Chapter 4
There is no good plan for what to do with Penny.
Amelia is dead. The Coven wants his daughter.
Maggie is old and human and a temporary solution at best, and Erath is running out of options with a speed that is, for an immortal being, deeply uncomfortable.
Penny is half-mortal. She can only stay in the underworld for half the year, and it’s not her time yet.
The rules governing her existence are older than he is and more inflexible, bound to the same cycles that move the tides and turn the seasons, and he cannot bend them.
She has to spend six months in the mortal realm.
She needs a guardian for those months. Her previous guardian is headless in the underworld making excuses, and the Coven that arranged her is still very much alive and very much looking.
Her mother used to be the answer. Angelica. Mortal, human, and when the three of them were together, truly together, they could exist in either world for as long as they wished. The bond between them had been the key. Three points holding the door open between life and death.
But Angelica hadn’t been who he’d thought she was.
She’d fallen back in love with her ex-husband, a son of the Coven.
She’d fallen in love with the idea of a husband who didn’t feel like death every time he walked into a room.
And she’d driven a blade through Erath’s throat while he slept, quite literally, a knife between the tendons, and she had taken Penny, and the triangle had shattered and the door had closed and that had been the end of everything Erath had allowed himself to want.
So that’s one problem he’s working on while dealing with the daily obligations of every soul in the city. The other problem is one of his own making and he knows it and he’s not quite certain what to do with it.
He takes a drag from his cigarette and exhales in a breath that is partially smoke and partially exasperation.
The neon sign above the door of Willow’s buzzes, warm amber cursive against the dark, and the light of it feels like damning evidence that he is somewhere he should not be.
But that’s not quite right, is it? This is his city.
He can go anywhere he likes. He oversees the dead of this entire realm and every soul within it will eventually answer to him.
It just sort of feels like he’s about to get caught.
The lid had not stayed closed. He’d told himself it would.
He’d told himself, walking back through the underworld two nights ago with Penny asleep in his arms and the blond man’s name sitting in his mouth refusing to leave, that it was over.
That he would file Sidney away along with the pink toenails and the stubborn jaw and the zero deference and the way the apartment had smelled like lavender and coffee and the warmth of a space that someone lives in alone.
He’d told himself all of that and then he’d lain on his bed and stared at the ceiling and the ceiling had not helped, and the next morning he’d asked Penny for the man’s name because he’s a liar and the lid was never going to stay closed and he’d known it the moment the door to that apartment had shut behind him and hadn’t felt final.
Sidney. The name has been in his head for two days. The name and the face and the way he’d looked at Erath in the doorway with an eyebrow raised and zero fear, and the way he’d looked at Penny when Erath had picked her up, that quiet, complicated tenderness he’d tried to hide and couldn’t quite.
It’s getting late. Somewhere around eleven.
He’s leaned against the side of the building with his hands in his pockets and he’s been waiting for less than ten minutes and he’s already composing a list of excuses for why he’s here that he doesn’t believe and won’t use.
The truth is he came because he couldn’t not come.
The truth is the file he built on a bartender he’d known for four minutes has been expanding without his permission and he needs more data, which is what he’s calling it, data, because the alternative is admitting that the god of death is lurking outside a bar at closing time hoping to see someone and the alternative is humiliating.
Nobody going in or out takes notice of him. They never do. He exists at the edge of perception, a cold spot in a warm room, and people move around him without knowing why.
A last group of stragglers comes out, holding each other up for support, laughing about something only the drunk would find funny. They wander down the street. Their voices fade.
He waits.
The door opens at eleven thirty and Sidney comes out.
He turns and closes the door and starts locking up and every motion is careful, gingerly, the controlled movements of someone who is in a great deal of pain and is refusing to let it show.
He’s wearing a jacket and jeans that are doing double duty hiding the damage Erath can see even from here: the way Sidney favors his left side, the way his arm stays pressed against his ribs, the way he breathes in shallow, clipped pulls that don’t go deep enough to press against whatever is broken underneath.
