Chapter 23 #2
Not pleading. Not begging. Just a clear, calm statement, the word landing in the warehouse with the weight of a closed door.
“We're going to destroy the phylactery,” he says. “Annabeth has turned on you. The coven is fracturing.” His voice is steady, his gaze locked on Angelica’s face, and his bleeding eyebrow doesn’t seem to exist to him.
“If you open this rift, August will close it, and the Order will come, and you will lose everything you’ve built. ”
Angelica watches him. Her hands have stilled on the table.
“Walk away, mother,” Newt says. “You can still walk away.”
He pauses. The warehouse is quiet except for the hum of the circle and the distant drip of water from a broken pipe and the ragged breathing of unconscious coven members on the floor.
“There is another version of this where you don’t die in a warehouse trying to resurrect people who will only use you the way they always have,” Newt says.
The words hang in the air. Sidney, lying in the circle with his body buzzing and his veins on fire, watches Newt’s face and sees the cost of saying them.
The cost of offering a hand to someone who has never once reached back.
The cost of still trying when every piece of evidence says it’s pointless, and the courage required to try anyway, not because you expect it to work but because the alternative is becoming the kind of person who stops trying, and Newt has decided, long ago and irrevocably, that he will not be that person.
Angelica looks at her son for a long, considering moment.
Her expression is unreadable. There’s a stillness to it, a pause, a beat of something that could be consideration or could be the mechanical calculation of a woman determining whether the obstacle in front of her requires negotiation or removal.
She throws up a blood barrier between them.
It erupts from the floor in a wall of dark, shimmering red, not solid, not liquid, but something between, a membrane of blood magic that seals itself from wall to wall and floor to ceiling and cuts Newt and Malik off from the center of the warehouse as cleanly as a door slamming shut.
Malik hits it immediately, one fist driving into the barrier, and the impact sends a ripple across its surface but doesn’t break it.
The barrier hums. It repels him, pushes him back physically, and Malik staggers and catches himself and hits it again, harder, and the same thing happens.
The barrier was built to repel the living, and Malik, despite being a demon, is alive enough for it to work.
Angelica turns back to Sidney. She turns back to her table, to her candles, to her knife and her bones and her symbols, and she begins chanting.
The language is nothing Sidney recognizes.
It’s not Latin, not any modern tongue, but something older, deeper, a language that seems to come from the floor itself, from the cracked concrete and the thin veil and the space between worlds.
It vibrates in the air. It vibrates in Sidney’s body, resonating with the humming in his veins, amplifying it, and the circle activates.
Sidney feels it in his bones first.
A pressure, deep and grinding, as though something is gripping his skeleton from the inside and squeezing.
Then his blood, and the humming becomes a roar, every vein and artery in his body igniting with a sensation that is beyond pain.
It’s dissolution. It’s being pulled apart at the seams, every molecule straining away from every other molecule, and he can feel something opening beneath him.
Through him. A tear in the fabric of the world that’s using his body as its doorway.
He screams. He can’t help it. The sound rips out of him, raw, animal, involuntary, and it echoes through the warehouse and bounces off the steel beams and the broken windows and comes back to him distorted, stretched, even the sound of his pain being pulled apart.
Newt is shouting, muffled behind the blood barrier, his voice frantic, and Malik is hurling himself against the barrier again and again, and neither of them can get through.
The barrier radiates outward, pushing everything living away from its edges, and Newt’s magic splashes against it in bursts of white light that illuminate the warehouse in rapid, frantic flashes.
The rift opens.
Sidney can’t see it. He’s on his back, staring at the ceiling, his body arched off the concrete in a bow of agony.
But he can feel it. Beneath him, through him, in him.
A crackling tear in the world, green and black light splitting the air, and the underworld opens below.
The cold that rises from it is absolute, not temperature but absence, the cold of nothing, the cold of death, and it pours through Sidney’s body and fills him and keeps filling him and there is no end to it.
