Chapter 10
Penny can’t enter the underworld for two more months.
She can’t. The rules are absolute. The way won’t open to her until the cycle turns and the days align and the boundary thins enough to let her through.
She’s tried before, in the early years, when she was too young to understand why she had to leave and would stand at the top of the staircase and cry and pound her small fists against the air where the passage should be and find nothing.
The barrier is not physical. It’s not something you can break through with force or will or desperation.
It’s a law, as fundamental as gravity, as immovable as the turning of the earth, and it has never, in Erath’s entire existence, been violated.
She’s here.
He feels her the moment she crosses. It arrives the way spring arrives after a long winter, sudden and entire, the world opening up and blooming, warmth pouring through channels that have been frozen for months.
He feels her in the air and in the ground and in the frequency of his own pulse, which isn’t a pulse at all but a rhythm, a current, and it changes when his daughter is near.
It changes the way the river changes when something living enters the water.
The whole underworld shifts. The light gets warmer.
The murmuring of the souls softens. Even the dirt beneath his feet feels different, less brittle, less dead, as though her presence is enough to coax something green from it.
Except it doesn’t bring him peace. Not this time.
Because it shouldn’t be possible. She is two months early and the barrier doesn’t bend and she has never been able to come before her time, no matter how badly she wanted to, no matter how badly he wanted her to.
She can’t be dead, because she can’t die, not in the way that would bring her here permanently. So how is she here?
He doesn’t rush.
If she’s here, regardless of how she’s here, then she’s safe. She’s in his domain. Nothing in this realm can hurt her without his permission and his permission will never be given. She’s safe, and the urgency of understanding how she arrived can wait until he finishes what he’s doing.
He’s in the middle of undoing a soulbind.
Two spirits who died together, tangled at the edges, their forms overlapping in the way that happens when people who are deeply connected die at the same moment.
It’s delicate work. The souls are fused at points of contact, threads of shared experience woven between them, and separating them requires patience and precision and a willingness to sit with the grief of it, because the separation is always the hardest part.
They don’t want to let go. They never want to let go.
They’d rather stay tangled forever than face whatever comes next alone.
He finishes. He separates the threads, gently, and watches the two spirits drift apart and downstream, and they reach for each other as the current carries them and their fingers pass through each other and then they’re gone.
He stands. He walks.
He crosses the breadth of the underworld, past the river, past the structures, past the places where the dead gather and wait and argue and refuse and eventually accept.
He walks toward his house, which he hesitates to call a home.
It hasn’t been a home in a long time. It can’t be a home when Penny is not there, and even when she’s there, her time with him is always overcast by the knowledge that she’ll have to leave again.
It’s never enough. One day without her feels like thirty.
The six months she has to spend in the mortal realm are the darkest, coldest stretch he weathers, and he has weathered a great many dark, cold things.
The stained glass windows are catching the light from the river.
The door opens before he reaches it. He steps inside and the warmth of the fire is there, familiar, and the smell of the house is there, wood and old fabric and the mustiness of a place that exists underground and doesn’t get sunlight, and Penny’s presence is there, vivid and radiant, coming from the direction of her room.
And something else is there.
Erath stops in the doorway of the main room. He stops because Sidney is on his couch.
Sidney is curled on his side with his knees drawn up and his shoes arranged neatly by the door and his socks visible and his arm tucked under his head and he’s wearing pajama pants and he is, unmistakably, asleep.
His breathing is even. His face, turned toward the room, is relaxed in a way that Erath has never seen it, the careful control that Sidney maintains during waking hours dissolved by sleep into something unguarded and young.
His hair has fallen across his forehead.
His lips are slightly parted. The bruise on his face is prominent along his cheek and jaw.
Erath stares at him. He stares for longer than is appropriate and then continues staring because apparently his body and his brain have reached a fundamental disagreement about the concept of appropriate.
He pushes himself forward. Down the hall. Penny’s door is cracked open, the way she likes it, a sliver of light from the hallway cutting across the floor of her room. He pushes the door open with two fingers and looks inside.
She’s in bed. Covers pulled to her chin.
Braids messy. The one-eared rabbit pressed against her face.
She’s asleep, deeply, completely, the way children sleep when they feel safe, with total surrender, and the sight of her there, in her bed, in her room, where she belongs and where he always wants her to be, makes something inside Erath go quiet.
A noise he hadn’t realized he was carrying goes silent.
A tension he’d been holding for days releases. She’s here. She’s safe. She’s his.
But how?
He leaves her undisturbed. He pulls the door back to where it was, cracked, the sliver of light, and goes back to the main room.
Sidney is still asleep. Still breathing. Still here.
Erath stands at the edge of the room and looks at him and tries to understand what he’s looking at.
Sidney is not dead. Erath can feel the difference as clearly as he can feel anything.
The living register differently in the underworld.
They burn. They radiate something that the dead don’t have anymore, a heat, a brightness, a charge that makes the air around them hum.
Sidney is doing this now. He’s lying on Erath’s couch, asleep and alive, and the air around him is warm and humming and he’s the brightest thing in a realm of the dead.
He should not be alive and be here. That is the fundamental, inescapable problem.
Anyone who willingly descends the stairs into the underworld, anyone who makes that choice, crosses the threshold as a spirit.
