X lurched toward the house now, too. No one made a move to stop him, for they knew he was too late. Every time he took a step, another wall crumbled, another ceiling fell. The bedroom where he had slept, the living room where he had answered questions from the silver bowl: everything was crushed, unrecognizable, gone.
In his mind, he saw only Zoe. He remembered how she looked on the lake where her father had been fishing—the way her eyes went wide with fear. I don’t think they’re coming after us. I think they’re going after Jonah. He saw her reach up to embrace him. He felt it so clearly that it was as if she were right there in front of him. He remembered the things they said to each other in those last moments. He remembered the way her heart had hovered over his own for a fraction of a second before touching down gently, as if docking there. He had pressed his lips to hers for so long she’d finally pulled away in alarm.
“You’re kissing me like I’m never going to see you again,” she’d said. “Stop it.”
She’d looked at him sternly.
“If you don’t come back, I’ll commit some horrible crime just so I get sent to the Lowlands,” she said. She was trying to be funny, but she’d begun to cry. “Ripper will come get me—won’t you, Ripper? And when I get there, I will find you, X. I will find you wherever you are, and I will act really obnoxious and dress really inappropriately, and I will tell everyone that I’m your girlfriend.”
She paused. Tried to pull herself together. Couldn’t.
“Promise me again that you’ll come back,” she said. “Promise me the way you promised me before. I want to hear the ‘two worlds’ thing.”
X leaned forward to kiss her once more. His face was so feverish it felt like a lantern.
“I will come back,” said X. “If I do not return, it is only because not one but two worlds conspired to stop me.”
Only then could she let him go.
Zoe’s mother lay doubled over in the snow, wailing. X tried to block out the sound—his heart couldn’t bear it.
“Jonah! Jonah! Jonah! Mommy’s here, baby! Mommy’s here!”
Ripper knelt beside her. She put an arm around her and pulled her close, as if trying to share the pain. X looked away. Even the tenderness was too much. He hated himself for what he had done. There had been a wall separating two worlds—a wall that stood there for a reason. He had burned it down.
He was innocent once. He was not innocent anymore. He’d finally made himself worthy of his cell.
The house gave a last shriek and sank into itself. The screeching and rumbling was terrifying, but the silence that followed was worse. Zoe’s mother stood and rushed into the rubble, desperate to find her son’s body—desperate to hold it in her arms.
Dervish strutted toward her.
“Tell me, woman,” he called out, “are you aware of who it is that caused you all this pain? Are you aware of who savaged your family and brought down your house?”
Zoe’s mother was searching frantically through the wreckage. She stopped for a moment. She straightened up, and turned.
“He did,” she said.
She was pointing at X.
Dervish smiled, his tiny rodent’s teeth flashing.
“A wise answer,” he said. “Perhaps you can convince him to return to the Lowlands before I must extinguish your heartbeat, too.”
“Why don’t you just take him yourself?” cried Zoe’s mother. “Why don’t you take him right now instead of—instead of all this?”
“A superlative question!” said Dervish. “FINALLY I meet someone intelligent! Our friend X must come willingly so that I know he has learned his lesson well—and truly been brought to heel. Also, madam, I will not lie to you: ‘all this,’ as you call it, is more fun.”
Dervish motioned to the other lords. They swirled toward him in unison. They raced over the snow toward the decimated sea of trees that used to be a forest—Zoe would have said they zoomed—and vanished one by one.
X drew close to Ripper, his face a picture of agony.
“I will not be the cause of more savagery,” he said. “I will return to the Lowlands as the lords demand, but first I must ask a final kindness of you.”
“I will do anything you ask, even if it involves mayhem or murder,” said Ripper. She thought for a second, then added, “Especially if it does.”
“I ask only that you carry a message to Zoe,” said X. “Tell her the Lowlands will not hold me long. Tell her that, even as I grovel at the lords’ feet, I will secretly do the very things I am promised are impossible. I will find my parents—and I will find a way back to her. Whatever portion of ‘forever’ I am allowed, I mean to spend with her.”