He didn’t enjoy it. He never enjoys it. The dead are his responsibility, not his pleasure. But he didn’t hesitate either, and the absence of hesitation told him something about what Sidney had already become to him, because Erath hesitates with most things. He deliberates. He weighs. He stands at the river and considers the flow and makes decisions with the measured patience of someone who has eternity to get it right.
He hadn’t deliberated here.
Two bodies on the ground. Two more souls for the river.
He’d knelt beside Sidney. The blond was shaking, his whole body trembling, continuous and involuntary, the trembling of a body that has been pushed past its capacity to absorb impact and is running on nothing but adrenaline and the stubborn refusal to quit. His eyes were half open and unfocused and he was making a sound that wasn’t quite breathing and wasn’t quitewhimpering, a sound that existed somewhere between the two, too quiet to be audible from more than a foot away and too raw to be anything other than honest. Erath had reached for him. His hand had gotten within inches of Sidney’s shoulder.
Sidney had flinched.
Erath had withdrawn his hand. He’d taken Sidney’s phone from his jacket pocket. The screen was cracked but functional. Recent calls: “Xela” with a heart emoji. He’d pressed call.
The banshee answered on the second ring. Her voice was a blade. When Erath told her where Sidney was and what condition he was in she’d said three words, none of them repeatable, and hung up. She arrived seven minutes later, moving through the dark at speed, and skidded to a halt at the mouth of the alley and looked at Erath and then at Sidney and then at the two bodies and then back at Erath.
“Did you do this?”
“They were going to kill him.”
She’d stared at him for a long moment, the kind of moment where someone is deciding whether to fight you or thank you and the decision could go either way. Then she’d gone to Sidney and knelt beside him and cupped his face in her hands and said his name, and Sidney had responded. His eyes had focused. His shaking had eased under the sound of her voice, and Erath had watched the way Sidney turned his face into her palm and the way his hand found her wrist and held on, and the holding had told Erath everything about who this woman was to Sidney and who Sidney was to her.
“He can’t walk,” Erath had said.
“I can see that.”
“His ribs are broken. He needs to be carried. Carefully.”
Xela had looked at him. Then at Sidney. Then back at Erath with an expression that communicated, with painful clarity, that she was about to ask for something she did not want to ask forand that she was going to hold it against him for the rest of eternity.
“Fine,” she’d said. “You carry him. But if you do anything…”
“I won’t.”
He’d picked him up. One arm under his knees and one behind his shoulders, careful of the ribs, careful of everything, and Sidney was lighter than he should have been, lighter than a man his height should be, and his head had fallen against Erath’s shoulder and his hand had found Erath’s collar and held on.
The same grip. The same fingers curling into fabric. Penny’s grip. The grip that doesn’t know how to let go. Sidney had held on to Erath’s collar the way Penny held on to his jacket and the way Penny held on to the blanket and the way, Erath suspected, Sidney held on to everything he was afraid of losing. The grip was not conscious. It was not a choice. It was the body’s answer to a question the mind hadn’t asked.
Erath had carried him up four flights of ugly carpet with a banshee at his heels who looked fully prepared to disembowel him at the first wrong move. He’d placed Sidney on the couch and pulled the blanket over him and stepped back. The banshee had positioned herself between Erath and the couch with the territorial precision of a wolf standing over a wounded packmate.
He’d left. The door had closed.
And Penny had still been there, at the edges of his awareness. Still watching. Still connected to this human she’d decided was hers. The thread between them, thin and new and entirely unauthorized, humming in the dark.
That was two nights ago.
Now Sidney is looking at him from the other end of the couch, bruised and untended.
“Yeah,” Sidney says. “Okay.”
Chapter 5
Sidney is twenty-five, and warm-blooded, and has had questionable taste in men since he was fifteen and first understood that his interest in the boys’ locker room was not, in fact, a universal experience. He has dated precisely the wrong kind of person at every available opportunity. He has a type, and his type is “will almost certainly ruin his life,” and he is aware of this pattern and has done absolutely nothing to correct it.
Which is why he does not turn down the god of death’s offer to help him bandage his ribs.
He should. He knows he should. August’s voice is in his head, urgent and worried, saying the lord of the underworld and I put you in a lot of danger and be careful, and Sidney is hearing all of it and choosing to get his medical supplies and take his shirt off in front of a man who could apparently end his existence with a thought. August would kill him. August would actually, literally kill him, and then Erath would have to deal with his soul in the underworld, and at least then they’d have an excuse to keep seeing each other.
He goes to the bathroom. Cabinet under the sink: linen bandages, medical tape, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide that expired two years ago, and a tube of Neosporin that he’s pretty sure came with the apartment. He brings it all back and sets it on the coffee table and stands in front of the couch where Erath is sitting, watching him with those dark eyes, and pulls his shirt off over his head.
It hurts. Lifting his arms hurts. The motion of the fabric sliding over his ribs sends a sharp, bright flare of pain through his left side that makes him suck in air through his teeth. The sudden exposure of his bare skin to the cool air of the apartment hurts too, although that’s less about the injury and more about the fact that he’s now shirtless in front of a man who looks at him the way Erath looks at him and he is not prepared for what that does to his nervous system.
