As the words hit him, and he realized what it meant, his own will began to collapse. She had a thousand souls. She would handily defeat his army. Now the pressure inside of him—the pressure he had been holding back since stepping into the vortex—could no longer be held. He felt a dam inside him rupture. His vision blurred and went dark. He felt everything begin to dissolve as the last bit of him gave in to the sickly-sweet cancer. What began as a small stain on his face was now all that remained of him.

“Now, sir?” asked Zin. “Should I do it now?”

Yes, that was it! Although he might not have his victory against her children, maybe he could still have his victory against her.

I give you a gift, Mary, he tried to say, just as he did in his fantasy, but he could no longer speak the words, for his mouth could only make a moaning sound like a cave in the wind. Before his thoughts could become too muddled, he sent Zin forward. “Now,” he tried to say—and she must have understood, because Zin lunged toward Mary, grabbed her by the shoulders, and began to push.

Mary had thought she had a contingency for everything.

In her mind the Ripper was a minor threat. A nuisance at best. Let the Ripper steal whatever she wants from me, Mary thought. I’ll survive. But the moment the Ripper began to push, Mary realized that she had miscalculated. There was a tingling in the back of her head unlike anything she had ever felt before. It moved down across her face to her shoulders as the ripper pushed her backward. What was happening to her? The Ripper wasn’t ripping at all!

Mary opened her mouth and gasped—she actually gasped, drawing in a breath of air like a living, breathing person would, and then it finally dawned on her exactly what the Ripper was doing. She was pushing Mary into the living world! How could that be? Was such a thing possible? She didn’t want to find out—so she fought back. Grabbing this horrible child, Mary tried to pull herself back into Everlost.

Zin had never felt so strong.

She knew it was the vortex helping her—the vortex had made opening a portal into the living world as easy as slicing butter, and Mary was sliding on through … until Mary began to fight back. As strong as Graceland made Zin, its effect on Mary was even more intense. Mary’s greatest asset had always been the sheer force of her will. Now her will was horribly amplified—and Mary did NOT want to be alive!

“This will not happen,” Mary asserted, her voice loud and echoing in both worlds. “I will not be forced out.”