Текст книги "Everlost"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

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The fifty-eighth floor had no tenants on the day the towers crossed into eternity. For that reason there were no walls or partitions subdividing it, and so, with the exception of the elevator core, the entire floor was nearly an acre of hollow space.

And still Nick found her.

“One of the little kids said you might be here,” he said as he approached.

It surprised her that anyone knew where she went. But then, perhaps everyone did, but respected her enough not to disturb her. She watched as he drew nearer, his gentle glow visible in the daylight because the floor was so vast it was mostly in shadows, even with windows on all sides. He was clearly not comfortable with the space. “Why would you come here? It’s so … empty.”

“You see emptiness,” she said. “I see possibility.”

“Do you think you’ll ever need all these floors?”

“There are more Afterlights out there, and more crossing everyday,” she told him. “It may take a thousand years until we need the space, but it’s nice to know I have it.”

Mary looked out at the faded world of the living, hoping Nick would go away, hoping he would stay, and cursing herself for not being able to keep her distance.

“Is something wrong?”

Mary considered how she’d answer, then decided that she wouldn’t. “Allies leaving, isn’t she?”

“That doesn’t mean I’m leaving.”

“She’s a danger to herself,” Mary said. “Which means she’s also a danger to you.”

Nick wasn’t concerned. “She just wants to go home and see if her father survived the accident. Why is that so bad?”

“I know something about going home,” Mary told him, and she found that just saying it brought the memory closer, along with all the pain it held.

Nick must have read her emotions, because he said, “If you don’t want to talk about it you don’t have to.” And because he was kind enough not to ask, Mary found herself telling him everything, with the honesty she would have had before a priest. It was a memory Mary had tried desperately to forget, but like the chocolate stains on Nick’s face, the harder she tried to forget, the more indelible the memory became.

“I died on a Wednesday, but I didn’t die alone,” Mary told him. “Like you, I had a companion.”

“We weren’t exactly companions,” Nick told her. “Allie and I were total strangers—until the car accident.”

“I had an accident, too, but my companion wasn’t a stranger. He was my brother.

The accident was entirely our fault. Mikey and I were walking home from school.

It was a cool spring day, but sunny. The hills were already turning green. I can still remember the smell of the wild-flowers that filled the fields—it’s one of the only smells I can still remember from the living world. Isn’t that odd?”

“So it happened in a field?” Nick asked.

“No. There were two train tracks side by side that crossed the dirt path that led home. Those tracks were mostly for freight trains. Every once in a while, for no good reason, a freight train would stop on the tracks and sit there for hours on end. It was a terrible nuisance—going around the train sometimes meant a half-mile walk in either direction.”

“Oh no,” said Nick. “You went under the train?”

“No, we weren’t stupid enough to do that, but quite often there was an empty boxcar open on both sides, so we could climb through the train. There was one on that day. Mikey and I had been fighting, I don’t remember what about, but it must have seemed important at the time because I was just furious and was chasing him. He was laughing and running ahead of me, and there was that boxcar, right in the middle of the dirt path, the doors on both sides pulled open, like a doorway to the other side. Mikey climbed up and into the boxcar. I climbed up right behind him, reaching for the back of his shirt as he ran across. I just missed him. He was still laughing and it just made me even more angry. He leaped out of the boxcar on the opposite side, and turned back to me.”

Mary closed her eyes, the image so strong she could just about see it playing on the inside of her eyelids like a cinema show. A movie, as the living now called it.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Nick said gently, but Mary had come too far to stop.

“If I hadn’t been so angry, I might have seen the sudden terror in Mikey’s eyes, but I didn’t see that; I was too dead set on catching him. I jumped down from the box car and slugged him in the arm—but instead of fighting back, he grabbed me and that’s when I realized something I had forgotten. There were two railroad tracks side by side. One track held the freight car that hadn’t moved for hours, and on the second track was another train traveling at full speed. We had both just jumped right into the path of a speeding train that we hadn’t been able to see from the other side of the boxcar. When I finally saw it, it was too late. I never felt it hit me. Instead there was the sudden darkness of a tunnel and a light far, far away but moving closer. I was flying down that tunnel, but I wasn’t flying alone.”

“I remember that tunnel,” Nick said.

