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the situation, Jackin’ Jill came up to him. As always, her blond hair was wild and full of nettles, as if she had been attacked by a tumbleweed. Was it Milos’s imagination or were the nettles in her hair multiplying?
    “If you’ve gotten us stuck again, then we should go skinjacking,” she said. As a skinjacker, she, like Milos, was much closer to life, and did not settle as easily into daily routines. But Milos knew Jill didn’t just want to go skinjacking. When she wanted to possess the living, she had a darker purpose in mind.
    “Call it what it is,” said Milos. “You don’t want to go skinjacking. You want to go reaping , don’t you?”
    “My last orders from Mary were very clear,” Jill said. “I won’t put everything on hold just because you’re a wimp.”
    Milos turned on her sharply. He would never strike a girl, but Jill often brought him to the very edge of his temper. “What I did for Mary proves I am anything but a coward.”
    “So why do you only let us reap once a week?”
    “Because there needs to be limits!” Milos shouted.
    “Mary’s vision has no limits, does it?” The fact that Jill could stay calm made him even angrier, but he resolved to calm himself down. Losing his temper gave her control, and he was the one in charge here. He had to remember that.
    “The difference between you and me,” said Milos, “is that I reap because it is what Mary wants. But you do it because you enjoy it.”
    Jill did not deny it. “In a perfect world,” she said, “shouldn’t we all enjoy our jobs?”
    Milos agreed to lead the skinjackers on a reaping excursion that night, but under the strictest of rules. “We will take no more than we can carry, and I will choose where and when.”
    “Whatever floats your boat,” Jill said, caring only that she would get her chance to do her dirty work.
    Moose and Squirrel were also part of the skinjacking team, bringing their number to four. Although Allie was also a skinjacker, Milos knew she would never come reaping, even if he did set her free from the train.
    “Can I take two, Milosh?” Moose asked. “Pleashe?”Moose was a linebacker who had made his unfortunate crossing into Everlost during a high school football game. As such, he was doomed to wear a blue and silver football uniform. That uniform included a helmet and an eternal mouth guard stuck between his teeth, so everything he said came out slurred.
    “Yeah, yeah,” said Squirrel, “Moose can carry mine back to the train.”
    “Thatsh not what I meant!” said Moose.
    Squirrel was a twitchy rail of a kid. Milos never knew the manner in which Squirrel had crossed into Everlost, only that his exit from the world of the living had been supremely embarrassing, as evidenced by the way Squirrel’s cheeks and ears would go red at the mention of it. Since Afterlights had no flesh or blood, one had to be severely embarrassed for the distant memory of blood to turn one’s face red.
    “As I said, we will take what we can carry,” Milos told him. “Don’t get greedy.”
    They set out from the train at dusk. Perhaps it was his imagination, or maybe just his misgivings, but Milos couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that they were being watched.

CHAPTER 3
Doomed Worthy
     
    J ix, still in the body of the jaguar, had tracked the ghost train from Memphis to Oklahoma, following the faint scent of the supernatural. It wasn’t a scent, really, but more of an absence of scent. It was that very specific feeling of fur standing on end for no apparent reason. No matter how keen the cat’s senses, though, it could not see into Everlost. So when he knew he was close, he marched that jaguar into a public park in broad daylight, and allowed himself to be captured by animal control, before leaving the jaguar’s body. He was himself again, and back in Everlost—but even as an Everlost spirit, he had absorbed enough from his feline hosts to be agile and stealth. He spent so much time furjacking cats that