“Have I,” said X. “Sins?”
“My god, you’re crying,” said Plum. “Of course you have no sins! I thought you knew that—you told me yourself that you were born here! I promise you, the ceiling was so white it made us all glow. The light warmed our faces! It was like nothing anyone of us had ever seen. All right? All right.”
X felt Plum’s hand on his shoulder. It hurt to be touched, but again, he allowed the kindness in.
“The Countess was livid,” Plum continued. “You’d promised her great sins. She expected a feast! She pressed the knife to your cheek, but before she could do anything else, she had a seizure of some sort. She tore open the collar of her dress. It turns out that she wears a gold band beneath it. She grabbed the thing like it was choking her—like she wanted to rip it from her neck. It was as if the band itself knew you were innocent, and refused to let her punish you.”
X knew it was not actually the gold band, but the Higher Power that ruled the Lowlands acting through it.
Plum resumed his account.
“The Countess shoved you off the altar,” he said. “You fell like a deadweight and your bones made a loud crack. Sorry—is that too vivid? I raced forward to pick you up. You don’t need to thank me. I failed. You are quite heavy. Shiloh? The soldier? He was still flabbergasted by what you’d done for him, so he tried to help me lift you, but since the Countess had shredded his foot he could barely walk himself. It was actually the knight who carried you here. He’s quite a fan of yours now. I think he’d follow you into battle with what little armor he has left. As for me, I did manage to at least carry your coat.”
When Plum finally finished, he let X rest, though X could sense his worried friend checking on him regularly. X still felt a pain so widespread in his body that it seemed to have replaced his bones. But he felt a contradictory sense of relief now, too: taking souls as a bounty hunter had not blackened his heart. Zoe would say she wasn’t surprised in the least. She’d pretend that she had never questioned that he was, as the Ukrainian had said of Plum, “good at bottom.” But then … Then she would pull him to her and hold him so fiercely that he would know she was secretly relieved, grateful, proud. “I knew all along, you dork,” she’d say. “Of course I knew. But you needed to know.”
It was true. He did.
X stared up at the black dome of the ceiling. He couldn’t remember everything that had happened on the altar. But one memory lingered. It was something the Countess had said. X struggled to call it forth, like someone trying to coax back a dream.
Finally, the memory X had been tugging at came loose.
“Take the foil packet from my coat and give it to me, if you would?” he told Plum.
“Can it wait until you’ve rested?” said Plum. “You’ve had a shock.”
“It cannot,” said X. “I have hold of a thought, and fear losing it.”
He rolled onto his side so Plum could fish the packet out of the coat, which lay beneath him, and asked him to show him the broken bracelet that read Vesuvius.
“You’ve seen the bracelet a thousand times,” said Plum. “There’s nothing different about it now. This absolutely could have waited. You are a very irritating patient.”
X only half-listened.
The Countess’s words echoed in his head: If that damnable feline erupts again, the Countess shall stop its breath. Would that the creature had been named for something mute, like a statue or the wind.
X ran his thumb over the lettering on the bracelet.
“You said Vesuvius was a volcano,” he said. “A legendary one.”
“Yes,” said Plum. “Can I put the bracelet back now, please?”
If that damnable feline erupts again … Would that the creature had been named for something mute …
X looked at Plum, who was staring at him with an unconvincing approximation of sternness.
“I don’t believe this is a bracelet at all,” said X. “I believe it is a collar.”
He didn’t pause for Plum to absorb this, but rather hurried on. He had to get the words out.
“And I believe Vesuvius is a cat.”
twelve
The Countess was still hungry for sins. She barked for Oedipus and Rex, and set off down the hill in search of evil to feed on.
It was harder for X to watch this time, for he knew what to expect—the screams of a soul dragged up through the crowd, the light on the ceiling, the flashing knife, the sickening cheers. He also knew that if he himself had given her an infested soul to feast on, she wouldn’t be searching for another.
Seeing the Countess descend, Plum sat cross-legged and began to meditate. X was jealous that his friend could escape that way, that he could disappear inside himself like a flower closing. X’s own brain was in turmoil. If Vesuvius belonged to the Countess, then the items in the foil had belonged to her, too—and only she could tell X where his mother was imprisoned. His mother had been friends with this woman? The thought of it rattled him. The Countess was as repugnant a soul as X had ever encountered—she was Dervish in a dress.
The souls on the hill dove out of the Countess’s way. To distract himself, X stared down at his silver packet, hoping to see something he had never seen before. But unlike Vesuvius’s collar, the remaining items told him nothing. Every one of them was a door that wouldn’t open.
Frustrated, X put the packet away. He looked up at the empty plateau: the rough-hewn altar, the absurd canopied bed, the wooden box that held Vesuvius. He remembered the mess of scratches he’d noticed on the Countess’s hands. They must have been Vesuvius’s work. How the animal must have hated her!
Just as X was about to look away, Vesuvius began to moan. It was a tentative cry at first, a question almost: Is anyone there? Not five seconds passed before the cat repeated his question more loudly: Is anyone there? Anyone?
It was agonizing to hear, and X saw a great number of souls turn their attention toward the cat. Vesuvius’s cries grew even starker. They seemed to branch out in the air, like they were searching for something, for someone. It struck X as an incredibly lonely sound. X had been damned for no reason at all. Maybe it was foolish or sentimental, but hearing Vesuvius wail, he knew he’d found a creature even more innocent and undeserving of pain than himself. Even Plum, without opening his eyes, murmured, “Poor thing. Poor, poor thing.”
There were noises from below. Someone was creeping up through the crowd. It was the woman in the servant’s dress and the bloodied apron. She was approaching the forbidden borderland beneath the plateau.
X guessed that the woman was from the early 20th century. Her shiny black hair was parted, pulled back into a bun, and covered by a white kerchief. Her apron hung around her neck and flowed past her knees. Her dress was a long, severe black garment that swallowed everything but her hands and feet.
X watched as she stepped into the borderland. He remembered how the Countess had sliced open the backs of the elderly man’s legs just for being pushed into it. He looked down the hill to see where the lord and the boxers were now. They had disappeared over a crest, but there was no telling when they would make their way back. X knew nothing about the servant woman, but now he was terrified for her.
He remembered what she had said to the Countess: “Let me comfort him. He doesn’t belong in a box.”
So that was it. She was coming to console the cat.