Chapter 23 #4
Her knees buckle. Erath catches her with his free hand, his other still holding the heart, dark and wet and steaming in the cold air, and for a moment they are close.
Close in the way they must have been once, a long time ago, when she was someone worth holding.
His arm around her waist, her weight against his chest, her face turned up to his.
An echo of an embrace. A ghost of something that might have been love if love were a thing she’d ever been capable of.
Then the light goes out of her eyes. Her soul leaves her body.
It's the snuffing of a candle, the severing of a thread, the quiet click of a life ending and the underworld receiving what is owed.
Except this one Erath knows. This one he chose, once, and loved, once, and that makes it heavier than most.
He holds her for a moment longer.
Then he lowers her to the ground and lets the heart fall. It dissolves before it hits the concrete, taken by the underworld the way everything dead is taken eventually, claimed by the domain that Erath governs, pulled down and through and away, and his hand is clean. It was never about the blood.
Malik is at Sidney’s side before Sidney can process anything else.
The demon crosses the warehouse floor in three strides and hauls Sidney up by his arm with a grip that is surprisingly careful for someone who was putting people through walls five minutes ago.
His hand is firm on Sidney’s bicep, holding, not squeezing, and he pulls Sidney away from the crumbling remains of the circle, away from the rift that is still groaning in the floor, toward the far wall.
Sidney’s legs don’t work properly. They buckle on the first step and wobble on the second and give out entirely on the third, and Malik doesn’t let him fall.
He catches him under the arm, takes most of his weight without comment, and half-carries him to the wall.
He braces Sidney against it, back against concrete, legs folded under him, and stays beside him.
One hand on his shoulder. Steady. Unmoving.
“Stay,” Malik says, and it’s not a command so much as a suggestion delivered with the authority of someone who is used to being obeyed.
Sidney stays. He doesn’t have a choice. His body has been used as a doorway between worlds and it is letting him know, in no uncertain terms, that it will not be cooperating with any requests for locomotion in the near future.
August bears down.
With the phylactery broken and Angelica’s power severed, the rift has nothing sustaining it.
It’s collapsing on its own, the edges fraying, the green and black light flickering, but it’s not closing fast enough, and August doesn’t wait for entropy to do its work.
He pushes. Sidney can see it in the set of his shoulders, the lock of his jaw, the way his arms tremble and his feet slide on the concrete.
He forces the rift closed with everything he has, and Vale’s hand on his shoulder tightens and his knuckles go white and he pours whatever he has into August to keep him standing.
The rift closes with a sound that shakes the walls. A deep, resonant crack, the world stitching itself back together, and the green light dies and the roar cuts to silence and the concrete floor is just a floor again, cracked and stained and cold, but whole.
August collapses against Vale.
Vale catches him. Both arms around him, blade dropped, and he presses his forehead against August’s temple and holds him.
August’s hands come up to Vale’s arms and grip and his breathing is ragged and his legs are not supporting him and Vale takes his weight without wavering, solid and immovable, and they stand there in the middle of a warehouse floor that still smells of blood and magic and hold each other and breathe.
Sidney watches them from against the wall. Malik’s hand is still on his shoulder. The warehouse is quiet.
And then Sidney looks at Erath.
Erath is standing over Angelica’s body with clean hands and an expression that Sidney cannot read, and the predawn light comes through the broken windows and turns everything gray.
He is looking down at her. At the woman he married, and trusted, and lost his daughter to, and spent centuries recovering from, and just killed with his own hand.
He is looking at her and his face is a closed door and whatever is happening behind it is happening in a place that Sidney does not have access to, not yet, maybe not ever, the private interior of a grief so old and so complicated that it doesn’t have a name in any language the living speak.
But Sidney sees his hands. Erath’s hands are at his sides and they are shaking, just barely, a tremor so subtle that no one else in the warehouse would notice it.
Sidney notices because he has spent days learning the language of Erath’s body, and the tremor is the same one he saw in the bedroom when Erath pulled away from him and sat on the edge of the bed and couldn’t stop his hands from shaking.
Sidney thinks about the bed. About the weight of Erath above him and the terror and the words that came out of him without permission.
He thinks about the look on Erath’s face when he realized what he’d done, the devastation in it, the way he’d pulled away so fast that the absence of him was a physical event.
He thinks about Erath’s trembling hands in the dark and Sidney’s bare feet on the pavement and the hours between then and now, the hours during which Erath found him gone and found his shoes by the door and understood what that meant and came for him anyway.
And Sidney thinks, again: He was scared too.
Not just tonight, in the bed, with the trauma response and the hands on Sidney’s wrists.
Not just in this warehouse, walking through a blood barrier and putting his hand through the chest of the woman who taught him that love was a leash.
But always. The whole time. Through every careful word and every gentle touch and every night spent lying in the dark holding Sidney because he liked it.
Erath has been scared. Erath has been doing this with the same trembling, white-knuckled courage that Sidney has, reaching for something he wanted and expecting it to hurt, and the only difference between them is that Erath is better at hiding it.
They are both building something in the dark.
They are both reaching for it with hands that shake.
They are both expecting the worst and trying anyway, and the trying is the hardest thing either of them has ever done, and Sidney cannot hold Erath to a standard he hasn’t met himself.
He can’t demand perfect safety from a man who is just as damaged and just as terrified and just as desperately, catastrophically in love as he is.
Sidney’s throat is tight. His eyes are burning.
His body is wrecked and his veins are raw and he is sitting against a warehouse wall with a demon’s hand on his shoulder and the aftermath of a rift in the world still echoing through his bones, and all he can think about is the way Erath’s hands are shaking and the fact that Erath came for him anyway, and the fact that he will always come for him, and the fact that Sidney wants to go home.
Home. The underworld. The house with the stained glass windows and the river and the kitchen where Sidney makes breakfast and the bedroom where Erath holds him in the dark.
Home, with Penny, with the macaroni and the bubble baths and the bedtime stories about fish who befriend birds.
Home, which is a word Sidney has never had a place to put and now does.
He wants to go home.