by Jeff Giles
Late in the afternoon, Zoe used her phone somehow to see when it was expected to stop, only to discover that there were no reports of rain (or sleet or power outages) anywhere within 500 miles.
“Idiots,” she said. “How can they not see this storm?”
X began to fear that the storm was meant for them alone.
Spock and Uhura pawed at the front door, begging to be let in. They’d finally been admitted into Bert and Betty’s house, and were now trying their luck here. Jonah looked at his mother with such pleading eyes that she finally groaned and said simply, “Okay, fine.”
Jonah clapped ecstatically, ran to the door—and discovered that it had been frozen shut. X listened as Zoe and her mother tried and failed to wrench it open. He could hear Spock and Uhura on the steps, whimpering. He pictured them shivering, their fur rattling with ice.
Above them, the roof groaned, threatening to cave in.
Then, suddenly, the rain stopped.
But the relief was short-lived, for soon the silence was torn by the sound of trees surrendering to the ice and splitting apart.
At first it was just a branch or two that snapped and fell onto the snow. Soon, though, the noise was terrifying and constant, like a thousand bones breaking. Trees that had stood more than a century were shattered in an instant. X could see Zoe and the others registering every loss. Jonah rushed to a window that looked out on the backyard. “Daddy Man’s tree!” he said. The willow had not cracked, but it was bent low again and threatening to snap. X was powerless to help. His head was boiling. He slumped farther down the wall, draped in the blanket Zoe had given him.
The blizzard had damaged the forest, but this decimation seemed nearly vengeful, and it could not be ignored, for there was no wind or snow to cover the sound. Even to X, who had heard every sort of agonizing sound the universe could produce, the destruction of the trees sounded raw and pitiless—a kind of mass murder.
Zoe’s mother, electric with anger and worry, said that there hadn’t been an ice storm in years.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
At that moment, X felt the bruises beneath his eyes begin to burn.
One of the lords had come for him.
X felt him calling out. He could envision the lord’s gnarled hands summoning up the storm—conducting it like an orchestra. X had no choice but to go to him. To end this.
He beckoned Zoe to his side.
“I have hurt you,” he whispered.
His voice was hoarse.
“A little,” she said.
“I am sorry, and ashamed, besides,” he said. “This storm, this rain—it is not from your world, but mine. A lord awaits me in the woods. I feel his rage in every part of me. He has come to put me back on the path.”
“Let him wait,” said Zoe.
She said it blithely, but he heard the fear in her voice.
“I must finish what I began,” he said. “I must drag Stan to the Lowlands where his kind belong. You must let me go.”
“No,” said Zoe.
“Yes,” said X.
“No,” said Zoe.
“Yes,” said X, laughing softly at her willfulness. “How long shall we continue in this vein?”
“I can go all night,” said Zoe.
She sat down next to him on the floor.
“Don’t you realize what the lords have done to you?” she said. “You were a little kid—totally innocent—and it killed them. So they made you hunt souls. And you were grateful, right? Because you got powers for a little while. Because you got to leave your cell every so often on some, like, supernatural hall pass. And the whole time—the whole time—they’ve been trying to turn you into them. And now you think you belong there! Which you don’t. I am so sick of losing people, X. Don’t make me lose you.”
She was crying now. X wanted to touch her—she was the only proof he’d ever had that there was light and life and warmth in the world—but he knew if he so much as brushed her skin with his fingertips, he wouldn’t have the strength to leave. He would sink into her, and all would be lost.
“I have brought evil to within a hundred yards of your door,” he said, “and I will face it before it crawls even one inch closer.”
Zoe looked away, defeated.
“Stay within these walls, no matter how fiercely they groan,” X continued. “The lord will not risk being seen by any who walk this world. It is an unbreakable code. I, myself, am about to discover the penalty for breaking it.”
He staggered to the door. He drew in a breath, gathering his strength so that he might break the seal of ice. He looked up at the ceiling as if his visitor from the Lowlands were hovering just above his head.
“If you want me,” he cried, “let me out!”
He pulled so fiercely that the wood burst along the hinges.
The door flew open.
Spock and Uhura rushed into the house, delirious with relief. Their fur was beaded with ice, just as X had imagined. Their legs made a crinkling sound as they ran.
Jonah and his mother rushed to the dogs. The last thing X saw was them covering the animals with the blanket that had fallen from his own shoulders.
He stalked toward the woods, his head lowered, his broad back curved against the cold. He had gone a hundred feet when he heard Zoe call out to him.
“Will you come back?” she shouted. “When you’ve found Stan—when you’ve brought him to the Lowlands—will you come back?”
It was an impossible question. Surely she knew that. Though he was scared, he wanted to make her laugh, if he could.
“Unless I get into college!” he shouted. When Zoe smiled, he added, “That was a blurt.”
“Yes, I know!” she said. “But, seriously, will you come back?”
Would it be a lie to say yes, if he truly didn’t know?
Nothing could induce him to lie to her.
He began striding toward her through the snow. The lord would have to wait one more moment.
Zoe cried even harder when she saw X coming. He could see her shoulders rise and fall.
