by Jeff Giles
“They are not correct,” she said. “You are going to take my father and you are going to come back to me. Not just because he deserves to be punished, but because—even if you’re a dork and don’t believe it—you deserve to be free.”
They headed up the beach to the road, the rocks sliding and clacking under their feet. It was afternoon now. Zoe knew it wouldn’t stay light for long. They walked half a mile without speaking, and she was grateful for the silence. If they talked, they’d have to talk about the fact that X was growing sicker by the minute—that he was tripping over his feet and hanging on to Zoe for support. She had never seen him so weak. Being close to her was not helping him now.
Once again, Zoe’s body told her that her father was near, just as X’s body told him. She saw omens and metaphors everywhere. It wasn’t just the dark birds back at the beach. It was the frigid wind, which pushed at their backs as if goading them on. It was the black road, which was riven down the middle with cracks, as if something was trying to break out of the earth.
After ten minutes, X and Zoe passed a junky-looking truck parked on the shoulder of the road. There was a path just ahead. X led Zoe to it, and they entered the dense, snowy forest. It was like the woods near her house. Every awful detail from the day she had chased Jonah and the dogs came back to her unbidden—everything about Bert and Betty, the fireplace poker, and the hole in the ice. And here she was preparing to collide with another soul marked for the Lowlands.
Zoe looped her arm through X’s. She didn’t know if she could survive another day like that.
The forest was hushed except for the creaking of the trees. Some of the firs were so deeply encased in snow that Zoe couldn’t see the slightest hint of green. They leaned over in every direction—giant, hooded figures bowing to each other. Snow ghosts, she’d heard them called.
Zoe thought of how much she’d once loved the woods. She remembered running through them in summer, patches of sunlight bright on her skin. She remembered snowshoeing through them on days so crazily cold that it hurt to breathe. She remembered Jonah’s laughter lighting them up, no matter the season. But too much had happened. She feared forests would always feel hostile now—claustrophobic somehow, as if the trees were waiting for her to look away so they could rush at her from all sides.
X’s fever was spiking. When they came to a larch that had fallen across the path, Zoe cleared some snow from the trunk and snapped off a half dozen spindly branches. She helped him sit.
“How much farther?” she said.
She was desperate to get there. And desperate not to.
“Perhaps a half mile,” said X, each word draining him even more. He pointed at the path ahead of them, which was tamped down and streaked with mud. “These tracks,” he said, “are your father’s.”
Zoe’s stomach did its tightening thing, where it felt like someone was turning a wheel. This time, it felt as if her skin was caught in the gears.
“My throat is in flames,” he said. “I feel as if glowing coals were being shoveled down it. Still, there is counsel I would give you, if you will hear it?”
“Of course,” she said.
She sat down next to him on the trunk.
“It is not that your father is an evil man,” said X, his voice a husk. “It is that he is a weak one. You will know it the moment your eyes encounter him.” He paused, collecting his energy. “You will also know that he loves you,” he said. “We are not slaying a dragon today, Zoe—just putting a wounded animal to rest. You will find it harder than you imagine. I have never known my parents—and it seems that I never will—so perhaps I have no right to advise you. However, if you find that you pity your father, you need only look at me and I will know—and I will not take him.”
“Stop it,” said Zoe. “Just stop it. He doesn’t love anybody but himself. I understand that now. You are going to be free. Do I seem like somebody who changes her mind?”
They walked for what felt like much more than half a mile. Maybe it was because the woods were strange. Maybe it was because Zoe was going to see her father. She was so tense now, so alert, that time seemed to crack open and expand just to maximize her anguish.
She was going to see her father—it seemed like such an innocent statement. Except that he was supposed to be dead. Hadn’t she prayed for his soul at the cave? Yet, somehow, her father was still alive. He was up ahead through the trees. Doing god only knew what. Pretending to have no wife, no children, no Zoe, no Jonah, no past. Did they mean so little to him?
Rage seeped through her. She knew one thing she’d tell her father for sure: it was a good thing he’d gotten rid of his name because where he was going they wouldn’t let him keep it anyway.
A squirrel jumped into a tree as they passed, sending snow down the back of Zoe’s neck. She shivered as it melted on her skin. They couldn’t be more than a quarter mile away now—but a quarter mile from what? Knowing her father, he could be living in a house, a cave, an igloo, anything. She peered through the trees. There was no plume of smoke, no sign of life at all.
Suddenly, her phone trilled again.
ME!!!! it said.
“Bug, I can’t talk,” she said, hoping to preempt another tirade.
“Why are you looking at an ocean?” said Jonah, his voice more desperate than before. “You don’t even like oceans! You have to come home, Zoe! Right now, right now, right now! I am still alone and now it’s—it’s either raining or snowing, I can’t tell which. But it’s creepy and loud, and even Spock and Uhura are mad at you because I told them where you were.”
Zoe only half-listened.
The forest thinned out up ahead. The light grew stronger.
X leaned close and whispered, “We will soon be within sight of your father.”
Zoe nodded, and squeezed his hand.
“I gotta go, bug,” she said into the phone. “I’m sorry. I love you.”
