Chapter 1 #4
She beams at him. It’s the first real smile he’s seen from her all night, full and unguarded and radiant in the way that only children’s smiles can be, and it cracks something open in Sidney’s chest that he wasn’t expecting.
The smile is enormous. It takes up her whole face, rearranges her features, makes the dark eyes bright and the fuchsia bows ridiculous and the chipped purple nails perfect, and Sidney has to look away for a second because the tightness in his chest has caught him off guard and he doesn’t want her to see whatever is happening on his face.
“Pink is so beautiful,” she says, with emphasis.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s my favorite.”
“I thought your favorite was purple.” He nods at her own nails.
“I have two favorites.”
She climbs back up onto the couch, satisfied with her work, and Sidney stays on the floor with his back against the couch and his pink toenails drying on the hardwood.
The TV is still going, some new cartoon now with a lot of singing, and Penny is getting drowsy again.
Her head tips sideways against the armrest and her eyes are fighting to stay open and losing.
“Sid?”
“Yeah?”
“Is my dad going to come get me?”
The question is quiet and it comes from somewhere deep, somewhere she’s been holding it in for a while, and the weight of it settles over the room. Sidney shifts so he’s facing her, his arm resting on the cushion near her head.
“I’m working on it, kiddo. We’re going to find him.”
“Promise?”
He shouldn’t promise. He doesn’t know her father.
He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know anything about this situation beyond what a five-year-old and a phone call with August have told him, and promises are heavy things that he doesn’t throw around.
But she’s looking at him with those dark eyes, the old-behind-the-young ones, and her braids are messy from the long night and there’s glittery purple polish on her fingernails and hot pink polish on his toes and she needs someone to say yes right now.
She needs it the way she needed the chocolate milk and the markers and the booth and the not-being-alone.
She needs a yes the way a person drowning needs a hand.
“Pinky promise,” he says, and holds out his little finger.
She wraps her small finger around his. The grip is tight.
Her hand is tiny against his, her whole fist smaller than his palm, and the pinky promise holds for a moment, firm and serious, and then she lets go and nods once, satisfied.
The matter is settled. The promise has been made.
She is five years old and she takes these things at face value and Sidney is going to keep this promise because he made it and because she’s looking at him with the trust of a child who has decided, against all evidence, that this person will do what he says.
She’s asleep in under a minute. Her breathing evens out, her body goes loose and heavy, and one of her braids falls across her face.
Sidney reaches over and tucks it behind her ear.
It’s an absent gesture, automatic, the same motion he uses on his own hair when it falls in his eyes, and he doesn’t think about it. He just does it.
He sits on the floor for a while. His back against the couch.
His feet pink on the hardwood. The cartoon plays on, tinny and bright in the quiet apartment.
Outside, a siren passes somewhere in the distance and fades.
The apartment settles around them, all its small noises, the hum of the fridge, the tick of the radiator, the creak of the building adjusting itself in the cold.
He thinks about calling August again. He thinks about the Coven, about the father, about the long chain of events that brought a five-year-old to a bar in the Old City at midnight with a dead guardian and nowhere to go.
He thinks about the woman whose head was pulled off and what kind of death that is and who does that to a person and why, and he thinks about the two women who came to collect Penny the way you collect a package and the look on the older one’s face when she’d given Penny that last appraising glance and what that look meant and what it promised.
It can wait. All of it. The questions and the plans and the phone calls and the reckoning with the fact that he’s invited the supernatural world’s problems into his apartment along with a kindergartener and a bottle of vintage nail polish. It can wait until morning.
At some point during the night Penny’s hand finds the collar of his shirt and holds on.
Small fingers curled into the fabric, gripping the way you grip something you’re afraid will leave if you let go.
Sidney feels the tug of it against his neck, the slight pull, and he doesn’t move.
He lets her hold on. He stays exactly where he is, on the floor, his head tipped back against the cushion, his feet pink, his shirt held by a child who has decided, for reasons he doesn’t understand and didn’t ask for, that he is safe enough to hold onto while she sleeps.
He lets her hold on. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t sleep, not really, not yet, but he stays.
He stays.