Chapter 2 #3
This man. This human. This bartender who is barely eye-level with Erath’s chin and has no defenses to speak of, no magic, no wards, no power of any kind beyond the ordinary stubbornness of being alive.
This person looked at two members of the Hargrove Coven, who are among the most dangerous practitioners in Haven, who could have twisted his spine backwards and left him convulsing on the floor of his own bar without breaking a sweat, and he told them to fuck off.
Not because he knew what was at stake. Not because he understood who Penny was or what she meant or what the Coven wanted with her.
But because they’d threatened a child he didn’t even know.
Erath cannot fathom it. He is grateful in a way he does not have the infrastructure for, gratitude being an emotion he has not had cause to exercise in a very, very long time.
But the gratitude is tangled up in something else now, something that started with the pink toenails and expanded with the door-screening and is currently being made worse by the way this man is looking at him with absolutely zero deference, zero fear, zero anything that Erath is accustomed to receiving from mortals who should, by all rights, be terrified of him.
This man is not terrified of him. This man is annoyed and tired and protective and he has opinions about the Hargrove Coven and none of those opinions are favorable, and Erath is holding his daughter in his arms and thinking about the way this man’s jaw tightens when he’s angry and he knows, he knows, this is exactly how the trouble starts.
“You need to be very careful around them,” he tells the man.
The man raises an eyebrow. The eyebrow implies that he has heard this kind of warning before and has found it, historically, unhelpful. “It’s not my little girl they’re after.”
“No,” Erath agrees. “But they tend to hold a grudge.”
He could say more. He could warn him properly, explain what the Coven is capable of, tell him that a human bartender who inserted himself between them and their objective is now carrying a target he can’t see.
He should say more. This man did a good thing, an extraordinarily good thing, and the good thing has put him in danger, and Erath owes him the information that would help keep him alive.
But Penny is warm against his chest and her breathing is steady and the man is looking at him with those eyes, the ones that aren’t afraid, the ones that are tired and stubborn and something else he keeps catching in flashes and then losing, something soft behind the hard exterior that surfaces and retreats and surfaces again, and the longer Erath stays in this apartment the harder it’s going to be to leave.
He leaves.
He walks down four flights of the terrible carpet and out through the secured door and into the night air, and he doesn’t look back.
The door shuts behind him and it should feel final.
An interaction completed. A transaction closed.
His daughter has been retrieved. The human has been thanked.
There is nothing else to say and no reason to return and the bartender with the brave mouth and the pink toenails and the eyes that aren’t afraid is someone Erath will never see again.
The door shuts behind him and it doesn’t feel like the finality that it should.
He carries Penny through the Old City and out of it, past the shuttered shops and the amber streetlamps and the occasional figure moving through the dark who takes one look at him and crosses to the other side of the street.
It’s not the jacket or the hood or the child.
It’s something else, something that lives in the air around him, a coldness, a wrongness, the discomfort of standing too close to the thing that will eventually come for everyone.
People feel it. They don’t understand it, but they feel it, and they move away.
The man hadn’t moved away.
Maggie’s neighborhood is quiet. It’s always quiet.
The buildings are older, set back from the street, with window boxes and iron railings and the general air of a place that has been respectable for long enough that it doesn’t need to prove it anymore.
Maggie’s walk-up is on the corner, second floor, and the light in her kitchen is on because Maggie is seventy-three years old and hasn’t slept through the night since 1997.
She is not related to Penny. She’s not related to Angelica or to anyone involved in any of this.
She is simply a woman Erath trusts, and the list of people Erath trusts could be written on a matchbook with room to spare.
How they know each other predates Angelica, predates Penny, stretches back through years and favors and a night in 1983 when Maggie had been the only person in a hospital waiting room who’d spoken to the strange man sitting alone in the corner, and Erath had been curious enough about a human who wasn’t afraid of him to remember her name.
A human who wasn’t afraid of him. The parallel lands in his chest and sits there.
He knocks. Maggie opens the door in her bathrobe, reading glasses perched on her nose, a paperback in one hand. She takes one look at Erath and the sleeping child and holds the door wide without a word.
He carries Penny to the guest bedroom, the one with the quilt that Maggie’s mother made and the nightlight shaped like a mushroom that Penny had picked out herself.
He lays her down and pulls the quilt over her and places the sunflower backpack at her feet because she’ll want it when she wakes up.
She stirs, rolls onto her side, pulls the quilt to her chin.
Doesn’t wake. He stands there for a moment and watches her breathe and counts breaths the way he used to when she was an infant, when she was so small and so alive and so bewilderingly fragile that he couldn’t believe anything this breakable was half of him.
He goes back to the kitchen. Maggie is leaning against the counter, arms crossed, waiting.
“Amelia is dead,” he tells her. “I need some time to figure out an alternative.”
“Don’t you worry about us,” Maggie says quietly. “We can camp out for as long as you need. I’ve been teaching her to crochet and she’s loving it.”
“I’m not worried about inconveniencing you. I’m worried the Coven may come looking.”
“Let them.”
A human who isn’t afraid. The parallel lands again, harder this time.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he says.
“Take your time.”
He leaves through the front door, the way a normal person would, because Maggie has always treated him as a normal person and he has always tried to return the favor.
He walks down the stairs and out into the street and starts the long walk back to Central, to the subway entrance, to the staircase that descends into the dark.
He descends. The cold wraps around him. The dark pulls him in. He goes back to the underworld, back to the dead, back to the work that never ends and never changes, and he puts the bartender in the back of his mind and closes the lid and tells himself that is the end of it.