Xela is polishing a glass, which is what she does when she's thinking. She doesn't look at him. "If you're not safe in Haven then you should stay in the underworld where the Coven can't reach you.”
"And do what? Live down there forever? Hide?"
"Yes," Xela says flatly. "That is literally what I'm suggesting."
"Xela." Sidney leans forward, arms folded on the bar. "I'm not dead. I have a life I'd like to continue living. And Penny is five years old. Staying inside a dark house with Legos for company for the rest of her life is not a productive thing for a growing girl. She needs sunlight. She needs other kids. She needs to not grow up in a crypt because the adults in her life are too scared to deal with the problem."
"You're not her parent, Sidney."
The words land harder than they should, and he knows Xela doesn't mean them cruelly. She means them practically. She means that this is not his fight, not his child, not his responsibility. That he's a bartender in his mid-twenties who got dragged into something cosmic by accident and has every right to walk away from it. He knows that. He also knows that walking away from Penny is something he's incapable of doing, and that Xela knows it too, and that the statement is less of an argument and more of a test.
He meets her eyes and says, quietly, "We need to be able to live freely. And the only way we're going to be able to do that is to deal with the coven."
Xela sets the glass down. She stares at him for a long time. Then she looks at Penny, who is drawing something with great concentration, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth, and something shifts in the banshee's expression. It's small. Barely perceptible. But Sidney has known Xela long enough to see it. It's the same look she gets when someone threatens a patron she's fond of, or when Sidney comes in with a new bruise, or when someone makes the catastrophic mistake of being cruel in her bar. It's possessive. It's protective. It's the look of someone deciding that something now falls under her jurisdiction.
"The coven would be very, very foolish to attempt anything while I'm around," Xela says, which is not the same as saying she'll help, but it's close enough. Her fingers drum once against the bartop. "Where do we start?"
Sidney exhales, some tension he didn't realize he was carrying loosening in his shoulders. "I know Erath wants August on board, but I can guarantee August won't give it his all unless he hears from me that I'm okay. Seeing is believing, so to speak. So we need to speak with him."
Xela hums, noncommittal but not disagreeing, and begins putting the bar back together for opening.
Penny holds up her napkin. It's a lopsided sunflower with what appears to be three stick figures underneath it. One is very tall and dark. One is medium and has yellow scribbles for hair. One is very small and holds both their hands.
Sidney's chest does something he refuses to examine too closely. He takes the napkin from her, studies it with the gravity it deserves, and says, "This is going on the fridge."
Penny beams.
He folds the napkin carefully and tucks it into the bag with the rest of his things, and when he looks up, Xela is watching him with an expression that is dangerously close to soft. She catches him noticing and immediately scowls.
"I'll give him a call," she says, all business again. "Give me twenty minutes."
Sidney nods and turns to Penny. "Alright, kiddo, finish your milk. We've got places to be."
Penny drains the chocolate milk, wipes her mouth on her sleeve, and hops off the stool with the energy of someone who has been cooped up for three days and is vibrating at a frequency that could power a small generator. She grabs Sidney's hand and looks up at him and says, "Are we going on an adventure?"
"Something like that," Sidney tells her. "A boring adult adventure where we talk to people and make plans and nobody gets to go spelunking."
"Splunking," Penny corrects, and Sidney doesn't correct the correction because she's five and she's earned it.
Chapter 16
Erath is in the middle of closing a fissure in the sea of the dead when he's pulled, quite literally, into the world of the living.
There's no warning. One moment he's knee-deep in the murky green water with both hands submerged, coaxing a crack in the riverbed to seal itself before the spirits pooling at its edges start leaking into places they don't belong, and the next the space around him warps. The air folds. The sky, such as it is in the underworld, splits open above him with a sound that is less a tear and more a breath, and a portal into the above opens cleanly with a set of stairs leading up into it.
He straightens. The water drips from his hands and hisses where it hits the dry ground. He stares at the portal for a long moment, because there is only one person in existence who can summon him, and if that's happening, it's probably something dire.
He's already had a morning. He'd been in the middle of working when he'd realized he couldn't feel Sidney and Penny within the underworld any longer. His first response had beenalarm, sharp and total, the kind that starts in his sternum and radiates outward. His second response, arriving half a breath later and overriding the first, had been trust. If Sidney had taken Penny, then Penny was with Sidney, and Sidney may have no magic and no defenses to speak of, but Sidney had also descended into the literal underworld for her, and climbed down a fire escape for her, and told the Hargrove Coven to fuck off for her, and Erath trusts him with his daughter's safety in a way he cannot rationalize and has stopped trying to.
The trust is new. It's new and it's fragile and it's built on a foundation of a man who sleeps with his whole body pressed against Erath's chest and holds on to him in the night and doesn't flinch anymore when Erath's hands find his waist in the dark. The trust is built on the way Sidney takes care of Penny without being asked, the way he takes care of Erath without being asked. It's built on the way Sidney's body had fully let go, for the first time in what Erath suspects is years, and the sound Sidney makes when he's falling asleep, a small exhale that isn't quite a sigh, the sound of someone's guard coming down.
He'd felt the absence of them and he'd thought: they'll come back. And the certainty of it had been strange and warm and he'd held it and gone to work.
Now he follows the stairs into the light.
The portal leads him into a small, cluttered apartment that smells of potpourri and incense. The potpourri is lavender, old and slightly dusty, the kind that sits in a bowl on a shelf and hasn't been refreshed in months. The incense is sandalwood, recently lit, the smoke curling from a stick on the windowsill and leaving a blue-gray haze near the ceiling. There are books everywhere. Stacked on the floor, piled on the coffee table, wedged into shelves that are already double-loaded and leaning under the weight. Crystals line the windowsill beside the incense, and there are plants, many of them, some thriving andsome questionable, crowding every available surface that isn't already occupied by books or candles or the small collection of ceramic frogs that sits on top of the refrigerator for reasons Erath is not planning on asking about.
In the middle of the apartment, holding out his hands to keep the portal open, is Newt Hargrove.
