One of the things that Zoe found hardest was that she couldn’t tell Val and Dallas the whole story—the before and the after. How could she? It sounded implausible even to her. So just when she needed to talk most—to vent and grieve—her life had become about managing secrets.
Should she tell them that the nightmare had started with her father? That he had been such a failure as a businessman that he’d sunk to committing crimes with a childhood friend—and that the childhood friend was a sociopath named Stan Manggold? Should she tell them that her father had suggested they rob the Wallaces? That he got scared and had second thoughts? That, when Stan blackmailed him, he was such a coward that he faked his own death in a cave, abandoned his family and ran?
Zoe tried not to let the memories in. But as she pulled up to a stop sign, the Taurus bounced hard in a rut and in that instant, in that tiny moment of fear, her defenses went down and everything came rushing back, like birds to a bare tree.
Stan had gone through with the robbery alone, and murdered Bert and Betty while he was at it. Weeks later, during a blizzard, he returned to their house, convinced they had money stashed somewhere. Zoe and Jonah were there, waiting out the storm. It made Zoe sick just to remember Stan’s face: the pockmarked skin, the pink slash of a mouth, the creepy white eyebrow that wriggled like a caterpillar.
Zoe checked for traffic before turning left. There was a fluorescent green SUV coming. It slowed to let her pull out. Dallas was still freestyling—his rap seemed to be exclusively about how good his rap was—but he paused long enough to say, “Look out for the deer.”
There were two of them up ahead in the wet field, a doe and her fawn. They were just nosing around in the dead grass. They weren’t going anywhere.
“I see them,” said Zoe.
Dallas started rapping again.
“My rhymes are unstoppable / Like a photo that’s uncroppable.”
Val, miserable, banged her forehead against the dashboard.
Zoe remembered seeing X for the first time. He had come to take Stan’s soul to the Lowlands. X was just a blur, a streak of light shooting across the frozen lake near the Wallaces’ house. Zoe begged X to let Stan go. She told him that it was wrong to kill somebody—that it wasn’t his job. She hadn’t known then that it actually was.
Zoe checked the rearview mirror. The SUV was too close. It was a new model, its front end designed to look like a sports car. Even if it hadn’t been a pukey green, it would have looked ridiculous. Its license plate was RELOADN.
Great, thought Zoe, a hunter.
She slowed, and waved the driver around, but the guy just flicked his high beams so she’d hurry up.
“Seriously?” she said.
She glanced at the deer. They had started toward the road, but she’d be gone by the time they made it there.
How do you tell your friends that you’ve fallen for a bounty hunter from the underworld? How do you tell them that you jeopardized your life for him, and that you would do it again right now, right this very second? Val and Dallas wouldn’t even know what the Lowlands were. She’d have to call the place hell. How do you say a sentence like that out loud? Would it help if she told them that X was an innocent, that he was born in the Lowlands? That he was a prisoner himself—and for no reason? The lords sent X to collect evil souls from the world from time to time, but that just reminded him of the life he could never have. The minute he returned with a soul, the lords threw him back into his cell, like it was a mouth they were feeding.
X had forged a family in the Lowlands. One of the lords who ruled the place, Regent, protected him as much as he could. And there was a badass British woman named Ripper who’d trained X to be a bounty hunter. She had worn the same golden ball gown since 1832, when she was damned to the Lowlands for beating a clumsy servant to death with a teakettle. Zoe had met Ripper and loved her, despite the thing with the teakettle. Ripper was on the run from the Lowlands now. She was up in the real world somewhere, searching for her children’s graves, which she had never seen.
So, yes, there were people who cared about X even in that hole in the earth. But the unfairness of him spending his life in a cell when he’d never done anything wrong, when he’d never even lived—it hollowed Zoe out.
She couldn’t tell Val and Dallas any of this. How could she? They were right there, but they were a thousand miles away.
Zoe gripped the steering wheel harder, and sank into her thoughts. She was only dimly aware of Dallas rapping, of Val riffling the orange index cards impatiently, of the SUV surging behind her, of the farmlands flowing past.
“Deer,” Dallas said again.
Zoe nodded, and sped up. The driver in the SUV closed the gap between them, then flicked his high beams again.
People: the worst.
Zoe remembered X carrying her and Jonah home through the woods after she convinced him to let Stan go. She remembered how dazed and feverish he got because he hadn’t done what the lords told him to do. X spent days recovering at the Bissells’ house, sleeping in Jonah’s bed, which was shaped like a ladybug, and bathing in the freezing river. But then Stan murdered someone else. X, battered by guilt, left Zoe to hunt him down again and bring him to the Lowlands. Zoe remembered the way X kissed her good-bye—he’d lifted her off the slushy driveway because she only had socks on.
Once X was back in the underworld, he had demanded his freedom. The lords made him a cruel offer: he could be free forever if he returned to the world and brought them one more soul.
But the soul was Zoe’s father.
X had searched for him, and found him in the woods in Canada. He brought Zoe there so she could confront her father about what he’d done to her family.
In the end, X couldn’t bring himself to take the man’s life. The lords of the Lowlands were enraged. They lashed out at Zoe’s family to remind X that he’d failed again and that he was theirs forever. An unhinged lord named Dervish led the attack, destroying the Bissells’ house and nearly killing Jonah. So X dove back into the earth. He had sacrificed himself because he refused to do anything that hurt Zoe. But his leaving—what could have hurt her more?
Hundreds of times a day, Zoe would think of him and, just for an instant, it was like he stood in front of her: gorgeous, pale, afraid of nothing, wanting only her. A half second later she’d remember that he was gone. The heat and the hope would vanish and it was like she’d been punched in the gut. But this was the thing: That instant before the pain leveled her? The moment before the remembering? It was worth it.
“DEER!” said Dallas. “Zoe, what the hell?”
The doe and the fawn had jumped the ditch that ran along the side of the road. They were racing to cross in front of the car.
A spike of dread hit Zoe’s blood.
She stepped on the gas, but the pathetic, piece-of-shit car had zero pickup. Val clenched for a crash.
The SUV was practically on top of them.
RELOADN—what did he care if Zoe hit the deer? He’d have the doe strapped to his roof within minutes. He didn’t see deer, he saw venison.
You weren’t supposed to swerve to avoid a deer. It was better to run into them than to cause an accident. Zoe knew it. Everybody in Montana did. The guy who’d taught Driver’s Ed—sad-faced and chubby and always wearing the same chocolate-brown sweater, which was unraveling at the wrist—started every class by saying, “I want to go to your weddings, not your funerals.”
Zoe had maybe a second and a half to decide what to do.
She had seen what deer looked like when they died. She’d heard the deceptively soft thump they made when the bumper hit them. She’d seen how they went rigid in a split second, how they flew through the air, stiff as stuffed animals.
She knew she should hit the doe and the fawn, but—maybe it was because she’d been thinking about X—all she saw when she looked at them was innocent creatures.
The fawn struggled to keep up with its mother. Its rickety legs were a blur, its frail back speckled white, as if with snowflakes. She could see its big, wet eyes.
Dammit.
Zoe stomped on the brake.