“I’m not worried about that.”
“Then what are you worried about?”
“You.”
The word sits between them. Sidney looks at him, head tilted, and his shoulders tense. Not a lot. Enough for Erath to notice, and Erath is noticing everything about this man, every shift and flinch and micro-expression, and the noticing is becoming a problem because the more he notices the more there is to notice and the file keeps growing.
“Well, obviously I got my ass beat.” Sidney lifts his coffee, sips, sets it down. “But I’m fine. Thank you for the concern.”
“They had no intention of letting you leave that alley alive.”
“And yet here I am. Alive. In my apartment. Drinking coffee.” He gestures at himself with the mug. “So obviously they changed their minds.”
“Or something changed it for them and you need to be very careful going forward.”
Sidney goes still. He holds the coffee in both hands and looks down at it and then back up at Erath, and the question forms on his face before it reaches his mouth. When it comes, it’s quiet, stripped of bravado, stripped of the dry delivery that Sidney uses as a first wall.
“In the alley. After I blacked out. Were you there?”
Erath doesn’t answer. He tilts his head, considers the man across from him, and gestures with his free hand toward Sidney’s midsection. “Are your ribs broken?”
The deflection lands. Sidney lets the previous question go, not because he believes it’s been answered but because the answer is already in the room and they both know it.
“I don’t know. Probably.” He shifts on the couch and the shift becomes a wince. “I let Xela take care of me because I woke upand she was there and claimed she found me. Unfortunately, she’s not a doctor. She’s also a terrible caretaker. She gave me two baby aspirin, a fifth of vodka, and called it a night.”
“Do you want to go to the hospital?”
Sidney huffs. The huff costs him. “What are they going to do for a broken rib? Wrap it? I can do that. I’ve got bandages in my bathroom.”
Some inner part of Erath sees the riptide he’s about to become caught in. He sees it clearly, the current and the pull and the direction it runs, and he sees, at the end of it, the shape of something that will either save him or destroy him and he cannot tell which. He should walk away. He should thank Sidney for the coffee, the way a reasonable person would, and leave this apartment and go back to the underworld and deal with the Coven through proper channels and never sit on this couch again.
He does nothing to change his trajectory.
He exhales through his nose. Cracks one of his knuckles. And says, “Do you want me to help you?”
The question hangs.
But Erath is not entirely in this apartment right now. Part of him is here, on this couch, watching Sidney decide whether to let him close, watching Sidney’s face work through the calculation of risk and trust and the kind of bravery required to take your shirt off in front of a stranger when your body is evidence of how the last encounter with a stranger went. But part of him is two nights behind, standing in an alley in the dark, and the two moments overlap, the offer and the memory, and he can’t separate them.
He’d felt Penny’s distress before he’d seen anything. A pull in his chest, sharp and bright, a sensation he’d never experienced before because Penny had never reached for him this way. She’d shown him things before, small images, gentle nudges. Thiswas different. This was fear. Hers and someone else’s, tangled together, and she was showing him that person being hurt because the person was connected to her and she could feel the connection vibrating with pain.
He’d seen Sidney on the ground. The alley. The giant. The witch.
He’d gone.
The staircase from the underworld had taken seconds. The streets of Central blurred past, the cold rolling out ahead of him, and the streetlights flickered and died as he passed beneath them because his presence does that when he’s not careful and he hadn’t been careful at all. He’d been fast, and cold, and intent.
The alley was dark when he arrived. Sidney was on his side with his arms around his ribs and his face against the cobblestones. There was vomit on the ground and blood at his mouth. The giant was standing over him with one fist raised, contemplating the most efficient way to end it, and the witch was talking, asking questions of a man who could barely breathe, her patience fraying toward the decision that would make the questions unnecessary. She was going to let the giant finish it. Erath could read the intention in the set of her jaw. She’d gotten what she could, which was nothing, and Sidney was now a loose end.
Erath hadn’t announced himself. Hadn’t spoken. The temperature dropped. Thirty degrees, forty, fast enough that the puddles on the cobblestones cracked and the moisture in the air crystallized and the witch’s words turned to frost on her lips.
The streetlight went out.
In the dark, Erath is not a man. He is the thing that waits at the end of every life. The silence after the last heartbeat. The weight that settles on your chest when you wake at three in the morning and know, with absolute clarity, that you are not alone.
The giant turned first. He was large and strong and accustomed to being the most dangerous thing in any space he occupied. He looked at Erath and understanding arrived all at once, the way understanding always arrives for things that are about to die, too late and too total. His hand dropped. His body locked. Erath closed the distance in a step that covered more ground than physics should allow and placed his hand flat against the giant’s chest and the giant stopped. Everything about him stopped. He dropped where he stood, foundation pulled away, and the sound he made hitting the ground was final.
The witch ran. She made it four steps. Her magic was already gathering at her fingertips, green-black threads of something old and borrowed, and Erath caught her by the back of her coat and turned her around and she saw his face. The magic died. The resistance died. She went still in his grip the way all things go still eventually, and Erath held her there long enough for her to understand exactly who she’d been sent after, and exactly who she’d tried to take from him.
