X heard a flurry of noises outside the garage: Voices. The rustling of clothes. Boots in the snow.
The door rose with a shivery screech, and the wind rushed in around him. He felt feverish, nauseated, depleted. Every sound was like a detonation in his head.
He looked up and saw three figures approaching in a funnel of light. It was the girl from the lake and her brother. A woman stood in front, shielding them. Their mother, surely. X winced and closed his eyes, as if it would make them disappear. He wasn’t afraid that they would do him harm. He was afraid they’d try to save him.
X knew he couldn’t be saved. Bounty hunters like him were just glorified prisoners, and they were bound by laws. He had been reckless—he had trampled on every one of them.
The most ancient commandment was None Must Know, meaning that mortals could never learn of the Lowlands’ existence. It could never be more than a story they told one another, a legend about a lake of fire they called hell. They could never have proof. That way, the living could be judged on how they behaved when they thought there would be no consequences. Bounty hunters were never to be seen by anyone but their prey. They were to strike quickly: in shadows and in silence.
X had put himself on parade. He’d spoken to the girl. He’d carried her and her brother through the stark woods. Worst of all, he had let the soul he’d been sent to collect escape into the trees, like a virus gone airborne. Had a bounty hunter ever failed to return with the soul the lords had sent him for? Had a bounty hunter ever refused to do his duty? X had never heard of such an outrage, until he had committed it himself.
And why had he been so weak? Why had he let Stan vanish into the hills? Because the girl had wanted him to.
No, there could be no saving him now. The fever that racked his body was called the Trembling. It was his punishment, and it had only just begun.
A day earlier, X had lain entombed in his cell in the Lowlands, a wholly different pain just beginning to stir.
He didn’t know if it was day or night—he never did—for the prison was plunged deep in the earth, like a tumor. He’d been trying to sleep for hours. He lay on his side, curled like a question mark on the rocky floor, when the ever-present bruises beneath his eyes began to burn. He ignored it at first, desperate for rest. But the pain grew until it was as if his face was on fire.
It was a sign—a signal. One of the lords would come for him soon and force him to capture some new soul.
X had heard stories about a Higher Power that ruled the Lowlands, but the lords were the most ferocious creatures he’d ever encountered. There were both men and women in their number, and they’d once been prisoners themselves. Now they were a race unto themselves. They wore golden bands that lay tight around their throats, and vivid cloaks that flashed in the gloom. Like the prisoners they ruled over—X knew of only one exception—the lords did not age. The ones who had been damned when they were young remained young forever. Often they were gorgeous and stately. The oldest, however, were a walking nightmare. X sometimes saw the elders stalking around the Lowlands, hissing and howling and sharpening their curling talons on the rocks. Some had long gray hair that rippled down their backs and bony hands that pulsed with veins as fat as worms. When X looked at their faces, he could see their skulls trying to press through.
He wondered which lord would come for him now—and to which corner of the earth he would be sent.
X must have drifted off. He woke up shouting.
The prisoner in the cell to his right, who was known as Banger, had overheard the exclamation.
“Bad dream, dude?” he said. “Heard you freaking out.”
The souls were forbidden from knowing each other’s true names, and Banger had earned his nickname in the simplest way possible: by beating his forehead on the floor to ease his mental anguish. Banger had been a bartender in Phoenix. It wasn’t long ago that, in a fit of rage, he had stabbed a patron in a bar. Then he’d fled to South America, abandoning his wife and four-year-old daughter. Banger was 27 when X hauled him to the Lowlands. Now he would be 27 for all eternity. The lords didn’t allow the guards to beat the prisoners, because they knew the prisoners found pain a welcome distraction. Banger, and many souls besides him, did violence to themselves instead.
X walked to the door of his cell and peered down the corridor, hoping a guard would quiet his neighbor. The nearest one, a giant Russian with a lame foot who wore a blue tracksuit and aviator sunglasses for no reason whatsoever, was 30 yards away.
“You heard not a word,” X told Banger, “for I spoke not a word.”
A third voice joined their conversation without warning: “Dissembler, dissembler, dissembler!”
It was Ripper, who occupied the cell to X’s left. To distract herself from her own searing thoughts, Ripper ripped her fingernails from their beds, then waited impatiently for them to grow so she could wrench them out once more. Back in the 19th century, in London, she had watched one of her servants spill soup onto the lap of a dinner guest. She’d stood up from her chair, followed the young woman to the kitchen—and killed her with a single blow of a boiling teakettle. Afterward, she instructed two footmen to deposit the servant’s body on the cobblestones behind the house. She knew the police would be too intimidated by her wealth to question her. Ripper had been 36 for nearly 200 years.
Many of X’s fellow prisoners were wretched men and women whose souls had been transported to the Lowlands when they died. A smaller number, like Banger and Ripper, had been snatched out of their lives by bounty hunters when earthly justice failed to punish them.
Ripper was now pacing in her cell and loudly reciting a poem from her youth: “‘Deceiver, dissembler / Your trousers are alight / From what pole or gallows / Shall they dangle in the night?’”