Their body stays above. Their soul separates.
It’s automatic, involuntary, the toll that the passage exacts, and it has been that way since the beginning.
Since before the beginning. The underworld does not admit the living. It never has.
But Sidney is here. His soul is still in his chest, nestled alongside his heartbeat, and his body is warm and whole and breathing on Erath’s couch. He descended the stairs willingly and the passage didn’t take his soul and the barrier didn’t stop him and the underworld is simply… allowing him.
The last person this happened with was Angelica. Which means that the bond Penny created with Sidney isn’t similar to the bond with Angelica, it is the same as the bond with Angelica.
Erath stands there for a long time.
The fire crackles. Sidney breathes. Down the hall, Penny turns in her sleep and the mattress creaks.
The house is holding all three of them and the house has not held three people since Angelica, since the triangle, since the three-pointed bond that made everything possible and whose breaking made everything impossible.
Eventually Erath realizes that standing in the middle of his living room staring at a sleeping man is behavior that would be considered alarming by any reasonable standard, and he is, despite all evidence to the contrary, trying to operate within reasonable standards.
He settles into the armchair across the room, near the fire, and sits.
He does not look at Sidney. He looks at the fire instead, at the embers glowing blue in the grate, and he listens to the sound of Sidney breathing, which is even and steady and alive, and he does not look at him.
He’s still not looking at him when he gets up, twenty minutes later, and crosses the room and takes the blanket from the back of the armchair and places it over Sidney’s sleeping form.
He tucks it around his shoulders, carefully, and stands there with his hand still on the edge of the fabric and watches the blanket rise and fall with Sidney’s breath and thinks: this is absolutely creepy behavior and I’m going to embrace it.
Sidney shifts in his sleep. His hand comes up and finds the edge of the blanket and holds on.
Erath removes his hand. He goes to his bedroom, which contains a bed and a dresser and very little else.
He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t need the bed.
He doesn’t need the room, but he’d made it when Angelica was part of his life because the act of laying and being together was irreplaceable.
He lies down on the mattress because the weight of everything is suddenly pressing down on him and lying down is the only way to let it settle.
The ceiling is stone, old and gray and unremarkable. He stares at it.
The Coven. This has to be connected. He does a mental check on Maggie, reaching out through the network of awareness that connects him to every soul and near-soul in his domain.
She’s alive. Still living, still breathing, still in her apartment on the edge of Central.
Which means the threat hadn’t come for Maggie directly, or it had come and Maggie had survived it, and either way Penny had felt it coming before it arrived and had done what Penny does: she’d run to the person she felt safest with.
Not to Erath. To Sidney.
And Sidney had done the only thing Sidney knows how to do, which is put himself between something vulnerable and something dangerous and deal with the consequences later.
He’d brought her here. He’d descended the stairs, willingly, into the land of the dead, with cracked ribs and no jacket and no plan beyond get this child to her father. And the underworld had let him through.
Erath stares at the ceiling for a very, embarrassingly long time.
Penny has bound Sidney to them. Not to her.
To them. To all three points of the triangle.
The bond she created isn’t a tether between herself and a kind stranger.
It’s a replacement. She’s rebuilt the structure that shattered when Angelica left, slotted Sidney into the space Angelica vacated, and it’s holding.
The door is open. The circuit is complete.
A mortal man walked into the underworld alive because a five-year-old decided he was theirs.
Erath presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and groans.
He gets up. He paces. The bedroom is small and the pacing is more of a tight loop between the bed and the wall and back again, but the motion helps, gives his body something to do while his mind goes through every permutation of how this could have happened and arrives, each time, at the same conclusion.
Penny’s power doesn’t work in halves. She can’t link to a person without extending that link outward.
Roots don’t grow in one direction. It’s instinctive, primal, and she’s five, and there’s no strategy behind it, no calculation, no awareness of what she’s doing or what it means.
She saw a man who was kind to her and she decided he belonged with them and her power, which does not consult her conscious mind any more than breathing does, made it real.
There are two ways to read it. Maybe Penny’s power is growing as she ages, the bond forming faster and with less discrimination than it used to. Or maybe it’s something about Sidney himself, some quality that took Angelica years to grow and that Sidney walked in already carrying.
He doesn’t like either interpretation. He especially doesn’t like the second one, because the second one implies things about Sidney’s role in his life that Erath has been very carefully not thinking about, and thinking about them now, in his bedroom, with Sidney asleep on his couch and Penny asleep down the hall and the three of them under one roof the way they used to be, when the third point of it was someone else entirely…
He lies back down.
He wonders, briefly, what Vivi would say if she knew. Then he decides he absolutely does not want to know what Vivi would say, because Vivi would say something pointed and accurate and he’s not ready for either.
The ceiling doesn’t have any answers. The ceiling has never had any answers.
The ceiling is stone and it is old and it doesn’t care about the god of death’s problems, and Erath lies there and stares at it and thinks about a blond man asleep on his couch who shouldn’t be able to be here and is, and a daughter who rebuilt the most important structure in her father’s existence around a stranger she met four days ago, and the fact that the stranger is now asleep in the house of the man he pushed away because when a child came to him frightened, he didn’t hesitate.
He didn’t hesitate at all.