The Warmest Dark (Haven Chronicles #4)

Chapter 1

It’s well past last call at Willow’s when Sidney notices the girl.

She’s in the far booth by the restrooms, pressed against the paneling with her knees drawn up and her body angled into the corner the way small animals flatten themselves into burrows when they don’t want to be found.

She’s not doing a great job of it. The booth is dark, sure, the overhead light burned out three weeks ago and neither Sidney nor Xela has gotten around to replacing it, but she’s wearing a striped sweater with overalls and her black hair is braided into two plaits that hang over her shoulders with fuchsia bows on the ends.

She’s not exactly blending in. She’s also very obviously underaged.

Not “I’m eighteen and I’m going to try to buy a wine cooler” underaged. “Where are your parents” underaged.

Sidney sets down the glass he’s drying and scans the room.

It’s thin tonight, a Tuesday crowd, mostly regulars nursing their last rounds and talking about nothing in .

Gerald is at the end of the bar with his whiskey neat, which he orders every night and will order every night until one of them dies, and Gerald is not the dying type.

A couple of fae are in the corner, nursing the same drinks they ordered three hours ago because fae metabolize alcohol at approximately the speed of continental drift.

Two vampires in the adjacent booth are either on a date or planning a murder and Sidney has learned not to ask which.

Nobody is looking around with the panicked energy of someone who’s lost a child.

Also, in spite of Sidney’s assessment of her inability to hide herself, nobody seems to have noticed her at all, which is both impressive and deeply concerning.

He doesn’t look for Xela. One, she’s in the back switching out the IPA keg that’s been giving them grief all week, a process she prefers to do alone because Sidney once tried to help and she nearly took his arm off with the dolly.

Two, Xela has the maternal instincts of a honey badger.

She wouldn’t know how to be nurturing if she were given a manual, a training course, and gave literal birth.

Her approach to children is the same as her approach to most living things: suspicion, followed by tolerance, followed by threats if they get too close.

Whatever is going on with the small person in the far booth is going to have to be Sidney’s problem.

He drops his rag on the bar and crosses the room.

She stares at him as he approaches, wide dark eyes tracking his every step with the wariness of something that hasn’t decided yet whether to run or bite.

The eyes are very dark, almost black, and there’s something about them that doesn’t quite track.

Something old behind something very young.

Sidney files this observation away and keeps walking.

He doesn’t crouch in front of the booth.

Crouching is what adults do when they want children to feel like they’re being talked to at their level, but what it actually communicates is I am large and I am getting closer to you and I am blocking your only exit.

Sidney slides into the opposite side of the booth instead, settles himself at the edge so he’s at her level and not looming, tucks a strand of blond hair behind his ear, and places his hands flat in his lap where she can see them.

“Hey,” he says. “I’m Sidney. You can call me Sid if you want.”

She doesn’t respond immediately. She studies him the way children study things they don’t understand, with total concentration and zero subtlety, cataloging the details of his face as though she’s compiling a report and intends to be thorough about it.

Her gaze moves from his eyes to his hair to his hands in his lap and back to his eyes, and whatever she’s looking for, she apparently finds it, because the rigid set of her shoulders eases by approximately one degree.

“I’m Penny,” she says. “I’m five.”

“Five’s a good age. I liked five.” He doesn’t remember five, but that’s not the point. “Are you here by yourself, Penny?”

She nods.

“Okay. Would you like some chocolate milk?”

The nod this time is more enthusiastic. She would, in fact, like some chocolate milk.

She would not like anything to eat, thank you, she’s not hungry.

Sidney leaves her there and crosses back to the bar.

He mixes the chocolate milk in a pint glass because they don’t have kid-sized anything at Willow’s, and grabs a piece of blank paper from the receipt printer and two markers from the junk drawer beneath the register.

The markers are green and brown, which are distinctive but not impressive colors, and he hopes she’s not the type of kid who needs a box of 186 colors or melts down.

Xela has resurfaced from the back by the time he turns around.

She’s behind the bar with her arms crossed, long black hair pulled back, watching Sidney cross the room with the chocolate milk and the paper and the markers and the general air of a man who has just adopted a stray.

