Allie, in the body of the woman’s elderly husband, tried to speak, but could only burp.

“Too spicy. I knew it!” Then the old woman called for the waitress.

Allie peeled herself out of Harold the Henpecked Husband, and when she was back in Everlost she made her way out into the street. Once outside, she got her bearings, and realized she had crossed the avenue, turned a corner, and had unexpectedly bounced herself into a delicatessen. Milos found her a few moments later.

“What happened?”

“I guess I got lost.”

Milos laughed. “It happens. It is hard to keep a sense of direction, yes? You will get better, it just takes practice.”

And so they practiced. It got a bit harder once the crowd thinned, but it just served as a challenge to her. She found that if she pushed off hard enough, she could leap from one person to another who was about ten feet away.

“Moose and Squirrel have been doing this for years, and they can not jump that far,” Milos told her. “You are, as they say, a natural!”

After a couple of hours Allie was exhausted. She had surfed her way through hundreds of people—some of them several times, and she had begun to recognize the “signature” of their bodies.

“Do they know we’re here?” Allie asked Milos. “We’re only in them for an instant, but still … can they sense us the way we sense them?”

Milos raised his eyebrows. “Do you remember when you were alive,” he asked, “and you suddenly forgot what you were about to say?”

“Yes …“

Milos smiled. “Perhaps someone was surfing through you.”

The thought gave Allie a shiver. Even though she was no longer in flesh, having surfed through so much of it, her spirit held onto some phantom physical feelings. One of those phantom feelings echoed within her when she looked at Milos, and she shivered again. She resisted the urge to move closer to him, and feel his afterglow mingle with hers. It was, after all, just a phantom feeling, easy to dismiss, wasn’t it?

“Congratulations,” he said gently. “You are one of the Deadlies now. You are one of us.” His smile became wider, and that made her all the more uncomfortable. She turned away.

“In any case, soul-surfing is good for crowded places, and big cities,” he said. “I can get through a city faster than anything.” Then, with a gentle toss of his head, he said, “Although sometimes I prefer to drive if I can skinjack a good-looking man, with a Ferrari.”

Allie shook her head, warding off an unpleasant memory. “I tried to jack and drive once. It didn’t end well.”

Milos puffed out his chest. “So then I do the driving. You ride shot put.”

“Shotgun,” Allie corrected. His butchered expressions always made her smile, but the smile faded quickly. “I still think it’s wrong to skinjack people just for fun.”