Chapter 9
Xela has had as much of his shit as she’s willing to take.
“Go home,” she says, when Sidney is doubled over at the sink after having tried to carry a rack of glasses and discovering, for the third time today, that his ribs have opinions about this.
Strong opinions. Opinions that express themselves through a pain so specific and so total that his vision tunnels and his knees go soft and the rack nearly ends up on the floor along with every pint glass in it.
“Go home and do what?” Sidney straightens up. The straightening takes longer than it should. It involves a sound he will deny until his last breath. “Lie on my couch and stare at the ceiling?”
“Yes, Sidney.” Xela is behind the bar, arms crossed, black hair pulled back, wearing the expression she reserves for situations in which she is right and he is wrong and she is rapidly losing patience with the distance between the two. “That’s called resting.”
“I don’t rest. So I might as well be working.” He braces his hand against the edge of the sink and breathes through the last of it. “Either I’m going to spend the afternoon reorganizing my apartment or I’m going to make drinks. Which one do you prefer?”
She grumbles. The grumble is a living thing, mostly consonants and partially in a language that hasn’t been spoken above ground in several centuries.
Sidney has worked with Xela long enough to know that her grumbles have gradients.
This one is somewhere between “you’re an idiot and I love you” and “you’re an idiot and I’m going to let you suffer the consequences,” which is about where most of their interactions land.
She doesn’t make him go home. She never makes him go home. She just makes sure he understands how she feels about his choices and then watches him make them anyway, which is the Xela equivalent of unconditional support.
He hobbles through the rest of his shift.
His regulars give him sympathetic looks but don’t ask questions.
They know better. The supernatural community in Haven is good at minding its own business, or at least at pretending to mind its own business while keeping a very close eye on things, and Sidney appreciates both the pretense and the reality.
Gerald raises his glass from his permanent post at the end of the bar, which could mean anything from “hang in there” to “I acknowledge your existence” to nothing at all, and Sidney nods at him and keeps moving.
He figures he’s safer at the bar than he is at his apartment.
The Coven already knows where he lives. They’ve already sent people.
Whether those people are still alive is a question Erath hadn’t answered, which Sidney takes as an answer in itself.
But if the Coven has resources, and they clearly do, then nothing stops them from sending more. Willow’s at least has Xela.
The thought of Erath arrives without invitation, the way it’s been arriving all day, at odd moments, while he’s pouring drinks or wiping down surfaces or counting the register.
Not the thought of the kiss, or not only the thought of the kiss, but the thought of the man himself.
The dark eyes. The steady voice. The way he’d accepted Sidney’s rejection and walked out of the apartment without negotiation or complaint or the silent, punishing withdrawal that Sidney has come to expect when he tells a man to leave.
Sidney doesn’t know what to do with any of it.
He doesn’t know what to do with a man who leaves when asked and lets the leaving be just that, an exit and nothing more.
He doesn’t know what to do with the fact that he’d kissed that man and wanted that man and his body had shut the whole thing down and the man had just gone.
He doesn’t know if Erath is angry, or hurt, or relieved, or indifferent, and the not-knowing is sitting in his chest alongside the cracked ribs, a second ache that the bandages can’t reach.
He finishes his shift. Leaves Xela to close up. She gives him a look on his way out, and says, “Call me if anything happens.”
He walks home in the last of the daylight.
The streets are quiet, the early-evening lull between the end of the workday and the start of the nightlife, and Sidney moves through it with his hands in his pockets and his head down and his ribs flaring at each step.
He makes it to his building. Punches in the code.
Climbs the stairs slowly, one hand on the railing, and lets himself into his apartment, and the apartment is dark and quiet and exactly the way he left it this morning except for the kitchen light, which is still on because he never turned it off.
He’d left it on last night, after the coffee and the kiss and the freeze, and he’d left it on again this morning, and he’s starting to wonder if the kitchen light is ever going off again or if it’s just going to stay on indefinitely as a monument to the worst evening of his recent life.
He takes a bath. Careful. The bandages stay dry, which requires a technique involving strategic towel placement and a refusal to submerge past mid-torso.