He is the door. His body is the frame and the hinges and the threshold, and the rift is opening wider, and the pain is so much that it circles back around and becomes almost abstract, almost distant, his brain having reached a ceiling on what it can process, everything beyond that ceiling reduced to white noise.
He stops screaming because he can’t anymore.
There’s no air left. There’s just the pain and the cold and the hum and the sound of Angelica’s chanting, steady and relentless, and the glow of the circle burning red against his closed eyelids.
Then the doors of the warehouse blow open.
Not inward. Outward. Ripped off their hinges and flung into the predawn dark with a shriek of tearing metal that cuts through everything, the chanting and the humming and the roar of the rift, and both doors are torn from their frames and hurled into the street with a force that sends them skidding across the asphalt in a shower of sparks.
The temperature inside the building plummets.
It was already cold, the rift had seen to that, but this is different.
This is not the cold of death. This is the cold of something arriving, and the moisture in the air crystallizes instantly, frost blooming across the concrete floor and the steel beams and the broken windows, and every breath in the warehouse becomes a cloud of white vapor.
Erath comes into the warehouse.
He doesn’t walk through the doorway so much as the doorway ceases to exist around him.
He is simply there, in the space where the doors were, and the darkness behind him is deeper than the predawn sky should allow, as though the underworld itself has followed him to the threshold and is peering over his shoulder.
August and Vale come in behind him. August takes one look at the rift forming in the center of the warehouse floor, the crackling tear of green and black light growing beneath Sidney’s body, widening, deepening, the edges of it fraying, and extends his hands toward it.
His fingers splay and his jaw locks and Sidney can see the effort hit him, his whole body bracing against a force Sidney can feel pulling at him from the inside, and the rift begins to slow.
It doesn’t close. Not yet. But it stops growing, the edges of it stabilizing, held in place by whatever August is doing with his hands and his will and whatever power he carries that allows him to push back against the space between worlds.
Vale is beside him instantly. One hand on August’s shoulder, steadying, anchoring, feeding him something through the contact that Sidney can’t see but can feel, a warmth that cuts through the cold, and the other gripping his blade, held low and ready.
The effort is costing August greatly. Sweat is forming on his brow and his arms are trembling and Vale’s hand on his shoulder is the only thing keeping him upright.
Erath does not go to Sidney.
He does not go to the circle. He does not look at Sidney, or if he does, it’s brief, a flicker of his gaze that takes in Sidney’s position and his condition and the fact that he is alive and files it away and moves on.
Because Erath is not here for Sidney. Erath is here for the woman standing at the stone table with her hands on her candles and her chanting filling the warehouse and the rift tearing open beneath the body of the man he loves.
He crosses the warehouse floor in a straight line toward Angelica.
The blood barrier is between them. It shimmers and hums, that wall of dark red energy that held Newt and Malik at bay, that repelled a demon’s fist, that pushed back everything living that touched it. Erath walks into it.
The barrier parts around him.
It opens, the red energy splitting and curling away from his body, and he passes through it the way a hand passes through smoke.
Behind him, the barrier seals itself shut.
The barrier was built to repel the living, and the thing crossing the warehouse floor toward Angelica with frost forming in his footsteps is something else entirely.
Something older than the magic that built the barrier.
Something older than the coven that cast it.
Something that existed before the concept of barriers was invented, because you don’t need walls when you are the thing the walls were built to keep out.
This is the miscalculation Angelica has made. She built her fortress against every threat she could imagine, hunters, demons, rival witches, the Order, and she forgot that the most dangerous thing in the room was never alive to begin with.
Angelica sees him coming.
The chanting falters. Just for a beat, a hitch in the rhythm, a syllable swallowed, and her eyes lift from the table and find Erath. He is ten feet away. Eight. Six.
“Erath,” she says.
She says it the way she used to. Sidney can hear it even through the pain, the shape of the name in her mouth, the familiarity of it, the way it curls around the consonants with an intimacy that speaks to history.
She said this name in the dark, once. She said it and it meant something other than a warning.
Erath doesn’t respond. He doesn’t slow down.