“Before I got to the light I felt Mikey tugging on me. ‘No, no!’ he was yelling, and he pulled me and spun me around and I was still so mad at him I started fighting. I hit him and he hit me, he tugged my hair, I pushed him, and before I knew it, I felt myself crashing through the walls of that tunnel and losing consciousness even before I hit the ground.”

“That’s just like what happened with Allie and me!” Nick said. “We slept for nine months!”

“Nine months,” Mary repeated. “Mikey and I woke up in the middle of winter. The trees were bare, the tracks were covered with snow, and of course like so many Greensouls, we couldn’t understand what happened. We didn’t realize that we were dead, but we knew something was terribly wrong. Not knowing what else to do, we did the worst thing that an Afterlight can do. We went home.”

“But didn’t you notice yourselves sinking into the ground as you walked?”

“The ground was covered with snow,” Mary said. “We simply thought our feet were sinking into the snow. I suppose if we turned around we would have noticed that we left no footprints, but I didn’t think to look. It wasn’t until we got home that I realized how wrong things were. First of all, the house had been painted, not the light blue it had always been, but a dark shade of green. All our lives, we had lived with our father and our housekeeper since our mom had died giving birth to Mikey. Father never found himself another bride, but all that had changed. Father was there, yes, but with some woman I didn’t know and her two kids. They were in my house, sitting at my table, with my father. Mikey and I just stood there, and that’s when we first noticed our feet sinking into the ground, and it hit us both at once what had happened. Dad was talking to this woman, she gave him a kiss on the cheek, and Mikey started yelling at them.

‘Father, what are you doing? Can’t you hear me? I’m right here!’ But he heard nothing—saw nothing. And then gravity—the gravity of the Earth, the gravity of the situation—it all wrapped up into one single force pulling us down. You see, Nick, when you go home, the very weight of your own absence is so unbearably heavy that you start to sink like a stone in water. Nothing can stop you then.

Mikey went first. One second he was there, the next second he was up to his neck, and then, the next, he was gone. Gone completely. He sank right through the floor.”

“But you didn’t?”

“I would have,” said Mary, “but I got to the bed. You see, when I started to sink, my reflex was just like anyone else’s; to grab on to something. I was already at the doorway to my parents’ room. I stumbled in, already up to my waist. Everything I tried to reach for, my hand just passed through and then I grabbed the post of my parents’ bed. Solid brass. Everlost solid. I held on to it and pulled myself up until I climbed onto the bed and tumbled into it, curled up and began to cry.”

“But how – “

“My mother,” Mary answered without even letting Nick finish the question.

“Remember, she had died giving birth. She died in that bed.”

“A dead-spot!”

Mary nodded. “I stayed there for a long time until my father, not even knowing I was there, climbed into the bed with his new wife. I couldn’t bear to see them together, so I left. By then I had recovered enough so that the weight of being home wasn’t so overwhelming anymore. I raced out of the house and although I sank quickly, I didn’t sink entirely, and the farther away from home I got the easier it was to walk.”

“What about your brother?” Nick gently asked.

“I never saw him again,” Mary answered. “He sank to the center of the Earth.”

Mary didn’t say anything for a very long time. There was an unpleasant heaviness where her stomach had once been, but everywhere else there was a strange, ethereal sense of weightlessness. Everlost spirits did not float through the air as the living imagined, but right then, she felt like she might. “I’ve never told anyone that before, not even Vari.”

Nick put his hand gently on her shoulder. “I know it must be horrible to lose your brother like that,” he said, “but maybe, maybe, I could be like a brother to you.” Then he moved a little closer. “Or…well…what I mean to say is, maybe not like a brother but something else.” Then he leaned toward her, and he kissed her.

Mary did not know how to deal with this. In the many years that she had been in Everlost there were boys who would try to force kisses on her. She wasn’t interested in those boys, and she always had more than enough strength to fight them off. But here was a boy whose kiss she didn’t want to fight off. On the other hand, neither did she want to have her judgment clouded by unfamiliar emotions. So she didn’t respond to him at all.

“I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly, taking her lack of response as disinterest.

“Don’t be,” was all Mary said, but kept all of her feelings wrapped up tightly inside, just as she was wrapped up inside her lacy velvet dress.

Rejection was every bit as humiliating in death as it was in life.