“If I do not return,” he said, “it is only because not one but two worlds conspired to stop me.”
Zoe came down the steps in just her hoodie and jeans. X all but flew the remaining feet. He removed his coat, and wrapped it around her. It brightened briefly, like coals being stoked.
He took her face in his hands, and pulled her mouth to his. Her lips were cool and smooth.
He lifted her off the snow when he saw she was standing in her socks.
The trees looked brittle and translucent: a forest of glass.
X moved slowly, pulled toward the lord by an unseen force. He feared that if he brushed against a branch, he might shatter it. He dodged and ducked the tree limbs. Where the tree trunks were thickest, he crawled. Up ahead, he heard the ice cracking and trees splitting apart. He knew the lord was close.
He came into a clearing littered with fallen trees. The lord, who was in a fury unlike any X had ever witnessed, stalked maniacally before him, pushing down firs with a single shove.
“I beg you to stop,” said X. “I have come.”
It was not the ebony-skinned Regent, but a crazed and vicious lord they called Dervish. He stared at X, eyes alight with anger.
“You will beg for MANY things before the horizon swallows the sun,” he said.
Dervish resumed the destruction of the trees, stripping branches and snapping trunks so that their interiors lay exposed.
X stepped forward hesitantly.
“Yes, yes, draw near!” Dervish screamed. “Mark well what I do to these trees for it pales next to the violence I shall visit upon you—and those creatures who have sheltered you.”
The lord had pointy, ratlike features. His face was as gray and papery as a wasps’ nest.
“You were hoping the one you call Regent would come for you, no doubt!” said the lord. “But he is too soft a kitten, you see. He coddled you. And in return? You shamed him by le
tting your prey escape, and by mingling with mortals! When you return to the Lowlands, do not be surprised if you see Regent’s bones floating in your soup.” He paused, then added with relish: “I am your master now.”
“I shall do whatever you ask,” said X. “But I beg you to spare the family that took me in. They know nothing of who I am.”
At this, the lord squawked with laughter.
“And now you would LIE to me?” he said. “I have borne witness to your every moment in that house. I have heard your pathetic mewling. You were like a love-struck schoolboy plucking petals from a flower.”
X repeated his plea, even more softly: “Spare the family, I beg you. I will do whatever you require.”
“Indeed you shall,” said the lord. “And I shall require things that will reduce your heart to ash!”
He stomped toward X.
“On your knees, bounty hunter,” he demanded. “It is time you took Stan’s sins into your blood once more.”
Dervish grasped X’s face with both hands, and began reciting the familiar speech: “The Lowlands require another soul for its collection. He is an evil man—unrepentant and unpunished.”
As he continued, the lord’s fingernails—long, curling, and yellowed—punctured X’s skin and sent blood down his cheeks.
X felt the lord’s power flow through his body. Once again, Stan’s story entered him. It was even more hateful this time, because new sins had been added to the old. When Dervish had finished, he shoved X to the ground, where he shook as if in a seizure.
The lord left him writhing, and stalked toward the Bissells’ house, leaving a wake of splintered trees.
X was terrified for Zoe and her family.
He found the strength to stand. He stumbled through the darkening woods, crashing against the very branches he had labored to preserve. He imagined the lord’s sickening hand closing around Zoe’s pale throat. The thought of it nearly caused him to empty his stomach into the snow.
X found Dervish at the edge of the forest. The lord was lurking behind the last row of trees, making certain he could not be seen from the house. He wheeled around toward X. He smiled so widely that his crooked teeth glinted in the dusk.
“So this is where you have played house with your pretty little mortals,” Dervish purred horribly. “Do you know how easy it would be for me to murder them all? How easy—and how pleasing?”
“I do,” said X, fearing that if he added even one more syllable it would enrage the lord.
“Bring me the soul whose name swims in your blood,” Dervish said coldly, then pointed toward Zoe’s house. “Do not fail a second time. Else I shall return here tomorrow night—and I shall swim in theirs.”
nine
X dove into the ground as if it were water. He blazed through snow, dirt, rock. The earth itself parted before him and closed again once he had passed.
Stan Manggold’s sins were flowing through him in a rush once more, this time coupled with X’s own fury. He had released the man—he had shown him mercy—only so Stan could murder again. Now X had been torn from Zoe. Now his heart was in ruins, all the worse because he’d only just discovered what his heart was actually for.
X burst out of the earth in a hot, sludgy marsh. He was in a part of the country he had never seen. He tried to orient himself, but there was no time: noises were already assaulting his ears. A hundred yards off, a pack of hunting dogs barked riotously, a squadron of geese swarmed the sky, and a half dozen shotguns crackled, decorating the air with smoke.
For all the villainous men and women he had encountered, X had never heard gunfire. The noise jolted him. He felt it under his skin.
Three birds plummeted from the sky. The hunters lowered their guns, and broke into chatter about the wind and the light. They drank from silver flasks that winked in the day’s last light. Some of them already had dead geese strung around their necks on giant necklaces. They reminded X of stories Ripper had told him about cannibals who wore skulls across their chests. He was no better than the hunters—or even the cannibals. He might as well have worn 14 skulls on a necklace of his own for all the souls he’d taken.
