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 letting 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.