It’s because of the chocolate, Nick thought. No, it’s because I’m a year younger than her. No, I’m a hundred years younger than her. Nick didn’t wait for an elevator, he climbed up the stairs two steps at a time, and returned to his apartment, closing the door. Sure, Nick had been lovesick before. There was that girl in science—or was it history—he wasn’t sure anymore—but the point was it had passed. Here in Everlost, though, it would never pass, and he wondered if he tried hard enough if he would be able to simply disappear, because how could he ever face Mary again, much less face her for eternity.

Mary, Mary, Mary. Her face and name were locked in his mind…And suddenly he realized that there was no room for the name that truly should have been in his mind. The name that that brat Vari was so sure he would forget. Hershey is what the other kids called him now, but that wasn’t his name, was it? His name started with an N. Nate. Noel. Norman. He was certain that it started with an N!

Mary found her moods were always soothed by Vari’s masterful playing. He could coax the sweetest sounds from the Stradivarius violin – the same violin from which Vari had taken his Everlost name. Today he played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, one of Mary’s favorites. It was supposed to be played by a string quartet, but Vari was the only string player among the 320 kids in her care. They had plenty of instruments though. People loved their instruments, so quite a few crossed over. A trumpet that had been run over by a bus, a piano that had fallen sixteen stories. Once in a while Mary tried to put together an orchestra, but not enough kids arrived in Everlost with the talent, or the desire to play.

“What would you like me to play next?”

Mary’s mind had been drifting, so she hadn’t even realized Vari had stopped playing.

“Whatever pleases you, Vari.”

He began to play something mournful and pleading. Mary couldn’t identify the composer. She preferred happier music.

“I should bring Nick up,” Mary said. “I’m sure he’d enjoy hearing you play, too.”

The passion of Vari’s playing seemed to fade. “Hershey’s a toad.”

“You should learn to like him,” Mary said.

“He’s got a dirty face, and I don’t like his eyes.”

“He’s half-Japanese. You mustn’t be prejudiced just because he has an Asian look about his eyes.”

Vari said nothing to that. He played a few more brooding stanzas of music, then said, “Why do you always want him around? He can’t really do anything. Not like some other kids. Not like me.”

Mary had to admit that it was true—Nick was not a standout spirit. But then, why did it matter what he could do? Why couldn’t he just be?

She stood, and went to one of the western windows. It was a clear afternoon, and she could see across the Hudson River to New Jersey, but a faint haze hid the horizon from her.

The world had become so small for the living. Airplanes took people across the country in a matter of hours. You could talk with people around the world just by pressing buttons on a telephone, and now those phones weren’t even connected to wires. Everlost wasn’t like that. It was still an unexplored wilderness of wild children, and gaping unknowns. Mary knew very little of children beyond her sphere of influence. Even after all her years here, her explorations were limited, because safety and security required digging in, and traveling as little as possible. Moving from the Everlost apartment building she had occupied for so many years to the towers had expanded her realm, and drawn many more children to her than she had sheltered before —yet even still, the only information she got from the world beyond her towers came from Finders passing through. Mostly they spoke of rumors. Sometimes she liked what she heard, and sometimes she didn’t.

Then a thought occurred to her; a marvelous thought that would give Nick a purpose and a reason to be something more than just one among many in her world.

“Finders have told me they’re reading my books as far west as Chicago now,” Mary told Vari. “Which means there must be children in other cities in need of care and guidance, don’t you think?”

Vari stopped playing. “You’re thinking of leaving here?”

Mary shook her head. “No. But that doesn’t mean I can’t send someone out there.

Someone I can train, and teach everything I know. That person can set up an outpost in an unexplored city. Chicago, perhaps.”

“Who would you send?”

“I was thinking about Nick. Of course it will take years to train him properly—ten, maybe twenty—but there’s no great hurry.”

Vari came up beside her, looked toward the hazy horizon, then turned to her.

“I can do it,” he said. “And it won’t take years to train me, either.”

She turned to him and smiled. “That’s sweet of you to offer.”

“But I can do it,” he insisted. “I might be little, but the kids respect me, don’t they? Even the older ones.”

Again she smiled warmly. “Vari, what would this place be without you and your violin? I’d always want you here, playing for us.”

“‘Us,’” Vari echoed. “I see.”

She kissed him on top of the head. “Now, why don’t you play something else.

Something cheerful.”

Vari began to play an upbeat tune, but somehow there seemed to be an edge to the music that was dark and undefinable.

There was no question in Allie’s mind that she was getting out. She had no desire to spend eternity caught in an endless loop, no matter how pleasant it might be. But she was also smart enough to know not to leave until she got what she had come for in the first place.

