Chapter 25
The next few days pass in a blur of exhaustion and aftermath.
Sidney sleeps for fourteen hours the first day.
He doesn't mean to. He means to shower, eat, check on Penny, be a functioning person.
But Erath takes him to the bedroom and sits him on the edge of the bed and Sidney's body makes the decision for him.
He lies down and the dark takes him and he doesn't dream.
When he wakes, the house smells like food that has not been burnt, which means someone other than Erath has been cooking. He finds Penny at the kitchen table eating pasta and Vivi hovering near the stove. Literally hovering. Three inches off the ground. Sidney decides not to question it.
Penny sees him and abandons her pasta and runs to him and slams into his legs with the force of a small, braided missile.
She wraps her arms around his thighs and presses her face into his hip and says nothing.
She just holds on. Sidney puts his hand on her head and holds on back, and they stand there in the kitchen while the pasta gets cold and Vivi pretends to be busy and neither of them lets go for a very long time.
The days blur together after that. Sidney and Erath return to a routine that feels different from the one before, quieter, more careful, shaped by something that neither of them is ready to name.
Sidney holds Penny and reads to her and makes her meals that are progressively better as Erath somehow manages to acquire actual groceries.
He doesn't ask where they come from. He assumes Vivi is involved, because Erath has the domestic capability of a housecat and someone is clearly running errands on his behalf.
Erath heals the bruise on his jaw first. He comes to Sidney on the second morning, when Penny is napping and the house is quiet, and cups his face in both hands and presses his lips against the bruise.
The warmth spreads through the damaged tissue and the pain dissolves and the skin knits, and Sidney stands there with his eyes closed and his hands on Erath's wrists and lets it happen.
Then Erath takes his hands and turns them over and lifts one wrist and presses his mouth against the burn marks the magic left there, and they fade under his lips, the angry red smoothing to pink and then to nothing.
He does the other wrist. He's thorough and unhurried and his mouth lingers on each mark longer than it needs to, and Sidney doesn't pull away.
The ghost of contact stays on his skin for hours afterward.
He sleeps more than he should and eats less than he should and Erath doesn't comment on either, but food appears near him at regular intervals and the bed is always warm and Sidney is too tired to pretend he doesn't need it.
Eventually, one night after Penny is asleep, Erath tells Sidney what happened with Angelica.
Erath tells him. Haltingly, the way he tells everything personal, in pieces that Sidney has to assemble on his own.
How they met. How Angelica came to the underworld as a young witch, bold and brilliant and burning with ambition, and how Erath was drawn to her because she was so ferociously alive that it disoriented him.
He had never met anyone who treated their mortality as a weapon rather than a weakness.
Sidney listens and thinks about how easy it must have been for her, how straightforward the manipulation, because Erath would not have recognized it.
Erath, who takes everything at face value because he has spent eternity among the dead, who do not lie because there is nothing left to lie for.
Of course she got to him. He was the easiest mark in the world and he didn't even know it.
Erath tells him the rest. That the love, or what he thought was love, was a calculated seduction designed to give Angelica access to the boundary between life and death, to the power that Erath maintained, to the secrets of his domain that no living person should possess.
He tells Sidney how she took Penny. How she left and took their daughter and he spent years fighting for even the partial custody arrangement that kept Penny tethered to him.
Years of it. How the courts of Haven, such as they are, favored the living parent.
How Angelica's lawyers argued that the underworld was no place for a child.
How Erath stood in rooms full of people who could not look at him without flinching and tried to explain that he loved his daughter and was told, politely and firmly, that love was not the issue.
Sidney's hands tighten on his knees. He is sitting on the couch listening to the god of death describe family court and the absurdity of it, the mundane cruelty of bureaucracy applied to something this enormous, makes something hot and furious rise in his chest. He's had his own encounters with systems that were supposed to protect people and didn't. He knows what it costs to stand in front of someone with power and explain that you matter and be told you don't, and hearing Erath describe it, Erath who could unmake any of them with a thought, standing in a room and being told he wasn't enough, makes Sidney want to break something.
He tells Sidney that in the warehouse, before the light left her eyes, he could read on her lips that Penny was better off without both of them.
"She might have been right about herself," Erath says. His voice is quiet in the dark room. "But she was wrong about me. Penny has never been more loved or more safe than she is right now."
He pauses. A beat. A breath.
"With you," he says.
Sidney's arms tighten around his knees. His chest is doing something catastrophic, swelling, aching, cracking open along fault lines he thought had calcified years ago, and his eyes are burning and his throat is tight and Erath has just told him, in plain and simple language, that Sidney is the reason Penny is safe.
Not Erath's power. Not the underworld. Not the boundary between life and death.
Sidney. A bartender from Central with a bad track record and a worse apartment and absolutely no business being part of any of this.
Sidney stands up from the couch.
He stands and Erath watches him and Sidney holds out his hand. Palm up, fingers open. An offering. Erath looks at it, at Sidney's hand, steady for the first time in days, extended toward him in the low light, and takes it.
Sidney leads him to the bedroom.
The hallway is dark. Penny's door is closed, a thin line of the nightlight she insists on glowing at the bottom, and the house is quiet except for the hum of the underworld and the sound of their footsteps.
Sidney's hand is warm in Erath's and his grip is sure and he doesn't hesitate at the bedroom door.
He opens it, pulls Erath inside, and closes it behind them.
The room is dim. The ambient glow of the underworld comes through the window, muted blues and silvers, and it casts the bedroom in soft, cold tones that make the shadows deep and the bed look vast.
"Sit on the edge of the bed," Sidney says.
Erath sits. The mattress dips under his weight and he settles with his hands on his thighs, watching Sidney, and his expression is open and patient and waiting.
He is always waiting. He is always giving Sidney the space to decide what happens next, and Sidney has never been with anyone who does that, who holds their own desire without letting it spill over, who wants without demanding, who offers without expecting.
Sidney stands in front of him. Between his knees, close enough to touch but not touching.
He looks down at Erath, for once taller, for once the one looking down, and the shift in position does something to him.
Something grounding. He is standing and Erath is sitting and Sidney is the one who led them here and the one who will decide what happens, and that matters.
That matters more than he can articulate.
He goes to his knees.
He sinks down slowly, deliberately, between Erath's thighs, his knees hitting the floor, his hands coming to rest on Erath's legs, fingers curling around the hard muscle.
Erath's breath shifts. Not a gasp, because Erath doesn't gasp, but a deepening, a thickening, and his hands on his own thighs tighten and then loosen.
His eyes are dark and fixed on Sidney's face with an intensity that would be overwhelming from anyone else but from Erath feels warm. Total. Enveloping.
"I want you to hold onto me," Sidney says.
The words come out quiet but clear. Not a whisper, he's not hiding this, but soft, the way you say things that cost you.
Because it does cost him. Every encounter they've had, Sidney has maintained control and distance.
He stays on top, he decides where the hands go, every parameter a boundary designed to keep him safe, to ensure that his body is his own, to make sure that at no point is he subject to someone else's will.
And now he is on his knees asking to be held.
It's a request that carries weight. It carries the weight of every man who held him without asking.
Every hand that gripped too hard. Every time he was pinned, restrained, directed, positioned, used.
He is on his knees between Erath's legs and he is asking Erath to hold onto him and the act of asking transforms it, turns it from something done to him into something he is choosing, freely, with his eyes open and his voice steady.
Erath's expression shifts. It moves into something that Sidney doesn't have a word for, something beyond tender, something that lives in the space between reverence and anguish.
His hand comes up from his thigh and finds Sidney's jaw and tilts his face up, gently, his thumb tracing the line of bone.
"Always," Erath says.