“Yes, that one. Penny. Her father is the lord of the underworld. My boss. The god of death.”
Sidney stares at him.
He runs through the mental catalog of last night’s events. The man in the doorway. Tall, dark-haired, dressed in all black with a hood up and a face that Sidney’s gaze had tracked in the low light of the hallway even though he’d been mostly focused on the fact that a stranger was at his door at three in the morning asking about the child on his couch. He’d been carrying a sunflower backpack. He’d answered Sidney’s screening questions with the patient composure of someone who was used to being treated as a threat and had learned to be patient about it.
Lord of the underworld. God of death.
Sure. Okay.
“Are you sure?” Sidney asks, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “He was carrying a sunflower backpack.”
“He’s literally my boss,” August tells him, flat as a board. “I see him every day. I know what he looks like and I know what his daughter looks like. And now, apparently, so do you.”
Sidney shrugs. “Okay. And?”
August stares at him. The stare goes on for a beat longer than is comfortable, the kind of stare that contains within it an entireunspoken monologue about Sidney’s self-preservation instincts and the notable absence thereof.
“And I wanted to make sure you were okay, Sid.”
“Yeah, I mean, he wasn’t rude or anything. He just took her and left.” Sidney leans against the wall, arms still crossed. “Thanked me for watching her. Warned me about the Coven. Very civil. Very tall.”
“Very tall,” August repeats, in the tone of someone who is choosing to let that description pass without comment but who is not happy about the implications.
“What? He was.”
August shakes his head. He pushes a hand through his hair, which is getting longer than he usually keeps it, dark and slightly curled at the ends. “I don’t think you understand. If I had known who she was when you called me, I never would have let you take her home. I put you in a lot of danger.”
“I can take care of myself.”
The look August gives him could strip paint. It’s the look of a man who has watched Sidney walk into bad situations with the breezy confidence of someone who has never fully internalized the concept of consequences, and who has been waiting, with diminishing patience, for the day when the consequences arrive.
“I’ve been watching out for myself in this city for a long time, August. Seriously.” Sidney uncrosses his arms, puts his hands in his pockets, tries to look like a person who has everything under control. “I appreciate the concern. But our interaction was entirely uneventful. He came, he picked up his kid, he left. And unless he has a sudden need for a babysitter, I can’t imagine I’ll ever see him again.”
August doesn’t look convinced. He looks, if anything, more worried than when he walked in, which Sidney finds vaguely insulting. But August has always been the worrier of the two of them, the one who checks the locks twice and keeps his phonecharged and calls when he says he’s going to call. And Sidney has always been the one who forgets to lock the door and lets his phone die and walks home alone at midnight through neighborhoods he shouldn’t be walking through. They balance each other. Or they would, if Sidney ever listened.
They talk for a few more minutes. August tells him Vale is looking into the murder but it’s going to take time. He says the Hargrove Coven is not a group to be taken lightly. He says Sidney should call him if anything feels off, if anyone approaches him, if anything happens that doesn’t seem right.
“Define ‘doesn’t seem right,’” Sidney says. “I work at a bar that serves vampires, August. My co-owner is a banshee. My baseline for right is pretty flexible.”
“Sid.”
“I’ll call you. I promise.”
August leaves. Sidney watches him go through the front window, black coat disappearing around the corner, and then he goes back behind the bar and picks up the glass he’d been polishing and tries not to think about the tall, handsome, dark-haired man from last night who is apparently the god of death.
He thinks about Penny instead. He hopes she’s okay. He hopes whoever her father left her with is feeding her something better than cookies at midnight. He thinks about the way she’d fallen asleep with her hand on his collar, the small fingers curled into the fabric, the grip that didn’t know how to let go. He thinks about the way she’d painted his toenails with the focus of someone defusing a bomb, and the way she’d said promise? with that weight that children give to words they desperately need to believe.
He’d made a promise. He’d said he’d find her dad, and he had, or her dad had found him, and the promise has been kept. The transaction is complete. He doesn’t know why it doesn’t feel complete. He doesn’t know why the image of her braids and herdark eyes and her fuchsia bows keeps surfacing at odd moments between drink orders, or why the tightness in his chest from last night, the one that had appeared when she’d smiled at him with her whole face, hasn’t fully loosened.
He scrubs a spot out of a glass that doesn’t have a spot and puts it away and takes out another one and scrubs that too.
The day drags. The IPA keg that’s been giving them grief all week starts leaking again, and Sidney spends twenty minutes on his hands and knees behind the bar trying to fix the connection while Xela stands over him and provides commentary that is unhelpful, mechanically impossible, and occasionally in a dead language. He fixes the keg. He pours drinks. He makes small talk with regulars and cleans tables and restocks the garnishes and does all of the small, repetitive tasks that make up the architecture of his days, and by eight o’clock the evening crowd is settling in and Xela tells him she’s good to close on her own.
“Go home,” she says. “You look like you haven’t slept.”
“I haven’t.”
“Then go home and sleep.”