Information.

Not “Miss Mary” information, but the real deal.

“I want to know about all the things Mary won’t talk about!”

Allie said it loudly and fearlessly on what was commonly called the “teen floor,” since that’s where the older kids in Mary’s domain liked to congregate.

No one seemed to react, but a kid playing Ping-Pong lost his concentration, and sent the ball flying across the room.

“Don’t act like you didn’t hear me, and don’t think that by ignoring me you can make me go away.”

Like the younger kids, these kids were also caught in repetition, but it didn’t take as much to jostle them out of their stupor. There seemed to be a few fourteen-year-olds here, some thirteen, maybe some twelve-year-olds who eternally wanted to be older. All told, there were maybe thirty of these older kids in Mary’s domain – which was only about one-tenth of the population. She wondered if there were simply fewer older kids who got lost on their way to the light, or if most older kids simply didn’t stay here with Mary for very long.

Nick had said Mary was writing a book on the subject. Allie wondered if there was a subject Mary wasn’t writing a book on.

“If Mary doesn’t talk about something, there’s a reason,” said the Ping-Pong boy.

But Allie already had her argument well rehearsed. “Mary says there are things we shouldn’t think about, and shouldn’t do—but she doesn’t flatly forbid anything, does she?”

“Because we always have a choice.”

“That’s right. And Mary respects our choices, right?”

No one said anything.

“Right?” insisted Allie.

The kids halfheartedly agreed.

“Well, I choose to talk about those things we shouldn’t. And by her own rules, Mary has to respect my choice.”

Several of the kids were suitably confused. That was okay. Shake them up a little, get them to see things in a new way. This was a good thing.

One girl stepped forward. It was Meadow– the girl they had met on their very first day here. “So, like, what do you want to know?”

“I want to know about haunting—and how we can communicate with the living world.

I want to know if there’s a way back to life—because no matter what Mary says, we’re not entirely dead, or we wouldn’t be here. I want to know about the McGill. Is it real, or is it just something made up to scare little kids?”

By now all action had stopped in the room. The routine had been broken. She knew the moment she left, everyone would get right back to it, but for now she had their attention. One kid left a game of pool and approached her—but he still held on to his cue, as if worried he’d need to use it to defend himself.

“No one knows if the McGill is real,” he said. “But I think it is, because Mary won’t talk about it. If it wasn’t real, she’d just tell us so, right?”

A few of the other kids mumbled in agreement.

“How about leaving Everlost? Is it possible to live again?”

Meadow spoke up, blunt, and unsympathetic. “Your body is in a grave, or worse, it’s in ashes. I don’t think you want it back.”

“Yeah, but there are other ways to be alive …,” said a kid quietly from the corner. When Allie turned to him, he looked away.

“What do you mean, other ways?” asked Allie.

When he didn’t answer, Meadow spoke up. “He doesn’t know what he means.”

“But you do.”

Meadow crossed her arms. “There are…talents…that some people have, and some people don’t. They’re not nice talents—and they will bring you a world of bad karma. Mary calls them ‘The Criminal Arts.’”

By now everyone had begun to gravitate around Allie and Meadow. By the looks on their faces, some kids seemed to know what she was talking about, but most seemed clueless.

“What kind of talents?” asked Allie. “How would I know if I have them?”

“You’d be luckier not to know.”

“Excuse me,” said a voice from the back. Everyone turned to see Vari standing there. There was no way to know how much he had heard. Meadow instantly put distance between herself and Allie, going back to the game she had been playing.

The rest of the kids moved away from Allie as well, as if she was poison.

“Good news,” Vari said. “Miss Mary just traded with a Finder for a bucket of fried chicken. She says everyone can have a single bite.”

The rush to the elevators nearly swept Allie off her feet. As much as Allie wanted a bite of that chicken as well, she resisted. The fact wasn’t lost on Vari, who patiently waited for the last elevator with her.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Were you a vegetarian when you were alive?”

Allie couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or sincere.

In her book, You’re Dead—So Now What?, Mary Hightower offers the following warning for the restless soul: “Wanderlust is a dangerous thing. In Everlost there’s safety in staying put. Afterlights who are cursed with a desire to travel don’t last for long. They either succumb to Gravity Fatigue, or they are captured by feral packs of unsavory children. The few that escape these fates become Finders, but the existence of a Finder is full of peril. Better to seek a safe haven, and stay there. And if you haven’t found a safe haven, by all means, come see me.”

