Chapter 11
Sidney wakes up warm.
This is the first thing he registers, before the disorientation, before the memory, before any of the higher-order processing that’s going to make the next few minutes very complicated.
He’s warm. He’s comfortable. His ribs, which have been a constant negotiation for days, have settled into a low, bearable hum that’s more memory than pain.
He is, against all reason and against the fact that he fell asleep in the literal land of the dead, well-rested.
Better rested than he’s been in weeks. His body feels safe in a way it hasn’t felt since Xela’s couch three years ago, when she’d wrapped him in blankets and left him alone and he’d slept for fourteen hours because his body had finally decided it was okay to stop standing guard.
The second thing he registers is the blanket.
It’s heavy. Thick, woven, the kind of blanket that has weight to it, not the thin fleece he keeps on the back of his couch at home.
Sidney hadn’t had a blanket when he fell asleep.
He’d lain down on the couch and closed his eyes and that had been it.
No blanket. No pillow. Just the green upholstery and the dying fire and the exhaustion pulling him under.
Someone covered him while he slept.
He knows who. There’s only one someone it could be.
He lies there for a moment with the blanket pulled to his chin and his face pressed against the arm of the couch and he thinks about the god of death standing over him in the dark, placing a blanket over his sleeping body, tucking it around his shoulders, and then, presumably, going to bed in a room down the hall and lying there and not sleeping because he doesn’t sleep.
He’d covered Sidney and left him. He hadn’t woken him.
He hadn’t sat down beside him or touched his face or done any of the things that Sidney has been trained to expect from men who find him vulnerable, and the absence of those things presses on something raw he doesn’t want to name.
The image is too tender. It doesn’t fit anywhere in the framework he’s built for understanding Erath, which is already straining under the weight of too many contradictions: the god of death who carries sunflower backpacks, the lord of the underworld who quits smoking because a bartender told him to, the most powerful being Sidney has ever encountered who said alright, of course and walked out of a kitchen without asking a single question.
The man who covered him with a blanket and didn’t stay.
He sits up. Slowly. The room assembles around him.
The main room of Erath’s house, the fireplace with embers still glowing in the grate, the armchairs, the table with the booster cushion on one chair.
No windows. No natural light. No way to tell what time it is, and Sidney’s internal clock, which is calibrated to bar shifts and last calls, is offering no guidance.
The pull in his chest is quiet. It’s been quiet since he arrived, the background hum that’s been following him for days gone soft and still, and standing in Erath’s living room with the blanket pooled around his waist, Sidney understands again what the quiet means.
He’s where the pull wanted him. He’s here.
And the gravity that’s been dragging him toward this place doesn’t need to drag anymore because the distance is zero.
He smells something.
It could be food. It could also be a chemical incident. The smell is ambiguous in a way that food should not be, hovering somewhere between breakfast and something has gone catastrophically wrong in a laboratory, and it’s coming from the kitchen.
Sidney pushes the blanket off and stands and follows the smell.
Erath is at the stove.
He’s wearing a shirt that is cut unfairly across the breadth of his shoulders and pants that fit him in a way Sidney is choosing not to catalogue at this hour, and he’s holding a spatula in one hand and poking at something in a skillet with the tentative, suspicious energy of a man who is not confident about what’s happening in the pan and suspects it might be hostile.
There’s a mixing bowl of batter on the counter.
There’s a carton of something that might be eggs.
There’s flour on the counter, on the stove, on Erath’s forearm, and on the floor.
The thing in the skillet is, theoretically, a pancake.
In practice it’s a charcoal disc that appears to have been cooked at approximately the temperature of the sun and is currently fused to the bottom of the pan.
There are two more on a plate beside the stove.
They look like abominations. They look like the kind of thing you’d find in an archaeological dig and have to carbon-date.
Sidney has a lot of things going through his mind right now. The underworld. The blanket. The fact that he told this man to leave fewer than twenty-four hours ago and is now standing in his kitchen in pajama pants with a hole in his sock.
