22. Chapter 22
Erath doesn’t go after him.
He should. He knows he should. Sidney is running scared through the underworld, and Erath should be behind him, should be chasing him, should be doing something other than sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands in front of him staring at the way they tremble.
They are shaking and he can’t make them stop.
He presses them together, presses them flat against his thighs, curls them into fists, and nothing helps.
The tremor lives deeper than muscle. It lives in the part of him that makes decisions before his mind is consulted, the part that felt fingers on his throat in the dark and became something old and terrible and acted accordingly.
He is not thinking about Sidney. He is trying to think about Sidney and instead he is thinking about Angelica. Her hands. The blade.
Except it wasn’t her. It was Sidney. Sidney’s hand, gentle and light, tracing the line of his jaw with the careful reverence of someone who just wanted to touch him.
Sidney, who has never once reached for Erath with anything other than tenderness, whose hands are incapable of the kind of cruelty Erath’s body remembered, and Erath’s body did not know the difference.
His body felt the contact and it reacted with the speed and the violence of something that has been waiting for years to defend itself against a threat that no longer exists, and he had Sidney pinned to the mattress before he was even awake.
Please don’t.
The words repeat in his skull and each repetition cuts deeper.
Not because of what they said but because of how they sounded.
The smallness of Sidney’s voice. The way it cracked.
The way it came from somewhere deep and rehearsed, a phrase spoken so many times that it emerged automatically, a reflex as ingrained as breathing.
Sidney didn’t say it to Erath. He said it to every man who ever gave him a reason to learn those words, and Erath was another one.
For those few terrible seconds, for the space between asleep and awake, Erath was just another body pinning him down in the dark.
His hands won’t stop shaking.
He sits there. He doesn’t know how long.
Time moves differently for him, has always moved differently, and in this moment it’s meaningless, just a series of breaths he doesn’t need to take drawn in and released in a rhythm that does nothing to settle the fracture in his chest. He should get up.
He should go after Sidney. He should find him and explain, and apologize, and hold him, except holding him is the last thing Sidney needs right now because the last thing Erath did with his hands was use them to shove a man onto his back and hold him down and Erath cannot look at his own hands without seeing that.
By the time he gathers himself, the bed is cold where Sidney was.
Not the gradual cooling of a recent departure, where warmth still lingers in the dip of the mattress and the pillow still holds the shape of the head that rested on it.
This is absence. The sheets are flat. The pillow has lost his impression.
The air has stopped carrying his scent. Sidney has been gone long enough for the bed to forget him, and the distinction between just left and gone for a while is the thing that converts Erath’s guilt into something colder and more urgent.
He is on his feet. He checks anyway, because thinking he's gone is not the same as being certain and he needs certainty. Kitchen: empty. Living room: empty. Bathroom: empty. The hallway is dark and still and there is no sound except the ambient hum of the dead and the soft rhythm of Penny’s breathing behind her closed door.
Sidney’s bag is in the corner of the bedroom where he always keeps it. Packed and ready, the way Sidney keeps everything, prepared, organized, arranged for a quick exit that he never intends to make but can’t stop planning for. The bag is here, which means he didn’t plan to leave permanently.
But his shoes are by the door, and Sidney is not wearing them.
He can’t feel him. He extends his awareness into the above and reaches for Sidney through the bond that connects them, the tether that Penny wove between them without asking, and the frequency is there but it’s muffled.
Dampened. As though something is wrapped around it, insulating it, cutting the signal to a whisper.
Sidney is alive, Erath can feel that much, but the rest is static, and the static is not natural.
It’s deliberate. Something is blocking the connection.
A door creaks open down the hall.
Small footsteps. The soft drag of a stuffed animal across the floor. Penny appears in the hallway in her pajamas, a stuffed animal held against her chest with both arms, and she looks up at Erath with eyes that are too old for her face.
“Sid’s in trouble,” she says.
