Chapter 16 #2
The qualifier comes out before Erath can stop it, and he watches it land in the room the way a dropped glass lands, all at once and impossible to take back.
Newt stares at him. Malik makes a sound that is either a cough or a very poorly suppressed laugh, and Erath gives the incubus a look that could freeze the river solid.
Newt's expression shifts through several things in rapid succession. Surprise first, then something calculating, then something softer that he seems to decide not to voice. He looks at Erath with the purposeful tact of someone who is being very careful about what they say next.
"Is he good for her?" Newt asks.
The question is simple and it's the right question and Erath is grateful for it because it gives him something concrete to answer instead of the sprawling, unmanageable thing happening in his chest. "He's made her his entire world and she's happy in a way she hasn't been since… ." He pauses. "He's very good for her."
"And to you?"
Erath looks at Newt. Newt looks back at him, steady and unflinching, and the question is not casual.
It's the question of someone who watched his mother use Erath, who watched the bond between them curdle into manipulation and betrayal, who knows exactly what it costs Erath to let someone close enough to occupy that position and who is asking, with the quiet fierceness of a person who cares, whether this time is different.
Erath doesn't know how to answer. He doesn't know how to say any of what he feels for Sidney. So he says, haltingly, with the gracelessness of a man who has spent eons dealing with the dead and has no practice talking about the living, "He's… yes. He is."
Malik makes the sound again. Erath gives him the look again. Malik raises his hands in surrender and leans back against the counter and says nothing, but his mouth is doing something that Erath finds deeply objectionable.
Newt, to his credit, doesn't push. He nods, once, and the nod carries acceptance and relief and something that might be the beginning of a smile, and he lets the topic settle and moves on to the reason he called.
He explains that Annabeth came to him last night.
He says this carefully, the way someone handles a piece of glass they know is cracked.
Annabeth, the other sister, the one who stayed when Angelica left, the one who's been holding the Coven together in Mathilde's absence with nothing but stubbornness and whatever authority her bloodline affords her.
She came to Newt's apartment, begrudgingly, and asked for help, which is one of the most surprising things he could say.
Annabeth asking anyone for help is remarkable.
Annabeth asking Newt, the nephew she's barely spoken to over the years, the defector, the one who walked away, is extraordinary. It means she's desperate.
Newt goes on. Annabeth had taken over in Mathilde's absence, but the Coven has been coming apart around her.
Members leaving. Factions forming. The power structure Mathilde held together through sheer force of will and fear is crumbling without her, and Annabeth doesn't command the same loyalty.
She's respected but not feared, and in the Hargrove Coven the distinction matters.
And then there is the complication. Angelica, who has come back into the picture with the inevitability of a returning tide.
Erath's jaw tightens at the name. It still does this, every time, a reflex he's stopped fighting.
Whatever he felt for her is gone, replaced so completely that he can't reconstruct it even when he tries.
What remains is the blade, the betrayal, and the knowledge that she will do worse if given the chance.
Angelica is conspiring with members of the Coven to open a rift into the underworld. To bring Mathilde and her husband, Jayson Voss, back to life.
Newt's voice is mostly steady as he explains, but not entirely.
Malik shifts behind him, just slightly, just enough that his shoulder is closer to Newt's, and Erath notes it.
The incubus is doing the thing that people do when someone they care about is in distress: getting closer without making it obvious, providing support without demanding acknowledgment.
Erath knows this maneuver. He's been doing it himself for days.
She plans to do this using a conduit that exists between life and death. Penny.
Erath's chest goes tight. He'd suspected as much, had laid the theory out for August and Vale days ago, the possibility that the Coven would try to use Penny as a bridge between realms to pull Jayson and Mathilde back through.
Hearing Newt confirm it doesn't surprise him.
It just makes the weight of it settle into something he can no longer dismiss as speculation.
But Newt isn't finished. Once the rift is open, Angelica intends to use a blood pact to bind the souls to living bodies, effectively resurrecting them.
And the blood pact requires a sacrifice.
The conduit that opens the rift becomes the fuel that sustains it.
Penny would open the door, and then she would become the door, and the door would burn.
Erath hadn't let himself think that far. He'd imagined the Coven using Penny, controlling her, bending her power to their ends, and all of those possibilities had been enough to keep him awake through every night he doesn't sleep. He hadn't imagined them consuming her.
The temperature in the apartment drops, incrementally, degree by degree, and the incense smoke drifts sideways, recoiling from him. The ceramic frogs on the refrigerator develop a thin layer of frost. One of the plants nearest to where he's standing wilts, its leaves curling inward.
His daughter, who paints strangers' toenails pink and chose a bartender as her family because he sat on the floor to be at her level, would be used as kindling for her own grandmother's resurrection. And the person orchestrating it is her mother.
He thinks about Sidney. He thinks about what Sidney would do if he found out, and the answer is exactly what Sidney always does: he would put himself between Penny and the threat and deal with the consequences later.
Sidney would walk into a warehouse full of Coven witches and blood magic and things that could kill him with a thought, and he would do it in his pajamas if he had to, and the consequences would be fatal because Sidney is human and mortal and breakable and brave in the way that people are brave when they've decided something matters more than their own survival.
Erath is not going to let that happen. Not to Penny. Not to Sidney. Not to any part of the fragile, impossible thing that has assembled itself around him.
Newt continues. His voice catches, just once, and he clears his throat and pushes through.
He says he can't allow Penny to be used for their mother's ambitions the way he was.
He says he has to put a stop to it before she becomes another casualty of the Coven.
He says this with the quiet ferocity of someone who knows exactly what it feels like to be used by the people who were supposed to protect him, and who will break himself open before he lets it happen to someone else.
Erath uncrosses his arms. He lets his hands hang at his sides and the cold in the room recedes, not because his anger has passed but because he is making a deliberate, conscious effort not to let it consume the space. He doesn't apologize for the frost or the wilting plant.
"It should have never been allowed to happen to you either," Erath says. His voice is level. Controlled. The words underneath it are not. "Angelica should never have been given custody of Penny or you."
Newt shakes his head. "There's no way around it. There was never anywhere else for me to go."
This is true, and the truth of it is the thing that has sat in Erath's chest for years, heavy and unresolvable.
Newt was Angelica's before Erath ever met her.
He was already part of the Coven, already enmeshed, and by the time Erath understood what that world really was, Newt was too deeply embedded to extract.
Erath couldn't take him to the underworld.
Not then, not with the laws that bound him, not without the kind of link Penny creates.
Newt was alive and mortal and belonged to the world of the living, and Erath's jurisdiction over the living has always been agonizingly limited.
He'd failed Newt. He knows this. He's carried it for years.
And now the same threat that consumed Newt's childhood is coming for Penny, delivered by the same woman, driven by the same hunger, and Erath is standing in a cluttered apartment full of books and ceramic frogs and he is going to stop it or he is going to burn the world trying.
Newt seems to sense his guilt, the way he always has. He looks at Erath and says, firmly, "There's nothing you could have done. I couldn't have come to the underworld. You know that."
Erath stares at him. Conflicted. Jaw tight.
Newt holds his gaze. "When I truly needed you and called, you came." His voice is quiet and carries more weight than most voices Erath has heard in his considerable lifetime. "You came. That's more than anyone else has done for me."
The words settle in the room. Malik is quiet behind Newt, and Erath watches the way the incubus's hand has moved to the small of Newt's back, resting there, not pushing, not pulling, just present.
"That hardly makes up for a lifetime of abuse," Erath says, and the words taste bitter because they're true.