Chapter 4 #2
Sidney avoids the alley. He crosses to the other side of the street before they reach it, a deliberate, unhesitating detour that tells Erath this is not the first time Sidney has rerouted himself around a place where something bad happened, and the thought lands heavy because it implies there have been other places, other detours, other bad things.
Erath positions himself between Sidney and the alley opening.
Sidney notices. He glances at Erath’s placement, at the way Erath has angled his body between Sidney and the dark, and something moves across his face.
Something complicated and quiet that he doesn’t comment on.
Another block. Then Sidney huffs out a breath that’s almost a laugh.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“I go by Erath.”
“Is that your real name?”
“Is your favorite color hot pink?”
Sidney laughs. Actually laughs, a short, surprised sound that he tries to suppress and can’t quite manage, and it turns into a wince halfway through as the motion pulls at his ribs and his hand presses against his side.
He ducks his head, just slightly, and shoves his hands deeper into his jacket, and the laugh is still there in the shape of his mouth even after the sound has gone, and Erath catalogs this too.
The laugh. The way it changed his face. The way it made the bruise look smaller, less significant, as though the act of laughing had briefly rearranged the hierarchy of what mattered on Sidney’s face and the bruise had been demoted.
This is Erath’s problem. His problem is not the Coven, although the Coven is a problem.
His problem is not Penny’s custody arrangement, although that is also a problem.
His problem is that he came to this bar tonight because a file in the back of his mind refused to close and he’d told himself he was coming for strategic reasons, to assess the threat level, to check on the human who’d been entangled in his daughter’s situation, and the strategic reasons had been a lie and he’d known it before Erath had put out a cigarette he’d been smoking for the better part of a thousand years because a bruised bartender with a pretty mouth told him to.
He is in an enormous amount of trouble. He’d known it in the apartment, looking at the pink toenails.
He’d known it on the ceiling, staring at the stone and failing to forget.
He knows it now, walking beside this man through the Old City, watching him wince and refuse to acknowledge the wince and keep walking and keep talking and keep being, relentlessly, exactly who he is.
Sidney is brave and broken and dry-witted and stubborn and he looks at Erath with an eyebrow raised and zero deference and the combination is doing something to the architecture of Erath’s composure that hasn’t been done since Angelica, and the comparison terrifies him and doesn’t stop him.
They reach the brick building. Sidney punches in the code. He turns to Erath and his expression is careful, practiced, the face he puts on when he’s about to end an interaction.
“Thanks for walking me home,” Sidney says.
“We need to talk, Sidney.”
Sidney’s jaw tightens. His lips press together and his shoulders square and Erath can see him deciding whether to argue, weighing the cost against the outcome. He doesn’t argue. He holds the door.
Four flights. The carpet is still the worst thing Erath has ever seen.
Sidney’s pace slows on the third flight, each step careful, and he grips the railing on the fourth and Erath watches the white of his knuckles and says nothing.
He could offer to help. He could offer his arm, his hand, his strength.
He doesn’t, for the same reason he said nothing about the pain in the street, and that reason is one he is still refusing to examine.
The apartment is the same. Small, warm, the ring stain on the coffee table and the bookshelf and the blanket folded on the couch where Penny had slept.
Sidney goes straight to the kitchen and puts coffee on without asking if Erath wants any and gestures vaguely at the couch.
Erath sits. He settles into the cushion where his daughter once slept, crosses one leg over the other, props his chin on his fist, and waits.
Sidney brings two mugs. He hands Erath the plain one and keeps the one with a cartoon dog on it and lowers himself onto the opposite end of the couch with a controlled exhale that barely conceals the hiss underneath.
He’s taken off his jacket. His arms are scraped, road rash from the alley, but mostly fine.
It’s the way he’s holding his torso that tells the real story, rigid and locked in, every movement an insurmountable project.
“Let’s get this over with,” Sidney says. “What do you want to talk about? The weather?”
“I heard you had a run-in with the Coven.”
Sidney’s jaw works. “I did. But I didn’t tell them anything, so don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“Then what are you worried about?”
“You.”
