He needed to see Zoe’s face. He needed to be sure she hadn’t changed her mind.
X turned to her father, and found that he was gaping at him in shock. He held a strange, twisted piece of metal in his hands. Dark water was pooling at his feet.
He seemed to recognize X from their moment on the beach the day before. X could see him replaying the conversation in his head:
“Is this your first time in Canada?”
“Is this Canada?”
X motioned for Ripper to stay behind. She made a small, pouty sound, and stopped walking, the hem of her dress waving above her boots. X went ahead alone.
Yet again he looked to Zoe—and finally she turned.
Her face was aflame with anger. X had never seen her features so distorted. She looked ready to kill her father herself.
She rushed toward X.
She embraced him, but for the first time she felt cold and stiff. Utterly unlike herself. She gripped his arm so hard he could feel her nails even through his coat.
She gestured toward her father.
“He’s the reason Stan killed Bert and Betty,” she said.
“Yes,” said X grimly. “He is.”
“Take him,” said Zoe.
X was startled by her fury. Had he done this to her? While she had been teaching him about kindness, had he been teaching her about rage? He tried to banish this new fear—tried to unthink the thought—but it had taken hold. Its roots were spreading.
Nonetheless, he nodded.
“Go to Ripper,” he said. “Walk to the woods. Do not look back.”
Ripper stepped forward. X did not know how she would greet Zoe—he prayed she would not be sarcastic or manic or dance in some outlandish way—nor how Zoe would respond in her present state.
They were tentative at first, but seemed to recognize something in each other. X could not stop studying them. It occurred to him that they were the only two people who had ever held him, had ever praised him, had ever loved him. He could see his entire life—everything that was decent and humane—in their faces. When X was young, he hadn’t understood that Ripper cared for him as if he were one of her own lost children. He understood it now. He watched as Zoe’s rage began to melt in her presence. He watched as Ripper put an arm around her shoulder, like a great, warm wing.
“I feel as if we are already well acquainted, dear girl,” she said. “Perhaps it is because X made me read your letter aloud twenty-five times.”
Zoe smiled weakly.
X watched as they crossed the lake, their arms linked, their heads touching gently. He heard Ripper tell Zoe that the lords were on their way.
“But they’ll leave us alone once X takes my dad?” said Zoe. “Right?”
“Perhaps they will,” said Ripper.
“What if he decides he can’t take him?” said Zoe.
“I suspect they will make X watch as they murder you in some colorful way,” said Ripper in an incongruously sweet voice. “But perhaps that is too obvious? The lords are a mystery, I confess. One never knows when they will feel the need to be creative.”
X turned at last toward his bounty, who was cowering against the shed and gripping the weird piece of metal as if it might protect him. X tried to tell himself that the man meant nothing to him, that his fate was of his own making, that his only name was 16th Soul.
But when he gazed at him, all he saw was Zoe’s father.
All he saw were Jonah’s eyes.
X pulled the metal out of the man’s hands. He flung it across the ice. It skidded to the far edge of the lake before coming to rest in a clump of dead reeds.
“Have you any other toys we should dispose of?” said X.
The father was too frightened to speak. He looked pleadingly at X—and then he ran.
Why did they always run? Every one of them had run! What made them imagine they could get away?
X watched as Zoe’s father raced for the shore, stumbling and slipping as he went. It was a pathetic spectacle. He remembered telling Zoe that her father was not evil, just weak. Had she not believed him? Could she really hate such a pitiful person, or was she just reeling from the shock and rage? Would she blame X tomorrow—and forever after—for what she’d told him to do today?
With a flick of his hand, X yanked the man back—it was as if he were on an invisible tether—and dashed him against the wooden shed. He left him suspended there, his feet dangling above the ground. With a few more gestures, he sent ice crawling like murderous ivy toward the man’s hands and feet. Zoe’s father watched helplessly as it bound him to the shed.
“What do you want from me?” he said miserably. “You can take anything I have. You can take anything you want.”
“Yes,” said X darkly. “I know.”
“So what do you want?” said Zoe’s father.
X unbuttoned his coat and let it fall to the ice in a heap.
“Just your soul,” he said, “which you have made poor use of.”
X cast his eyes around the lake.
“Which of these holes do you choose for your grave?”
Zoe’s father flailed wildly, but the ice held him fast.
X ignored his exertions—he had seen such desperation many times—and pulled his shirt over his head. The man’s sins were so eager to show themselves that X’s back was burning.
He had to turn off his mind, had to shut out the man’s questions, had to stop looking at his eyes.
X’s body knew what to do. He just had to let his body do it.