Stan’s skull would be next.
The hunters collected their trophies and pressed on. As he waited for them to disappear, X’s mind crept back to Zoe. He pictured her wearing his coat in the rain. He was glad he’d left something of himself behind. She would wear it, even if it was too long for her, even if it hung down around her ankles. He knew she would. And someday soon he would knock on her front door and say…
What would he say?
He would say, I forgot my coat.
She would like that. She would smile. And then he would kiss her for the second time. She’d expect him to be shy, but he was finished with shyness forever. There was no time for it.
When he could no longer hear the dogs, X climbed out of the marsh and wrung the water from his pants. The ground was flat for miles. It looked nothing like Montana. There were clumps of trees here and there, but mostly it was just wetlands marked by wide rivers and tiny, tufted green islands. It looked as if the world had been flooded and the water had only just begun to recede.
There was no road in sight, but X didn’t need one. He moved at a superhuman pace. The anger in him fed the longing, and the longing fed the anger. The marshy ground exploded with water as he passed. Had anyone been watching, they would have seen what looked like a comet cutting through the landscape.
After a mile, X felt the pain coursing through him deepen. The Trembling was guiding him. He was on Stan’s trail.
He found him just a few minutes later. Stan was walking the main street of a dusty town, eating an ice cream cone and peering into a shop window, looking as innocent as a child. X was repulsed by the sight of him. But there were too many people dotting the street for him to charge at Stan and snap his neck. He stepped out of sight, and waited for his prey to turn down some quiet passageway.
X didn’t know the name of the town. Half a mile back, atop a pole wrapped in vines, there had been a sign, shaped like a coat of arms. He had stared at it, sensing that it welcomed him to the town of Somewhere in the State of Something. The name of the state had an X in it. He recognized it from what Zoe had written on the back of his hand. He looked down at his hand, wishing she’d told him what the other letters meant.
The message was already beginning to fade: My X.
He shook off the thought of her. He had to deliver Stan to the Lowlands. If he did, there was a chance he could see Zoe again one day. If he failed, she and her family might not even survive until morning.
When he looked up, Stan had disappeared.
X headed down the sidewalk, catching his reflection in a store window. He looked like a wild creature. His pants were filthy. His shirt was torn. And his hair … His hair looked as if it had been in an ice storm and a marsh. Every strand was straining in a different direction.
He’d draw too much attention like this.
He found a shop with a horse etched into the door, and a rack of colorful shirts on the sidewalk. X peeked inside. No one was watching. He slipped one of the shirts off its hanger. It was purple with decorative white stitching that looped across the chest. X put it on over his own shirt. It was too small for him, and he could not even begin to manage the pearl buttons, so he left it hanging open. He stared at himself again in the window. Now he looked like a wild creature wearing a purple shirt.
He shook his head and went after Stan.
The pain told him which way to go as surely as a compass.
When he found Stan, he saw that he’d bitten the bottom off his ice cream cone and was sucking out the last dregs. Ice cream dripped off his chin and onto his stomach.
Stan finished the cone, and strolled to the edge of the street, which was lined with trucks and SUVs. He examined a dark green pickup to see if it was worth stealing. He made up his mind against it, rubbed his nose, and kept walking.
Halfway down the next block, Stan swung open the
door of a store and stepped out of sight. X followed. He couldn’t read the name on the store window, but, on the door, there was a pair of scissors and a woman caressing her silky hair.
X peeked over the lacy curtains that lined the windows. In the front of the store, behind a glossy desk, there was a bored young woman taking a photograph of her toenails. In back, there were half a dozen women in smocks milling about. Stan was already behaving ridiculously—dancing around a handsome, brown-skinned woman in a way that seemed vile. The woman kept gesturing nervously to the chair.
X was so close to Stan now that his body began to shiver. But revealing who he was—what he was—to another half dozen people seemed like madness. He leaned his head against the window, hoping the pain would pass.
It did not. It grew and grew, until X felt as if he were a puppet whose master was violently shaking his strings. He had broken so many laws of the Lowlands. What was one more indiscretion?
He swung the door open.
He was in such discomfort now that the woman behind the desk was just a floral, lipsticked blur.
“Welcome to the House of Uncommon Beauty,” she said in a drawl.
Before X could respond, the woman had taken in his preposterous hair.
“Oh, sugar,” she said, “I don’t think we can help you with that.”
X tried to center himself, to clear his mind. He could hear Stan in the back, yammering. He was telling the woman cutting his hair to call him Stan the Man or—“depending on how cozy we get”—Stanley the Manly.
The woman behind the desk rolled her eyes.
“That one’s trouble,” she said. “Minute he walked in, I said, ‘Mister, you been drinkin’?’ And he hoots and says, ‘Since I was fourteen!’ I’ll tell you what, I’m calling the sheriff if he gives Marianna any trouble.”
X growled, half in anger, half in agony, and stumbled toward the back. He ignored the woman when she called after him.
Marianna had laid a hot towel over Stan’s face. Steam rose off it now, as he reclined in his chair, moaning with pleasure.