She was a beautiful, formidable woman. She had trained X to be a bounty hunter, and dozens of others, as well. Lately, however, she seemed separated from insanity by the width of a dime.
X glanced down the corridor again. The Russian guard had heard Ripper ranting, and was on his way, dragging his left foot behind him.
Banger hissed at Ripper: “Jesus, Rip, shut it, would you?”
“But he is a deceiver! I heard his exclamation as well!”
“Okay, fine,” said Banger. “But chill the hell out. And by the way, the real version of that thing is, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire / Hang them from a telephone wire.’ Just sayin’.”
This caused Ripper to cackle.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “I shall alert Mr. William Blake to his error when next we meet.”
The Russian arrived and poked his club through the bars of Ripper’s cell.
“Vy sexy lady talk so much?” he said. “Must shut mouth.”
“I already warned her, dude,” said Banger. “I’m on it.”
The guard shuffled over to Banger’s cell.
“I am not needing assistance of dung beetle like you,” he said. “Please to shut up, also.”
“Or what?” said Banger. “You gonna hit me? Oh, that’s right: you can’t. Because your job suuucks. Do you even get health care? You obviously don’t get dental.”
“If anyone is to be struck, it should be moi,” Ripper interjected. “I must insist, I really must.”
The guard cursed, then shuffled back to Ripper’s cell. After a furtive look around, he gave her a quick jab with his club. She was cooing with pleasure when he limped away.
“Nothing for me?” Banger called after him.
“Nyet,” said the guard, “because you are jackass.”
Silence reigned awhile. X lay back on the rocky ground, the bones of his face still glowing with pain. Just as his heart had begun to settle, he heard Banger’s annoying whisper.
“Talk to me, man,” he said. “Tell me your life story. I’ll tell you mine.”
X fought back a wave of anger. He had no desire to talk. He spoke harshly to snuff out the conversation.
“Banger, your story is well-known to me,” he said. “Do you forget that it was I who conveyed you to this place? Or that it was I who trained you to be a bounty hunter just as Ripper trained me? I know your crimes only too well. Hearing them again would only disgust me.”
“Jeez,” said Banger. “Way to be a dick.”
When it was quiet again, X closed his eyes, already regretting his outburst. He had collected 14 souls for the lords of the Lowlands, and Banger was by no means the worst of them. But X hated telling his story: it only reminded him of the injustices of his life.
X had committed no crime.
He was an innocent.
Unlike every other soul he’d ever encountered, he did not know why he had been condemned. He did not know what outrage he had supposedly committed—or even how or when he might have committed it. But rather than making him feel pure, X’s confusion only convinced him that there was something vile and corrupt in his heart that he would one day discover.
The pain beneath his eyes was excruciating now.
It was time.
Even Banger knew it. He was standing at the bars of his cell, gazing out.
“You got company, stud,” he said.
X looked through the bars, his heart like a drum.
A lord had leaped from the stony plain, and was hurtling at him through the air.
The prisoners were forbidden from knowing the lords’ names, as well. But the personage who swept into X’s cell now had a royal, African bearing and was quietly referred to as Regent, out of respect for his proud posture, his great height, and his shining, ebony skin.
X lay down on his back, readying for the ritual that was to come.
Regent came and towered above him, the golden band around his throat and the brilliant blue of his robe shimmering in the darkness.
He lowered his hand over X’s face like a mask, and began intoning a speech X had heard many times before.
“The Lowlands require another soul for its collection,” he intoned. “He is an evil man—unrepentant and unpunished. I bring you his hateful name. Will you receive this name and will you bring the man to me on his knees?”
“I will,” said X.
“Will you defend the secrecy of our world all the while? Will you defend the ancient, inviolable wall between the living and the dead just as bounty hunters have defended it since before time was even scratched in stone?” said Regent.
“I will,” said X.
The lord gripped X’s face harder with his taloned hand. X’s skull seemed to ignite. The pain coursed down his neck, traversed his shoulders, and so on until it had consumed him entirely. He could not breathe. He knew from the 14 previous occasions that the terror would pass, yet he could not prevent himself from bucking and kicking. The lord’s hand pressed down harder still.
But X did not think Regent cruel. Even as the lord held him fast, he stroked X’s hair paternally with his other hand, taking care that his nails did not lacerate X’s skin. Soon something behind X’s eyes burst like a dam, and he saw nothing but an overpowering whiteness. When he retrieved his senses, he found himself in the Overworld—on a mountain, in a blizzard.
Regent had set a man’s sins swimming in X’s veins.
X was like a dog who’d been given the scent of his prey.
Now he could hunt.
The man’s name was a boring little brick: Stan. It wasn’t just Stan’s story that rushed through X’s blood, but also the story of everyone whose lives he had infected. There was an old couple called Bert and Betty. There was a boy lost in the woods without a coat or gloves. A pair of dogs.
And a girl.
X could have summoned her face and pictured it with perfect clarity, but he was careful not to. He merely glimpsed her out of the corner of his mind’s eye, and saw enough to know that she was too lovely—too fierce and full of hope—for him to recover from.