All of these things are important. All of them require attention and conversation and probably some kind of emotional reckoning that Sidney is not equipped for before coffee.
But whatever is happening in that skillet needs to be stopped immediately.
He crosses the kitchen. He’s aware of the way Erath’s eyes move to him, dark and heavy, and he feels the weight of that gaze land on him and it’s a lot, it’s too much for this early in whatever passes for morning in the underworld, but the pancake crisis takes priority over the emotional crisis and Sidney has always been better at solving problems that involve a stove.
He reaches the stove and takes the spatula out of Erath’s hand and takes the handle of the pan.
He gives Erath a look that he hopes communicates the full scope of what he’s feeling about the state of the skillet, which is less complicated than what he’s feeling about everything else and therefore easier to express.
He dumps the charcoal disc into the trash.
He dumps the two hockey pucks into the trash.
He puts the skillet back on the burner, turns the heat down to something reasonable, and pours fresh batter into the pan.
“I can’t believe this child has been surviving on whatever you’ve been making her for five years,” he says.
Erath doesn’t respond immediately. Sidney can feel him there, behind him, watching, and the quality of the watching is something he’s trying to read.
It’s not the warm, curious, interested watching from the night at Sidney’s apartment, when Erath’s eyes had tracked the way Sidney moved and the slide of his hands had been curious.
This watching is heavier. More careful. The look of a man who is managing something, and Sidney can’t tell if the something being managed is discomfort at Sidney’s presence or something else.
Something that looks identical to discomfort from the outside but isn’t.
The expression on Erath’s face, when Sidney had first entered the kitchen, had been difficult to parse.
It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t the cold withdrawal Sidney had been bracing for, the distance that should exist between two people when one of them pushed the other away.
It was something helpless. All of the words and questions and things that must be building behind his teeth had no fire to come out, and what was left was a tall, dark god standing in his own kitchen watching a man in pajamas commandeer his stove and having absolutely nothing to say about it.
The batter hits the pan. It sizzles. Sidney watches a pancake begin to form, round and golden and correctly heated, and the normalcy of the act, cooking breakfast, the most mundane thing in the world, settles something in him.
Erath watches him watch the pancake for a long, uncomfortable stretch of time before he says, “You’re in your pajamas.”
Sidney glances down at himself. Pajama pants, t-shirt, gray socks, hole in the left toe.
He’s standing in the underworld looking exactly the way he looked when he fled his apartment, which is to say: not great.
“I didn’t have a lot of advance notice before the wrath of the damned descended upon me last night.
” He flips the pancake. Golden on the underside.
Perfect. “So at least I’m not in my bunny slippers. ”
There is a long pause. Erath is looking at him very strangely, a look that Sidney catches in his peripheral vision and that makes his stomach do something complicated. He glances over, eyebrow raised. “It’s a joke. Don’t think too hard about it.”
He makes two more. Three. The stack grows.
The kitchen fills with the smell of actual, identifiable food, and Sidney can feel the weight of everything they’re not saying pressing against the walls of the room.
Because this is what this is, isn’t it? Sidney told Erath no.
Erath heard him. Erath left. And then, fewer than forty-eight hours later, Sidney shows up in his house, in his realm, in his life, wearing pajama pants and cooking on his stove as though he has any right to be here.
As though the words in the kitchen hadn’t happened.
As though Sidney hadn’t pushed him away and shut the door and spent the rest of the night on his couch with his hand on his bandages convinced it was over.
The mortification arrives first. A hot flush that starts at his ears and works its way down his neck.
Then the defensiveness, the armor plating sliding into place, because what else was he supposed to do?
He brought Erath’s daughter home. He didn’t come here because he wanted to be in Erath’s kitchen.
He came because a five-year-old was scared and there was nowhere else to go and the underworld was the only safe place he could think of and he’s sorry if his presence is an inconvenience but he’s not going to apologize for keeping a child alive.