His hair is tucked behind his ear, the same ear, and Erath notices this, catalogs it alongside the way Sidney’s fingers tap against the key he’s holding and the set of his shoulders and the angle of his jaw in the light from the buzzing neon sign.
He’s still beautiful. The bruise on his face hasn’t changed that.
The swelling at his lip hasn’t changed that.
The careful, pained way he moves hasn’t changed that.
If anything, the damage has made it worse, because the beauty is visible through the bruising, persistent, refusing to be obscured, and the stubbornness of it is doing something to Erath’s chest that he recognizes and doesn’t want.
Sidney’s head turns. He feels Erath there, the way all living things feel Erath eventually, and his gaze finds him against the brick wall and there’s a moment of surprise on his face that he suppresses almost immediately.
“You again,” Sidney says. He turns back to the door and jams the key into the lock and jiggles it. The lock doesn’t cooperate. He jiggles harder. “Did you need something?”
Erath has never been so readily dismissed in his life.
He has been feared, worshipped, bargained with, pleaded to, and cursed at by entities older and more powerful than this bartender, but he has never been treated as though he were simply not worth pausing for.
The dismissal is absolute. It is also, and he hates this about himself, enormously attractive.
“I thought I might walk you home,” Erath says.
“August is walking me home tonight, but thank you for the offer.” Sidney doesn’t look at him. He’s still fighting with the lock, shoulder hunched, jaw set. “He should be here any minute.”
“I told August to stay home.”
That gets a reaction. Sidney’s hands stop moving.
He looks at Erath out of the corner of his eye, lips pressed together, and Erath can see the bristle, the quick flash of something that’s half irritation and half something else, something warmer that gets tamped down before it can fully surface.
He doesn’t get visibly upset. He just turns back to the lock and says, flatly, “Then I guess I’ll walk home alone. ”
“I’m going the same way. I’ll walk with you.”
“You don’t know which way I’m going.”
“I’m going the same way regardless.”
Sidney finally gets the lock to turn. It clicks, reluctant and defeated, and he pockets the key and straightens up and turns to face Erath fully.
Despite the bruise that is a gradient of purple and black from his undereye to his jaw, despite the swollen edge of his lip and the way he’s holding his body so carefully that every breath is a calculation, he does not look the least bit fragile.
He stares Erath down with the full weight of a man who has something to say and is going to say it.
“I don’t go home with men who smoke.”
Is he flirting?
Erath looks at him. Holds his gaze. The sentence is hanging between them, delivered with the dryness that Sidney seems to bring to everything, and Erath doesn’t know if it’s a joke or a boundary or an invitation disguised as a challenge, and the not-knowing is electrifying in a way that nothing has been electrifying in a very, very long time.
He drops his cigarette on the ground and grinds the blue flame out with the toe of his shoe. Deliberate. Unhurried. He looks back up at Sidney and says, “Just quit.”
Sidney stares at him. The corners of his mouth do something complicated.
A twitching, a suppression, the visible effort of someone who wants to react and is refusing to give the satisfaction.
He holds it for three full seconds before it breaks and his mouth curves, just barely, and he shakes his head and starts walking.
Erath falls into step beside him.
He matches his pace to Sidney’s, which is slower than Sidney clearly wants it to be.
Every step is costing him. He’s paying for each one out of a reserve of stubbornness that must be deep because the reserve shows no signs of running out, and Erath walks beside him and doesn’t offer to slow down because offering would acknowledge the pain and acknowledging the pain would be something Sidney would have to accept or reject and either option would require him to drop the composure and Sidney is not going to drop the composure.
Erath understands this. He’s met approximately three people in his existence who have this quality, this absolute refusal to be seen as weakened, and the other two were not human and not nearly this interesting.
They walk in silence for a block. Another. The Old City is quiet around them, amber streetlamps and cobblestones and the sound of their footsteps.