19. Chapter 19
After Penny is asleep, tucked into her canopy bed with the fairy lights casting constellations on the ceiling and her stuffed bear clutched against her chest and the door cracked open the exact width she requires, Sidney pads back into the main room and drops onto the couch.
His body aches. Not from injury, for once, but from the exhaustion of a day spent above ground navigating parks and banshees and difficult conversations with best friends and then descending back into the underworld to make dinner and supervise a bubble bath that resulted in more water on the floor than in the tub. It's the good kind of tired.
Erath is already in the room, sitting in the armchair near the fire with his legs stretched out and his head tipped back, staring at the ceiling in the way he does when he's thinking about seventeen things at once and none of them are good.
He looks tired too, which shouldn't be possible for a being that doesn't sleep, but there it is.
The tiredness is in his shoulders, in the set of his jaw, in the way his fingers are drumming a slow rhythm on the armrest. He's been gone most of the day, and whatever he was doing has left a weight on him that Sidney can see from across the room.
"So," Sidney says, pulling his legs up onto the couch and sitting cross-legged because the floor of the underworld is cold and his socks are thin. "Are you going to tell me where you were today, or am I supposed to guess?"
Erath lifts his head and looks at him. There's a pause, the kind that comes before a long explanation, and then Erath shifts forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, and begins talking.
He tells Sidney about Newt. He tells him that Newt was visited by Annabeth, the current acting matriarch of the Coven, who came to him for help because the Coven is fracturing from within.
He explains that Angelica, Erath's ex-wife, Penny's mother, is the one driving the plot to use Penny as a conduit.
She wants to open a rift into the underworld.
She wants to bring back Mathilde and Jayson Voss.
She wants to use a blood pact to bind them to living bodies, and the sacrifice that fuels the pact is Penny.
Sidney knew pieces of this. August had speculated about it in the park. But hearing it confirmed, hearing the details laid out with the cold precision of someone who has spent the day assembling them, makes the knowledge settle differently. Heavier. More real.
Erath continues. He explains that Newt is Penny's half-brother.
Angelica's firstborn. That he was raised in the Coven and used by them and that his relationship with his mother is something Erath carries guilt about, though he doesn't say it that way.
He says it the way he says everything personal, which is sideways and underneath, buried in the facts and visible only if you know where to look.
Sidney knows where to look.
He takes it all in. He processes it in pieces, fitting new information into the framework he's been building since this started, and finds that the picture is becoming both clearer and uglier.
A Coven torn apart by power struggles. A mother willing to sacrifice her own daughter for immortality.
A network of allies forming, fragile and new, held together by the shared understanding that something very bad is about to happen and the people best equipped to stop it are the ones who've been broken by it before.
"Newt sounds like a good person," Sidney says, when Erath finishes.
"He is." Erath says it simply, without qualification. "Better than most."
"And you trust him."
"With my life. With Penny's life."
Sidney nods. He pulls at a loose thread on the couch cushion, winding it around his finger, and says, "Okay. So we've got Newt and his demon, and Dimitri and his human. Annabeth, maybe. August and Vale. That's a decent group."
"It's more than I expected."
"People tend to care when the power crazy mages they already killed once might be resurrected." Sidney shrugs.
"August said basically the same thing you just told me," he continues.
"About Penny being a conduit. About the Coven wanting to use her to resurrect Voss and Mathilde.
He said if Jayson Voss comes back with the power of a blood sacrifice behind him, he won't be the same man he fought last time.
He'll be worse. And August doesn't have his full arsenal of necromancy at his disposal anymore. "
Erath nods in agreement. "August exchanged most of his power to become a Psychopomp for the underworld.
He will be able to help, but we can't count on him being stronger than an immortal necromancer resurrected through blood magic.
With Mathilde beside him, they would have access to power that isn't meant to exist. The barriers between life and death that I've spent my entire existence maintaining would be compromised. "
"And Angelica doesn't care about the collateral damage."
"Angelica cares about Angelica." There's no bitterness in Erath's voice.
Just the flat, exhausted acceptance of someone who loved a person and watched them choose, over and over, to be exactly who they always were.
"She thinks bringing back Mathilde will earn her a place at the table.
She thinks power will fill whatever void is driving her.
She's wrong, but she won't believe that until it's too late. "
"So what's the plan?"
Erath tells him. He says Newt is assembling the allies.
Malik is contacting Dimitri. Knox and Annabeth are working from inside the Coven.
Erath himself needs to meet with August and coordinate the approach from the Order's side, because August and Vale have intelligence and resources that the rest of them don't. He says he thinks they have a few days at most before Angelica is ready to make her move.
She's been picking apart the wards the Order placed at the warehouse where Voss originally opened his rifts, and once those wards are down, she'll have a location with the veil between worlds already thin enough to tear.
Sidney absorbs all of this and says, "I want to help."
Erath looks at him.
"I know what you're going to say," Sidney continues.
"You'd prefer if I stayed in the underworld where I'm safe.
And I get it. I do. But I'm not going to sit on my hands while everyone else works to solve a problem I'm actively part of.
The Coven has already come after me twice.
I'm involved whether either of us likes it or not. "
Erath is quiet for a long moment. His fingers have stopped drumming on the armrest. He's looking at Sidney with the focused attention of someone who is weighing every possible outcome and finding none of them ideal.
"I would prefer you stayed here," Erath says. "Yes."
"But?"
"But if you have to leave, keep Xela within arm's reach."
Sidney nods. "I can do that. I'll be careful."
"I know you will." Erath pauses, and then adds, with the faintest edge of dry amusement, "You'll also do whatever you want regardless of what I say, so I'm choosing to be supportive."
"See, that's growth," Sidney tells him, and the corner of Erath's mouth pulls in a way that is dangerously close to a smile.
The smile fades. It doesn't vanish all at once but recedes by degrees, the warmth pulling back from Erath's face the way the tide pulls from shore, and what's left behind is something careful and heavy.
He's not done. Sidney can feel it the way you feel weather changing, a pressure shift in the room, and he watches Erath's hands go still on his knees and waits.
"There's something else," Erath says. "Something I should have told you sooner."
Sidney's stomach tightens. Nothing good has ever followed that sentence, in his experience.
Not from a doctor, not from a boss, not from any of the men who've said it to him in various kitchens and bedrooms and parking lots before delivering the kind of information that rearranges the furniture in your life.
"The bond between you and Penny," Erath says. "The tether Penny created when she chose you as her guardian. It doesn't just connect you to her. It connects you to the underworld. To me. To the boundary itself."
Sidney waits. He doesn't say anything, because Erath's face tells him there's more and the more is the part that matters.
"Penny is a conduit because she was born between worlds.
Half mine, half mortal. Her blood carries the frequency of the boundary, and that frequency is what the Coven needs to open a rift.
" Erath pauses. His jaw works once, a small, tight motion.
"When she bound you, she threaded that same frequency into your blood.
You carry it now. Not as strongly as she does, but enough. "
The words land in Sidney's chest and sit there, cold and heavy.
"Enough for what?" Sidney asks, though he already knows. He can feel the answer forming in the shape of the silence between them, in the way Erath is looking at him with the care of someone delivering news they've been carrying too long.
"Enough to be used as a conduit. If the Coven can't get to Penny, or if they need a secondary source to stabilize the rift, you would serve the same purpose."
Sidney stares at him.