“Just remember—I can’t help you if you sink,” Mikey said. “You know how it is when you go home—you’ll be sinking too fast for me to ever catch you.”

“I know.” She was well aware of the dangers of going home—not just because of Mary’s Everlost-for-idiots warnings, but because of Mikey’s firsthand account.

Home, he had told her, had a certain gravity to an Afterlight. The ground becomes more and more like quicksand the closer to home one gets. Mikey had told Allie how he and his sister had gone home more than a hundred years ago, shortly after they died. The moment he saw how life had gone on without them, Mikey sunk into the ground in a matter of seconds. Mary had been lucky—somehow she had avoided his fate. She never had to endure that long, slow journey down to the center of the earth.

Mikey, however, had discovered a skill—perhaps the rarest of all Everlost skills. His will was so great that he could force change upon himself—his hands turned to claws, tugging at the earth around him. His memory of flesh was replaced by a full body scar, thick as leather and as pocked as the surface of the moon. He made himself a monster, and as a monster he could rise, fighting the relentless pull of gravity year after year, until the day he broke surface.

But that was all over now. He was Mikey again, and he was slowly growing used to his old self, just as Allie was growing accustomed to Everlost.

Yet through all of their travels, in the back of her mind, Allie knew she had business left undone. Going home had been so important to her when she had first arrived here. But somewhere along the line, it became something best saved for tomorrow, and then the tomorrow after that—but unlike other Afterlights, she did not forget her life on Earth. She did not forget her family, she did not forget her name.

She didn’t know why she should be different from others. Not even Mary wrote about such things in her books of questionable information. But then, Allie had powers that other Afterlights didn’t possess. Why she and no one else should have these powers was a mystery to her as well. Allie could skinjack. The living might call it “possession,” but she much preferred the Everlost term—for she was not a demon taking control of a human being for evil purposes. She merely “borrowed” people, wearing their bodies for a short time—and only when absolutely necessary.

They made their way down the quaint main street of Cape May. The living went about their blurred, muffled business. Cars passed through Allie and Mikey, but they had grown accustomed to the flow of the living world through and around them so they barely noticed it anymore. Not even their horse did.