"Gotcha!" it said.

This kid was all wrong in every way. He had an ear where an eye should be, and an eye instead of a nose. His cheeks were at different heights, and his mouth was entirely upside down. It was as if someone had been playing Evil Mr. Potato Head with his face.

"Who are you? Let me go!"

There were more of them now. A dozen of them, and they were still coming out of the woodwork, grabbing her, keeping her from moving. Every one of them had skewed features, but no two were exactly alike. Picassoids, Allie decided to call them, because they looked like something Pablo Picasso might have painted on a very, very bad day.

"Don't let her skinjack!" shouted the Picassoid in charge, who had blue hair that was somehow familiar.

"You have to let me go!" she shouted, while behind her, the tour bus left for the mansion.

"I don't think so," their leader said. "We've been looking everywhere for you, Miss Allie."

She had to talk her way out of this, and she thought she knew just the thing. "Are you Mary's children? I'm here to help her," Allie said. "I've seen the error of my ways, and I'm here to beg for forgiveness--now LET ME GO!"

The Picassoids looked to one another, then back to Allie. "We don't work for the Sky Witch," the blue-haired Picassoid said. "We serve a monster. The one true monster of Everlost."

Allie did not like the sound of that. "What monster do you mean?"

Then he gave her an unpleasant upside-down smile. "We serve the McGill."

*** Mikey McGill was not blessed with good timing.

In life he would get his knuckles rapped repeatedly for looking at his neighbor's paper at precisely the moment the schoolmaster would look at him. He jumped in front of a speeding train at precisely the wrong moment, sending him and his sister to Everlost--and even in Everlost, he had chosen to spy on Allie at precisely the moment she had kissed Milos.

Naturally it would follow that he would capture Allie at the worst possible moment in this, or any other, universe.

His new minions--the Afterlights he had picked up in Nashville--feared him, and obeyed his commands, but that wasn't enough. He made them pledge themselves to him, but that still wasn't enough. He twisted and tweaked their faces using his talent of change to change them, but none of this could fill the hole inside him. Allie was the only one who could fill it, and so he followed her to Memphis. Since he was convinced he would never win Allie back, he decided the next best thing was to steal her away.

The Picassoids brought Allie to Mikey in an old-fashioned paddy wagon--a cell on wheels that had crossed into Everlost, God knows when.

When Mikey saw them approaching with Allie in the cage, he felt a heart begin to swell in his chest, threatening to transform his entire body into a bloody beating thing. He allowed his bad emotions to overwhelm the good, forced his heart back down his throat, and he strode forward encased in the same armor that had grown the day he ran away. Every step shook the ground as he approached her. Then, when he was right in front of her, he spilled himself through his open mouth, turning inside out, revealing the horrible thing he had become.

"Look at me!" he demanded. "Look at me." Although he didn't have to say it, because she was already looking. He wanted her to scream, he wanted her to cry, he wanted her to feel the misery of what she had done to him ... but she did not react the way he expected. He sprouted himself an extra eye so he could read her more clearly.

"Mikey!" she grabbed the bars, peering through at him, not repulsed, not averting her eyes in the least. "Mikey! You didn't leave! You're still here!"

There was a good reason why Mikey, even with an extra eye, couldn't read Allie. That was because Allie found her emotions were such a strange mix, they all blended together into something unidentifiable. There was incredible joy in knowing that Mikey hadn't left Everlost, but confusion as to why he had turned into this nasty-looking thing. Rather than being horrified, she found herself impressed by it and deeply saddened at the same time. She knew him well enough now to know that his shell was merely that: a mask that he used to express the things he couldn't put into words. Was this, then, the manifestation of what he had been feeling? She couldn't deny that Mikey had been sullen and subdued while he was locked into simple human form--and although she never wanted to see him as a monster again, there were parts of the monster she missed. The truth was, Mikey was boring when he was beautiful.

But what was she thinking? None of this mattered at the moment. Nick was in danger! She had to save Nick!

"Mikey, listen to me!" "No, you listen to ME!" He didn't care what she had to say. She would not rob him of this moment! He reached into a fold in his awful body that had once been a pocket, and he pulled out a coin. "You chose Milos over me!" Then he grabbed Allie's hand. "If I can't have you, then no one will!" and he placed the coin firmly in her palm, closing her fingers around it. He was determined to stay silent as she vanished into the light, but he couldn't stop himself from saying the words he could never before say out loud.

"I love you, Allie... ."

Then he waited for her to get where she was going.

He waited.

And he waited.

But Allie's eyes did not grow wide with cosmic wonder. The light of infinity did not shine on her face. She did not disappear in a rainbow twinkling of light. She stood there mesmerized--dazzled by his heartfelt confession, but she did not vanish. Then, she squeezed his hand firmly, but lovingly, and said:

"Mikey, we need to talk."