“No, Zoe, no!” he said. “If you hang up, I will call back! I will call back thirty-two times!”
“Bug, stop!” she said. “I promise to call you back and make you giggle, okay? I will do whatever it takes. I will tickle you over the phone, if I have to.”
“That’s not even possible, obviously,” he said. “Unless I, like, put the phone in my armpit, and probably not even then.”
She felt guilty for hanging up. Jonah had suffered even more than she had. If she’d cried over her father a hundred times, he had cried a thousand. His eyes had gotten so puffy with tears that he could hardly see, and he’d let out wails that she would never forget.
There were only a hundred yards of forest left.
They could see something through the trees—a field of snow, maybe. A gray sky hung above it.
Zoe took X’s arm, and they followed the path as it snaked through the firs. Anger and fear fought for her attention. The woods were so quiet it was as if the silence, rather than being passive and still, were a living thing that devoured all sounds. It was like the snow. It buried everything.
Just ahead, two snow ghosts leaned toward each other, weary under their heavy white coats. They formed a narrow archway—an exit out of the woods, an entrance to whatever it was that awaited them. Zoe peered between the trees. In the distance, she could see a dark smudge on the snow—a cabin, maybe. A hundred feet and they’d be out of the forest.
She needed this to be over, but she kept slowing down, she couldn’t help it. She kept thinking of that day with Stan. She thought of Spock and Uhura huddled on top of Jonah in the snow, saving his life. She thought of Stan throwing Spock into the freezing water and holding him down with his foot. She thought of X doing the same to Stan. The boot on Stan’s head, the frigid water lapping into his mouth—the images were carved into her. They were her tattoos.
They ducked under the snowy archway. The branches groaned above them. Zoe didn’t trust them to hold. She held her breath, waiting for snow to bury them. She thought of the bird that had flown in for their breakfast—but now, instead of being trapped inside the
hut, it was trapped inside her. She felt its wings banging and thumping in her rib cage.
“I want to talk to my father alone first,” said Zoe.
X began to object. She shook her head to silence him.
“Just give me a few minutes,” she said. “Then you can come and take him. I want him to know what he’s done to us.”
X agreed reluctantly.
“I will watch from the trees,” he said. “If you want me, I will be at your side before you can even finish the thought.”
They plunged out of the archway. The forest fell away and the world rushed out in every direction.
The smudge they had seen was not a cabin and it did not stand on a plain. It was a dingy shed, smaller even than the hut on the beach.
It stood on a frozen lake.
Zoe felt the bird squeeze up into her throat, scratching and choking her and desperate to get out.
In front of them, a small hill ran down toward the lake. They were out in the open now. If Zoe’s father was in the shed, he might see her at any moment. She thought of hiding, but there were no snowbanks or bushes or rocks and, anyway, she was paralyzed. She couldn’t convince her body to move.
The door of the shed swung open. The sound reached her an instant later, like an echo.
It was her father.
It was her father.
He was skinnier than she remembered, and she didn’t recognize his tattered clothes. But she knew the goofy way he walked—the way his head bobbed, the way his lanky arms swung at his sides.
He carried a fishing pole.
She watched as he loped around, his eyes cast downward to inspect the frozen lake. It took her a moment to understand—to see what he saw—and then the bird in her throat let out a screech so sudden and alien that it shocked even her. X clasped her hand.
Her father turned and saw them.
There were a dozen holes in the ice.
nineteen
X watched as Zoe hiked down the hill. Her arms were crossed tightly around her chest. She was staring straight at her father, refusing to let him look away.
X heard noises behind him in the woods. Something was crunching through the snow. He assumed it was an animal and did not turn. He would not take his eyes off Zoe.
The Trembling made it almost unbearable for X to be so close to his prey. His fever burned beneath his skin. His hands had a will of their own, and began to shake at his sides. They were desperate to act—to kill—even if X was repulsed by the thought.
He reminded himself that killing this one last soul would set him free. But freedom was too strange and vast an idea to hold for more than an instant, and it was followed by a crushing guilt. Why must being with Zoe come at another soul’s expense—and why must that soul be her father? The lords had made even freedom seem a sin. He told himself not to think of his bounty as Zoe’s father, but rather as a faceless, nameless creature to be disposed of: a 16th skull to hang around his neck, no different from the 15 others.
A branch snapped behind him. It was a tiny sound but X was so agitated it assaulted his ears. Still, he refused to turn.
Zoe was halfway down the hill now, halfway to her father.
Before X met her, he’d wrenched souls from the Overworld without so much complaining from his conscience. He used to tell himself that he hated it, but, when the time came, he always managed to summon up enough fury to strike his target down. He wondered if he’d been such a fierce bounty hunter because he had the blood of a lord in his veins—or because he’d never lived a true life and never known the value of a soul.
The noises returned. It was not an animal behind him. He knew that now. It was a human being.
A hiker, perhaps, or a hunter.
X could hear the man’s breath.
He could not have someone stumbling on the scene about to unfold. He forced himself to look away from Zoe. He spun back to the trees. He saw a flash of gold through the parted branches of a fir.
