Chapter 17
Central has a park. It's one of the nicer ones in the city, which is a designation that means the benches haven't been vandalized in the past week and the grass is more green than brown.
There's a playground with a swingset, and the swingset is the only detail that matters to Penny, and the playground is the only reason Sidney agreed to meet August here instead of somewhere with walls and locks and fewer sightlines for anyone who might be watching.
The day is overcast. Cool. The kind of gray that can't commit to rain and settles for hanging there, noncommittal, letting everyone underneath it make their own assumptions.
The park is mostly empty. A few joggers on the path, an older man feeding pigeons near the fountain, a woman with a stroller on the far side having an intense phone conversation.
Normal people doing normal things. Sidney finds it grounding in a way he doesn't want to examine too closely, because examining it would mean admitting how far from normal his life has drifted.
Penny spots the swingset the moment they round the corner and is gone before Sidney can tell her to stay close.
She crosses the grass with the single-minded focus of a child who has spent three days in the underworld and has just been presented with the greatest invention known to mankind.
There's another girl already on one of the swings, maybe six or seven, red hair, rain boots, and Penny approaches her with the confidence of someone who has never encountered the concept of a stranger.
Within thirty seconds they're in conversation.
Within a minute they're both swinging, legs pumping in tandem, and Penny is laughing, and the sound of it loosens something in Sidney's chest that he didn't realize was cinched.
He watches her for a moment. Lets it settle.
Xela stations herself on a bench near the playground with the energy of a corrections officer supervising yard time.
She sits with her arms crossed and her legs crossed and her sunglasses on despite the overcast sky, and she watches the children with an expression that dares anyone within a fifty-foot radius to try something.
She does not look comfortable. She does not look like she's enjoying herself.
But she's there, and she's watching, and Sidney has learned that Xela's version of caring is indistinguishable from low-grade hostility and is no less effective for it.
August arrives a few minutes later, crossing the park in his black coat with his tattoos and the expression he wears when he's been thinking about something for too long and hasn't landed anywhere good.
He spots Sidney on the bench near the path and drops into the seat beside him.
He looks at the playground, at Penny flying high on the swing and shrieking with delight, and then at Xela, who gives him a look that could curdle milk at thirty paces.
"She seems thrilled to be here," August says, nodding toward Xela.
"She's been like that all morning. I think it's her version of a good mood."
August hums, unconvinced, and shifts his weight on the bench.
He's fidgeting with the edge of his coat, which is what he does when he's working up to something, and Sidney lets him get there on his own because pushing August has never once produced useful results.
It just makes him retreat further into his own head, and August's head is already a complicated enough place without Sidney adding pressure to it.
Finally August turns to him. "So you and Erath."
Sidney glances at him. "That's subtle."
"Sidney."
He sighs. Leans back on the bench, stretches his legs out, and watches a pigeon strut across the path with the unearned confidence of a creature that has never once questioned its place in the world. He envies the pigeon. He envies the pigeon's absolute lack of existential complication.
"So Erath's daughter has bound me to her and him," he says, and the words come out with less weight than they deserve, which is probably a defense mechanism but also just how Sidney talks about things that terrify him.
"Magically. Irrevocably. I can go to the underworld and come back alive, because a five-year-old decided I was trustworthy enough to adopt. "
"And you've been there for three days. Which I had to find out about from my employer."
"What was I supposed to do? Send you a carrier pigeon from the underworld?"
August stares at him. Sidney can feel it without looking, the weight of August's attention when his brain is running hard against information that refuses to fit into the categories he's built for understanding the world.
August is a necromancer. He knows death the way other people know weather, as a constant ambient condition that shapes everything around it.
And what Sidney is describing should not be possible, and they both know it, and the silence between them is the silence of two people recalibrating.
"Did you know," August says slowly, "that the last living person who could enter the underworld and come back was Erath's wife?"
"He mentioned that, yeah."
"And you don't find that alarming?"
Sidney shrugs. It's not the appropriate response to being told you've been mystically bonded to the god of death in the same manner as his ex-wife, but appropriate responses have never been his strong suit, and he's long since stopped pretending otherwise.
"Penny did it. She's five. I don't think she had a grand plan.
She decided I was safe and her magic did the rest."
August absorbs this. He opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. "What exactly does it mean that you're bound to Erath?"
Sidney gives him the version that involves an unemotional explanation of events.
He says it means he can move between the underworld and the above as long as Penny is with him.
He says Erath can heal him when they're down there.
He says Penny can sense when he's in danger and where he is.
He does not say what it means when Erath's hands are on his waist and his mouth is against his skin and the whole underworld goes quiet around them.
He does not say what it means when he falls asleep in Erath's arms and doesn't have nightmares for the first time in years.
There's a version of this conversation where he says all of that, and in that version August would look at him the way he's already starting to look at him, and Sidney is not ready for what comes after that look.
August is not fooled. August has known him since they were nineteen and stupid and trying to navigate a city full of things that wanted to eat them, and August knows what Sidney looks like when he's leaving things out.
But August also knows when to push and when to let it lie, and apparently this falls into the second category, because he shifts direction.
"When I spoke with Erath," August says, "he seemed to think it was theoretically possible for the Coven to use Penny as a conduit between life and death and bring the deceased back to life."
"I mean that sounds on par for them, doesn't it?
We know they've sent people after her twice.
We know they killed her foster guardian.
We know Erath's ex-wife is involved, and she's part of the Coven.
" Sidney ticks the facts off on his fingers.
"If her grandfather was a necromancer then it stands to reason the rest of the family would be dabbling as well. "
August is quiet for a moment, watching the playground.
Penny has abandoned the swings and is hanging upside down from the monkey bars while the red-haired girl watches with admiration.
Xela has stood up from the bench and taken two steps closer, as though prepared to catch Penny if she falls, and then caught herself and sat back down and pretended she hadn't moved.
It's the most human thing Sidney has ever seen her do, and he files it away for later, when he can think about it without the rest of this pressing against his skull.
"I don't know much about the Coven," August says.
"Not the inner workings. I know their matriarch, Mathilde, recently became a resident of the underworld.
I know her husband, Jayson Voss, is already there.
I helped put him there." He pauses, and Sidney can see him turning something over, running the pieces against whatever he learned about necromancy and blood magic during his years doing the work.
The look on his face when he lands on the answer is grim.
"If they use her as a conduit for a resurrection, the conduit doesn't survive.
That's how blood sacrifices work. The body that opens the rift becomes the fuel. It would kill her, Sidney."
The words land with the quiet, sickening weight of something that was obvious in hindsight. Sidney stares at August. August stares back. Neither of them moves.
"She's five," Sidney says.
"I know."
Sidney feels cold. Not the underworld kind of cold, not the temperature-dropping presence of death that he's become familiar with over the past three days.
This is the ordinary human cold of fear finding a place to settle and deciding to stay.
It's in his bones and in his hands and in the base of his throat, and it has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the fact that there's a five-year-old on a playground who trusts him to keep her safe, and the people who want to hurt her are willing to use her body as a doorway between worlds.
"I need your help to keep her safe," Sidney tells him. "I know Erath has already asked you, but this is me asking you."
"You don't have to ask me. As long as he's not forcing you to stay in the underworld against your will then of course I'll help."
August shifts, and Sidney can feel the change in him, the transition from strategic to personal, and he braces for it the way you brace for something you know is coming and can't avoid.