At first, he just showed off. They came across a basketball court where a choose-up game was in full swing. He skinjacked the player with the ball, then passed to another player—but Milos got to the other player before the ball did, skinjacked him, and caught his own pass. Allie watched, laughing in spite of herself, as he bounced himself around the court, becoming one player, then another, then another, passing the ball to himself, stealing the ball from himself, shooting and scoring. Allie got dizzy trying to keep track of where and who he was.

By the time he was done, the players were all a bit dazed and confused, not quite sure what had just occurred.

“Jill and I would play many sports together,” Milos told her. “We would jump from player to player—that was always part of the game.” The memory brought a smile, but a measure of pain to Milos’s expression.

“Did you love her?” Allie dared to ask.

Milos took a few moments before answering. “We came upon a wedding once,” he told her. “We skinjacked the bride and groom.”

“You didn’t!”

“Well, I skinjacked the groom, but Jill’s legs were cold.”

Allie looped that back through her mind. “Do you mean she got cold feet?”

“Yes, she got cold feet. Instead of the bride, she went to hide in the flower girl. That should have told me something, you think?”

“I’m sorry, Milos.” Then a silence fell between them that was decidedly awkward.

They made their way to the heart of the town, and found a street fair in full swing taking up all three blocks of Lebanon, Tennessee’s main street.

“For your first lesson, I think I will teach you to surf.”

Allie laughed. “Well, as the nearest beach is hundreds of miles away, I sincerely doubt that.”

“Not that kind of surfing,” he told her. Then in a flash he was gone. Allie thought she saw him leaping into a kid eating ice cream, but the kid just continued on.

“Milos?”

“Over here!” His voice was coming from somewhere far away. She looked down the street, and finally caught sight of him—he wasn’t skinjacking now, he was just standing in the middle of the street fair, two whole blocks away, waving at her. How on earth had he done that?

Then he vanished again, and a few seconds later, there he was standing right beside her.

“Boo!” he said, and she jumped in spite of herself.

“Did you just … teleport?”

“More like tele-phoned,” Milos answered. “Wires conduct electrical impulses, yes? Well, the living conduct us.”

“I don’t understand.”