Chapter 8
The Coven thinks his hands are tied. They’re wrong, but not entirely, and the distinction matters.
Erath can’t stay in the mortal realm for long stretches.
He can visit, surface for hours at a time, make his presence known and felt, but he can’t occupy the space the way he wants to.
He can’t be there when Penny wakes up and when she goes to sleep and in the hours between.
He can show up when things go wrong. He’s good at that.
But prevention requires a sustained presence, and sustained is not something his existence allows for.
The larger problem is jurisdiction.
His ability to cause direct harm to living beings follows rules he didn’t write and can’t rewrite.
He can harm things that have a relationship with death.
People cheating it, dodging it, defying the natural order.
People threatening Penny, who belongs to him regardless of her relation to life or death, falls within his authority.
These are his to deal with. Straightforward.
What isn’t straightforward is Sidney.
He shouldn’t have been able to save Sidney.
Sidney is human. Fully mortal. No connection to death beyond the ordinary one that all living things carry.
These things should have placed him firmly outside of Erath’s jurisdiction.
He should have shown up in that alley and been unable to lay a hand on the witch or the giant.
His presence might have frightened them.
The cold, the dark, the weight of him pressing against their awareness.
That’s usually enough. But direct intervention, the physical act of ending two lives with his hands, that should have been impossible.
It hadn’t been. He’d touched the giant and the giant had died.
He’d caught the witch and she’d died. They’d been real and solid in his grip and they’d gone the way all things go, easily, as though killing them were as natural as ferrying a soul across the river.
As though Sidney were under his protection the way Penny is.
Which means Penny has done something.
Not deliberately. She’s five. There’s no intent behind it beyond the raw, uncomplicated logic of a child who decided this person is safe and this person is mine.
But the bond she’s created isn’t just a tether between herself and Sidney.
It’s an extension. She’s placed him inside the circle of Erath’s protection, so that an attack on Sidney registers, in the workings of Erath’s power, as an attack on family.
The last time Penny extended a bond like this, it had been with Angelica.
That bond had taken years to form, grown slowly through the accumulation of trust and closeness and the alchemy of a child’s attachment.
It had been the key to everything, the three-pointed connection that let all of them move freely between worlds.
With Sidney, it’s taken days.
Erath doesn’t know what that means. He doesn’t know if Penny’s power is growing or if it means something about Sidney specifically, some compatibility with the mechanism that Erath can’t measure, and neither interpretation is comforting.
Both point toward a future where the bartender is permanently entangled in his existence, and the word “permanently” is one he sets down fast, before it can settle into something he has to reckon with.
The practical implications, at least, are clear. Erath can’t simply go to the Coven estate and destroy everyone in it. He can only harm those who are harming Penny, and right now no member of the Coven is actively reaching for her.
What he should do is have Penny release the bond.
Get Sidney somewhere safe. Resolve the Coven problem through the channels available to him, August and the Order and whatever leverage Vivi can dig up from the souls who’ve recently arrived.
Let Sidney go back to his bar and his ugly apartment and his life, far away from gods and covens and things that come up from the dark.
That’s a plan. That’s the correct, responsible, strategically sound plan.
He holds onto it for about twelve minutes before Vivi accosts him.
She has a list. Vivi always has a list. She’s been in the underworld so long she’s become part of its infrastructure, a spirit whose edges have gone translucent with age and whose opinions have only gotten sharper.
She manages the daily operations of the dead with an efficiency Erath has never been able to replicate and has long since stopped trying to. She is also, unfortunately, perceptive.
She’s halfway through her daily briefing, something about a backlog at the eastern crossing and a dispute between two spirits who died simultaneously and can’t agree on precedence, when she stops mid-sentence. Studies him. Raises an eyebrow.
“You get everything taken care of up there? Everything okay with Penny?”
“Penny’s fine. She’s at Maggie’s.” Erath follows Vivi toward the river of souls, which is murkier than it should be.