CHAPTER 10

An Elevator Down Allie was alone in an elevator the following morning, when a human skeleton got in on the ninety-eighth floor.

Allie gasped at the sight of him.

“Get over it,” the skeleton-boy said as the elevator doors closed.

Allie quickly realized who it was. He wasn’t a skeleton at all. He simply had white makeup all over his face, with black around the eyes, and wore a cheap Halloween skeleton costume. His Afterlight glow merely added to the overall effect.

“Sorry,” said Allie. “You just caught me off guard.”

There were two kids here who had the supreme misfortune of crossing on Halloween: this kid, and another with green face-paint and fake peeling skin.

Everyone called them Skully and Molder.

“So,” said Skully, after the elevator doors had closed. “I hear you’ve been asking about the Criminal Arts.”

“Yeah,” said Allie, “but asking is useless if nobody answers.”

“I can tell you stuff, but you can’t tell anyone you heard it from me.”

The elevator door opened. “Your floor?” asked Skully.

Allie had been going down to the arcade to try to wrestle Lief away from his Pac-Man game, but that could wait. She didn’t get out, and the elevator door closed again.

“Tell me what you know. I promise I won’t tell anyone you told me.”

Skully hit the button for the lobby, and the elevator began its long fall.

“There’s this place a couple of miles away from here. A building that crossed a long time ago. A pickle factory, I think. There’s this kid who lives there. They call him ‘The Haunter.’ He teaches people how to do things.”

“How to do what, exactly?”

“Paranorming, ecto-ripping, skinjacking —you name it.”

“I don’t know what those things are.”

Skully sighed impatiently. “He can show you how to move things in the living world, make yourself heard to the living—and maybe even seen. They even say he can reach into the living world, and pull things out of it. He can actually make things cross into Everlost.”

“And he can teach this?”

“That’s what I hear.”

“Have you ever met him?” Allie asked.

The kid backed away a little. “I know kids who went there. But they didn’t come back.”

Allie just shrugged it off. “Maybe after visiting the Haunter, they found something better than this. Maybe they didn’t come back because they didn’t want to.”

“Maybe,” said Skully. “If you want, I’ll get you the address.”

Allie was going to ask him more, but the doors whooshed open, he stepped out, and a gaggle of little kids swept in from the lobby, on their way to higher places.

Nick. Nicky. Nicholas.

It had taken him hours to remember his name, and now that he had captured it, he wasn’t letting go. His name was Nick. Nick something-or-other. It was a Japanese last name, because his father was Japanese. His mother was Caucasian, although he couldn’t quite remember the details of either of their faces, but that was a battle for another time. Right now, holding on to his first name took all his attention.

Nick. Nicky. Nicholas.

He would remember his last name, too. He would. He had to. Even if he had to track down his own grave and read it there, he would know his last name again.

He would keep them both, and no one would call him Hershey, or Cadbury, or Ghirardelli, or anything other than Nick, Nicky, Nicholas.

He took scraps of paper from his room, and wrote it over and over again, shoving a tiny slip into each of his pockets, in every drawer, under his mattress, and even under the cushions of the sofa that Lief slept on. Lief wouldn’t care—he hadn’t been back to the room for days, anyway.

Nick, Nicky, Nicholas. Maybe even Nic-o.

He was interrupted by Allie pounding on the door. He knew it was Allie, because she was the only one who ever pounded. Mary’s knock was gentle and refined.

Allie knocked like she wanted the door to fall down.

“I’m busy!” Nick said. “Go away.”

But she just kept on pounding, so he had to let her in.

When Allie stepped in, she looked around, as if something was wrong. “Nick, what are you doing in here?”

Nick turned around to look at his room, and for the first time he saw what he had done. There were little scraps of paper everywhere—not just in and under things, but all over the room. It looked like the place was covered in a dusting of snow. He hadn’t just used the paper in the drawers, he had torn out all the pages of all the books on the shelves. Mary’s books. He had torn them to shreds and had written “Nick” on every little shred, both front and back.

Only now did he notice it was daylight. Hadn’t he started this at dusk? Had he been doing this all night? Nick was speechless. He had no idea how this had happened. It was as if he were in a trance, broken only by Allies arrival. The weird thing about it was that a part of him wanted to throw her out, and get back to his work. His important work. Nick, Nicky, Nicholas.

