"It's more than I expected."
"People tend to care when the power crazy mages they already killed once might be resurrected." Sidney shrugs.
"August said basically the same thing you just told me," he continues. "About Penny being a conduit. About the Coven wanting to use her to resurrect Voss and Mathilde. He said if Jayson Voss comes back with the power of a blood sacrifice behind him, he won't be the same man he fought last time. He'll be worse. And August doesn't have his full arsenal of necromancy at his disposal anymore."
Erath nods in agreement. "August exchanged most of his power to become a Psychopomp for the underworld. He will be able to help, but we can't count on him being stronger than an immortal necromancer resurrected through blood magic. With Mathilde beside him, they would have access to power that isn'tmeant to exist. The barriers between life and death that I've spent my entire existence maintaining would be compromised."
"And Angelica doesn't care about the collateral damage."
"Angelica cares about Angelica." There's no bitterness in Erath's voice. Just the flat, exhausted acceptance of someone who loved a person and watched them choose, over and over, to be exactly who they always were. "She thinks bringing back Mathilde will earn her a place at the table. She thinks power will fill whatever void is driving her. She's wrong, but she won't believe that until it's too late."
"So what's the plan?"
Erath tells him. He says Newt is assembling the allies. Malik is contacting Dimitri. Knox and Annabeth are working from inside the Coven. Erath himself needs to meet with August and coordinate the approach from the Order's side, because August and Vale have intelligence and resources that the rest of them don't. He says he thinks they have a few days at most before Angelica is ready to make her move. She's been picking apart the wards the Order placed at the warehouse where Voss originally opened his rifts, and once those wards are down, she'll have a location with the veil between worlds already thin enough to tear.
Sidney absorbs all of this and says, "I want to help."
Erath looks at him.
"I know what you're going to say," Sidney continues. "You'd prefer if I stayed in the underworld where I'm safe. And I get it. I do. But I'm not going to sit on my hands while everyone else works to solve a problem I'm actively part of. The Coven has already come after me twice. I'm involved whether either of us likes it or not."
Erath is quiet for a long moment. His fingers have stopped drumming on the armrest. He's looking at Sidney with thefocused attention of someone who is weighing every possible outcome and finding none of them ideal.
"I would prefer you stayed here," Erath says. "Yes."
"But?"
"But if you have to leave, keep Xela within arm's reach."
Sidney nods. "I can do that. I'll be careful."
"I know you will." Erath pauses, and then adds, with the faintest edge of dry amusement, "You'll also do whatever you want regardless of what I say, so I'm choosing to be supportive."
"See, that's growth," Sidney tells him, and the corner of Erath's mouth pulls in a way that is dangerously close to a smile.
The smile fades. It doesn't vanish all at once but recedes by degrees, the warmth pulling back from Erath's face the way the tide pulls from shore, and what's left behind is something careful and heavy. He's not done. Sidney can feel it the way you feel weather changing, a pressure shift in the room, and he watches Erath's hands go still on his knees and waits.
"There's something else," Erath says. "Something I should have told you sooner."
Sidney's stomach tightens. Nothing good has ever followed that sentence, in his experience. Not from a doctor, not from a boss, not from any of the men who've said it to him in various kitchens and bedrooms and parking lots before delivering the kind of information that rearranges the furniture in your life.
"The bond between you and Penny," Erath says. "The tether Penny created when she chose you as her guardian. It doesn't just connect you to her. It connects you to the underworld. To me. To the boundary itself."
Sidney waits. He doesn't say anything, because Erath's face tells him there's more and the more is the part that matters.
"Penny is a conduit because she was born between worlds. Half mine, half mortal. Her blood carries the frequency of the boundary, and that frequency is what the Coven needs to opena rift." Erath pauses. His jaw works once, a small, tight motion. "When she bound you, she threaded that same frequency into your blood. You carry it now. Not as strongly as she does, but enough."
The words land in Sidney's chest and sit there, cold and heavy.
"Enough for what?" Sidney asks, though he already knows. He can feel the answer forming in the shape of the silence between them, in the way Erath is looking at him with the care of someone delivering news they've been carrying too long.
"Enough to be used as a conduit. If the Coven can't get to Penny, or if they need a secondary source to stabilize the rift, you would serve the same purpose."
Sidney stares at him.
His mind does the thing it does when it receives information too large to process, which is break it into smaller pieces and line them up and examine each one individually because looking at the whole will shut him down. Piece one: the bond he chose, the bond he walked into willingly because a five-year-old grabbed his hand and didn't let go, has painted a target on him that he didn't know was there. Piece two: every time the Coven came after him, every attack, every grab, it wasn't just about leverage. It wasn't just about using him to get to Penny. They wanted him for himself. For what's in his blood. Piece three: Erath knew this. Erath has known this, and the careful way he's been handling Sidney, the insistence on staying in the underworld, the protectiveness that Sidney interpreted as overbearing, was never just about worry. It was about keeping a second target out of reach.
"How long have you known?" Sidney's voice is even. Flat. He's aware of the flatness and can't do anything about it.
