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"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."
"What makes fun wrong?" he asked. And when she didn't have an answer for him, Milos said, "What we do is right. It is natural--or else why would we be able to do it? If we are skinjackers, we are meant to skinjack."
"We provide a link between Everlost and the living world--perhaps the most important one," Allie insisted. "Maybe we were meant to use it for something important."
"Maybe we were meant to simply enjoy it."
She wanted to argue, but between his easy logic, and his easier smile, she found her argument had no teeth. She looked down to see that, while Milos had continued to shift his feet to keep from sinking, Allie had not, and had sunken into the sidewalk to her ankles. She pulled her feet out, feeling embarrassed that he had caught her ankle-deep.
"In life did you ever do something just for fun?" asked Milos.
"Yes ..."
"So why not be as you were in life? And if it hurts no one, why is it wrong to enjoy skinjacking? This is what we are."
"No, it's what we do!"
"No, Allie, it is what we are." Milos gently put his hand on her shoulder. "It is what you are."
"So was it fun?" Mikey asked.
Allie shrugged, trying, for his sake, to hide how much she had enjoyed the soul-surfing lesson. "It was tiring. I prefer being me, rather than the crowd. What did you do?"
"I took a walk."
"Through town?" She wondered if he had been downtown, and had seen her with Milos. If she were a fleshie she would have flushed at the thought, then she got mad at herself. She had nothing to feel guilty for.
"I went into the woods," he told her. "There's an oak grove where half the trees have crossed over. And in the middle of it I found a house that crossed over too. It would be a nice place to live. That is ... if you wanted to."
"We can't 'live,' "she reminded him.
"No, but we could enjoy our existence here. I'm tired of being a finder. I'm tired of moving around. I'm tired of everything."
Allie considered this, noting the slight lavender tinge to his afterglow. Perhaps there was a different meaning for it. "Then maybe you're ready," she said.
"Ready for what?"
"To move on."
What Allie meant as a simple observation hit Mikey like a fist on flesh. He took a step back, reeling from the blow, but tried not to show how deeply it hurt him.
