Zoe pulled away from him.
“Why?” she said.
His mind spun in search of an answer.
“Why should I stop them?” she said.
“Because I am asking you to, Zoe,” he said. “Because I am begging you to. Because everything depends upon it.” He was going too far. He was saying too much. “Because I will destroy the cave with my own hands before I let anyone venture into it.”
Zoe recoiled from him.
“What is wrong with you?” she said. “Why should I stop them? I’m going to keep asking until you answer me. And you know me—I can go all night.”
This time, he interrupted her before she could get the question out.
“Nothing but the most desperate pain can be found in that cave,” he said. “You might recover from it, but I am not so strong as you, Zoe. I could not bear to watch rags made of your heart.”
His tenderness had no effect.
“You’re not answering me,” Zoe said angrily. “Why should I leave my father’s body in a hole? He would never have left me. Why shouldn’t we go into the cave? Tell. Me. Why.”
X felt the answer fly up his throat, like a sickness.
“Because your father is not there,” he said. “And because you are wrong—he did leave you. He left all of you.”
Zoe staggered back a step, her face suddenly unrecognizable.
“What are you talking about?” she said.
He stepped toward her. She drew back, as if in fear.
“What are you talking about?”
“The lords gave me one last commission—one last soul I must take if I am to be free,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “Banger told me.”
“The soul they sent me for, Zoe—it was your father,” said X. “He is alive. I have seen him.”
The color was gone from Zoe’s face now. He reached for her again. She wouldn’t let him touch her.
“You’ve—you’ve seen my father?”
“In Canada,” he said. “On a barren coast. Not so many hours ago.”
Zoe shook her head.
“It couldn’t have been my father,” she said. “Tell me how you knew. Tell me exactly what he said.”
“We spoke but little,” said X. “He gave off a strong scent of fish. He begged my pardon for it—he said he had been fishing through the ice.”
Zoe’s eyes suddenly flared with hope.
“My father didn’t fish,” she said. “He didn’t know how. If he knew how, I would know how. He would have taught me.”
“It may be that he has learned,” X said gently. “This is a man who fled his life—who shed even his name. I suspect he lives on the margins and in the shadows now. He calls himself Leo Wrigley.”
This last detail seemed to wound Zoe more than anything that had come before.
“We used to have a cat named Wrigley,” she said, her voice breaking. “And Leo is—it’s Jonah’s middle name.” She was quiet a moment. “What else did he say? This is insane.”
X searched his mind. He had spent so few moments with the man—and he had been in such a tortured state.
“He praised the rock we were sheltered under,” he said. “He said it was sandstone, and remarked on how ‘freakin’ awesome’ it was. I grieve to tell you, Zoe. But it was your father.”
Zoe burst into sobs.
He reached out to her again, and yet again she shrank away. Not being able to touch her was excruciating. X clenched his hands so tightly that his nails drew blood.
“Did you—did you take him?” said Zoe. “Did you take my father to the Lowlands?”
“No, Zoe,” said X. “How could I? He sits on that beach still, for all I know.”
“What did my father do?” she said. “What were his crimes?”
“Do not ask me,” said X. “Spare yourself something.”
Zoe rubbed frenziedly at her eyes, but the tears kept coming.
“I need to know at least a little,” she said. “I mean, it was bad, what he did? Bad, like … bad, like you’re used to?”
X shivered. Every word she spoke pierced him, but the words he was forced to speak in return were worse somehow—because they pierced her.
“Much of it occurred in his youth,” he said. “Yet—”
Zoe could not wait for him to complete the thought.
“Yet what?” she said.
“Yet I have taken souls for less,” he said. “There was blood on his hands when he was still a young man. And there is fresh blood on them today.”
He watched as the last remnants of hope drained out of Zoe.
“What happens now?” she said.
He reached out to her a final time, and this time she let him hold her.
“I regret this answer above all the others,” he said. “What happens now is for you to decide. Either your father goes free—or I do.”
X waited for what felt like years for Zoe to speak.
“Take me to him,” she said finally. “Take me to my father.”
Her voice sounded so hard now. X turned from her. He stared down at the feeble metal fence, which shook and rattled in the wind.
“Please,” she added. “Or I’ll go myself. I’ll find a way. You know I will.”
“Yet what will you say to him, Zoe?” X said. He did not look back at her. He couldn’t. “And what will you have me do? Will you ask me to stop your own father’s breath? Will you watch as I circle his neck with my fingers? And, once I am done, will you ever be able to look at me again?”