Chapter 6
He’s at Willow’s again.
He tells himself it’s about the Coven. About making sure the mundane who’s been linked to his daughter through no fault of his own isn’t attacked a second time on his walk home from work.
About the fact that the Hargrove Coven is still out there, still looking, and that the man they nearly killed in an alley is still walking home alone at night because he’s apparently incapable of accepting help or acknowledging danger or doing anything that a rational person would do to preserve their own continued existence.
Erath tells himself this is duty. Protection.
A strategic concern for an asset adjacent to his daughter’s safety.
He is lying to himself so thoroughly it’s almost impressive.
He’s had eons of practice. He’d lied to himself about Angelica for years, told himself that the tension in her jaw when he touched her was just the way she was, told himself that the way she looked at the door wasn’t longing but restlessness, told himself that a mortal woman could love a thing that felt like death without eventually wanting something that felt like life.
He’d been wrong about all of it and the wrongness had ended with a blade between the tendons of his throat, and he’d promised himself he wouldn’t lie to himself again, and here he is, leaning against a brick wall in the Old City at eleven o’clock at night, lying.
The truth, since he’s apparently incapable of telling it to himself but might as well try, is that he hasn’t stopped thinking about what Sidney told him last night.
I had a run of bad luck. With people. Men.
I pick wrong. I’ve always picked wrong. Sidney had said it with the kind of practiced lightness that only comes from saying something often enough that the edges have worn smooth, and Erath had listened, and wrapped the linen, and said nothing that would crack the casing Sidney had built around it, and then he’d gone home and thought about it until the thinking became a weight in his chest that hasn’t lifted.
He’d said it like he was narrating someone else’s life, describing a pattern that had happened to a person he knew rather than to the body sitting beside Erath on the couch, ribs cracked, face bruised, flinching from nothing at all.
And now Erath is here. At the bar. Waiting.
And the thing he cannot reconcile, the thing that has been eating at him since he left Sidney’s apartment last night, is this: Sidney had told him all of that and then let Erath bandage him anyway.
He had laid out the history, named the pattern, and then he hadn’t asked Erath to leave.
He’d let Erath’s hands stay on his skin.
He’d let Erath finish the wrapping and linger and sit on his couch and drink his coffee, and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with any of that information except stand outside this man’s bar and wait for him to come out.
The door opens. Sidney comes out.
He’s moving better tonight. The stiffness from the last three days has softened into something more fluid, still careful but less controlled, the pain receded from the foreground into a background he’s learned to work around.
He’s wearing a jacket Erath hasn’t seen before, darker, a little too big for him, the sleeves rolled to his forearms. His hair is down, not tucked behind his ear the way it usually is, and it falls across his forehead in a way that changes the angles of his face, makes him look younger.
Erath notices this. He notices it the way he’s been noticing everything about Sidney, with a granularity that is entirely inappropriate and completely involuntary.
He’s noticed that Sidney rolls his sleeves when he’s relaxed and pulls them down when he’s not.
He’s noticed that Sidney’s hands are never still, always adjusting something, tapping the edge of a counter, fidgeting with a zipper.
He’s noticed that Sidney smells of citrus and bar soap and something underneath both that’s just warm skin, and that the smell strengthens when he’s been working, when the heat of the bar and the movement of his body have brought it to the surface.
He’s noticing too much. He knows this. He continues to notice.
Sidney fights with the lock. The lock fights back.
This is apparently a nightly ritual, and Erath is developing an opinion about it that involves replacing the entire mechanism, which is not his lock, on a door that is not his door, to a bar that is not his bar, and the fact that he’s thinking about this at all is a symptom of a problem he is not addressing.
The lock gives. Sidney pockets the key and turns and sees Erath and his expression does something complicated.
It starts with resignation, the resignation of a man who expected to find exactly this, and then softens into something warmer and less defended, and then catches itself and pulls back, not all the way, just enough.
“You again,” Sidney says.
“Would you like me to walk you home?”
Sidney gives him a look. It’s not the same look as the night before. Last night’s look had been wary, assessing, the look of a man deciding whether to allow something. Tonight’s look is the look of a man who has already allowed it and is deciding how he feels about having done so.
He doesn’t say yes. He doesn’t say no. He shoves his hands in his jacket and starts walking and Erath falls into step beside him and neither of them comments on the fact that this is becoming routine.
The Old City is busier than it was the night before, a Thursday crowd spilling out of restaurants and theaters, clusters of people on the sidewalks who force Sidney and Erath to walk closer together.
Their shoulders brush. Once, turning a corner.
Again, navigating around a group of women who’ve stopped to take a photograph.
The third time it happens Erath feels Sidney’s arm press against his for a full stride before the sidewalk opens up and the contact breaks, and Sidney doesn’t move away from it.
He doesn’t lean in either, but he doesn’t create distance.
They walk. Sidney tells him about his shift.
A keg situation that Xela resolved with violence.
A new cocktail Sidney is developing that involves bourbon and something he’s calling “angry honey,” which Erath does not ask about because the name suggests it will involve a story and Sidney will almost certainly tell the story without being prompted.
He does. He tells the story. It involves an apiarist, a disagreement about payment, and a jar of honey that was allegedly cursed by a minor forest spirit, and Sidney tells it with his hands and his eyebrows and the dry, sideways delivery that makes simple things sound absurd and absurd things sound simple.
Erath listens the way he’s been listening to Sidney, which is with his full attention, every word cataloged, and he watches Sidney’s mouth as he speaks and the way his eyes crinkle when he gets to the punchline and the way he ducks his head slightly when he’s said something he thinks is funny but isn’t sure the other person agrees.
Sidney’s humor is a deflection. Erath knows this now, after last night.
It’s the first wall, the outermost defense, and Sidney keeps it polished and sharp and constantly deployed.
The dry delivery, the self-deprecation, the way he turns everything into a story with a punchline.
It’s not dishonest, exactly. Sidney is genuinely funny.
But the humor is also a door he holds open so that people walk through it and stop there, satisfied, without going any further into the house.
Last night Sidney had let Erath through a second door, briefly, when he’d said I pick wrong, and then he’d shut it again and gone right back to jokes about skeleton-wearing banshees.
Erath is patient. He has had eons of patience. He can wait at the second door for as long as it takes.
They reach the brick building. Sidney punches in the code. The door clicks open and he holds it and then hesitates. He turns in the doorway and looks up at Erath.
The expression on his face is one Erath has not seen before.
It’s calculating, but not cold. It’s the look of someone weighing a real risk in real time, counting what he wants against what it might cost him to reach for it.
And underneath that, in the set of his jaw and the tension in his shoulders, is the thing Sidney told him last night.
The pattern. The history. The knowledge that every time he’s opened a door for someone, it has ended in something he had to recover from.
Sidney is looking at Erath and deciding whether to open the door anyway, and the fact that he’s considering it, given what Erath now knows, is either the bravest or the most reckless thing he’s ever witnessed.
“Do you want to come up?” Sidney says. Then, as if he needs to justify it: “I could put some coffee on. If you want.”
Erath has been alive for longer than coffee has existed as a concept.
He has presided over the deaths of civilizations and ferried the souls of kings and watched empires crumble to dust at his feet.
He has been offered tribute and sacrifice and the prayers of millions and none of it, not a single moment across the breadth of his existence, has undone him as quickly as a bartender in an oversized jacket offering to make him coffee while bracing himself to be hurt again.
“Yes,” he says.