“Is Sidney safe?”
“He’s safer in the underworld than anywhere else right now.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.” August holds his gaze. He’s twenty-six and human and standing in front of the god of death in his own hallway in his sweatpants and he doesn’t flinch. He has never flinched from Erath, which is something Erath has always respected about him and is currently finding inconvenient. “I’m asking if he’s safe from you.”
The silence is long. It fills the hallway and presses against the walls and Erath lets it sit there because the question deserves more than a quick answer. It deserves more than a quick answer because the quick answer would be yes, and the truthful answer is more complicated than yes, because yes assumes that Erathknows what safe means for Sidney and he’s not certain he does. He thought he did.
“I have no intention of hurting Sidney,” he says.
“Intentions aren’t what I’m worried about.” August’s voice is steady but his eyes are fierce. The fierceness is not anger. It’s the intensity of someone who loves another person and is about to go to bat for them with the full knowledge that the person they’re going to bat against could unmake them with a thought. “Sidney has a history with men who don’t know how to be gentle with him.”
The sentence lands in Erath’s chest and doesn’t move.
“I don’t know what’s happening between you two,” August continues, because he’s not going to let the silence be the answer, “and I’m not going to pretend I can tell the god of death what to do. But he’s my best friend, and I need to know that he’s okay.”
He could say there is nothing between him and Sidney and it would be technically true and completely dishonest. He could say he has no claim on Sidney and that would be true too and equally dishonest. What is honest is that Erath’s daughter has bound them together and Erath has been falling since the night in the doorway and Sidney is sleeping in his house and taking care of his child and Erath doesn’t know what that is but he knows what he wants it to be and he knows that the wanting requires him to be something he’s not sure he is.
Gentle. He needs to be gentle. And gentle is not a thing that comes naturally to the god of death. He is patient, yes. He is deliberate. But gentle requires understanding the landscape of another person’s damage and navigating it without adding to it, and Erath has already failed at that once and August is standing here asking him if it’s going to happen again.
“There is nothing between me and Sidney,” he says, and the words are ash in his mouth, “and there will continue to not beunless he wishes otherwise. And if he does wish otherwise, I will be careful with him.”
August stares at him. The stare has the quality of someone who has said what they needed to say and is deciding whether the answer is enough. It’s not the answer August was looking for. It’s not reassurance and it’s not a guarantee. It’s the truth, spoken by someone who has been alive long enough to know that guarantees are lies and the best he can offer is the intention to do better than the men who came before him.
August’s jaw works. Then he nods, once, and the nod is acceptance without belief, trust without certainty, the best he can give and the best Erath deserves.
“Take care of him,” August says.
It’s not a request. It’s the closest thing to a threat that a human psychopomp can level at the god he works for, and Erath hears it for what it is: a man who loves his friend telling a god that the friend matters more than the god’s authority, more than the god’s power, more than the god’s eons of existence. Sidney matters. The bartender with the smart mouth and the bruised face matters, and August is planting a flag on that hill and daring Erath to challenge it.
“I will,” Erath says.
He means it. He means it the way he means everything, completely, with the full weight of what he is behind it. But meaning it and doing it are different things, and the distance between intention and execution is the distance in which every man who came before Erath has failed, and he is going to have to learn to close that distance or he is going to lose this before it starts.
Chapter 13
Sidney has exactly zero cell service in the underworld, which isn’t surprising, and he knows Xela is going to kill him herself once she finds out he’s alive.
He has no way to get a message to her. He’s been trying, on and off, holding his phone up at different angles in different rooms as though the underworld might have a pocket of signal hiding behind the armoire if he just finds the right spot. It does not. The underworld does not care about his bars. The underworld has its own concerns and none of them involve the cellular infrastructure of the mortal realm, and Sidney’s phone is a dead brick in his pocket and Xela is, at this moment, almost certainly running his bar alone and composing increasingly violent plans for what she’s going to do to him when she finds out he’s not dead.
He doesn’t have time to worry about that right now, because he’s currently supervising a five-year-old girl who is painstakingly reading him every book in her collection, and “reading” is doing an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting in that sentence. Penny does not read. Penny interprets. Thecaterpillar, according to her latest retelling, does not eat through one apple and two pears. The caterpillar eats through a castle and three dragons and then has a stomachache, which, to be fair, sounds likely after such consumption. Sidney sits on the floor of her bedroom with his back against the daybed and his legs stretched out and listens to the latest revision and asks follow-up questions about the dragons and acts appropriately mesmerized by her story crafting skills.
