Chapter 13
Sidney has exactly zero cell service in the underworld, which isn’t surprising, and he knows Xela is going to kill him herself once she finds out he’s alive.
He has no way to get a message to her. He’s been trying, on and off, holding his phone up at different angles in different rooms as though the underworld might have a pocket of signal hiding behind the armoire if he just finds the right spot.
It does not. The underworld does not care about his bars.
The underworld has its own concerns and none of them involve the cellular infrastructure of the mortal realm, and Sidney’s phone is a dead brick in his pocket and Xela is, at this moment, almost certainly running his bar alone and composing increasingly violent plans for what she’s going to do to him when she finds out he’s not dead.
He doesn’t have time to worry about that right now, because he’s currently supervising a five-year-old girl who is painstakingly reading him every book in her collection, and “reading” is doing an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Penny does not read. Penny interprets. The caterpillar, according to her latest retelling, does not eat through one apple and two pears.
The caterpillar eats through a castle and three dragons and then has a stomachache, which, to be fair, sounds likely after such consumption.
Sidney sits on the floor of her bedroom with his back against the daybed and his legs stretched out and listens to the latest revision and asks follow-up questions about the dragons and acts appropriately mesmerized by her story crafting skills.
Erath had left that morning, after the pancakes and the burn and the revelation that Sidney has been cosmically bonded to a god’s dead wife’s parking spot.
He’d said something about Penny not being able to stay in the underworld without Sidney, because it wasn’t her time yet, and he’d heavily implied, without outright asking, that he’d like Sidney to stay so Penny was safe and not in the above where the Coven could reach her.
He hadn’t asked. Erath doesn’t ask for things.
He hovers at the edges of requests and waits for people to read between the lines, which is infuriating, and Sidney had taken pity on him and said yes, he’d stay.
So here he is. In the underworld. In the god of death’s house.
Wearing the god of death’s clothes, which are too long in the arms and too wide in the shoulders and make him look like a child playing dress-up in his father’s closet, except the father in question is an immortal being and the closet contains nothing but identical black shirts.
Sidney has rolled the sleeves three times and the hem still hits mid-thigh and he’s trying not to think about what it means that Erath’s shirt smells like moss and stone and the mineral warmth that is specifically, unmistakably Erath, and that Sidney has caught himself pressing his face into the collar twice today.
He catches himself doing it again while Penny is between books, his nose against the fabric, breathing in the scent, and the bruise on his face presses into the collar and the ache reminds him that he still looks like he lost a fight with a freight train.
The bruise is still there. Erath had healed the burn on his palm this morning, lips against skin, brief and warm and over before Sidney could process it, but the face is untouched.
The purple-black gradient from his undereye to his jaw is still broadcasting to the world that someone hit him, hard, and the swelling at the edge of his lip is still there, and Penny has been looking at it with the concern of a five-year-old who doesn’t know what to say about the damage on a grown-up’s face but knows it shouldn’t be there.
He spends the day with Penny. He makes her lunch, which consists of whatever he can find in a kitchen that has been stocked by someone with no concept of groceries.
There are eggs. There is bread. There is peanut butter and, inexplicably, a jar of honey that appears to have come from somewhere that is not a regular grocery store, given that the label is in a language Sidney can’t read and the honey itself is a shade of amber that glows faintly in the light.
He makes peanut butter and honey sandwiches and decides not to investigate the honey further.
In the afternoon Penny builds a fort out of couch cushions and Sidney is conscripted as the architect, which involves holding things in place while she makes structural decisions that are, from an engineering standpoint, ambitious.
The fort collapses twice. They rebuild it twice.
She names it Fort Sid, which Sidney considers a high compliment.
They eat dinner inside the fort, cross-legged on the floor, and Penny tells him about a dream she had involving a purple horse and a river made of juice, and Sidney asks where the horse lives and what kind of juice and Penny has answers for all of it and none of them make sense and Sidney is content with that.