Aggravated by the interruption, X stalked back down the path, the trees exploding with snow as he pushed past them. He would terrify whoever it was and send him running. It wouldn’t be difficult. He knew how grim and malevolent he must look with his wild eyes and his hair trailing him, ragged as fire.
The glint of gold was maybe 200 feet back, still hidden by trees. X bore down on the intruder. Whoever it was would surely turn and flee before he’d even reached him.
But something strange happened. Rather than retreating, the figure moved toward him, scudding through the snow.
X himself was being hunted.
Ripper appeared suddenly, breathless and fierce and firing words.
“The lords are coming,” she said. “I am here to warn you.”
X was so shocked to see her that he could not speak. Ripper waited a moment, then continued, her voice rising.
“Struck dumb, are you?” she said. “You must do what you were sent to do. You have dallied too long with your lover. The thing that needs stiffening is your spine! Do you not know how the lords watch you? Do you not know how your insolence makes them seethe? I am ignorant of their plan, but they will surely unleash hell if you betray them again.”
She fell silent, finally. She wore only black boots and her golden dress, which looked like a Christmas ornament against the snow. Her old bounty hunter tattoos peeked out from beneath her lacy sleeves.
“How did you come to be here?” said X.
“That is what you would ask me?” said Ripper angrily. “You have a friend in Regent, and I have a friend in that repulsive Russian. If you must know, I had to promise him a kiss, which I may never forgive you for. I have not kissed anyone for a hundred and eighty-four years, and I had hoped for a grander prize.”
She took X’s arm.
She turned him back toward Zoe’s father.
“Come,” she said. “Let us find that soul that needs taking. I will crush the man’s throat myself if you cannot.”
“I will do what is required,” he said. “But you must return to the Lowlands before your absence is discovered.”
“I will not,” she said. “Not until this thing is done.”
“I insist, Ripper,” he said. “You have endangered yourself enough on my behalf.”
“And I have done it gladly, foolish boy,” she said. “I am to rot for eternity, in any case. I should be glad to think back on the one or two occasions I tried to be kind.”
X accepted this, gratefully. Though the Trembling still pulsed through him, he felt stronger with Ripper by his side.
They walked through the dwindling trees, Ripper’s eyes darting around with fascination. She took in the enormous pines, the streaks of sky, the snowflakes that drifted down like motes of dust. She had collected her last soul many years ago. She hadn’t been in the Overworld for decades.
They stopped at the top of the hill and peered down at the tense figures below. Zoe was just now reaching the lake.
“Is that your blurting girl?” said Ripper.
“And her father,” said X.
Once more the thought of taking the man’s soul filled him with dread.
“This calling of ours,” he said. “Did it never bring you shame? What we call ‘bounties’ are human beings, after all.”
Ripper seemed surprised by the question.
“Surely you do not still think of them as human,” she said. “Was I human when I cracked the skull of that serving girl—or when I left her corpse to grow cold in the street? Was I human when I rendered my babies motherless? No, these souls we take have given up all claims on humanity. They are garbage—and we are dustmen.”
twenty
Zoe’s father stared at her as if she couldn’t be real. His fishing pole fell from his hand and clattered against the ice.
Zoe stomped the last few feet to the lake. Her body was shaking uncontrollably. Vibrating, almost. She hated it—it made her seem weak. She wanted her father to feel nothing from her but disgust. She wanted him to know, even before she spoke, t
hat she loathed him, that she saw him for what he was, that he had gotten away with nothing.
But the sight of him stirred up tenderness, too. She hadn’t expected that. Part of her wanted to run to him. He was her father. He used to cut her sandwiches into ridiculous shapes—once he used a cookie cutter to cut a star out of the middle. He used to tell her bedtime stories and insert her into famous moments in history—she’d cured smallpox, begged Decca Records not to reject the Beatles, and refused to board the Titanic when she heard there were only 20 lifeboats. You couldn’t count on him, but when he hugged you, you really felt hugged.
No. He was vile. He was poison. She didn’t have to know what he’d done with Stan when he was young, she didn’t have to know exactly why X was taking him—because she knew what he’d done to her family. He had deserted them. He was the domino that pushed all the others down.
The lake was fringed with dead reeds poking up through the snow. Zoe picked her way through them, still holding her father’s eyes. The thoughts in her head were dizzying: love, hate, forgiveness, revenge.
Her boot struck a rock in the reeds. She stumbled forward.
She landed on her knees on the ice, furious with herself for being so clumsy. When she looked up again, her father had broken out of his daze and was scrambling to help her.
“Zoe!” he called.
The sight of his teary face rushing toward her was too much. It softened her and repulsed her all in the same moment.
“Don’t touch me,” she screamed. “Are you kidding?”
She had never spoken to him like that before—not once in her life.
Her father backed away, palms in the air, indicating that he meant no harm. He seemed startled by the rage radiating from her.
He hung his head.
He can’t even look at me, thought Zoe. The coward.
She got to her feet. She brushed the ice from her clothes.
“How did you find me—and who are they?” her father said, gesturing to the hill behind her.
Zoe was stunned to see X standing with a woman she’d never seen before. She knew from her golden dress—and her coolly ferocious air—that it was Ripper.