Eventually, Zoe returned and insisted he come inside. She put a blanket around him, and placed a hand consolingly on his shoulder.
“Stan’s gone,” she said. “You couldn’t go after him if you wanted to.”
X couldn’t bear to be touched. The bee in his skull had been joined by a dozen others. He pushed Zoe away—more roughly than he intended.
“It is my duty to hunt him down, even if he flees to the end of the earth,” he said. “It is all I am made for.”
Zoe backed away.
“You can’t go,” she said.
“And yet I can’t stay here—pretending I am something other than I am,” he said.
He saw how his words wounded her. He tried to explain, but she waved him off and sank onto the couch, refusing to look at him. Outside, the rain fell harder. It froze the instant it landed, encasing the driveway, the trees, the world in ice.
Soon the power failed with a spooky sighing sound they all felt in their stomachs. The house went black. Candles were lit and distributed. They flickered and glowed, but were in no way comforting. The Bissells huddled on the couch, growing colder and listening to the rain as it entombed them bit by bit. X slumped against a wall, his head in his hands. The storm had grown so intense that it worried even him.
Late in the afternoon, Zoe used her phone somehow to see when it was expected to stop, only to discover that there were no reports of rain (or sleet or power outages) anywhere within 500 miles.
“Idiots,” she said. “How can they not see this storm?”
X began to fear that the storm was meant for them alone.
Spock and Uhura pawed at the front door, begging to be let in. They’d finally been admitted into Bert and Betty’s house, and were now trying their luck here. Jonah looked at his mother with such pleading eyes that she finally groaned and said simply, “Okay, fine.”
Jonah clapped ecstatically, ran to the door—and discovered that it had been frozen shut. X listened as Zoe and her mother tried and failed to wrench it open. He could hear Spock and Uhura on the steps, whimpering. He pictured them shivering, their fur rattling with ice.
Above them, the roof groaned, threatening to cave in.
Then, suddenly, the rain stopped.
But the relief was short-lived, for soon the silence was torn by the sound of trees surrendering to the ice and splitting apart.
At first it was just a branch or two that snapped and fell onto the snow. Soon, though, the noise was terrifying and constant, like a thousand bones breaking. Trees that had stood more than a century were shattered in an instant. X could see Zoe and the others registering every loss. Jonah rushed to a window that looked out on the backyard. “Daddy Man’s tree!” he said. The willow had not cracked, but it was bent low again and threatening to snap. X was powerless to help. His head was boiling. He slumped farther down the wall, draped in the blanket Zoe had given him.
The blizzard had damaged the forest, but this decimation seemed nearly vengeful, and it could not be ignored, for there was no wind or snow to cover the sound. Even to X, who had heard every sort of agonizing sound the universe could produce, the destruction of the trees sounded raw and pitiless—a kind of mass murder.
Zoe’s mother, electric with anger and worry, said that there hadn’t been an ice storm in years.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
At that moment, X felt the bruises beneath his eyes begin to burn.
One of the lords had come for him.
X felt him calling out. He could envision the lord’s gnarled hands summoning up the storm—conducting it like an orchestra. X had no choice but to go to him. To end this.
He beckoned Zoe to his side.
“I have hurt you,” he whispered.
His voice was hoarse.
“A little,” she said.
“I am sorry, and ashamed, besides,” he said. “This storm, this rain—it is not from your world, but mine. A lord awaits me in the woods. I feel his rage in every part of me. He has come to put me back on the path.”
“Let him wait,” said Zoe.
She said it blithely, but he heard the fear in her voice.
“I must finish what I began,” he said. “I must drag Stan to the Lowlands where his kind belong. You must let me go.”
“No,” said Zoe.
“Yes,” said X.
“No,” said Zoe.
“Yes,” said X, laughing softly at her willfulness. “How long shall we continue in this vein?”
“I can go all night,” said Zoe.
She sat down next to him on the floor.
“Don’t you realize what the lords have done to you?” she said. “You were a little kid—totally innocent—and it killed them. So they made you hunt souls. And you were grateful, right? Because you got powers for a little while. Because you got to leave your cell every so often on some, like, supernatural hall pass. And the whole time—the whole time—they’ve been trying to turn you into them. And now you think you belong there! Which you don’t. I am so sick of losing people, X. Don’t make me lose you.”
She was crying now. X wanted to touch her—she was the only proof he’d ever had that there was light and life and warmth in the world—but he knew if he so much as brushed her skin with his fingertips, he wouldn’t have the strength to leave. He would sink into her, and all would be lost.
“I have brought evil to within a hundred yards of your door,” he said, “and I will face it before it crawls even one inch closer.”