This kid was all wrong in every way. He had an ear where an eye should be, and an eye instead of a nose. His cheeks were at different heights, and his mouth was entirely upside down. It was as if someone had been playing Evil Mr. Potato Head with his face.

“Who are you? Let me go!”

There were more of them now. A dozen of them, and they were still coming out of the woodwork, grabbing her, keeping her from moving. Every one of them had skewed features, but no two were exactly alike. Picassoids, Allie decided to call them, because they looked like something Pablo Picasso might have painted on a very, very bad day.

“Don’t let her skinjack!” shouted the Picassoid in charge, who had blue hair that was somehow familiar.

“You have to let me go!” she shouted, while behind her, the tour bus left for the mansion.

“I don’t think so,” their leader said. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you, Miss Allie.”

She had to talk her way out of this, and she thought she knew just the thing. “Are you Mary’s children? I’m here to help her,” Allie said. “I’ve seen the error of my ways, and I’m here to beg for forgiveness—now LET ME GO!”

The Picassoids looked to one another, then back to Allie. “We don’t work for the Sky Witch,” the blue-haired Picassoid said. “We serve a monster. The one true monster of Everlost.”

Allie did not like the sound of that. “What monster do you mean?”

Then he gave her an unpleasant upside-down smile. “We serve the McGill.”

***

Mikey McGill was not blessed with good timing.

In life he would get his knuckles rapped repeatedly for looking at his neighbor’s paper at precisely the moment the schoolmaster would look at him. He jumped in front of a speeding train at precisely the wrong moment, sending him and his sister to Everlost—and even in Everlost, he had chosen to spy on Allie at precisely the moment she had kissed Milos.

Naturally it would follow that he would capture Allie at the worst possible moment in this, or any other, universe.

His new minions—the Afterlights he had picked up in Nashville—feared him, and obeyed his commands, but that wasn’t enough. He made them pledge themselves to him, but that still wasn’t enough. He twisted and tweaked their faces using his talent of change to change them, but none of this could fill the hole inside him. Allie was the only one who could fill it, and so he followed her to Memphis. Since he was convinced he would never win Allie back, he decided the next best thing was to steal her away.

The Picassoids brought Allie to Mikey in an old-fashioned paddy wagon—a cell on wheels that had crossed into Everlost, God knows when.