Chapter 9 #3
Inside is warm. The space is wood and plaster, the walls draped in heavy fabrics, dark greens and deep reds, that muffle the sounds from outside and hold the heat from the fireplace that’s burning in the main room.
There’s furniture. Not thrones. Not altars.
A couch, deep green and old and sagging in the middle.
Two armchairs flanking the fire. A table with four chairs, one of which has a cushion on it to boost a smaller person taller.
A kitchen that has a stove and a sink and cabinets and a coffee mug on the counter with nothing on it because the lord of the underworld apparently doesn’t go in for novelty dishware.
It looks like a house. It looks like someone’s house, someone who has a child and a life and a preference for warm colors and old furniture and who has done their best to make a home in a place that was never designed for one.
The cognitive dissonance of it, the stained glass and the fairy lights, the river of souls and the coloring books, is so total that Sidney has to stand in the doorway for a moment and let his brain catch up.
Penny climbs down from his back. The absence of her weight hits Sidney all at once and his ribs make themselves known with a vengeance that nearly puts him on the floor.
He braces a hand against the wall. Breathes.
The pain peaks and plateaus and settles into the familiar, grinding ache that he’s been carrying for days.
Penny takes his hand and pulls.
The tour is not optional. She leads him down the hallway, chattering with the sudden, manic energy of a child who has been terrified for the past hour and is now in her safe place and is burning through the residual adrenaline by talking.
She shows him the bathroom, which has a bathtub that’s bigger than his entire bathroom at home.
She shows him a closet that contains nothing but coats, all of them black, all of them the same, which answers the question of whether the lord of the underworld has a varied wardrobe. He does not.
Her room is at the end of the hall. She pushes the door open and pulls him through and it’s shockingly, almost aggressively normal.
A daybed with a canopy made of some gauzy fabric that catches the light from the fairy lights strung along the ceiling.
A rug with sunflowers on it. Bookshelves crammed with picture books, their spines creased and faded from use.
A collection of stuffed animals that could populate a small, very eclectic zoo.
Sidney tries to imagine the god of death shopping for fairy lights.
He tries to imagine those hands, the ones that had wrapped his ribs and cupped his jaw and pressed against a kitchen counter on either side of his hips, selecting a sunflower rug from a display.
He tries to imagine Erath standing in a toy store evaluating stuffed animals and he can’t do it, and the inability lodges somewhere soft and undefended.
Penny introduces him to every stuffed animal.
All of them are her favorites. She shows him her books, most of which feature a caterpillar that apparently eats an unreasonable amount.
She shows him the drawings on the wall, which are done in crayon and marker and depict, as far as Sidney can tell, a family: a tall dark figure, a small dark figure, and, in the most recent one, tacked to the wall with a piece of tape, a yellow figure with a smile that takes up most of its face.
Sidney looks at the yellow figure. He looks at it for a long time.
“That’s you,” Penny says, helpfully.
“I gathered.”
She’s flagging. The energy is draining out of her, the adrenaline metabolized and spent, and her movements are slowing and her eyes are getting heavy and her voice is softening into the register of a child who is fighting sleep and losing.
“Can you tuck me in?”
He’s never tucked a child into bed. He doesn’t know the protocol.
He suspects it’s more of an art than a science, and he’s not great at either, but Penny is looking up at him with dark eyes and messy braids and a one-eared rabbit clutched to her chest and he would do anything for this child.
He knows this. He’s known it since the night she walked into his bar, and it’s only gotten worse.
“Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”
He does his best. He pulls back the covers and she climbs in and he pulls them up and tucks the edges around her feet because that seems like a thing you do.
He smooths the blanket down. He asks if she wants a story.
She shakes her head. She’s already going, eyes closing, opening, closing again, and the rabbit is pressed against her chin.
“Sid?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t leave while I’m asleep.”
“Okay, I won’t leave.”
“Promise?”
He looks at her. She’s half gone already, the words coming from somewhere between awake and asleep, and the weight of them is enormous.
This child, who has been uprooted and frightened and chased across a city and down into the dark, is asking him to stay.
Not her father. Him. The bartender. The human.
“Pinky promise,” he says.
She’s asleep before the words finish landing.
Her breathing evens out. Her grip on the rabbit loosens, slightly, and one of her braids falls across her face and Sidney reaches down and tucks it behind her ear.
He watches her breathe for a moment. Then he backs out of the room, leaving the door cracked, a sliver of light from the hallway cutting across the floor.
He goes back to the main room.
The fire is burning low, embers and the occasional lick of flame, casting warm, unsteady light across the furniture.
Sidney takes off his shoes and sets them by the door because it seems wrong to track whatever’s on the ground of the underworld across the god of death’s floors, and he stands in the middle of the room and looks around and processes, for the first time since Penny knocked on his door, the full scope of what has happened.
He’s in the underworld. He’s in Erath’s home. He’s in the house of the man he kissed last night and then pushed away, who’d simply gone and left Sidney certain it was over.
And now he’s here. In Erath’s living room.
Wearing pajama pants and a t-shirt and no jacket because he’d fled his apartment through a window with a child on his back and hadn’t had time to grab one.
Standing on Erath’s floor, looking at Erath’s couch and Erath’s fireplace, and the intimacy of it is excruciating.
This is where Erath lives. This is where he sits when Penny is asleep and the dead are quiet and the underworld is still.
This is the couch he occupies, the fire he watches, the coffee mug he drinks from, and Sidney is seeing all of it without permission, without invitation, because a five-year-old brought him here and he hadn’t had the option of saying no.
He doesn’t know what Erath is going to think when he finds him.
He doesn’t know if the look on Erath’s face when he sees Sidney on his couch is going to be the look of a man who’s glad he’s here or the look of a man who thought the kitchen had been a clear enough signal and is wondering why Sidney is the one confused.
He told Erath he couldn’t do this. Erath left. And now Sidney is in his home, in his world, with no warning and no right to be, and the irony of it is so pointed it almost hurts.
He sits down on the couch. It’s old and ugly, the upholstery a shade of green that was never fashionable, and it is, impossibly, the most comfortable thing he’s ever sat on.
It holds him. The cushions conform to the shape of his body and the back supports his spine and his ribs settle into a position that hurts less than any position has hurt in days and Sidney leans his head back and closes his eyes.
He should stay awake. Erath will come back eventually and they’ll need to talk and there are things to figure out, Penny and the Coven and the fact that Sidney is apparently now in the underworld, alive, which seems like it should be a bigger logistical concern than it currently feels. He should stay awake and wait.
He’s asleep in under a minute.
His last thought, the one that follows him down into the dark behind his eyelids, is that Xela doesn’t know where he is and she’s going to burn Haven to the ground looking for him, and the underworld almost certainly does not have cell service, and when she finds him she’s going to kill him in a way that is creative and painful and will probably involve his skeleton being displayed as a warning to others.
He falls asleep on the god of death’s couch, in the god of death’s home, in the land of the dead, and the fire crackles and Penny breathes down the hall and the river of souls murmurs in the distance and Sidney sleeps without dreaming.