Chapter 16
Erath is in the middle of closing a fissure in the sea of the dead when he's pulled, quite literally, into the world of the living.
There's no warning. One moment he's knee-deep in the murky green water with both hands submerged, coaxing a crack in the riverbed to seal itself before the spirits pooling at its edges start leaking into places they don't belong, and the next the space around him warps.
The air folds. The sky, such as it is in the underworld, splits open above him with a sound that is less a tear and more a breath, and a portal into the above opens cleanly with a set of stairs leading up into it.
He straightens. The water drips from his hands and hisses where it hits the dry ground. He stares at the portal for a long moment, because there is only one person in existence who can summon him, and if that's happening, it's probably something dire.
He's already had a morning. He'd been in the middle of working when he'd realized he couldn't feel Sidney and Penny within the underworld any longer.
His first response had been alarm, sharp and total, the kind that starts in his sternum and radiates outward.
His second response, arriving half a breath later and overriding the first, had been trust. If Sidney had taken Penny, then Penny was with Sidney, and Sidney may have no magic and no defenses to speak of, but Sidney had also descended into the literal underworld for her, and climbed down a fire escape for her, and told the Hargrove Coven to fuck off for her, and Erath trusts him with his daughter's safety in a way he cannot rationalize and has stopped trying to.
The trust is new. It's new and it's fragile and it's built on a foundation of a man who sleeps with his whole body pressed against Erath's chest and holds on to him in the night and doesn't flinch anymore when Erath's hands find his waist in the dark.
The trust is built on the way Sidney takes care of Penny without being asked, the way he takes care of Erath without being asked.
It's built on the way Sidney's body had fully let go, for the first time in what Erath suspects is years, and the sound Sidney makes when he's falling asleep, a small exhale that isn't quite a sigh, the sound of someone's guard coming down.
He'd felt the absence of them and he'd thought: they'll come back. And the certainty of it had been strange and warm and he'd held it and gone to work.
Now he follows the stairs into the light.
The portal leads him into a small, cluttered apartment that smells of potpourri and incense.
The potpourri is lavender, old and slightly dusty, the kind that sits in a bowl on a shelf and hasn't been refreshed in months.
The incense is sandalwood, recently lit, the smoke curling from a stick on the windowsill and leaving a blue-gray haze near the ceiling.
There are books everywhere. Stacked on the floor, piled on the coffee table, wedged into shelves that are already double-loaded and leaning under the weight.
Crystals line the windowsill beside the incense, and there are plants, many of them, some thriving and some questionable, crowding every available surface that isn't already occupied by books or candles or the small collection of ceramic frogs that sits on top of the refrigerator for reasons Erath is not planning on asking about.
In the middle of the apartment, holding out his hands to keep the portal open, is Newt Hargrove.
The boy looks older than the last time Erath saw him properly.
Not by years, but by weight. There's a tension in his shoulders that speaks of things carried for too long, and his face is thinner, sharper at the edges, though his eyes are the same.
Dark, serious, too old for someone his age.
His hands are steady as he holds the portal, but the light at his fingertips is flickering, which means its cost is not zero.
Erath climbs out of the underworld and Newt closes the portal behind him.
It seals with a soft exhale, the apartment air rushing to fill the space where the passage had been, and the temperature in the room normalizes.
Malik is standing nearby. One of the demons under Erath's command, though "command" is a stretch these days, given that Malik is voluntarily bound to a human and no longer resides in the underworld and seems content to stay that way.
He's leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed and he looks like his metaphorical feathers have been ruffled.
It's never a good sign when an incubus looks worried.
Their concerns tend to center around pleasure and self-preservation, and the fact that Malik looks like he's doing long division in his head suggests that whatever Newt is about to say is more complicated than either of them would like.
"Newt," Erath says, and he realizes as he says it how long it's been since they've truly spoken.
Face to face, in a room, with enough time to say the things that need saying.
The last time Newt had called for his help there hadn't been time.
Mathilde had been there and the portal had been unstable, flickering in and out, and they'd had minutes at best. Erath had done what he could and then the passage had closed and they'd gone their separate ways and that had been the end of it.
He is more than capable of opening his own portals, but it's not easy to get one to stay stable anywhere near the Hargrove manor.
They've been dabbling in enough forbidden magic that even death has a hard time taking hold, the wards and counter-wards and blood-soaked protections layered so thick that the boundary between worlds calcifies rather than bends.
It speaks to the level of skill Newt has developed that he was capable of holding a portal open at all, let alone one stable enough for Erath to walk through.
"I'm sorry," Newt says immediately, which sounds exactly like him.
He's twisting his hands, the afterglow of magic still fading from his fingers, and he looks far too unsure for someone as capable as he is.
At least power hasn't gone to his head. He still appears to be the same sweet, kind boy he's always been, the one who used to sit in Penny's room and read to her when she was too small to hold the books herself, turning the pages and doing the voices with a patience that had surprised Erath then and still surprises him now, because patience is not a trait the Hargrove Coven cultivates and Newt has it anyway, stubbornly, defiantly, a quality he grew in himself because no one else was going to plant it.
"I know you've got a lot going on," Newt says, "but this involves Penny."
Of course it involves Penny. Everything involves Penny right now.
But the fact that it also involves Newt is a very bad sign, because Newt has spent a lot of effort extracting himself from the Coven's grasp and if they've pulled him back in, then whatever is happening has escalated beyond what Erath had hoped.
"How is she?" Newt asks, before he can say anything.
The question comes out fast, and the way Newt says it tells Erath it's been sitting at the front of his mind since before the portal opened.
He's not asking how she is in the general sense.
He's asking how she is right now, today, given everything that's happening. "Is she safe? Where is she?"
"She's safe," Erath says. "She's in Haven with a friend."
"A friend?" Newt's brow creases and he says, with the innocent bluntness that comes to him so naturally, "You don't have any friends. Not any living ones anyway."
He's not wrong, of course, but it's still a little amusing to hear a tiny redheaded witch call out the literal god of death for being an antisocial recluse.
Erath pauses. The pause goes on longer than it should for a simple answer, and he watches Newt register the length of it, watches the crease in his brow deepen. "Penny has… bonded with someone."
Newt stares at him. Malik, behind him, uncrosses his arms.
"Bonded," Newt repeats. The word lands with its full weight because Newt knows what it means.
He was there for the Angelica years. He watched the bond form between the three of them, watched what it made possible, watched what happened when it broke.
He understands the mechanics of Penny's power better than most people alive, because he grew up inside the belly of it, because his mother's place in the triangle was the scaffolding of his teenage years and when it collapsed he'd been caught in the wreckage along with everyone else.
He'd lost Penny. He'd lost Erath. "Bonded the way she bonded with my mother? "
"Yes."
"To who?"
Erath should be able to answer this question easily.
It's a factual question with a factual answer.
Sidney. A bartender. A human who found Penny in his bar and kept her safe.
The words are right there and they should be simple and instead they're stuck somewhere between his chest and his throat because the simple version of the answer is not the whole version and the whole version requires explaining things that Erath has not said out loud to anyone and is not entirely certain how to articulate.
"A mortal," he says. "A man. He found Penny the night Amelia died. She was alone in his bar and he took care of her and refused to hand her over to the Coven when they came for her. And Penny…" He trails off. Starts again. "Penny decided he was hers."
"Penny decided he was hers," Newt echoes, and there's something careful in his voice now, something that is reading between every line Erath is offering and finding the lines he's leaving out. "And she rebuilt the triangle."
"Yes."
"With a stranger."
"He's not a stranger. Not anymore."