Chapter 3 #2
He’s been going for about two blocks, thoughts in the clouds, running through the mental list of things he needs to do tomorrow and the shorter mental list of things he’s going to actually do, when he feels it.
A prickle at the back of his neck. A shift in the quality of the air behind him.
The awareness that comes from years of working in a bar in a city full of things that are stronger and faster and meaner than him, the awareness that tells him someone is watching and the someone has intent.
Sidney has good instincts. He’s always had good instincts, honed over years of navigating Haven’s nightlife and a handful of relationships that taught him, at significant personal cost, to pay attention to the signals his body sends when something isn’t right.
The signals are loud right now. They’re saying move.
He doesn’t turn around.
He walks a little faster, not running, not obvious, and angles toward a side alley that he knows Xela’s friends like to use as a shortcut.
It’s usually occupied. There’s a fae couple who sells charms out of a cart, and a troll named Bernard who’s been living behind the dumpster for six years and who once threw a man through a brick wall for catcalling a woman in his alley.
Tonight, of course, the alley is empty. No fae.
No Bernard. No one at all, just wet cobblestones and the smell of old garbage and a single streetlight buzzing overhead.
He exhales through his nose. “Fantastic.”
The hand that grabs the back of his jacket is enormous.
Five fingers the size of sausages and a palm that spans the width of his back, and it hauls him off his feet and slams him into the wall with enough force to rattle his teeth in his skull.
He gets his hands up, instinct, palms flat against the brickwork, and tries to push off, but the thing holding him has the structural integrity of a small building and Sidney’s attempts at resistance are about as effective as pushing against a mountain.
He looks behind him. The creature is a giant, or part giant, the features slightly wrong, slightly stretched, the proportions distorted in the way of things that were made rather than born.
Close to seven feet tall and almost as wide and his face has the lack of expression that comes from not being designed for nuance.
He’s an enforcer. Muscle. The brains is somewhere else.
The brains is the woman standing to the side.
She’s not one of the women from last night.
She’s different, smaller and sharper, with dark hair pulled back from a face that’s all angles and no warmth.
Her arms are crossed and she’s looking at Sidney the way you’d look at something stuck to the bottom of your shoe, with a mixture of distaste and impatience that suggests she has better things to do and resents having to deal with this.
“The child,” she says. No preamble. No introduction. “Where is she?”
Sidney’s feet are barely touching the ground.
The giant has shifted him so his back is against the brick, grip bunched at his collar, and the pressure on his throat is making it hard to speak but not hard enough to stop him, which is a mistake on their part because stopping him from speaking would be strategically advisable right about now.
“She has a name, you know.”
The woman’s lips thin. She raises two fingers, a small, precise gesture, and the giant’s grip changes.
His hand twists the fabric at Sidney’s neck until the shirt becomes a tourniquet around his own throat and he’s on the tips of his toes, struggling for air, the edges of his boots scraping against the wet stone.
“She’s gone,” he manages, the words compressed, squeezed through the narrowing passage of his own collar. His fingers are wrapped around the giant’s wrist, not because it’s helping but because his body insists on trying. “Her dad came and got her. I don’t know where they went.”
“He can’t take her.” The woman’s jaw tightens with the absolute certainty of someone who has been told the rules and believes they apply to everyone equally. “She can’t be with him for two more months. Tell me where she is.”
“How would I know where they went?” Sidney’s fingers tighten uselessly on the wrist above him. “And even if I did, why the fuck would I tell you?”
He expects to be hit. He’s been hit before.
He’s been hit by men who were angry and men who were drunk and one memorable occasion by the troll who used to live behind the dumpster in this very alley, and he knows what it feels like when a fist connects with his body.
He knows the physics of it, the compression, the way the air leaves your lungs and doesn’t come back immediately, the lag between impact and pain.
He is not prepared for this.
The giant’s free fist hits him in the ribcage and it doesn’t feel like a punch.
It feels like being hit by something mechanical, a piston or a battering ram, something that has no awareness of the damage it’s doing and no capacity to care.
Sidney’s breath leaves him in a single violent rush, every molecule of air evacuating his lungs at once, and the pain follows half a second later, a white-hot detonation in his left side that makes his vision go gray at the edges.
The giant’s grip loosens and Sidney crumbles to the ground, knees first, hands second, and he’s clutching at his ribs and trying to breathe and can’t. The air won’t come back.
His ribs are cracked. He knows this the way you know something by the sound it makes, and the sound his body made when the fist connected was wrong.
A wet, structural noise that doesn’t belong to things that are intact.
He presses his forehead against the cold stone and wheezes and the pain transcends the specific injury and becomes a condition, a state of being.
He is a person made entirely of pain and he cannot get up.
He’ll be damned if he’s going to lie in this alley.
He presses his knuckles into the cobblestones.
Pushes. His arms shake. His ribs scream in a register he didn’t know his body could produce.
He gets one knee under him, then the other, and he’s almost vertical when the hand finds his jacket again and hauls him up and slams him into the wall and the back of his head bounces off the brick and his vision whites out and the witch is asking him another question he can’t answer because he doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know where Penny is and he wouldn’t tell them if he did and they can hit him until his bones are powder and his answer is going to be the same.
He tells her something derogatory. The exact words involve a suggestion about what she can do with her line of questioning that is physically impossible for most species and anatomically ambitious for the rest.
The backhand comes from the giant. A casual swing, almost lazy, that catches the side of Sidney’s face with the flat of a hand the size of his thigh.
The impact snaps his head sideways and the world goes dark for a moment, then comes back in fragments, spots and shapes and the distant sound of his own breathing.
He’s on the ground. His stomach is turning itself inside out.
He’s vomiting on the cobblestones and that’s probably not a good sign, and the ringing in his ears is so loud he can’t hear around it, can’t hear the giant saying something to the woman or the woman hissing back, and he presses his cheek against the cold stone and thinks this is it.
This is where it happens. This is where he dies in an alley behind a dumpster because he told some witches to fuck off about a little girl he’d known for four hours.
He’d do it again. That’s the thing he’s certain of, lying on the ground with broken ribs and a face that’s rearranging itself and the taste of blood and bile in his mouth.
He’d do it again. For Penny. For any child.
For anyone who was scared and small and being collected by people who had no right to them.
He’d stand in the doorway and say no and take the consequences and he’d do it again, and that’s probably a personality defect but it’s not one he’s interested in fixing.
Then it gets very cold.
Not gradually. Not in the way that temperatures drop when the wind shifts or the clouds move.
It gets cold the way a door gets kicked open, sudden and total and without warning, and one second Sidney is sweating on the ground and the next he’s shivering, goosebumps erupting under his jacket, the sweat on his forehead turning to ice water against his skin.
His breath comes out in a white plume and the air itself changes, thickens, takes on a weight and a pressure that feels wrong, that feels like standing at the edge of something very high and looking down.
The woman stops talking. The giant goes still. There’s a sound, or the absence of a sound, a silence so total and so sudden that the ringing in Sidney’s ears becomes the only noise left, and then even that fades, sucked into the vacuum that’s opened in the alley behind him.
The streetlight flickers. Buzzes. Dies.
The darkness that follows is not the ordinary darkness of a light going out.
It’s a darkness with substance, with texture and weight, and it pushes against Sidney’s skin and fills his lungs when he breathes and tastes like earth and copper and something older than either.
His vision clears just enough, in the last moment before consciousness leaves him, to see his breath crystallizing in front of his face, each exhale a small ghost that forms and dissolves and forms again.
Then nothing.
The cold takes him and he goes.