“You’re sinking,” said Mikey, who was still on the horse. Shiloh the horse, having grown accustomed to the strange texture of the living world, kept pulling its hooves out of the ground with a sucking sound, as if it were slowly prancing in place. Allie on the other hand, was already in the ground to her knees.

She reached up, and Mikey helped her out of the ground. “That’s it, isn’t it?” Mikey asked. “Cape May? I remember you said you lived in Cape May.”

“Yes.” With all their wanderings, Allie had lost her sense of direction. She had no idea they were this close to her home.

“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? To go home?”

“Yes … from the very beginning.”

Mikey hopped off the horse and stood beside her. “Back on my ship, I used to watch you look out to shore. You had such a longing to go home. You don’t know how close I came to taking you there, even then.”

Allie smirked. “And you called yourself a monster.”

Mikey was suitably insulted. “I was an excellent monster! The one true monster of Everlost!”

“‘Hear your name and tremble.’ “

Mikey looked away. “No one trembles anymore.”

Allie was mad at herself for mocking him. He didn’t deserve that. She touched his face gently. To look at him now, you’d never guess that the fair skinned, blue-eyed boy was once the terrifying McGill, but every once in a while Allie could still see a bit of the beast in him. It was there in the shortness of his temper, and the clumsiness of his hands, as if they were still claws. It was there in the way he approached the world—as if it still owed him something. Yes, the monster still lingered there inside him, but his face was that of a boy, attractive by any standards, if somewhat doleful.

“I like you much better this way.”

“Why should I care?” But he smiled, because he did care and they both knew it.

“You must teach me to be human again,” he had told her, when he first lost his monstrous form. Since then, she had done everything in her power to do so. It was in small moments like these that she caught glimpses of his successful steps back from being a monster. How long ago had that been? As is the way in Everlost, the days had blended until there was no telling. Weeks? Months? Years? Certainly not years!

“So,” he asked, “does bringing you home make me more human?”

“Yes, it does.”

Even his selflessness was wrapped in self-interest. It would have bothered her, but she knew that he would have done this for her anyway, even if it had no benefit for him. It made him different from his sister, for while Mary pretended to serve others, deep down she was serving no one but herself.