The word sits between them. Sidney looks at him, head tilted, and his shoulders tense.
Not a lot. Enough for Erath to notice, and Erath is noticing everything about this man, every shift and flinch and micro-expression, and the noticing is becoming a problem because the more he notices the more there is to notice and the file keeps growing.
“Well, obviously I got my ass beat.” Sidney lifts his coffee, sips, sets it down. “But I’m fine. Thank you for the concern.”
“They had no intention of letting you leave that alley alive.”
“And yet here I am. Alive. In my apartment. Drinking coffee.” He gestures at himself with the mug. “So obviously they changed their minds.”
“Or something changed it for them and you need to be very careful going forward.”
Sidney goes still. He holds the coffee in both hands and looks down at it and then back up at Erath, and the question forms on his face before it reaches his mouth. When it comes, it’s quiet, stripped of bravado, stripped of the dry delivery that Sidney uses as a first wall.
“In the alley. After I blacked out. Were you there?”
Erath doesn’t answer. He tilts his head, considers the man across from him, and gestures with his free hand toward Sidney’s midsection. “Are your ribs broken?”
The deflection lands. Sidney lets the previous question go, not because he believes it’s been answered but because the answer is already in the room and they both know it.
“I don’t know. Probably.” He shifts on the couch and the shift becomes a wince.
“I let Xela take care of me because I woke up and she was there and claimed she found me. Unfortunately, she’s not a doctor.
She’s also a terrible caretaker. She gave me two baby aspirin, a fifth of vodka, and called it a night. ”
“Do you want to go to the hospital?”
Sidney huffs. The huff costs him. “What are they going to do for a broken rib? Wrap it? I can do that. I’ve got bandages in my bathroom.”
Some inner part of Erath sees the riptide he’s about to become caught in.
He sees it clearly, the current and the pull and the direction it runs, and he sees, at the end of it, the shape of something that will either save him or destroy him and he cannot tell which.
He should walk away. He should thank Sidney for the coffee, the way a reasonable person would, and leave this apartment and go back to the underworld and deal with the Coven through proper channels and never sit on this couch again.
He does nothing to change his trajectory.
He exhales through his nose. Cracks one of his knuckles. And says, “Do you want me to help you?”
The question hangs.
But Erath is not entirely in this apartment right now.
Part of him is here, on this couch, watching Sidney decide whether to let him close, watching Sidney’s face work through the calculation of risk and trust and the kind of bravery required to take your shirt off in front of a stranger when your body is evidence of how the last encounter with a stranger went.
But part of him is two nights behind, standing in an alley in the dark, and the two moments overlap, the offer and the memory, and he can’t separate them.
He’d felt Penny’s distress before he’d seen anything.
A pull in his chest, sharp and bright, a sensation he’d never experienced before because Penny had never reached for him this way.
She’d shown him things before, small images, gentle nudges.
This was different. This was fear. Hers and someone else’s, tangled together, and she was showing him that person being hurt because the person was connected to her and she could feel the connection vibrating with pain.
He’d seen Sidney on the ground. The alley. The giant. The witch.
He’d gone.
The staircase from the underworld had taken seconds.
The streets of Central blurred past, the cold rolling out ahead of him, and the streetlights flickered and died as he passed beneath them because his presence does that when he’s not careful and he hadn’t been careful at all. He’d been fast, and cold, and intent.
The alley was dark when he arrived. Sidney was on his side with his arms around his ribs and his face against the cobblestones.
There was vomit on the ground and blood at his mouth.
The giant was standing over him with one fist raised, contemplating the most efficient way to end it, and the witch was talking, asking questions of a man who could barely breathe, her patience fraying toward the decision that would make the questions unnecessary.
She was going to let the giant finish it.
Erath could read the intention in the set of her jaw.
She’d gotten what she could, which was nothing, and Sidney was now a loose end.
Erath hadn’t announced himself. Hadn’t spoken. The temperature dropped. Thirty degrees, forty, fast enough that the puddles on the cobblestones cracked and the moisture in the air crystallized and the witch’s words turned to frost on her lips.
The streetlight went out.