Chapter 23 #3
“Erath,” she says again. Louder. An edge now, sharp and defensive. “You can’t hurt me. You know the rules.”
Four feet.
“You cannot harm the living,” she says, and her voice is rising, losing the measured calm she’s maintained all night. “You are bound by the same laws you enforce. I am living, and you can’t touch me.”
Two feet.
Erath doesn’t slow down. He doesn’t speak.
He walks toward her with the unhurried patience of something that has spent eternity waiting for people to stop running, and the look on his face is not anger.
It’s not fury. It is the absolute, settled certainty of a man who has found the line and watched someone cross it and is now going to do exactly what he was always going to do, what he was always capable of doing, what she should have known he was capable of doing if she had ever truly understood what he was.
She’s right about the rules. They’ve held for as long as he’s existed and there has never been an exception.
He cannot harm the living. It is the foundational law of his existence, the constraint that makes him a guardian rather than a predator, and it has never been broken.
Not once. Not in all the millennia of his stewardship.
Except there is one exception. And she made it herself.
She took Sidney. She drew a circle around the body of a man who is linked to Penny, who is threaded through with the bond between life and death that makes him Erath’s to protect.
She used him. She hurt him. She tore at the fabric of his being and used his body as a doorway, and in doing so she crossed the one line that matters.
Because Sidney belongs to Penny. And Penny belongs to Erath.
And anyone who harms what belongs to him, who reaches into the space he has claimed and protected and held sacred, is fair game.
Living or otherwise.
Erath reaches Angelica and drives his hand through her chest.
Sidney sees it happen. He is on the floor and his head is turned and the pain is still screaming through every cell in his body, the rift still pulling at him, the circle still burning, but he sees it.
Erath’s hand goes into her chest. Through her ribcage, past the sternum, into the cavity of her body with a sound that is less a crunch and more a displacement, the air itself making room.
His arm sinks to the forearm, to the elbow, and Angelica’s mouth opens and no sound comes out.
Her eyes go wide. She looks down at the arm buried in her chest, at Erath’s sleeve disappearing into her body, at the impossible reality of what is happening, and then she looks up at Erath’s face with an expression that is, for the first time, genuinely surprised.
Not frightened. Surprised. As though she hadn’t thought he had it in him.
She stares at him. Breathless, literally breathless, because there is an arm in her chest and her lungs are not functioning as designed, and manages through a mouth that is trying to form words around the shock, “What are you doing? I can’t be killed.”
And she’s right.
Erath’s hand is in her chest and it should have ended her but it hasn’t.
The phylactery is keeping her alive, feeding her body with the stolen power that has sustained her magic and her ambition and every terrible thing she’s ever done.
Her heart is beating around his fist, pushed aside but not crushed, and the magic from the phylactery is stitching her together even as Erath’s presence tears her apart.
She can’t be killed. Not while the phylactery holds.
And Erath knows this.
He knows it, and he doesn’t pull his hand back, and he doesn’t step away, and the expression on his face doesn’t change. He stands there with his arm buried in the chest of the woman he once loved, his fist closed around the space where her heart beats, and waits.
“I’ve always been a patient man,” he says. Quietly. Almost conversationally.
Angelica’s eyes widen further. Sidney can see the understanding arrive in her face, the realization of what Erath is saying and what it means.
He’s not trying to kill her. Not yet. He’s holding.
He’s standing there with his hand on her heart and he is waiting for the phylactery to break, and when it does, there will be nothing between his fist and her life.
She starts to struggle. Her hands come up to his arm, gripping, pulling, trying to pry him free, but he is immovable.
Not resistant, not bracing against her. Immovable, the way the ground is immovable, the way the dead are immovable.
Her hands slide off his skin. Her nails scrape against his forearm and leave no mark.
She pushes and shoves and her feet slide on the concrete and she is trapped there, held upright by the arm inside her, kept alive by a power source she cannot reach, and the god of death stands before her and waits with the patience of someone who has nothing but time.
Vale, still anchoring August with one hand on his shoulder, pulls a communication rune from his pocket with the other.
He presses it to his ear. Listens. The warehouse is filled with the sound of the rift groaning against August’s hold and Sidney’s ragged breathing and Angelica’s increasingly frantic struggles, and Vale’s voice is low and even when he speaks into the rune and then lowers it.
“Knox found the phylactery,” Vale says. “They’re working on it. Hold on a little longer.”
The minutes stretch.
They stretch the way minutes do when every second is a lifetime, when the body is in agony and the mind is barely holding on and the world has narrowed to a single point of endurance.
August groans through his teeth, sweat pouring down his face, the rift trembling and pulsing against his hold, trying to widen.
Vale’s hand tightens on his shoulder and his blade is still drawn and his eyes are scanning the warehouse, watching for threats, watching for coven members who might regain consciousness, watching for anything that might tip the balance.
Sidney feels himself being pulled in both directions.
Toward life and toward death. The rift wants him, wants to use him, wants to tear him open and pour through, and the circle is feeding it, and August is holding it back, and Sidney is caught in the middle, stretched between two forces that are each trying to claim him.
The pain is so immense it has become total.
His body has stopped reporting individual sensations.
There is no my arm hurts or my chest is burning.
There is just pain, all-encompassing, a white noise that fills every corner of his being.
He stops screaming because he can’t anymore.
He just breathes. Short and ragged, each breath a conscious decision, each exhale a victory.
He lies on the concrete floor of a warehouse with a rift in the world pulling at his bones and he breathes and he watches Erath standing there with his hand in his ex-wife’s chest, waiting, and the patience in Erath’s face is the most frightening and the most comforting thing Sidney has ever seen, because it means Erath will wait forever if he has to.
He will stand there with his fist around her heart until the end of time if that’s what it takes, and the certainty of that, the absolute, immovable devotion of it, is the thing Sidney holds onto while the rift tries to pull him apart.
Then, across Haven, in a vault beneath the coven mansion, Knox’s mace comes down.
Sidney doesn’t see it. He doesn’t need to. He feels it.
It hits as a shockwave, a tremor that runs through the air, through the floor, through the blood magic that saturates the warehouse and the circle and Angelica’s barrier and everything she’s built.
Somewhere across the city, in a room Sidney has never seen, a glass orb pulsing with black light explodes and Annabeth speaks the words that unbind her sister’s power from the phylactery.
Three things happen at the same time.
The blood barrier disintegrates. It doesn’t fall or fade. It fragments into a million particles that dissolve before they hit the ground, and the wall that held Newt and Malik at bay simply ceases to exist.
The circle around Sidney goes dark. The red glow dies, the symbols stop moving, the humming in his veins cuts out as though someone has pulled a plug, and the pain stops so abruptly that the absence of it leaves him gasping and hollowed out on the concrete.
His body is his own again. His muscles are his own.
The rift beneath him shudders, destabilized, and the pull that was tearing him apart releases and he collapses flat against the floor, every nerve ending raw and singing.
And Erath’s hand closes around Angelica’s heart and rips it from her chest.
She doesn’t scream.
She looks down at the cavity in her sternum, at the space where her heart was, where there is now nothing, where the stolen power that sustained her should be rushing to repair the damage and isn’t, because there is no power left, because the phylactery is dust on the floor of a vault across the city. And then she looks at Erath.
Her mouth moves. Nothing comes out. Her lips shape a word, or a name, or a question, and the air carries none of it.
Her eyes are wide and dark and in them Sidney can see not fear but something more complicated.
Recognition, maybe. The recognition of a woman who bet everything on the conviction that she knew this man, knew his limits, knew exactly how far she could push before he pushed back, and has just discovered that she was catastrophically, fatally wrong.