Mikey found no Afterlights in Little Rock, or anywhere else west of the Mississippi, for that matter. He pondered this as he rested on a sizable deadspot in a hotel lobby. He didn’t even want to guess how the deadspot had gotten there. In the living world, a TV played a twenty-four-hour news network. Someone was being interviewed about a car wreck. Mikey didn’t pay much attention until he heard—

“It’s bad, it’s bad. I’d never seen so many cars piled up!”

Mikey’s eyes snapped to the TV. There was something familiar about that voice. The focus was blurry, like everything else in the living world, but he could make out two middle-aged men being interviewed.

The second man said, “Yeah, I never shaw shush a bad crash.”

Mikey stood and stared at the TV, trying to tell himself he hadn’t heard it, that it was a trick of his own twisted mind. He had heard enough of the report to know that this had happened in San Antonio, Texas. The driver of an eighteen-wheeler claimed to have fallen asleep at the wheel. A witness in one of the cars, however, claimed that she saw the driver jackknife the truck on purpose.

Mikey tried to dismiss it. The two voices couldn’t belong to Moose and Squirrel. These were deeper, older . . . but Mikey had heard their skinjacking voices before. The vocal chords change with each fleshie, but the way a person speaks does not.

. . . And the driver turned the wheel intentionally. Mikey knew that Moose and Squirrel had been on the ghost train. Could they be causing greater and greater mischief for their own amusement? Was Allie still captive on that train?

If Moose and Squirrel were creating disasters, Mikey figured there would be other occurrences, other awful events that seemed random, but were not. The problem was, Mikey couldn’t access the information. He couldn’t turn the page of a living world newspaper, or read the blur beneath the headline.

What Mikey needed was someone who could be in both Everlost and the living world at the same time. What he needed was a scar wraith.

Clarence did not die when he was shot that day at the crumbling farmhouse. Had the bullet pierced his heart, or even nicked an artery, his story would have ended. He would have faced the tunnel and the light—and in that light, maybe he would have found some of the answers as to why his life had been so unfair.

But the officer who shot him hadn’t been aiming for the heart. He had aimed merely to disarm him. The bullet had imbedded itself in Clarence’s shoulder, fracturing his collarbone, leaving Clarence with a whole host of internal issues—but none of them life-threatening.