22. Chapter 22 #2
The snarl dies. The violence retreats. Her eyes move from Erath’s face to Penny’s, to the way Penny is clinging to his neck, to the expression on Erath’s face that he knows is not the expression he normally wears, and something in her own expression shifts from threat assessment to recognition that something is very wrong.
“Sidney has been taken by the Coven,” Erath says.
The words land in the storage room with the weight of a physical impact. Xela’s hand tightens on the clipboard. Her knuckles go white.
“I need you to watch Penny while I go to get him.”
Xela’s face goes through fury first, hot and sharp, a flash of rage that distorts the air around her and makes the bottles on the shelf rattle against each other.
Then fear, brief, almost invisible, a flicker in her eyes that she kills nearly as fast as it appears.
And then a cold, calculated determination that settles over her features and stays there, the expression of someone who is choosing not to lose control because losing control would waste time, and time is something they don’t have.
She sets the clipboard down. She crosses the room and holds out her arms and Erath transfers Penny to her with a care that belies the urgency, making sure she is settled.
Xela holds the child against her hip with a strength and a gentleness that exist in the same motion, and Penny, who has met Xela exactly twice, tucks her head under the banshee’s chin and closes her eyes as though she’s found a second home.
Xela looks at Erath over Penny’s head. Her eyes are hard and bright and there is a promise in them that doesn’t require words, but she says them anyway.
“You bring my human back.”
“I will.”
“You bring him back whole. Not broken. Not damaged. Not traumatized beyond what he already is. You bring him back the way he left.”
The way he left. Barefoot. Panicked. Running from Erath’s hands.
The sentence hits Erath in a place he doesn’t have armor for, because the way Sidney left was already broken, already damaged, already traumatized by what Erath did to him in the dark, and bringing him back whole means undoing something that Erath caused, and he doesn’t know if that’s possible.
He doesn’t know if Sidney will let him close enough to try.
“I will,” he says again, and means it in both directions: the rescue and the repair.
“If they’ve hurt him,” Xela starts, and then stops herself, because the end of that sentence is something that shouldn’t be said in front of a child. She swallows it. Her jaw works. She holds Penny tighter. “Go.”
Erath goes.
He leaves through the back of Willow’s and steps onto the street and the temperature drops in his wake.
Not gradually, not the slow dissipation of warmth that accompanies a cold front.
This is sudden, specific, the kind of cold that has nothing to do with weather and everything to do with proximity to death, the air contracting around the passage of something that doesn’t belong in the world of the living and knows it.
Streetlights flicker. One of them pops, the bulb blowing out in a shower of sparks that die before they hit the ground.
A stray cat hisses from beneath a dumpster and bolts into the dark.
Erath walks.
His stride is measured and even. He is not rushing, because rushing suggests panic, and what Erath is feeling is not panic.
Panic is disorganized. Panic flails. What Erath is feeling is focused and precise and directional, a force with a fixed point of origin and a fixed destination, and every step between those two points is deliberate.
The city responds to him the way it always does, by getting out of his way.
Traffic lights change. Doors lock themselves.
A man sleeping in a doorway presses himself against the wall without waking, making room on the sidewalk for something his unconscious mind knows not to be near.
He encounters August and Vale two blocks from the warehouse.
They are standing at the corner of an intersection that smells of the river, brackish and industrial, tinged with rust and decay.
August is in his coat, and his face has the tight, focused expression of a man who received a cryptic message from a cryptic man and is not looking forward to whatever is going to happen.
Vale is beside him, as he always is, armed and looking displeased.
“Angelica has Sidney,” Erath says.
August’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t ask how or why, because the how doesn’t matter and the why is obvious, and Erath is grateful for this, because he is not in a state to explain and the explaining would require him to say things he is not ready to say. August nods once.
Vale is pulling a communication rune from his pocket, pressing it to his ear, listening, speaking in a low voice.
After a moment he lowers it and says, “Knox contacted me an hour ago. He and Dimitri are with Annabeth at the Hargrove mansion. They’ve been searching for Angelica’s phylactery, the object anchoring her power.
Annabeth believes it’s in the vault beneath the house. ”
The phylactery. Of course. Of course Angelica would have one, because Angelica has always been meticulous in her cruelties, always careful to build a failsafe into every scheme so that even if she is confronted directly, even if someone tries to kill her, the phylactery will sustain her.
It will feed her body with stolen power and keep her magic intact and she will not die. Not while it holds.
“Without the phylactery, Angelica’s blood magic collapses,” Vale continues. “She won’t be able to use Sidney or Penny as a conduit. She’ll be vulnerable.”
“Then Knox needs to find it,” Erath says. “And we need to get to Sidney before Angelica finishes the ritual.”
He starts walking. August and Vale fall into step on either side of him, and the three of them move toward the waterfront.
Two blocks. The warehouse comes into view at the end of a dead-end street, a hulking industrial structure, dark and angular against the predawn sky, with high windows that are mostly broken and a loading dock that faces the water.
It looks abandoned in the way that places look abandoned when terrible things have happened in them, the kind of emptiness that isn’t empty at all but full of residue, full of the echoes of what was done here and what was opened here and what came through.
The veil between life and death is so thin in this space that Erath can feel it against his skin, a gauze he could tear with a thought.
The doors are closed. From inside, muffled but unmistakable, comes the sound of voices. Of chanting. Of something being prepared.
Erath doesn’t slow down.