Chapter 24
The warehouse is very cold and very quiet and the living in the room feel the weight of what he is press down on them.
It's not intentional. He's not projecting.
But the restraint he normally maintains, the careful modulation of his presence, the way he pulls himself in so that mortals can stand beside him without feeling the gravity of what he carries, has slipped.
The death in the room is his. The body on the floor is his doing.
And the underworld, which is always beneath him, always around him, always reaching up through the soles of his feet and the marrow of his bones, is closer to the surface than it should be.
The living feel it. He can see it in the way August shivers against Vale, in the way Malik's jaw tightens, in the way the air itself seems to resist being breathed.
Erath is standing with Angelica's body at his feet and nothing left in the warehouse but the aftermath.
The heart is gone. It dissolved, claimed by his domain, and his hand is clean and empty and hanging at his side.
He looks at it, his own hand, the hand that held her heart, the hand that held her once in another way entirely, and it doesn't tremble.
He's not sure what that means. He's not sure if steadiness is strength or numbness, and right now the distinction doesn't matter.
He looks at Newt.
Newt is standing where the blood barrier had been.
His hands are still faintly raised, fingers splayed, the glow fading from his palms in slow, dimming pulses.
He hasn't moved since the barrier fell. He has been standing there through the phylactery breaking, through the rift closing, through Erath driving his hand into his mother's chest and holding it there and waiting and then tearing her heart out, and he watched the whole thing.
His face is doing something complicated and private that Erath can't fully read.
Not grief. Not exactly. Newt grieved his mother a long time ago, grieved the idea of her, the possibility of her, the version of her that existed only in the space between what she was and what he needed her to be.
He grieved that woman years ago, quietly, in the way children grieve parents who are alive but absent, who are present but hollow, who stand in the same room and occupy none of the same emotional space.
By the time Angelica became someone who needed killing, Newt had already buried the mother she never was.
What's on his face now is the exhaustion of having believed in something and watched it prove him wrong in the cruelest possible way.
He had offered her a choice. Twice. Stop.
Walk away. There is another version of this.
And twice she had chosen violence, had chosen the ritual, had chosen power over her son and her daughter and every living thing that stood between her and what she wanted.
Newt gave her an out and she looked at it and looked at him and built a wall of blood magic between them.
The glow fades from Newt's fingers entirely.
His hands lower to his sides. He stares at the space where Angelica's body lies and his expression settles into something that is not quite acceptance and not quite peace but is, at least, finished.
The trying is over. The hoping is over. There will be no more chances offered and rejected, no more hands extended across impossible distances.
She made her choice. He made his. And those two choices were never going to meet.
Malik is at Newt's side before Erath can speak.
He crosses the warehouse floor in long, unhurried strides, leaving Sidney braced against the far wall, secure, breathing, and reaches Newt and puts an arm around his shoulders.
Not around his waist, not across his back, but around his shoulders, pulling him in close, the gesture of someone who knows exactly where Newt needs to be held and holds him there without hesitation or awkwardness or the fumbling uncertainty that typically accompanies comfort between two people who are still learning each other's shapes.
Malik is not fumbling. Malik has been paying attention.
Newt doesn't resist. He leans into the incubus, his weight shifting sideways, his head dropping against Malik's shoulder, and closes his eyes.
He doesn't cry. He doesn't speak. He just breathes.
In and out, in and out, slow and measured, the breathing of someone who is actively choosing to stay in their body rather than float out of it.
Malik's arm tightens around him and his other hand comes up to the back of Newt's head, fingers resting in his hair, and he holds him. Just holds him.
"Newt," Erath says. Gently.
Newt opens his eyes. They're dry but red-rimmed, and the cut above his eyebrow has stopped bleeding but the blood has dried in a rust-colored streak down the side of his face, and he looks very young. He looks exactly as old as he is, which is too young for any of this.
"You gave her a choice," Erath says. "That's more than she deserved."
Newt swallows. His throat works, and for a moment it seems as though he might speak, might say something about what he's feeling, or what he saw, or what it means, but nothing comes.
He nods, once, and that seems to be enough.
It's not absolution. It's not comfort, not really.
But it's the acknowledgment that Newt did the right thing even though it didn't work.
That offering a hand to someone drowning is not a failure just because they chose not to take it.
That the attempt matters even when the outcome doesn't change.
Malik meets Erath's gaze over Newt's head.
The incubus's expression is calm and steady and there's something in his eyes that Erath hasn't seen from him before, not quite tenderness, because Malik would bristle at the word, but a fierceness that lives in the same territory.
A quiet, absolute declaration: I have him. He's mine. I will not let go.
Erath nods back, and there's an understanding between them that doesn't require words.
Malik will take care of him. Malik always takes care of him, and the consistency of that, the reliability of a demon keeping a promise he never made with his mouth, is one of the more surprising things Erath has witnessed in a very long existence.
Erath kneels beside Angelica's body.
She looks smaller in death. That's always the way with the dead.
The force of their personality, the energy of their presence, the sheer volume of a living person leaves the body at the moment of death and what remains is just flesh, just weight, just the shell they carried it in.
Angelica was larger than life. She occupied every room she entered and bent it to her will.
In death she is a woman on a concrete floor with dark hair and fine features and an empty cavity in her chest, and she is small, and she is still, and she is nothing.
He gathers her in his arms. She weighs almost nothing, another thing death does, another trick of the transition, the body surrendering its substance to whatever comes next.
He lifts her and she settles against his chest and her head lolls back and her hair falls and he can smell her perfume.
Faintly. Beneath the blood and the magic and the ozone of the closed rift.
The same perfume she wore when they met, when she was bright and sharp and magnetic and he looked at her and thought maybe this is what the living feel.
He was wrong about that. He was wrong about a lot of things.
But the perfume is the same, and the body in his arms is the body he once reached for in the dark, and the fact that he ended her does not erase the fact that she was, once, the first person who made him wonder if he was capable of love.
He opens a portal in the warehouse floor with a thought.
It's easy here, the veil is thin, the concrete already cracked, the boundary between worlds already strained from everything that's happened.
The portal opens cleanly, a dark rectangle in the floor that descends into the underworld, and Erath carries Angelica through it.
The underworld receives her the way it receives all the dead.
Quietly. Without ceremony. Her spirit separates from her body as he descends, the last thread snapping, the soul detaching and drifting into the current of the dead, and the body in his arms loses even its residual warmth.
He deposits her spirit where it belongs.
Among the others. Among the dead she tried to raise, the father she tried to resurrect, the mother she tried to make immortal.
They are all here, all of them, and they will remain here, and Erath will maintain the boundary between their world and the one above and that is the order of things.
He does not look back.
He returns to the above within minutes. The portal closes behind him as he steps through, the concrete sealing, the veil settling, the underworld retreating to its proper distance beneath the surface, and it is as though he'd simply gone to the next room and come back.
His hands are empty. His expression is neutral.
The weight of what he carries is invisible.
Sidney is sitting against the far wall.
His knees are drawn up. His head is back, resting against the concrete.
His eyes are closed. His hands, resting on his knees, are shaking, a fine, persistent tremor that he is either unaware of or unable to stop.
His feet are bare. Bare and dirty and scraped, the soles red and raw from running through city streets without shoes, and there's a bruise forming on his jaw where someone hit him and his wrists are red and chafed where the magic burned and his chest is rising and falling in the careful, deliberate rhythm of someone who is managing their breathing because if they stop managing it they will fall apart.
He is alive. He is here. He is Erath's.