18. Chapter 18
Erath knows Penny is not in the underworld.
He feels her absence the way he always does, a hollowing at the center of his chest, a frequency gone silent.
It's not painful, not anymore. He's had years to acclimate to the rhythm of her coming and going, the six months on, six months off that has defined his existence since she was born.
But this is different from the scheduled separations.
This is unplanned, unexpected, and it carries with it the anxiety of not knowing exactly where she is or what she's doing.
He doesn't know about Sidney, because despite the way Penny has linked him, he can't keep tabs on mortals.
The bond doesn't work that way. He can feel Sidney in the abstract, a warmth at the edge of his awareness, the knowledge that he exists and is alive and is somewhere in the world.
But he can't pinpoint him. He can't track him across the city the way he can feel Penny's presence or absence.
Sidney is alive, and the living are not his to monitor, and the distinction has never irritated him more than it does right now.
But there's a larger part of him that he doesn't want to examine too closely that implicitly trusts Sidney with his daughter's safety.
It's not a small thing, that trust. It's not something Erath gives easily or often or to anyone who hasn't earned it over years and trials and the kind of proof that leaves no room for doubt.
He's known Sidney for days. Barely more than a week.
And yet the trust is there, solid and unmovable, not because Sidney has proven himself through grand gestures or impossible feats but because of the small things.
The way he kneels to be at Penny's level.
The way he tucks her in at night and leaves the door cracked the way she likes it.
The way he makes her pancakes and lets her cheat at Candyland and carries her on his back through the literal underworld without complaint.
If Penny is not in the underworld, then she is with Sidney in the above.
And while that might not be the safest place for either of them with the Coven running around, Erath knows Sidney well enough by this point to know that he can be very tenacious when he wants to be.
Tenacious, stubborn, obnoxiously brave, and flanked by a banshee who would shred anything that looked at them sideways.
They'll be fine. Probably. He's going to tell himself they'll be fine and then he's going to focus on the work in front of him because the alternative is pacing through the underworld like a caged animal and that's not productive for anyone.
He spends the day dealing with the usual business of the dead.
A cluster of spirits that got tangled in one of the passage vaults and need to be sorted.
A minor breach in the western wall of the river basin that's letting water seep into the lower archives, which is a problem because the lower archives contain things that should not get wet.
Vivi handles the breach while he handles the spirits, and they work in a rhythm that has been refined over centuries, efficient and wordless and occasionally punctuated by Vivi saying something pointed that he chooses not to respond to.
She asks him, at one point, while they're standing at the mouth of the passage vault watching the last of the tangled spirits drift free, if he's heard from the above today.
He says no. She says that's unusual, isn't it, given that his human tends to be a magnet for catastrophe.
He says Sidney is not his human. Vivi gives him a look that he can only describe as profoundly unimpressed and walks away without comment.
He finishes the day's work. He checks the river, checks the walls, checks the structures at the edges of his domain where the more volatile residents are housed.
Everything is in order. The underworld is as stable as it ever is, which is to say it's one bad day away from requiring his full attention, but today is not that bad day.
He goes back to the house.
It's quiet when he enters. The fire is burning low, the embers glowing in the grate, and the main room is empty.
He stands in the doorway for a moment and listens, and the silence presses against him the way it always does when she's not here.
The house is not a home without her. Without them.
He has thought this before and he thinks it again now and the repetition doesn't make it any less true.
It's just a structure. Walls and a roof and furniture he doesn't need, arranged in a configuration meant to approximate something livable.
He doesn't eat, he doesn't sleep, he doesn't need warmth or light or comfort.
The house exists because Penny needs it to exist, because she needs a bed and a kitchen and a room full of toys and fairy lights on the ceiling.
Everything in it is for her. None of it is for him.
Except the couch. The couch is for him now, because that's where Sidney sleeps when he's too tired to make it to the bedroom, and that's where they sit together in the evenings after Penny is in bed, and that's where Sidney curls into his side and falls asleep mid-sentence and Erath stays very still so as not to wake him.
The couch is his. The indentation on the left cushion where Sidney always sits is his.
The blanket folded over the armrest that Sidney draped there the first night because the underworld is cold even with the fire, that is his too.
He's being ridiculous. He knows he's being ridiculous.
He sits down on the couch anyway, in the spot that is not Sidney's spot, and picks up a book he's been reading and doesn't read it.
The words slide past him, displaced by the things Newt told him in that cramped apartment with the ceramic frogs and the wilting plants.
The sacrifice. The conduit. The fact that Sidney's blood now carries the same frequency as Penny's, and the Coven could use him to open the rift instead of her, and Erath has been holding that information behind his teeth because every time he looks at Sidney's face and sees the calm that has finally settled there, he can't bring himself to be the one who shatters it.
He will have to tell him. He knows that.
He's known it since Newt said the words and the room went cold.
But knowing and doing are separated by a distance Erath has not yet learned to close, and in that distance Sidney sleeps peacefully against his chest and laughs at his cooking and doesn't flinch when Erath reaches for him in the dark.
He stares at the same page for long enough that the fire burns down to coals and then he gets up and adds another log and sits back down and stares at the same page again.
He hears them before he sees them. The distant sound of footsteps in the tunnel, only one set because Penny is being carried, and then the front door opens and they come through it and the house changes.
He can't describe it any other way. The air shifts.
The fire brightens. The silence that was pressing against him recedes, filled instead with the noise of a child and the man carrying her, and everything that was hollow is suddenly full.
Penny is riding on Sidney's shoulders, her small hands fisted in his hair, and she's telling him something about a girl named Sophie and a three-legged cat and the injustice of not being allowed to get bread from a bakery they apparently passed on the way home.
Sidney is nodding along with the patience of a man who has heard about this cat for the entire walk back and has accepted his fate.
He ducks through the doorway, careful of Penny's head, and straightens up and sees Erath on the couch and something flickers across his face.
Surprise, maybe. Like he thought they might get back before him.
Or like he expected to have a few minutes to settle in before having to account for where they've been.
He lowers Penny onto the floor and she lands on her feet and immediately says, "Daddy!
" and runs to Erath, who catches her and lifts her and holds her against his chest and feels the hollow thing in him go quiet.
She's talking. She's telling him about the park and the swings and Sophie and the cat and the monkey bars and how she hung upside down and Xela being scary and how Sid says she should ask him about getting a cat but she already knows the answer is no so she's asking anyway because maybe this time it'll be different.
Erath listens to all of it. He holds her and listens and when she's done he says, "We'll talk about the cat," which is not a no and not a yes and is the best he can do right now because his daughter is in his arms and she's safe and she's here and nothing else matters.
Sidney is still standing by the door. He has a bag over his shoulder that he didn't have before, which means they went to his apartment, and he's wearing his own clothes, which fit him properly and make him look less like a child playing dress-up and more like himself.
He looks good. He looks rested and clean and his hair is freshly washed and tucked behind his ears and there's color in his face from the outside air.
He looks alive in the way that Erath has come to find necessary, the brightness of him, the warmth of him, standing in the doorway of a house in the underworld and looking for all the world like he's been doing this his whole life.
And Erath looks at that face, that bright, alive, unguarded face, and the truth sitting in his chest goes heavier because he knows what it will do when he finally says it.
Sidney shifts his weight and says, "I know I probably should have asked before we left."
Erath looks at him over Penny's head. He waits.