Erath stares at him. His mind goes momentarily blank, every thought scattering, because he heard every word in that sentence but the ones his brain has latched onto are fell for and the magnitude of them in Sidney's mouth, said with such resignation, such practiced defeat, the way you state a fact you've accepted rather than a feeling you're still hoping for.
Sidney seems to realize what he's said. The guard cracks. Color floods his face, just the slightest hint of pink at his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, and he curses under his breath. Something short and vicious and directed entirely at himself. He steps away from Erath, already turning back to the hallway, and Erath can see the self-degradation washing over him, the internal collapse of someone who showed their hand and immediately wishes they hadn't. He's retreating. He's going to go into the bathroom and help Penny with her bath and by the time he comes out the wall will be rebuilt and reinforced and this conversation will be filed away under things they don't talk about.
Erath can't let it happen. He can't let Sidney spiral like this when he's wrong, because it does mean something to Erath. It means everything to Erath. It means more than he knows how to say with a vocabulary that was built for managing the dead and not for telling the living that they matter.
This time he grabs him with one hand on his waist and one hand on his shoulder and turns him around bodily. It's more contact than he's initiated since the first night they were together, more assertive than he's been since he learned that Sidney flinches from hands that move too fast, and he's careful about it, deliberate, making sure the touch is firm but not forceful. Sidney goes without a fight. He turns in Erath's grip and faces him and the expression on his face is not angry or guarded or calm. It's defeated. He looks so beaten. He looks like every man who has ever stood in front of him has said the exact same thing and he has learned to expect it the way you learn to expect rain.
Erath moves his hand from his shoulder to his cheek. He holds him there, palm against the side of Sidney's face, and he can feel the heat of him, the blood and the warmth and the life that is so staggeringly present. Sidney's eyes are bright and wounded and looking at him and Erath has never in his existence been so terrified of saying the wrong thing.
"I've only ever done this once before and it ended badly," he says, and the words come out quiet. "The person I thought I loved took everything from me. We're not so different, Sidney. We've both been hurt."
Sidney swallows. His eyes move, trying to look away, trying to find somewhere else to be, and Erath's hand holds him in place. Not forcefully. Just present. Just there. Saying stay. Look at me. Let me try.
"But I've already let you in," Erath says, and the truth of it resonates through him with the force of something shaken loose, something that's been stuck for a very long time. "There's a hollow place in my chest that I didn't realize was empty until you and her walked back through that door."
Sidney stares at him. The defeat is still there, but something else is pushing through it, something that looks terrified andhopeful and angry at itself for being hopeful. His lips part but nothing comes out. His eyes are shining and his throat works and he doesn't speak, and Erath realizes he doesn't need him to. Not right now. Not yet.
He leans in and kisses him softly. Carefully. The way he's learned to touch Sidney, with patience and intention and the understanding that every gentleness is new, every tenderness a language Sidney is still learning to trust. Sidney's mouth is warm and his breath catches and for a moment he's perfectly still, and then he presses back. His hands come up and curl into the fabric of Erath's shirt and pull him forward, closer, and the kiss deepens into something that tastes desperate and relieved at the same time.
They stand there in the hallway and kiss for a long moment, unhurried, the sounds of the underworld distant and irrelevant. Erath's hand stays on his face and his other hand stays on his waist and he doesn't pull, doesn't push, just holds on while Sidney takes what he needs.
Then, from the bathroom, the unmistakable sound of a faucet being turned on full blast and the enthusiastic splashing of a five-year-old who has discovered that bubbles are more fun when you use the entire bottle.
They pull apart. Sidney's eyes are bright and his lips are swollen and there's pink on his cheeks that has nothing to do with embarrassment this time. He looks at Erath, and the wall is not gone but there's a door in it now that's open, and Erath can see through it.
Sidney touches his face. Just a press of his fingers, light and brief, against the line of Erath's jaw. Then he turns and goes into the bathroom, and Erath can hear him saying, "Penny, that is way too many bubbles," and Penny's responding shriek of delight, and the splash of water hitting tile.
Erath breathes in. He stands in the hallway with his hand still warm from the side of Sidney's face and the weight of what he hasn't said pressing against his ribs, and listens to the sounds of his family in the other room.
Chapter 19
After Penny is asleep, tucked into her canopy bed with the fairy lights casting constellations on the ceiling and her stuffed bear clutched against her chest and the door cracked open the exact width she requires, Sidney pads back into the main room and drops onto the couch. His body aches. Not from injury, for once, but from the exhaustion of a day spent above ground navigating parks and banshees and difficult conversations with best friends and then descending back into the underworld to make dinner and supervise a bubble bath that resulted in more water on the floor than in the tub. It's the good kind of tired.
Erath is already in the room, sitting in the armchair near the fire with his legs stretched out and his head tipped back, staring at the ceiling in the way he does when he's thinking about seventeen things at once and none of them are good. He looks tired too, which shouldn't be possible for a being that doesn't sleep, but there it is. The tiredness is in his shoulders, in the set of his jaw, in the way his fingers are drumming a slow rhythm on the armrest. He's been gone most of the day, and whateverhe was doing has left a weight on him that Sidney can see from across the room.
"So," Sidney says, pulling his legs up onto the couch and sitting cross-legged because the floor of the underworld is cold and his socks are thin. "Are you going to tell me where you were today, or am I supposed to guess?"
Erath lifts his head and looks at him. There's a pause, the kind that comes before a long explanation, and then Erath shifts forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, and begins talking.
He tells Sidney about Newt. He tells him that Newt was visited by Annabeth, the current acting matriarch of the Coven, who came to him for help because the Coven is fracturing from within. He explains that Angelica, Erath's ex-wife, Penny's mother, is the one driving the plot to use Penny as a conduit. She wants to open a rift into the underworld. She wants to bring back Mathilde and Jayson Voss. She wants to use a blood pact to bind them to living bodies, and the sacrifice that fuels the pact is Penny.
Sidney knew pieces of this. August had speculated about it in the park. But hearing it confirmed, hearing the details laid out with the cold precision of someone who has spent the day assembling them, makes the knowledge settle differently. Heavier. More real.
Erath continues. He explains that Newt is Penny's half-brother. Angelica's firstborn. That he was raised in the Coven and used by them and that his relationship with his mother is something Erath carries guilt about, though he doesn't say it that way. He says it the way he says everything personal, which is sideways and underneath, buried in the facts and visible only if you know where to look.
Sidney knows where to look.
He takes it all in. He processes it in pieces, fitting new information into the framework he's been building since thisstarted, and finds that the picture is becoming both clearer and uglier. A Coven torn apart by power struggles. A mother willing to sacrifice her own daughter for immortality. A network of allies forming, fragile and new, held together by the shared understanding that something very bad is about to happen and the people best equipped to stop it are the ones who've been broken by it before.
"Newt sounds like a good person," Sidney says, when Erath finishes.
"He is." Erath says it simply, without qualification. "Better than most."
"And you trust him."
"With my life. With Penny's life."
Sidney nods. He pulls at a loose thread on the couch cushion, winding it around his finger, and says, "Okay. So we've got Newt and his demon, and Dimitri and his human. Annabeth, maybe. August and Vale. That's a decent group."
