Jacoby Henricksen wakes buried in the earth's mantle-burning, broken, and certain he's dead. He is. But Hell has paperwork, and a demon named XIC offers him a bargain: collect "pounds of flesh" from souls that belong to the underworld, and Jacoby can earn his way back to the wife and children he barely remembers losing. One cut, one offering at a cemetery gate, one name at a time.
Spat out of a grave into California in 1856, Jacoby is trapped in a brutal frontier world where time bends, mercy is expensive, and every kindness becomes leverage. As he's forced across territories and decades-through ranches, boomtowns, circuses, asylums, and open sea-XIC's crow-eyed enforcer keeps him moving, while the body the demon is building grows closer to completion. To survive, Jacoby must become a liar, a drifter, a monster-and decide what redemption is worth when the price is always paid by someone else.