He goes back to the main room.
The fire is burning low, embers and the occasional lick of flame, casting warm, unsteady light across the furniture. Sidney takes off his shoes and sets them by the door because it seems wrong to track whatever’s on the ground of the underworld across the god of death’s floors, and he stands in the middle ofthe room and looks around and processes, for the first time since Penny knocked on his door, the full scope of what has happened.
He’s in the underworld. He’s in Erath’s home. He’s in the house of the man he kissed last night and then pushed away, who’d simply gone and left Sidney certain it was over.
And now he’s here. In Erath’s living room. Wearing pajama pants and a t-shirt and no jacket because he’d fled his apartment through a window with a child on his back and hadn’t had time to grab one. Standing on Erath’s floor, looking at Erath’s couch and Erath’s fireplace, and the intimacy of it is excruciating. This is where Erath lives. This is where he sits when Penny is asleep and the dead are quiet and the underworld is still. This is the couch he occupies, the fire he watches, the coffee mug he drinks from, and Sidney is seeing all of it without permission, without invitation, because a five-year-old brought him here and he hadn’t had the option of saying no.
He doesn’t know what Erath is going to think when he finds him. He doesn’t know if the look on Erath’s face when he sees Sidney on his couch is going to be the look of a man who’s glad he’s here or the look of a man who thought the kitchen had been a clear enough signal and is wondering why Sidney is the one confused.
He told Erath he couldn’t do this. Erath left. And now Sidney is in his home, in his world, with no warning and no right to be, and the irony of it is so pointed it almost hurts.
He sits down on the couch. It’s old and ugly, the upholstery a shade of green that was never fashionable, and it is, impossibly, the most comfortable thing he’s ever sat on. It holds him. The cushions conform to the shape of his body and the back supports his spine and his ribs settle into a position that hurts less than any position has hurt in days and Sidney leans his head back and closes his eyes.
He should stay awake. Erath will come back eventually and they’ll need to talk and there are things to figure out, Penny and the Coven and the fact that Sidney is apparently now in the underworld, alive, which seems like it should be a bigger logistical concern than it currently feels. He should stay awake and wait.
He’s asleep in under a minute.
His last thought, the one that follows him down into the dark behind his eyelids, is that Xela doesn’t know where he is and she’s going to burn Haven to the ground looking for him, and the underworld almost certainly does not have cell service, and when she finds him she’s going to kill him in a way that is creative and painful and will probably involve his skeleton being displayed as a warning to others.
He falls asleep on the god of death’s couch, in the god of death’s home, in the land of the dead, and the fire crackles and Penny breathes down the hall and the river of souls murmurs in the distance and Sidney sleeps without dreaming.
Chapter 10
Penny can’t enter the underworld for two more months.
She can’t. The rules are absolute. The way won’t open to her until the cycle turns and the days align and the boundary thins enough to let her through. She’s tried before, in the early years, when she was too young to understand why she had to leave and would stand at the top of the staircase and cry and pound her small fists against the air where the passage should be and find nothing. The barrier is not physical. It’s not something you can break through with force or will or desperation. It’s a law, as fundamental as gravity, as immovable as the turning of the earth, and it has never, in Erath’s entire existence, been violated.
She’s here.
He feels her the moment she crosses. It arrives the way spring arrives after a long winter, sudden and entire, the world opening up and blooming, warmth pouring through channels that have been frozen for months. He feels her in the air and in the ground and in the frequency of his own pulse, which isn’t a pulse at all but a rhythm, a current, and it changes when his daughteris near. It changes the way the river changes when something living enters the water. The whole underworld shifts. The light gets warmer. The murmuring of the souls softens. Even the dirt beneath his feet feels different, less brittle, less dead, as though her presence is enough to coax something green from it.
Except it doesn’t bring him peace. Not this time. Because it shouldn’t be possible. She is two months early and the barrier doesn’t bend and she has never been able to come before her time, no matter how badly she wanted to, no matter how badly he wanted her to. She can’t be dead, because she can’t die, not in the way that would bring her here permanently. So how is she here?
He doesn’t rush.
If she’s here, regardless of how she’s here, then she’s safe. She’s in his domain. Nothing in this realm can hurt her without his permission and his permission will never be given. She’s safe, and the urgency of understanding how she arrived can wait until he finishes what he’s doing.
He’s in the middle of undoing a soulbind. Two spirits who died together, tangled at the edges, their forms overlapping in the way that happens when people who are deeply connected die at the same moment. It’s delicate work. The souls are fused at points of contact, threads of shared experience woven between them, and separating them requires patience and precision and a willingness to sit with the grief of it, because the separation is always the hardest part. They don’t want to let go. They never want to let go. They’d rather stay tangled forever than face whatever comes next alone.
He finishes. He separates the threads, gently, and watches the two spirits drift apart and downstream, and they reach for each other as the current carries them and their fingers pass through each other and then they’re gone.
He stands. He walks.
He crosses the breadth of the underworld, past the river, past the structures, past the places where the dead gather and wait and argue and refuse and eventually accept. He walks toward his house, which he hesitates to call a home. It hasn’t been a home in a long time. It can’t be a home when Penny is not there, and even when she’s there, her time with him is always overcast by the knowledge that she’ll have to leave again. It’s never enough. One day without her feels like thirty. The six months she has to spend in the mortal realm are the darkest, coldest stretch he weathers, and he has weathered a great many dark, cold things.
The stained glass windows are catching the light from the river. The door opens before he reaches it. He steps inside and the warmth of the fire is there, familiar, and the smell of the house is there, wood and old fabric and the mustiness of a place that exists underground and doesn’t get sunlight, and Penny’s presence is there, vivid and radiant, coming from the direction of her room.
And something else is there.
Erath stops in the doorway of the main room. He stops because Sidney is on his couch.
Sidney is curled on his side with his knees drawn up and his shoes arranged neatly by the door and his socks visible and his arm tucked under his head and he’s wearing pajama pants and he is, unmistakably, asleep. His breathing is even. His face, turned toward the room, is relaxed in a way that Erath has never seen it, the careful control that Sidney maintains during waking hours dissolved by sleep into something unguarded and young. His hair has fallen across his forehead. His lips are slightly parted. The bruise on his face is prominent along his cheek and jaw.
Erath stares at him. He stares for longer than is appropriate and then continues staring because apparently his body andhis brain have reached a fundamental disagreement about the concept of appropriate.
He pushes himself forward. Down the hall. Penny’s door is cracked open, the way she likes it, a sliver of light from the hallway cutting across the floor of her room. He pushes the door open with two fingers and looks inside.
She’s in bed. Covers pulled to her chin. Braids messy. The one-eared rabbit pressed against her face. She’s asleep, deeply, completely, the way children sleep when they feel safe, with total surrender, and the sight of her there, in her bed, in her room, where she belongs and where he always wants her to be, makes something inside Erath go quiet. A noise he hadn’t realized he was carrying goes silent. A tension he’d been holding for days releases. She’s here. She’s safe. She’s his.
