Chapter 2 #2
Erath has always been the picture of composure.
It comes with the job. You cannot oversee the transition of every soul from the living world to the dead and lose your temper about it.
Patience is not a virtue for him. It’s a requirement.
But the idea that this man has his daughter alone in his apartment, that his daughter is somewhere behind this door in the company of a stranger with bare arms and bedhead and a jawline that Erath’s gaze has tracked twice now without his permission, is doing something to his composure that hasn’t happened in a hundred years.
The urge to reach into this man’s chest and rearrange the architecture of his skeleton is sudden and vivid and so close to the surface that Erath can feel it in his fingertips.
He doesn’t know why he hesitates.
One minute he’s thinking about pulling this man apart, and the next he’s not.
He hesitates the way he hasn’t hesitated in centuries, the way that suggests something beneath the violence is pushing back against it, something that understood before his conscious mind caught up.
His gaze drops, an involuntary sweep, and he catches a flash of bright pink at the edge of his vision. He looks down.
The man is standing barefoot in the threshold of his apartment. His toenails are painted. Hot pink, uneven, splotchy in the way that indicates the person applying the polish had very small hands and very large ambitions.
Erath stares at the pink toenails. He stares at them for long enough that the man shifts his weight and the annoyance on his face sharpens into something warier, the expression of someone who has just noticed a large stranger staring at his feet at three in the morning and is recalculating the threat level accordingly.
The violence recedes. It doesn’t leave. It banks itself, pushes down beneath the composure, and what surfaces in its place is something Erath doesn’t have a name for.
He takes a breath. Not calming, not exactly, but the kind that creates a space between impulse and action, and in that space the thing without a name settles and stays.
“Is my daughter with you?” he asks. Quietly.
The man’s posture changes. Instantly. The annoyance drops away and what replaces it is something alert and protective and entirely different from anything Erath expected, because the man doesn’t step back or go pale or fumble for an explanation.
His shoulders square. The door pulls inward, narrowing the gap, not enough to block Erath’s view but enough to make the intention clear: he is prepared to shut this door.
He believes he can. He can’t, not against the god of death, but the instinct is remarkable.
This man’s first response to a stranger claiming to be the father of the child in his apartment is not compliance. It’s verification.
“Maybe.” His voice is careful now, stripped of the casual irritation, and there’s something in the way he says it that makes Erath’s chest do something inconvenient.
The man is protecting Penny. He is standing in the doorway of his own apartment at three in the morning in his pajamas with pink toenails and he is screening Erath before letting him near the child behind the door. “What’s her name?”
“Penny.”
“What’s she look like?”
Erath huffs out a breath that is almost, but not quite, a laugh.
The laugh surprises him. Nothing about this situation should be funny, and yet this man’s absolute refusal to be impressed by or afraid of the literal god of death standing on his doorstep is getting under Erath’s skin in a way he does not care for and cannot seem to stop. “Me, but tiny.”
The man studies him. There’s a calculation happening behind those eyes, rapid and thorough, an assessment of threat and trustworthiness and intention that is far more sophisticated than it has any right to be coming from a twenty-something in pajamas.
His gaze moves from Erath’s face to the sunflower backpack on his shoulder and stays there, and Erath can see the recognition land.
The backpack is the proof. Penny’s name is on it, in her own crooked stitching, and the man has obviously seen it, or at least the girl it belongs to, and the backpack in the hands of a man who looks like Penny is enough.
He opens the door.
“She’s asleep on the couch,” he says, stepping back to let Erath in. “We were watching cartoons.”
The apartment is small. One bedroom, a narrow kitchen, a living room with a couch that has seen better decades.
The TV is still on, volume low, something animated playing to an audience of no one.
There’s a glass of milk on the coffee table with a ring of chocolate at the bottom and a plate with golden crumbs and a piece of paper with marker drawings on it, a circle with legs that could be a dog or a spider or something entirely outside the taxonomy of known animals.
And there, on the couch, buried under a blanket that’s too big for her with her braids messy and her mouth slightly open and her fist holding the edge of the blanket the way she holds everything, with a grip that doesn’t know how to let go, is Penny.
The inside of Erath’s chest collapses. There is no other word for it.
Every piece of scaffolding he’s been using to hold himself together since Amelia’s headless spirit appeared on the dirt of the underworld gives way at once, and what’s left is raw and open and so relieved it borders on pain.
She’s fine. She’s sleeping and she’s whole and she’s alive and the blanket is pulled to her chin and there’s chocolate on her mouth and she is, without question, the most important thing that has ever existed in any realm he has jurisdiction over.
He crosses the room and shifts the backpack.
The man is watching him. Erath can feel his gaze, attentive and guarded, and he notes, distantly, the way the man has positioned himself.
Not blocking the door. Just occupying the space between Erath and the exit.
Aware. Ready. As though even now, even having let Erath in, even having verified the backpack and the resemblance and the name, some part of him is still standing between the child and the potential threat.
This is the second time this man has put himself between Penny and something dangerous. The first was the Coven. The second is Erath. And the man doesn’t even know what Erath is.
He leans down and scoops Penny up. She’s light, and she stirs against him and makes a small sound and tucks her face into his neck without waking.
Her breath is warm against his skin. Her fingers find the collar of his jacket and hold on, the same grip, the grip that doesn’t know how to let go, and Erath adjusts her weight and presses his mouth against the top of her head and breathes.
She smells like chocolate milk and cookies and something floral that’s probably cheap shampoo, and underneath all of it she smells like his, the scent of his blood and his power that lives in her cells whether she’s in the mortal world or not. She smells alive. She smells safe.
He straightens and turns toward the door, and the man is watching them.
The blond is standing with his arms crossed, leaning slightly against the kitchen doorframe, and the expression on his face is not one Erath was prepared for.
It’s not suspicion, not anymore. It’s not wariness or relief or any of the things Erath would expect from a stranger watching a man collect his child from their apartment.
It’s something quieter. Something tender, and complicated, and quickly hidden, the expression of someone who is watching a father hold his daughter and is feeling something about it that they don’t want to feel and don’t want anyone to see.
Erath sees it. He sees it and the thing without a name in his chest shifts and expands.
“Thank you for taking care of her,” he says. His voice is low, conscious of the sleeping child against his chest.
“Yeah, of course.” The man shifts his weight. The casual ease is back in his posture but there’s something underneath it, a discomfort that Erath reads as the awkwardness of someone who has done a kind thing and doesn’t know how to be thanked for it. “Sorry about, um, the woman. Or whatever.”
Erath doesn’t respond to that. Amelia is dead and Amelia is his problem.
The man seems to reach a decision about the next thing.
His jaw sets. His arms tighten across his chest. And his voice, when he speaks again, is different.
The casual register is gone and what replaces it is something with edges, something that tells Erath this man has opinions about the thing he’s about to say and none of those opinions are gentle.
“You should know there were people looking for her. From the Hargrove Coven.”
Erath doesn’t move. “You saw them?”
“Yeah, they came to my bar. That’s where I found her, she was…
” He stops, recalibrates, skips past something.
“Anyway, they came in and said they were there to collect her.” His mouth does something specific on the word collect, a tightening, a disgust that reshapes his whole expression.
“Collect her, like she’s a fucking stamp or something, and I told them to touch grass.
” He pauses. “I doubt they’ll be gone long. ”
Erath stares at him.
The man stares back. He doesn’t look away.
He doesn’t fidget or qualify or soften what he’s said.
He stands in his own apartment, in his pajamas, with his pink toenails and his stubborn jaw and his hair tucked behind one ear, and he looks at the god of death holding a sleeping child and he does not flinch.