Erath had left that morning, after the pancakes and the burn and the revelation that Sidney has been cosmically bonded to a god’s dead wife’s parking spot. He’d said something about Penny not being able to stay in the underworld without Sidney, because it wasn’t her time yet, and he’d heavily implied, without outright asking, that he’d like Sidney to stay so Penny was safe and not in the above where the Coven could reach her. He hadn’t asked. Erath doesn’t ask for things. He hovers at the edges of requests and waits for people to read between the lines, which is infuriating, and Sidney had taken pity on him and said yes, he’d stay.
So here he is. In the underworld. In the god of death’s house. Wearing the god of death’s clothes, which are too long in the arms and too wide in the shoulders and make him look like a child playing dress-up in his father’s closet, except the father in question is an immortal being and the closet contains nothing but identical black shirts. Sidney has rolled the sleeves three times and the hem still hits mid-thigh and he’s trying not to think about what it means that Erath’s shirt smells like moss and stone and the mineral warmth that is specifically, unmistakably Erath, and that Sidney has caught himself pressing his face into the collar twice today.
He catches himself doing it again while Penny is between books, his nose against the fabric, breathing in the scent, and the bruise on his face presses into the collar and the ache remindshim that he still looks like he lost a fight with a freight train. The bruise is still there. Erath had healed the burn on his palm this morning, lips against skin, brief and warm and over before Sidney could process it, but the face is untouched. The purple-black gradient from his undereye to his jaw is still broadcasting to the world that someone hit him, hard, and the swelling at the edge of his lip is still there, and Penny has been looking at it with the concern of a five-year-old who doesn’t know what to say about the damage on a grown-up’s face but knows it shouldn’t be there.
He spends the day with Penny. He makes her lunch, which consists of whatever he can find in a kitchen that has been stocked by someone with no concept of groceries. There are eggs. There is bread. There is peanut butter and, inexplicably, a jar of honey that appears to have come from somewhere that is not a regular grocery store, given that the label is in a language Sidney can’t read and the honey itself is a shade of amber that glows faintly in the light. He makes peanut butter and honey sandwiches and decides not to investigate the honey further.
In the afternoon Penny builds a fort out of couch cushions and Sidney is conscripted as the architect, which involves holding things in place while she makes structural decisions that are, from an engineering standpoint, ambitious. The fort collapses twice. They rebuild it twice. She names it Fort Sid, which Sidney considers a high compliment. They eat dinner inside the fort, cross-legged on the floor, and Penny tells him about a dream she had involving a purple horse and a river made of juice, and Sidney asks where the horse lives and what kind of juice and Penny has answers for all of it and none of them make sense and Sidney is content with that.
He puts her to bed. It’s becoming routine, the tucking, the blanket around the feet, the offer of a story, the door left cracked. She’s asked him twice today where her dad is, and both timesSidney has told her he’s working but he’ll check on her when he gets home, and both times she’s accepted this with the trust of a child who has decided that if Sidney says it then it’s true. The weight of that trust sits on his chest and doesn’t move.
She’d touched his face earlier that day, during the second story, the one about the caterpillar and the castle. Reached up from where she was sitting in his lap and pressed her small fingers against the bruise on his jaw and said, “Does it hurt?” And Sidney had said, “Nah, it’s just a bruise. It’ll go away.” And she’d looked at him with those dark eyes, the old-behind-the-young ones, and said, “Daddy can fix it.” And Sidney had said, “Yeah, I know he can.” And she’d gone back to her story and hadn’t mentioned it again.
He tries not to think about how, for two days in a row, he’s been primary caretaker to a child. Down that road lies complicated thoughts and all of them lead back to the same place, which is the man who lives in this house and who kissed Sidney’s palm this morning with a mouth that healed what it touched and left something else behind that hasn’t healed, hasn’t faded, is still sitting under Sidney’s skin, warm and humming and connected to the pull in his chest that has been quiet all day but is getting louder now, in the evening, as though it knows something Sidney doesn’t.
Erath comes home hours later.
