Chapter 12
The pretty blond human he’s been linked to by his well-meaning five-year-old daughter is not currently Erath’s biggest concern.
This says a lot about the kind of day he’s having.
He crosses the underworld with a purpose that feels better than the aimless circling of the past few days.
He has problems. Multiple, overlapping, urgent problems. But problems are things he can work, things he can strategize around, and strategy is a language he’s fluent in.
It’s the other thing, the human-shaped thing in his kitchen looking at him with zero deference and an eyebrow raised, that doesn’t have a strategy.
That doesn’t have a language at all. That just sits in his chest and takes up space and gets larger every time he looks at it.
He finds Vivi at the northern arch, where a soul has gotten itself tangled in a vine that spirals up the stone and refuses to let go.
The soul is wailing. The vine is pulsing.
Vivi is standing with her arms crossed, looking at both of them with the expression of a woman who has been dealing with this for approximately too long and has run out of professional sympathy.
“I need information,” Erath says.
Vivi turns to him with visible relief. “Thank god. If I have to listen to this one for another ten minutes I’m going to climb in there myself.” She steps away from the arch and the wailing continues behind her, muffled and persistent. “What kind of information?”
“The Hargrove Coven.”
Vivi’s expression shifts from relief to the focus she wears when the work gets serious. She walks with him, away from the arch, along the bank of the river where the light is steadier and the air is quieter, and she gives him what she has.
The Coven has been busy. Mathilde Hargrove arrived in the underworld recently.
Her husband, Jayson Voss, came through not long before that.
Both are in the river. Mathilde’s daughters are both still living.
Annabeth is running the Coven now, as far as Vivi can tell, trying to hold together an institution that was designed to be held together by someone scarier than she is. And Angelica is still alive.
Erath’s jaw clenches at the name. He feels it happen and can’t stop it.
Whatever he’d felt for Angelica has been replaced so thoroughly by the last week that the old feeling has become archaeological, a thing he studies from a distance and doesn’t want back.
But the name still carries the weight of the blade, the betrayal, the silence after, and the weight is not love and it’s not grief.
It’s the cold fury of a man whose trust was used as a weapon against him.
“Still alive,” Vivi confirms, watching his jaw with the careful attention of someone who has learned to read the weather in his face. “And still powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s in Annabeth’s ear.”
“What about Newt?”
“Newt Hargrove? He’s not on the radar. He’s still living, still in the Old City.
Left the Coven after Mathilde’s death. As far as I can tell he has no contact with them.
” Vivi’s tone suggests she’s been thorough about confirming this.
“One of the demons is with him. Malik, I think. They’re…
cohabiting.” The word is carefully chosen.
“That’s the second demon I’ve lost in as many months,” Erath says.
“Dimitri is also on the surface in what appears to be a voluntary arrangement with a Templar. You’re running out of demons.”
“They’re not pets, Vivi.”
“No, they’re subordinates who have decided they’d rather live with humans than work for you, which is arguably worse.” She pauses. Looks at him. “Speaking of humans. How’s yours?”
Erath gives her a look that could frost the river and doesn’t answer.
He leaves the underworld. Surfaces in Central. The daylight is thin, overcast, and the city has the gray quality of a morning that hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet.
He walks to August’s apartment, a second-floor unit in a building that’s nicer than Sidney’s but not by much, and knocks.
August opens the door in a t-shirt and sweatpants and bare feet, dark hair uncombed, tattoos visible from wrist to collar.
He looks surprised to see Erath standing in his hallway, which is fair.
Erath has never come to his apartment before.
Their interactions happen in the underworld, at the river, in the formal spaces where their roles are defined.
This is domestic. This is August’s kitchen and August’s couch and August’s life, and Erath is standing in it uninvited.
“Sir,” August says, recovering quickly. He always does. “Why didn’t you just summon me?”
“Because I needed to tell you something first, and I’d rather do it face to face.” Erath pauses. “Your best friend is currently in the underworld. Alive. Playing house with my daughter.”
