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: