While Allie spent her days being tutored by Milos, Mikey spent his time practicing his own skills as well, although he practiced alone. Each day he went off to some secret and solitary deadspot, and there he would spend the day focusing on the one thing he could do better than anyone else. Change. It was the one aspect of his existence that he still had control over—or at least he could have control if he practiced enough.

Allie was off with Milos. Fine. He couldn’t change that. He couldn’t control what they did or said to each other. But he could grow feathers and scales. He could sprout extra arms and legs. He could even grow a rhino horn and moose antlers. And just like skinjacking, changing himself was irresistible—for who can resist their nature?

The transformations were becoming easier and easier to achieve. The hard part was changing back … but just as Allie was beginning to master the finer points of skinjacking, Mikey was mastering the art of bringing himself back to normal. It was all a matter of wanting to be Mikey McGill more than he wanted to be all those other tweaked and twisted creations. What made it difficult was that, with all the things he could be, he found it harder and harder to want to be Mikey McGill.

On the night that Allie and Milos played games at the Grand Ole Opry, Mikey was caught in the act.

He had found a nice sized deadspot—a street that had been torn down to build a freeway overpass. None of the buildings had crossed into Everlost, but someone must have had fond feelings for the street itself, because it had crossed over, along with all the streetlights, which still cast a pale glow all around him. It was careless of him to be practicing his transformations in such a wide-open, brightly lit space. Considering the transformation he was working, he shouldn’t have been caught at all, because he quite literally had eyes in the back of his head, among other places. He had been trying to see how many eyeballs he could sprout. He had gotten up to fifty-three—they were popping up all over his body like large blue-eyed chicken pox, and each of them had a unique perspective on the world around him.

When he heard a gasp behind him, every available eye turned toward it, and he saw Squirrel trying to run away.

Wasting no time, Mikey took off after him, turning his arms and legs into tentacles that he used to fling himself from one lamppost to another, flying right over Squirrel’s head, and landing directly in front of him. Mikey gave himself a set of fangs as he snarled, just to addle Squirrel’s acorn-size brain even more.