Erath goes very still.
He kneels in front of her. His hands find her shoulders, small, bony, impossibly fragile, and he holds her there, careful not to let the urgency in his chest bleed into his grip.
She is five years old and she is looking at him with an expression that no five-year-old should have, the expression of someone who can see things that haven’t happened yet, or are happening now, or exist in the space between the two where the living and the dead overlap and the distinction between is and will be loses its meaning.
“What do you see, Penny?”
Penny’s face scrunches. It’s the same expression she makes when she’s trying to read a word she doesn’t know, brow furrowed, nose wrinkled, lips pressed together, except her eyes are doing something different.
The focus drains out of them and what replaces it is something Erath recognizes, because he’s seen it in the dead, in the spirits who linger between worlds and see in both directions at once.
“He’s sleeping,” Penny says. “He’s on the ground.” Her voice is small and concentrating. “There’s circles. On the floor.” She blinks, her eyes moving as though tracking something he can’t see. “Mama’s there.”
Erath’s grip on her shoulders tightens. Just slightly. He eases it immediately.
“What else?” he asks. His voice is level. Steady. It costs him everything to make it so.
“A building. It smells bad.” Penny wrinkles her nose, a real reaction, physical, as though the vision carries sensory information. “Big windows. Near the water.”
The warehouse. The one where Jayson Voss opened his rifts.
Erath knows it before she finishes describing it, because of course Angelica would go back there.
The wards are already weakened. The veil between life and death is already thin in that space, worn down by what Voss did to it, never fully healed despite the Order’s efforts.
It’s the path of least resistance, and Angelica has never been one to work harder than she has to when she can exploit what’s already been broken.
He sends a message to August. Not through conventional means, because there is nothing conventional about the connection between the lord of the underworld and a man who has walked in his domain and returned and carries the residue of that passage in his veins.
The message travels through the thread that links them, the resonance that exists between Erath and anyone who has dealt in death under his watch.
It is brief and precise: The warehouse where Voss opened the first portal. Come now. Send word to Knox.
He picks Penny up. She wraps her arms around his neck and she doesn’t ask where they’re going, because she already knows, or because she trusts him, or because she is five and the distinction between those two things doesn’t exist yet.
Erath carries her through the underworld at a pace that sends spirits scattering.
The murmur and shuffle of the dead parts before him, shades pressing themselves against the walls of the passageway, wisps of consciousness flattening into the dark, and he doesn’t slow for any of it.
His stride is long and purposeful and the underworld responds to his urgency, corridors shortening, passages aligning, the structure of death rearranging itself around him because it is his domain and it answers to his need.
He surfaces in Central. The city is gray and predawn and holding its breath, that suspended hour between the bars closing and the morning beginning when the streets belong to no one and the silence has a quality of waiting, the whole city poised for permission to start again.
He goes to Willow’s.
Sidney was right about one thing. About many things, actually, he is right about most things, which Erath has catalogued with a meticulousness that borders on compulsive and will never admit to.
But he was specifically right about Xela.
Xela is a banshee who would tear apart an army if it stood between her and the people she considers hers, and her love is a violent, possessive, territorial thing that she hides behind sharp words and sharper looks, and she would burn everything in the world to cinders for the bartender she has claimed as her own.
The bar is closed. Sign off. Windows dark.
Door locked, and Erath doesn’t need doors.
He passes through the back entrance the way he passes through every physical barrier, because walls are for the living, and finds Xela in the storage room counting bottles on a shelf with a clipboard in one hand and a pen behind her ear.
The normalcy of the task is so at odds with the emergency screaming through his veins that it nearly stops him. Nearly.
Xela whips around when she hears him. She is snarling before she fully turns, lips pulling back, eyes flashing, her body shifting into something that is two degrees from violence and closing fast, because something has entered her territory without invitation and every predatory instinct in her is at full alert.
Then she sees Penny in his arms and stops.