August’s face goes through a rapid succession of expressions. Confusion. Alarm. More confusion. Then something that’s not quite fear but is adjacent to it, the alarm of someone who cares about a person and has just been told that person is somewhere they should not be able to survive.
“How is that possible?”
“We’ll get to that. Right now I need to know about Jayson Voss.”
August blinks at the subject change. Then he steps aside. “Come in.”
The apartment is clean, lived-in, warmer than Erath’s house in every sense.
There’s a coat draped over the back of a chair, too large to be August’s, and a pair of boots by the door that are scuffed and heavy and belong to someone who uses them for more than walking.
The Templar is here. Erath can feel him, the hum of holy energy that Templars carry, muted but present, threaded through the walls of the apartment the way Sidney’s warmth is threaded through the walls of Erath’s house.
He notices the parallel. He doesn’t want to notice the parallel. He notices it anyway.
Vale appears from the hallway. Tall, dark-haired, severe in the way of someone who has been alive for three centuries and has stopped pretending to be casual about it.
His eyes are old. The rest of him looks twenty-eight.
He sees Erath and his posture adjusts, deferential to the complicated hierarchy between a god and a Templar who are meeting in a living room with throw pillows.
“Lord Erath.”
“Vale.”
They sit. August on the couch, Vale beside him with their shoulders touching, Erath in the armchair across from them.
He watches the way August’s body angles toward Vale without conscious effort, the way Vale’s hand rests on the arm of the couch between them, close enough to touch but not touching.
They orbit each other. The gravity between them is quiet and sure and established, and Erath thinks about the pull in his own chest, the one that responds to Sidney, and wonders if this is what it looks like from the outside.
Two people caught in each other’s field, held there not by force but by the quiet physics of wanting to be close enough to reach.
“Jayson Voss,” Erath says. “Tell me what happened.”
August straightens. The shift from August-at-home to August-at-work is subtle.
He explains. Voss was a Templar turned necromancer who tried to steal relics from the Order’s vault, artifacts that could grant immortality or something approaching it.
He opened rifts between the mortal realm and the underworld to undo the wards sealing the vault.
August, Vale, Knox, and Cassidy sealed the rifts, banished the undead Voss had summoned, and killed him in combat.
August says this last part without inflection, the way you report a fact that changed your life but that you’ve had enough time to stop performing about.
“What about the relics?” Erath asks.
“Secure,” Vale says. “Locked in the vault. Protections have been reinforced since Voss. No one who isn’t a Templar can access them. Voss only got in because he knew the weaknesses from the inside.”
“Unless another Templar defects.”
Vale’s jaw tightens. “That won’t happen.”
Erath lets the assertion stand without challenge, because arguing with a Templar’s certainty about his own order is not a productive use of anyone’s time, and moves on.
He lays out what he knows. The Coven is currently being run by Annabeth Hargrove, daughter of Mathilde and Jayson Voss.
His ex-wife and Annabeth’s sister, Angelica, is either advising Annabeth or positioning herself to take over.
Angelica was with a member of the Coven before she met Erath.
She had a son, Newt, who has since extricated himself from the Coven’s grasp.
Amelia, Penny’s foster guardian, was a Coven member arranged through Angelica, a way of keeping proximity to Penny during her time in the mortal realm.
The whole arrangement, from the beginning, was a leash.
The room is quiet when he finishes. Vale and August exchange a look that contains an entire conversation conducted in the language of two people who have been through something terrible together and emerged on the other side of it still holding on.
Erath lets the silence settle. Then: “If the Coven gets their hands on Penny, blood magic will be the least of our concerns.”
August’s brow furrows. “What do you mean?”
“Penny exists between worlds. She can shift between life and death. In the Coven’s hands, she could be used as a conduit.” He watches both of their faces as the implication lands. “They could use her to bring Jayson and Mathilde back.”
Vale goes very still. August’s hand finds Vale’s knee, an unconscious motion, grounding, and the gesture is so natural and so immediate that Erath feels something tighten in his chest that responds to the way August’s fingers curl against Vale’s knee without looking, without thinking, just reaching for the person beside him because reaching is what his body does when the world gets heavy.