, but none of them had an answer. Good, thought Jix. Because when facing a spirit like Mary Hightower, knowing you knew nothing was the best place to start.
“And we have another skinjacker on our side,” Jix told them. “I believe you know her.”
* * *
Jill put her cat to sleep next to Jix’s, joining them, and they all spoke through the morning, sitting in the shade of a crossed oil well that had burned into a charred knot many years before. The decisions they reached were not easy, but Jix was persuasive in his simple, obvious logic.
Fact: The seven of them could not hope to battle Mary and her maniacal vision alone.
Fact: Mary’s skinjackers were her weakness, for she needed them to do her bidding in the living world.