He let go of her hand, not knowing what to do, because he had not seen anything beyond this moment. The way he imagined it, Allie would be gone, he would wallow forever in the misery of it, and that would be that. But instead, Allie gave the coin back to him. "It doesn't work for skinjackers," she said. "There's a lot I have to tell you, but now's not the time. You have to let me go now. I have to help Nick."

Mikey turned his transformed hand back to the hand of a boy and gently took the coin. "It doesn't work for me, either. So neither of us is ready." Allie looked at his humanized hand, surprised. "How did you do that?"

"I can do a lot of things," Mikey said, and to prove it, he took on his normal boyish face once more, on the body of the monster. Allie was amazed.

"You can change at will?"

"You have a power," said Mikey, "and so do I."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I thought you hated the monster."

"You were never the monster you pretend to be, Mikey. Not then, and not now."

"I am if I want to be. I am whatever I want to be."

Allie shook her head and smiled. "Then I love all the things you choose to be, because beneath it all, you're still Mikey McGill."

Mikey took a step back. Was she trying to trick him into freeing her? "But ... but you love Milos... ."

Allie laughed. "Is that what you think? Is that why you left?"

"I saw you kiss him... ."

She gasped at the realization that he had seen the kiss. But then she said, "Mikey, you are such an idiot." Then she looked him in the eye and said, "You're the one I love."

Mikey found his ears starting to grow larger all by themselves--as if by doubling his hearing it would help him to understand. "Prove it."

"Okay, fine!" Allie said. "Give me your worst. The most horrible thing you can imagine--but do it quickly!"

And so Mikey dug inside himself to find the worst of all his feelings, the worst of all his fears, the very worst of himself. Then he pushed forth a face so hideous his followers turned their eyes away in terror. A face that could melt the living, or at the very least turn them to stone. A face so God-awful it defied the ability of any language to describe.

And yet Allie not only looked at him, but she reached out through the bars, pulled the horrible head to hers, and she kissed him.

The kiss was the definition of perfect. True, it lacked the heat, the passion, the breathlessness of the living-world kiss she had given Milos, but this had something greater. More than a flash of fire, it had an unbreakable, perhaps eternal bond of connection. Mikey had transformed back into himself by the end of the kiss, and the moment their lips parted he knew, as he should have known long, long ago, that no one--not Milos, not another Afterlight, not anyone in any world--could ever come between him and Allie, from now until the day they met their maker.

"Now please, Mikey. Please let me go help Nick."

Suddenly Mikey felt naked and exposed before her, so he stepped back and pulled himself in, folding into his armor shell. Then he bore down and forced his armor to dissolve. It was harder than changing his features, harder than growing an arm or an eye or a tentacle, but he did it, and promised himself he would never grow the armor again.

He turned to his followers who looked at him with shock and surprise.

"Hey--you're not the McGill," said one of them. Mikey considered turning himself horrible just to scare the kid into line, but he decided he didn't want to. He could be whatever he wanted to be, but there were many more parts he wanted to play beyond that of a monster. So instead of fangs, he sprouted himself a pair of tall white ears. "No, I'm the Easter Bunny," he told them. "Now free Allie from that cage!"

And they were all so bewildered that they hopped right to it.

Chapter 36 The Intolerable Nexus of Extremes

Graceland had a faint but perpetual smell of peanut butter and bananas.

"Even better now with chocolate," offered Zin, as she and Nick stepped inside.

From the moment Nick arrived, he knew there was something odd about the world-famous tourist attraction. The floors were both soft and solid at the same time, and everywhere he looked Nick saw double. He wanted to chalk it up to his own failing vision, but he knew it was more than that.

"What is this, some sorta funhouse?" asked Zin, but Nick suspected there was no fun to be had for anyone but the tourists. This is a vortex, Nick realized. He sensed it would be wise to leave, but he said he would meet Mary here, and he wouldn't go back on his word.

He had come with a team of Afterlights, but told them to wait outside, as he went in with Zin. They moved through rooms that alternated between elegant and absurd, and the air was filled with the faint echoes of a thousand parties. Of course, all the living heard was "Love Me Tender" pumped in through the speaker system, but they were beginning to notice an uncanny aroma of chocolate.

Toward the back of the mansion, Nick and Zin found the infamous Jungle Room, full of leopard- and zebra-skin furniture and green shag carpeting--not just on the floor, but on the ceiling, too. There they waited for Mary.

Nick didn't feel well at all, and this was troubling, because you couldn't feel sick in Everlost. Yet there was a fever burning within him, rising from the deepest part of his soul, radiating out.

Zin nervously doodled on her prop notepad to pass the time. "What if she don't come?"

"She'll come," said Nick.

When all the clocks in the house struck five, and Mary hadn't arrived, Nick began to worry. Mary was never late, and with each passing minute Nick felt worse.

"She's not comin'" said Zin. "Let's get outta this place, it gives me the creeps."