Chapter 4 #3
In the dark, Erath is not a man. He is the thing that waits at the end of every life. The silence after the last heartbeat. The weight that settles on your chest when you wake at three in the morning and know, with absolute clarity, that you are not alone.
The giant turned first. He was large and strong and accustomed to being the most dangerous thing in any space he occupied.
He looked at Erath and understanding arrived all at once, the way understanding always arrives for things that are about to die, too late and too total.
His hand dropped. His body locked. Erath closed the distance in a step that covered more ground than physics should allow and placed his hand flat against the giant’s chest and the giant stopped.
Everything about him stopped. He dropped where he stood, foundation pulled away, and the sound he made hitting the ground was final.
The witch ran. She made it four steps. Her magic was already gathering at her fingertips, green-black threads of something old and borrowed, and Erath caught her by the back of her coat and turned her around and she saw his face.
The magic died. The resistance died. She went still in his grip the way all things go still eventually, and Erath held her there long enough for her to understand exactly who she’d been sent after, and exactly who she’d tried to take from him.
He didn’t enjoy it. He never enjoys it. The dead are his responsibility, not his pleasure.
But he didn’t hesitate either, and the absence of hesitation told him something about what Sidney had already become to him, because Erath hesitates with most things.
He deliberates. He weighs. He stands at the river and considers the flow and makes decisions with the measured patience of someone who has eternity to get it right.
He hadn’t deliberated here.
Two bodies on the ground. Two more souls for the river.
He’d knelt beside Sidney. The blond was shaking, his whole body trembling, continuous and involuntary, the trembling of a body that has been pushed past its capacity to absorb impact and is running on nothing but adrenaline and the stubborn refusal to quit.
His eyes were half open and unfocused and he was making a sound that wasn’t quite breathing and wasn’t quite whimpering, a sound that existed somewhere between the two, too quiet to be audible from more than a foot away and too raw to be anything other than honest. Erath had reached for him.
His hand had gotten within inches of Sidney’s shoulder.
Sidney had flinched.
Erath had withdrawn his hand. He’d taken Sidney’s phone from his jacket pocket. The screen was cracked but functional. Recent calls: “Xela” with a heart emoji. He’d pressed call.
The banshee answered on the second ring.
Her voice was a blade. When Erath told her where Sidney was and what condition he was in she’d said three words, none of them repeatable, and hung up.
She arrived seven minutes later, moving through the dark at speed, and skidded to a halt at the mouth of the alley and looked at Erath and then at Sidney and then at the two bodies and then back at Erath.
“Did you do this?”
“They were going to kill him.”
She’d stared at him for a long moment, the kind of moment where someone is deciding whether to fight you or thank you and the decision could go either way.
Then she’d gone to Sidney and knelt beside him and cupped his face in her hands and said his name, and Sidney had responded.
His eyes had focused. His shaking had eased under the sound of her voice, and Erath had watched the way Sidney turned his face into her palm and the way his hand found her wrist and held on, and the holding had told Erath everything about who this woman was to Sidney and who Sidney was to her.
“He can’t walk,” Erath had said.
“I can see that.”
“His ribs are broken. He needs to be carried. Carefully.”
Xela had looked at him. Then at Sidney. Then back at Erath with an expression that communicated, with painful clarity, that she was about to ask for something she did not want to ask for and that she was going to hold it against him for the rest of eternity.
“Fine,” she’d said. “You carry him. But if you do anything…”
“I won’t.”
He’d picked him up. One arm under his knees and one behind his shoulders, careful of the ribs, careful of everything, and Sidney was lighter than he should have been, lighter than a man his height should be, and his head had fallen against Erath’s shoulder and his hand had found Erath’s collar and held on.
The same grip. The same fingers curling into fabric.
Penny’s grip. The grip that doesn’t know how to let go.
Sidney had held on to Erath’s collar the way Penny held on to his jacket and the way Penny held on to the blanket and the way, Erath suspected, Sidney held on to everything he was afraid of losing.
The grip was not conscious. It was not a choice.
It was the body’s answer to a question the mind hadn’t asked.
Erath had carried him up four flights of ugly carpet with a banshee at his heels who looked fully prepared to disembowel him at the first wrong move.
He’d placed Sidney on the couch and pulled the blanket over him and stepped back.
The banshee had positioned herself between Erath and the couch with the territorial precision of a wolf standing over a wounded packmate.
He’d left. The door had closed.
And Penny had still been there, at the edges of his awareness. Still watching. Still connected to this human she’d decided was hers. The thread between them, thin and new and entirely unauthorized, humming in the dark.
That was two nights ago.
Now Sidney is looking at him from the other end of the couch, bruised and untended.
“Yeah,” Sidney says. “Okay.”