He puts her to bed. It’s becoming routine, the tucking, the blanket around the feet, the offer of a story, the door left cracked.
She’s asked him twice today where her dad is, and both times Sidney has told her he’s working but he’ll check on her when he gets home, and both times she’s accepted this with the trust of a child who has decided that if Sidney says it then it’s true.
The weight of that trust sits on his chest and doesn’t move.
She’d touched his face earlier that day, during the second story, the one about the caterpillar and the castle.
Reached up from where she was sitting in his lap and pressed her small fingers against the bruise on his jaw and said, “Does it hurt?” And Sidney had said, “Nah, it’s just a bruise.
It’ll go away.” And she’d looked at him with those dark eyes, the old-behind-the-young ones, and said, “Daddy can fix it.” And Sidney had said, “Yeah, I know he can.” And she’d gone back to her story and hadn’t mentioned it again.
He tries not to think about how, for two days in a row, he’s been primary caretaker to a child.
Down that road lies complicated thoughts and all of them lead back to the same place, which is the man who lives in this house and who kissed Sidney’s palm this morning with a mouth that healed what it touched and left something else behind that hasn’t healed, hasn’t faded, is still sitting under Sidney’s skin, warm and humming and connected to the pull in his chest that has been quiet all day but is getting louder now, in the evening, as though it knows something Sidney doesn’t.
Erath comes home hours later.
Sidney hears the door before he sees him.
The heavy wood opening and closing, the shift in the air, the way the fire in the grate flickers once and then burns brighter, as though the house itself is responding to its owner’s presence.
Sidney is on the couch with his knees drawn up, one of Penny’s coloring books in his lap because he’d started coloring absently and then gotten invested in staying inside the lines.
He looks up and Erath is in the doorway, in his leather jacket with the hood up, and his eyes are dark and his expression is complicated and Sidney’s stomach does something that is not appropriate for a man holding a coloring book.
The pull surges. It surges the way it had when Erath’s mouth touched his palm, a single bright flare of warmth that radiates from his sternum and makes his breath catch.
It says: here. It says: he’s here. And the force of it is startling because it’s been quiet all day, a background hum, and now it’s loud and insistent and pointing directly at the man standing in the doorway and Sidney realizes, with a certainty that goes all the way through him, that the pull responds to Erath.
Not to proximity. Not to the underworld.
To Erath. When he’s close, the pull ignites, and when he’s gone, it waits.
Erath pushes his hood down. His hair is dark and slightly damp, which means it’s raining above, and he looks tired in the way that immortal beings look tired, not physically but somewhere deeper, like they're carrying the weight of the world.
He looks at Sidney on the couch in his clothes with a coloring book in his lap and the corners of his mouth do something very small and very private.
“She’s asleep,” Sidney says, because it’s the first thing Erath will want to know.
“I know.” Erath shrugs off his jacket and hangs it on the hook by the door, where it joins its identical siblings. “I can feel her.”
“That must be nice. I had to check manually, by walking down the hall and looking at her.”
Erath’s mouth twitches. He crosses to the armchair by the fire and sits, and the distance he chooses is deliberate.
Sidney notices. The armchair is across the room.
It’s as far from the couch as you can get while remaining in the same room, and Erath has chosen it on purpose, the way he’s been choosing distances on purpose since the kitchen, always giving Sidney more space than he needs rather than less.
“You can sit over here,” Sidney says. “The couch isn’t going to bite you.”
Erath looks at him. “Are you sure?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.”
Erath rises from the armchair and crosses to the couch and sits.
Not close. Not on the other end either. The middle distance, close enough that Sidney could reach out and touch him if he wanted, far enough that there’s air between them.
Sidney appreciates the calibration even as he recognizes it for what it is, and the recognition does something warm and complicated to his chest.
Erath is quiet for a long moment, looking at the fire, and says, “Will you stay for a while? In the underworld. So she can be here until the Coven is dealt with.”