She gives him a look. Then she gives the child a look, the kind of look that suggests she’s concerned the child might be contagious.

“There’s a child in the booth,” Xela says.

“I’m aware.”

“Why is there a child in the booth?”

“I’m figuring it out.” Sidney adds a straw to the chocolate milk because children deserve straws. “Keep an eye on her for me? Don’t let her leave, don’t let anyone bother her.”

Xela wrinkles her nose. Her nostrils flare slightly, which on a banshee is the equivalent of a full-body recoil. “She smells strange.”

“She’s five, Xela. She probably smells like pancake syrup and chalk dust.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Just watch her, would you?”

Xela doesn’t tell him no. She never tells him no, to be fair.

She tells him a lot of other things, most of them profane and several of them anatomically creative, but she doesn’t tell him no.

She leans against the bar and fixes the booth with a stare that would discourage approach from anything short of a freight train, and Sidney takes his supplies and heads back.

He sets everything down in front of Penny.

She takes the chocolate milk in both hands, drinks from the straw, and then picks up the brown marker and starts drawing on the paper with the focused intensity of a child who has been given a task and intends to execute it to the best of her ability.

A circle first, then legs extending from it, then something that might be a tail or might be an antenna.

It could be a dog. It could be a spider.

It could be a new species that exists only in the mind of a five-year-old, and Sidney doesn’t ask because the answer is unlikely to clarify things.

She draws. She drinks her milk. Sidney sits across from her and doesn’t push.

He’s tended bar long enough to know that people talk when they’re ready and not before, and this applies to five-year-olds as much as it applies to the midnight crowd.

He waits, and she colors, and eventually the information comes, in pieces, the way children share things: not in a narrative but in fragments, scattered observations that Sidney has to assemble into something coherent on his own.

She lives downtown with her dad. She also lives in the city with Amelia, a woman she stays with. Two homes. Two lives. Sidney doesn’t ask about custody arrangements because he doubts a five-year-old has opinions on family court.

Then Penny switches to the green marker and says, without looking up from the grass she’s adding beneath the circle-spider-dog, “Amelia is dead.”

Sidney keeps his face still. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” She’s doing long vertical lines now, careful and methodical. “Her head got pulled off this morning. I was scared, so I ran out of the house.”

The bar is warm and the lighting is low and there are people laughing somewhere behind him and Sidney sits very still in this booth across from a five-year-old girl who has just told him, between sips of chocolate milk, that her guardian was decapitated.

The delivery is matter-of-fact in the way only children can manage.

She’s not crying. She’s not shaking. She’s coloring and drinking her milk and telling him about the worst day of her life with the same tone she’d use to describe what she had for breakfast.

This morning. This child has been on her own since this morning.

She’s been moving through Haven for twelve hours or more, five years old, alone, with the image of her guardian’s head being pulled off as the last thing she saw before she ran.

And she ended up here, in a bar in the Old City, in a booth by the restrooms, because this is where her feet brought her and no one along the way noticed or stopped or helped.

Something tightens in Sidney’s jaw. He releases it before she can see.

“That’s terrible,” he says. “I’m really sorry that happened.”

Penny keeps coloring. She doesn’t seem to need his condolences. She seems to need the green marker and the chocolate milk and someone sitting across from her who isn’t going anywhere, and Sidney can be that. He can sit here and be that.

“Okay,” he says after a moment. “You stay right here. I’m going to make a phone call and then I’ll be right back. Sound good?”

She looks up at him. “Okay.”

He crosses to the bar, grabs his phone from where it’s charging behind the register, and calls August.

It rings four times. Five. Xela materializes at his elbow, because Xela doesn’t walk to places so much as appear in them with the sudden, predatory efficiency of something that was designed by evolution to be wherever it needs to be at all times.

“Who’s the kid?” she asks.

“Still figuring that out.”

“She shouldn’t be in here. We serve alcohol. There are laws.”

“Xela, she’s five and she’s alone and it’s midnight. I’m not calling the cops on a kindergartener.”