The hot water helps. His muscles unclench, his ribs settle into a lower register of pain, and by the time he gets out and dries off and changes into pajama pants and a t-shirt he feels almost functional.
He makes cereal. Cooking would require bending, reaching, and the use of his arms in ways his body has vetoed, and cereal is the food of people who have given up and Sidney has given up.
He eats it on the couch. He finds the remote.
He turns on something that requires no attention and watches it without seeing it and thinks about nothing.
The knock comes while he’s rinsing the bowl.
It’s small. Quiet. Made with a hand that barely reaches the door, a tentative, hesitant sound that is nothing at all like the firm, deliberate knock Erath had used the first time he’d shown up at this apartment.
Sidney knows the height it’s coming from before he’s across the room. He knows the weight behind it.
He opens the door.
Penny is already moving. She launches herself at his waist with the total, unreserved commitment of a five-year-old who has decided that this is where safety is, and Sidney’s ribs detonate and his breath leaves him and he puts one hand on her head and one hand on the door frame and looks down at the top of her head, two messy braids and a rainbow sweater, and then up and down the hallway. Empty. Nobody.
He takes one moment to wonder how she got past the security door downstairs and then lets the question go, because security doors are apparently a suggestion in this family rather than a barrier.
“Hey, kiddo.” He keeps his voice calm. Light. Steady. The voice you use when a child is terrified and you need them to believe that you are not. “Where’s your dad?”
“He’s at home.” She looks up at him. Her eyes are wide and dark and her face is flushed from running and there’s a leaf in her hair that she hasn’t noticed. “He left me with Grams, but the bad lady is coming.”
“The bad lady.” Sidney pulls her inside.
Shuts the door. Locks it. The deadbolt slides home and he kneels down, slowly, because kneeling requires the use of muscles that are directly connected to his ribcage, and puts his hands on her shoulders and makes his face as reassuring as he can manage.
“Okay. Do you know where the bad lady is right now?”
Penny shakes her head. “No. But she’s coming.”
“How do you know she’s coming?”
“I can feel her.”
Sidney files this under “questions to ask the god of death when he’s available” and stands up.
“Okay. That’s okay. We’re going to figure this…”
Glass breaks.
Not in the apartment. Downstairs. The sound is distant but unmistakable, the crash of a door being forced, glass and metal and the whine of a lock giving way, and then an alarm, shrill and electronic, the building’s security system doing the one thing it’s supposed to do and doing it too late.
Sidney’s head snaps toward the sound. He can hear movement in the stairwell, heavy footsteps, fast, too fast for someone climbing four flights, and the footsteps have the quality of weight being thrown around by something that is bigger than a person should be.
He doesn’t think. He acts.
He turns from Penny and crosses the apartment, pulling on his shoes as he goes.
Doesn’t bother with a jacket. No time. No arm mobility.
He goes straight to the living room window and fights with the lock, which is stiff, which is always stiff, and he imagines can hear something large moving through the stairwell, it’s hard to tell over the alarm and his own pulse.
The lock gives. He shoves the window up.
He climbs out onto the fire escape into the night air, one leg over the sill, then the other, and turns and reaches back in and lifts Penny through the window.
She’s light. She comes through easily, and she doesn’t scream and she doesn’t cry and the composure of this five-year-old child who is being extracted through a window in the middle of the night is something that Sidney is going to think about later and be very, very angry about, because no child should be this practiced at fleeing.
“Okay,” he says. “You’re going to hold onto my neck and put your legs around my waist. Piggyback. Got it?”
She nods. She wraps her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and she clings. Her grip is extraordinary. Sidney grabs the ladder and starts down.
His ribs are screaming. Not the dull, manageable ache that he’s been working through all day.
This is a fresh, vivid howl, every rung sending a shock wave through the bones that are trying to knit and being denied the opportunity.
His hands are sweating on the cold metal.
His arms are shaking. Penny’s weight on his back is not heavy but it’s there, a constant pull that his body has to compensate for with muscles that are attached to structures that are broken.