“Do you want to come up?” Sidney says. Then, as if he needs to justify it: “I could put some coffee on. If you want.”
Erath has been alive for longer than coffee has existed as a concept. He has presided over the deaths of civilizations and ferried the souls of kings and watched empires crumble to dust at his feet. He has been offered tribute and sacrifice and theprayers of millions and none of it, not a single moment across the breadth of his existence, has undone him as quickly as a bartender in an oversized jacket offering to make him coffee while bracing himself to be hurt again.
“Yes,” he says.
They go up. Four flights. The carpet hasn’t improved. Sidney’s pace is steady tonight, no faltering on the stairs, and he unlocks his apartment door on the first try, which Erath notes is the first lock that’s cooperated with him all evening. The apartment is warm and smells of lavender. Sidney drops his keys on the counter and fills the coffee maker and clicks it on and the machine starts its low, industrial grumbling. He pulls two mugs from the cabinet, the one with a dog on it and the plain one and sets them on the counter and leans back against the opposite side and crosses his arms.
The kitchen is narrow. The counter puts about three feet between them. Erath is on one side, leaned against the edge. Sidney is on the other, hip against the counter, arms crossed, watching the coffee maker with the focus of someone who needs something to look at that isn’t the other person in the room.
The coffee maker drips. The apartment is quiet. Erath watches a strand of Sidney’s hair fall across his forehead and wants, with a fierceness that startles him, to push it back.
“So how does the dad thing work?” Sidney asks, eyes still on the coffee maker.
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“I mean, you’re the lord of the underworld. You oversee all the dead. You manage the entire afterlife.” He glances at Erath. “How does that work with being someone’s dad? How do you balance the whole dominion-over-death thing with, you know, parenting?”
“The dead don’t require constant supervision. Most of them are content to move through the process. The ones who aren’ttake time, but the underworld has its own rhythms. I’ve had eons to learn them.”
“So you clock out and go home and be a dad.”
“Something to that effect.”
“Does she know? About what you do?”
“She knows in the way children know things. She understands that people come to the underworld when they’re done living, and that I take care of them.” Erath pauses. “She thinks it’s boring.”
Sidney’s mouth curves. “She thinks managing the entirety of death is boring?”
“She thinks most things are boring unless they involve coloring, snacks, or painting someone’s nails.”
“Fair. She’s got her priorities straight.” The coffee maker sputters and finishes. Sidney turns and pours, and the motion puts his back to Erath for a moment, the line of his shoulders visible through the too-big jacket, and Erath’s gaze traces the shape of him without permission. Sidney turns back and hands him the plain mug and their fingers brush in the exchange, brief, incidental, and Sidney doesn’t pull away from it. “What’s her favorite book?”
“She has a book about a caterpillar that eats an extraordinary amount of food for its size. She’s read it to me four hundred times. I could recite it in my sleep, if I slept.”
“You don’t sleep?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“Not in the way you mean.”
Sidney takes a sip of his coffee. He holds the mug in both hands, elbows on the counter, and looks at Erath over the rim. The kitchen light is warm and it catches the gold in his hair and the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, lines that deepen whenhe smiles and are visible now even though he’s not smiling, not quite, just existing in the proximity of one.
“What do you do at night, then? When she’s asleep?”
“Think. Walk. Check on the river. Make sure nothing’s gotten in that shouldn’t be there.”
“That sounds lonely.”
It is. Erath doesn’t say that. Saying it would give it a shape and a weight and a name and he’s been carefully avoiding all three for a very long time. He lifts his mug and says, “It’s quiet. I prefer quiet.”
“Liar,” Sidney says.
The word is precise and unhesitating and it lands with the force of something that’s true. Erath’s mug pauses halfway to his mouth.
“You’ve showed up at my bar two nights in a row,” Sidney says. “You walked me home. You’re sitting in my kitchen drinking coffee at midnight. None of that screams I prefer quiet.”