Just like the kids playing kickball, or the kids watching The Love Boat every day until the end of time, he had found his “niche,” and hadn’t even realized it.

He looked at Allie, pleadingly, opening his mouth, but unable to say anything.

He felt a certain shame about it that he couldn’t explain.

“It’s all right,” Allie said. “We’re getting out of here.”

“What?”

“You heard me—we’re leaving.”

Nick resisted. Leave here? Leave Mary? “No! I don’t want to leave.”

Allie stared at him like he was a mental case. Maybe he was. “What do you want to do? Stay here writing your name forever?”

“I told Mary I wouldn’t leave.” But then, thought Nick, that was before she so thoroughly rejected his sorry butt.

Allie scowled, and Nick thought she might start ranting about what a terrible person Mary was, and blah blah blah—but she didn’t. Instead she said: “If you really want to impress Mary…if you really want to be useful to her, then you need to learn a skill.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How would you like to be able to talk to the living—or better yet, how would you like to reach into the living world and actually pull things out of it?”

Nick shook his head. “But that’s Ecto-ripping! Mary hates it!”

“She only hates it because no one here can do it —and just because Mary calls them ‘The Criminal Arts,’ doesn’t mean they really are. They’re only criminal if you use them in criminal ways. Think about it, Nick. If you come with me and learn all there is to know, you can come back with food and toys for all her little kids. You can bring her a dozen roses that will never wilt or fade. You can actually mean something to her.”

Nick found this irresistibly tempting. The more he considered it, the harder it was to refuse. “Who’s gonna teach us that?”

“I know a kid who knows a kid,” said Allie.

Nick looked at his room, covered in little bits of paper. If an eternity of that was the alternative, maybe it was time he trusted Allie, and took a leap of faith.

“Tell me more.”

“C’mon,” said Allie. “We’ll talk on the way to the arcade.”

One down, one to go. Allie found Lief exactly where she expected to: practically glued to the Pac-Man machine.

“Lief?”

“Leave me alone, I’ve got to beat this level.”

“Lief, this game is so old, living people don’t even play it anymore. ‘Retro’ is one thing, but this is prehistoric!”

“Stop bothering me!”

Nick leaned his back against the side of the game, with his arms crossed. “He’s found his niche,” Nick said. “Like I almost did.”

“It’s not a niche,” said Allie, “it’s a rut. Mary might think it’s a good thing, but it’s not.” Allie knew now that in the same way water always seeks its lowest point, so do the souls of Everlost – carving a rut that becomes a ditch, that becomes a canyon—and the deeper it gets, the harder it is to escape from. Allie knew it, just as she knew that Lief, if left alone, would play this game until the end of time.

“This is wrong, Lief!”

“Just go.”

She went to the back of the machine to pull the plug, only to find out that it wasn’t even plugged in, and she cursed the fact that the normal laws of science didn’t apply in Everlost. Machines worked not because they had a power source, but because in some strange way, they remembered working.

Allie thought for a moment, then said, “We’re going to a place that has even better games!”

“Don’t lie to him,” said Nick—but she had already caught Lief’s attention. He was looking at her instead of at the machine. His eyes were glassy, and his expression vague, like he was surfacing from a deep, deep sleep.

“Better games?”

“Listen,” said Allie, “you saved my life before we got here. Now it’s my turn to save yours. Don’t lose your soul to a Pac-Man machine.”

On the screen, his Pac-Man was caught by one of the fuzzy creatures, and died.

Game over. But, like everything else in Mary’s world, it wasn’t over, because it started again. No quarter needed. Lief turned to gaze longingly at the game, but Allie touched his cheek, and turned his head to face her again.

“Nick and I are going to learn about haunting. I want you to come with us.

Please.”

She could see the moment he pulled himself out of the quicksand of his own mind.

“I didn’t save your life,” he said. “Too late for that. But I did save you from a fate worse than death.”

Allie couldn’t help but think she had done the same for him.

Deep down, Nick knew that a trip to the Haunter was a betrayal of Mary, but if Allie was right, the skills he’d come back with would be worth it. Mary would forgive him; forgiveness and acceptance were part of who she was. Nick felt a sense of anticipation, like butterflies in his stomach, and he had to admit it was a good feeling. It felt almost like being alive.