Chapter 2
News travels slow to the underworld.
New businesses, new mayors, new world orders.
News trickles down through word of mouth, mostly, and those mouths are usually rambling and arguing and trying to convince him that they don’t belong in the land of the dead and that the fourteen bullet holes currently occupying their chest are just a minor inconvenience they fully intend to recover from.
Which is to say it takes a long time for Erath to know what is happening above his head in the land of the living.
Days, sometimes. Weeks, if whatever has happened doesn’t concern him directly.
The dead bring their stories with them, but those stories are garbled and self-serving and filtered through the brand of denial that the recently deceased specialize in.
So when Amelia shows up on the brittle gray dirt of the underworld with her head cradled under her arm and an excuse already forming on her tongue, Erath knows two things immediately. One, whatever has happened is not good. Two, it involves Penny.
He doesn’t let her speak.
“Where is she?” he asks.
Amelia’s mouth opens and closes. Her head, tucked against her hip the way you’d carry a melon, blinks at him with glassy, disoriented eyes.
The body is still adjusting. It takes the newly dead a while to reconcile with their condition, and decapitations are ly disorienting.
Her spirit is intact, at least, which means whatever killed her did it quickly enough that the soul didn’t have time to scatter.
“She ran,” Amelia says. “I tried to stop her but she ran, and it wasn’t my fault, I need you to understand that the Coven promised me…”
He walks past her.
He doesn’t need to hear it. He already knows.
The Coven had promised Amelia something, immortality or power or whatever scrap they’d dangled in front of a woman too weak to refuse, and Amelia had agreed to hand over the most precious thing in Erath’s existence in exchange for it.
The details don’t matter. The details have never mattered.
What matters is that his daughter is somewhere in the mortal realm, alone, and the people who want her are not the kind of people who stop looking.
Amelia is not family. She’s not Penny’s blood, not Angelica’s blood, not anyone’s blood that matters.
She’s a low-ranking member of the Hargrove Coven who was appointed as Penny’s foster guardian in Haven, an arrangement Angelica had insisted on and Erath had reluctantly agreed to because his options for the months Penny had to spend in the mortal realm were vanishingly thin.
The Coven had presented Amelia as a neutral party.
Adequate, they’d said. Trustworthy. Erath had always been suspicious, but he’d lacked a better alternative, and Amelia had been fine enough for the first few years.
Fine, apparently, right up until the moment she wasn’t.
He leaves her to be handled by Vivi, who is currently elbow-deep in the river of souls trying to untangle something that died badly. Vivi looks up as he passes, reads his face, and straightens.
“Problem?”
“Amelia is dead. Penny is above.”
Vivi’s expression doesn’t change, but her jaw tightens. “I’ll deal with her. Go.”
He goes. He crosses the underworld with a stride that sends two hellhounds scrambling sideways and a stray spirit flickering out of existence entirely, which isn’t ideal, but he’ll sort that out later.
The entrance to the above is a wide set of stairs that leads up to a subway station in Central, flanked by walls of old stone that sweat condensation in the damp.
It’s not visible to mundanes. The supernatural know better than to go down it.
No one voluntarily enters the underworld.
For one, aside from Erath himself and those under his authority, no one who descends those steps walks back out again.
For another, the air emanating from the staircase is cold, and heavy, and carries with it the weight of a place that is not interested in visitors.
There are more pleasant ways to die, is the thing.
He surfaces in Central and it’s late. Past two, maybe closer to three, but time has never been a concept Erath has had much use for.
The city is quiet the way cities are quiet at this hour, not silent but muted, the sounds pushed to the edges, the living retreated into their buildings and their beds.
He pulls the hood of his jacket up and shoves his hands in his pockets and walks.
Amelia’s apartment is warded off in holy tape when he arrives, white strips across the door frame that glow faintly with residual power, meaning the Order has been by.
The Templars are efficient. The body has already been removed, the spirit released, and there’s no one stationed outside watching the scene.
There’s nothing left to watch. Erath goes past the tape.
It parts for him because everything parts for him, and the door opens because all doors open for him, and the apartment is dark and smells of copper and something chemical.
He doesn’t linger. He finds the sunflower backpack on the hook by the door, the one with Penny’s name stitched into the front pocket in crooked letters because she’d insisted on doing it herself, and he loops it over one shoulder and leaves.
The trail starts at the apartment door.
Petunia petals. Small, translucent, the color of watered-down ink.
They’re scattered down the steps and across the sidewalk and out into the city, and they’re not visible.
Not really. Not to anyone but him. He’d given Penny this when she was smaller than she is now, when he’d had to accept that she couldn’t stay with him all of the time, that half of her belonged to the world above and half to the world below and there was nothing he could do about that.
The petals were his way of saying I’ll always know where you are.
His way of saying if you need me, I will come for you.
She needs him now.
He follows the trail down the stairs and into the Old City, where the streets narrow and the buildings lean against each other and the cobblestones are older than the city itself.
The petals lead him to a bar. Closed, dark, a neon sign above the door turned off for the night, and Erath pauses there on the sidewalk and stares at the sign and wonders what his five-year-old daughter was doing at a bar.
He doesn’t spend too long trying to understand.
The important thing is that the trail doesn’t stop here.
It continues, around the corner, down a side street, and he follows it.
A five-story brick building with ivy growing up the side and a secured door that requires a code.
Erath presses his hand flat against the lock and the mechanism clicks open with a sound that is less a mechanical release and more a reluctant surrender.
All doors let him in. They always have. They don’t know why they’re keeping him out.
Four flights. The ugliest mauve carpet he has ever seen, and he has seen civilizations rise and fall and the aesthetic choices of none of them have offended him as deeply as this carpet.
The petals cluster at a door on the fourth floor, an aging wooden thing with a handle that’s older than the deadbolt keeping it closed, and there they stop.
She’s here. He can feel her now, the warmth of her presence, the way the air shifts when his daughter is near.
She’s alive. She’s sleeping. She’s safe.
He could open the door. He could walk in and take her and leave without a word. But Penny is on the other side, and he doesn’t want to scare her, so he knocks.
Firmly.
A pause. The sound of movement, soft footsteps, the shuffle of someone who was not asleep but wasn’t expecting company. The deadbolt turns. The door opens.
It’s a man.
Erath’s expectations rearrange themselves in the space of a heartbeat.
He’d expected a waitress from the bar, maybe.
A woman walking home from work who’d found a lost child and done the decent thing.
He had not expected this. The man is mid-twenties, with blond hair that falls to his chin and is tucked behind one ear, and he’s wearing a t-shirt and pajama pants and he’s holding the door open with one hand and looking at Erath with an expression that is less afraid and more annoyed, the annoyance of someone who has been interrupted during a long night of doing something he didn’t plan on doing and is not in the mood for whatever comes next.
The temperature drops. Erath doesn’t do it on purpose.
It’s involuntary, tied to his mood, and his mood is deteriorating rapidly because there is a strange man standing between him and his daughter and his daughter is alone in this man’s apartment and the last time someone stood between him and Penny it had been Angelica, and that had ended with a knife in his throat and six months of silence.
He watches goosebumps break out along the man’s bare arms, watches him shiver and pull the door a fraction tighter.
The man doesn’t understand what the cold means.
He doesn’t understand what Erath is. He just shivers and looks him up and down with the evaluative suspicion of someone assessing whether the person at the door is a threat and raises an eyebrow.
“Can I help you?”