The Edge of Everything (The Edge of Everything #1)(20)

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?”