“Yeah.” She’s doing long vertical lines now, careful and methodical. “Her head got pulled off this morning. I was scared, so I ran out of the house.”
The bar is warm and the lighting is low and there are people laughing somewhere behind him and Sidney sits very still in this booth across from a five-year-old girl who has just told him, between sips of chocolate milk, that her guardian was decapitated. The delivery is matter-of-fact in the way only children can manage. She’s not crying. She’s not shaking. She’s coloring and drinking her milk and telling him about the worst day of her life with the same tone she’d use to describe what she had for breakfast.
This morning. This child has been on her own since this morning. She’s been moving through Haven for twelve hours or more, five years old, alone, with the image of her guardian’s head being pulled off as the last thing she saw before she ran. And she ended up here, in a bar in the Old City, in a booth by the restrooms, because this is where her feet brought her and no one along the way noticed or stopped or helped.
Something tightens in Sidney’s jaw. He releases it before she can see.
“That’s terrible,” he says. “I’m really sorry that happened.”
Penny keeps coloring. She doesn’t seem to need his condolences. She seems to need the green marker and the chocolate milk and someone sitting across from her who isn’t going anywhere, and Sidney can be that. He can sit here and be that.
“Okay,” he says after a moment. “You stay right here. I’m going to make a phone call and then I’ll be right back. Sound good?”
She looks up at him. “Okay.”
He crosses to the bar, grabs his phone from where it’s charging behind the register, and calls August.
It rings four times. Five. Xela materializes at his elbow, because Xela doesn’t walk to places so much as appear in them with the sudden, predatory efficiency of something that was designed by evolution to be wherever it needs to be at all times.
“Who’s the kid?” she asks.
“Still figuring that out.”
“She shouldn’t be in here. We serve alcohol. There are laws.”
“Xela, she’s five and she’s alone and it’s midnight. I’m not calling the cops on a kindergartener.”
August picks up. His voice has the quality of someone who was either asleep or doing something he’d rather not be interrupted from. “Hey, Sid.”
“Hey. Got a situation. Five-year-old girl in my bar whose guardian apparently got her head removed this morning. Does your Templar boyfriend think he could help? Maybe get us in touch with the father?”
A pause. The sound of August sitting up. “Head removed how?”
“Penny’s exact words were ‘pulled off,’ which doesn’t sound like something for the Haven PD. It sounds supernatural.”
“Christ.” More movement, another voice in the background, low and male. “Okay, give me a minute. Let me check.”
Sidney can hear him talking to someone, the murmur of a conversation he can’t make out, and he’s about to ask August if he needs to call back when the door to Willow’s opens.
Two women step inside.
Sidney hangs up the phone without saying goodbye.
They’re dressed in black, both of them, long coats with hoods pushed back and an air about them that says they are not here for the ambiance. One is older, sharp-jawed, with gray threaded through dark hair pulled back tightly and cheekbones that could cut glass. The other is younger, broader in the shoulders, with her hands clasped behind her back in a way that’s either formal or threatening. Sidney can’t tell the difference. He doesn’t think there is one. Their eyes sweep the room with the unhurried attention of people who know exactly what they’re looking for.
Penny is already out of the booth.
Sidney is barely halfway across the bar when she reaches him, small hands grabbing the back of his jeans and his leg and clinging with a grip that is startling for someone her size. She presses her face into the back of his thigh and doesn’t let go. He puts a hand on her head, on the messy braid with the fuchsia bow, and the motion is instinctive, automatic, the same way he steps between drunk patrons and the people they’re bothering, the same way he puts himself in front of Xela when someone gets aggressive at the bar even though Xela could kill them faster than he could blink. He puts himself in front of things that are vulnerable. It’s what he does. He turns his body between Penny and the door and faces the women.
The older one addresses him. Her voice is clipped, efficient, the voice of someone who expects compliance and is prepared to be unpleasant about it if she doesn’t get it. “Good evening. We’re from the Hargrove Coven. The child’s guardian was a member of our order. Given her untimely passing, we’re here to collect the girl.”
Collect. Sidney registers the word the way you register a wrong note in a song, instinctively, before you can identify why it’s wrong. You collect stamps. You collect debts. You don’t collect children. He feels Penny’s fingers tighten on his leg and he looks down at the top of her head, at the braids and the way she’s folded herself against him, and then he looks back up at the women who have used that word about a child as though she were a piece of mail.
“She’s waiting on her father,” Sidney says. His voice is even. Calm. The bartender voice, the one that de-escalates. “And the authorities have been called. She’s not leaving until one of those two shows up.”
The older woman’s jaw tightens. “The father is an abusive drunk who doesn’t even have custody of her. You can’t possibly expect us to hand this child over to him.”
“From what Penny’s told me, she spends half her time with him. That sounds like at least partial custody to me.”