Something has died badly. Something complicated, something that shouldn’t be intermingling with the regular flow, and the water has gone gray and sluggish where it should be green and moving.
He goes to his knees at the bank, shrugs off his coat, and plunges his hand in up to the elbow. “She’s adopted a mundane.”
“Adopted. Like a stray dog? Snuck it a piece of hot dog and now it’s following her around?”
“Something like that.”
“And this troubles you because…?”
Something slimy and bony brushes his fingers in the murk. He grabs for it and misses. He stretches further, arm in to the shoulder, the edges of his shirt going dark. “Because she’s made him death-touched and now they’re linked. I don’t know that she knows how to undo it.”
“Of course she doesn’t know how to undo it. She’s a child. Can’t you undo it?”
He doesn’t actually know the answer to that.
He never tried. Angelica severed the bond when she stabbed him and took Penny.
Because Penny’s trust in her shattered and, with it, so did their link.
He didn’t have to pull Angelica away from them because she did that on her own.
In theory, he should be able to. If Sidney is truly death-touched then Erath should be able to manipulate his presence.
He goes too long without answering and Vivi’s eyebrows raise.
“Do you not want to?” she asks plainly.
The question is casual. Vivi’s questions are always casual. They’re also always pointed, and this one lands exactly where she aimed it.
“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Erath says. “It matters what’s…”
There. His fingers close around something that thrashes and shrieks and spits a venom that sizzles against his skin without doing damage.
He hauls it out of the river. It’s bat-shaped, if bats had six legs and a mouth full of needle teeth, and it screams in a frequency that would rupture a mortal’s eardrums. A soul-eater.
Vermin. They feed on spirits in the river and then find their way back above and cause problems for the Templars.
He crushes its neck in his fist and tosses the body onto the bank where it crumbles to ash and the wind takes it.
The water clears. The gray recedes. The green returns. Souls begin to move again, drifting downstream, and the river resumes its constant, murmuring hum.
He stands. Wipes his hand on his pants.
Vivi is still giving him the look.
“Far be it from me to suggest,” she says, “that you have a conversation with your daughter about boundaries with the living.”
“She’s five. She doesn’t understand boundaries.”
“Imagine when she’s thirteen and she’s bound herself to some teenage boy.”
The look that crosses Erath’s face is, apparently, extraordinary, because Vivi points her index finger at it and says, “Yes. See. Start early or she’ll be uncontrollable.”
“Noted,” he says flatly.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which one?”
“Do you want to undo the bond or are you also attached to this human she’s adopted?”
He doesn’t answer. Vivi watches him not answer with the patience of someone who has known him for several hundred years and understands that his silences are more informative than his words.
“You know,” she says, “the last time she did this, it was with someone you loved.”
“I’m aware.”
“And now she’s done it with a mundane.” Vivi tilts her head. “Children aren’t subtle, Erath.”
Erath looks at the river. The souls drift.
The water moves. Somewhere beneath the surface, another soul-eater is probably forming, another piece of vermin that will need to be rooted out and destroyed, and there will be another after that, and another, because the work never ends and the dead never stop coming.
“What she sees,” he says, “is a man who protected her from something scary. She’s a child. She sees kindness and decides it’s permanent.”
“And you? What do you see?”
He sees a man standing in his kitchen with shaking hands and a voice that almost didn’t waver. He sees the space he’d created when he stepped back and the expression on Sidney’s face when the push he’d been bracing for didn’t come.
He doesn’t say any of this.
“It’s complicated,” he says.
Vivi makes a ‘hm’ sound, turns and walks back toward the eastern crossing, list in hand.
Erath stands at the river for a long time after she’s gone.
The water moves. The souls drift. The cold wraps around him, familiar and constant, and he thinks about what Vivi said about children not being subtle.
He thinks about the plan. The correct, responsible, strategically sound plan. The one where he severs the bond and lets Sidney go and resolves this through proper channels and never walks a bartender home from work again.
It’s a good plan.
He doesn’t believe for a second that he’s going to follow it.