“Wild, huh?” said Moose, looking at the crammed car. “Like clownsh in a car.” The faces in the window didn’t seem in distress, and Jix figured they had been in there quite a long time because they had gotten used to it. At most, it looked awkward and inconvenient, but they were still having conversations with one another as if this was just another normal day for them.
“Why are they in there?” Jix asked. “For someone’s amusement?” That made Squirrel laugh, which was not a pleasant sound.
“They were an enemy army,” Milos told him. “We defeated them a few months ago, and now we hold them in there for safekeeping.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Squirrel. “Prisoners of war.”
“Bet you’ve never sheen sho many Afterlightsh,” said Moose.
For a moment Jix wanted to brag about the great City of Souls, but decided to keep that to himself.
The skinjackers brought their four slumbering spirits to an Afterlight who waited by a sleeping car.
“Leave them with me,” the kid said, but Jix was reluctant.
“It is all right,” said Milos. “Sandman will tag them, and mark them with the date they will awake.”
Jix refused to give his sleeping girl to Sandman; instead he carried her into the sleeping car himself.
“Hey,” said Sandman, “you can’t go in there.” Jix turned to him, bared his teeth and growled. Although his growl still sounded more like a boy than a wild cat, Sandman was intimidated enough to leave him alone.
The sleeping car was already crowded. Each upper and lower berth had two, sometimes three sleeping kids, their chests rising and falling with the memory of breathing, but none of them snored or made the slightest sound. Jix found a comfortable place and left his sleeping girl there, making sure she looked comfortable, then kissed her forehead, because he knew she no longer had parents to do so, and because he knew no one was watching. Then he left the sleeping car and went straight to Milos.
“I will meet Mary, the Eastern Witch, now.”
“You will meet her,” said Milos, “when she is ready to be met.”
“And when will that be?”
Milos took a long look at him, perhaps trying to read something in his expression, but stealth also required a cool, unreadable face. Jix never gave anything away that he didn’t intend to.
“Not today,” was all Milos said.
“In the meantime,” suggested Jackin’ Jill, “why don’t you go lick yourself clean like a good kitty?”
Jix suspected that he and Jill were never going to be friends.
CHAPTER 4
Green Goddess
M ilos had not forgotten what Allie had told him, and although he hated the thought that she knew something he didn’t, he had to find out what she had seen from her perch at the front of the train. About a mile back, she had said. Figure it out for yourself. Once the newly harvested souls were safely in the sleeping car, Milos decided to set off alone to do exactly that.
He left Jill in charge of Jix, which she resented. “I don’t trust him,” Jill said. “No normal person skinjacks animals.”
“Would you rather Moose and Squirrel watch him?” suggested Milos. She just grunted in disgust. They both knew Moose and Squirrel had attention spans too short to effectively guard anyone. “Perhaps you could charm him into telling you more about where he comes from,” Milos said, with a grin. “After all, you’re a bit like a cat yourself.”
She raised her hand like a claw. “In that case, why don’t I just scratch that grin right off your face?” Still, Milos smiled. He had once been in love with Jill, as he had once been in love with Allie-but both times the love was bleached away by betrayal, leaving him with a wounded, if not broken, heart.
But then there was Mary.
All else in his life, and afterlife, had been mere preparation for her. She was his salvation-and in a very real way, he was hers as well.
Milos left the train in the afternoon, and followed the track, every couple of minutes looking around, trying to spot anything out of the ordinary, but nothing caught his eye. Looking back at the train proved to be a surreal sight: the locomotive, standing against the little white church right in the middle of its path. The way its steeple poked up at the sky made it appear as if the church was giving the train the middle finger.
Milos found nothing a mile back. Just a dead track, and the living world on either side of it. Whatever it was Allie saw, it was not revealing itself to Milos. He returned to the train, his afterglow faintly red with slow-boiling frustration.
When he arrived, all seemed the way it always did. Kids playing games, shuffling their feet to keep from sinking into the living world.
Speedo came running to him when he saw that Milos had returned. “What was there?” Speedo asked. “What did you see?”
“Nothing,” Milos told him. “I saw nothing at all.”
“So what do we do now?”
“I will figure something out!” Milos shouted at him. “Don’t ask me again!” When he looked around, he saw that his outburst had gotten the attention of some of the kids playing around them. When Mary’s kids saw him, they used to look away, too shy and respectful to make eye contact. But now when they looked at him, they stared coolly, and their gazes were an accusation. What are you doing for us? those gazes said. What good are you at all? Now it was Milos who looked away when they stared.
He considered going up to the front car, and bargaining with Allie to tell him what she saw, or perhaps threatening her-but he would not give her the satisfaction of knowing she had the upper hand. Instead, he turned, and strode toward the caboose.
“Wait, where are you going?” whined Speedo.
And Milos said, “I need to talk to Mary.”
When Mary’s army had acquired the train from the Chocolate Ogre, it did not have a caboose. It had been a simple steam engine with nine passenger cars, each from a different time period. The caboose was added at Milos’s insistence before they left Little Rock, Arkansas. He was adamant that they travel no further west until a final car-a special car-was found. No one argued. It was, in fact, the only order he gave that met with no resistance from anyone.
They finally found the caboose sitting on a slight stretch of dead track, hidden by a living-world apartment complex. Once found, attaching it to the train had been relatively easy. So was decorating it-because Christmas ornaments were both beloved and fragile, and so were naturally abundant in Everlost. The strings of brightly colored lights even stayed lit in Everlost without needing to be plugged in.
The caboose was decorated by Mary’s loving children, and the entrance was locked to everyone but Milos, the only one who knew the lock’s combination.
Now, as he spun the lock, and turned it to the combination, he took in a deep breath, for even though he no longer needed to breathe, the mere act of doing so helped him steel himself for the moment. Then, once he was sure he was ready, he stepped inside.
It was late afternoon now. Light poured into the windows of the caboose and onto an object that lay in the center. It was the only thing in the caboose.
The object was a coffin.
It wasn’t made of wood as one might expect, or even of stone, as had been done in ancient days. This coffin was made entirely of glass-bits and pieces of it, meticulously glued together with bubble gum and anything else sticky enough to do the job. There were pieces of crystal taken from chandeliers that had crossed into Everlost. There were bottles, and window panes and sunglass lenses, artfully arranged, and little stained-glass window hangings that added color. The casket was strange and piecemeal, yet perfect in its own way.
Within the glass coffin lay a figure in a shimmering green satin gown, ever silent, ever still. A girl once lost to
