Erath's eyes clear.
It happens in an instant, the transition from wherever he was to where he is, and the recognition that floods his face when he sees Sidney beneath him is worse than anything Sidney has ever seen on a living or dead thing. Erath's hands release. His weight lifts. He pulls back so fast that the absence of him is a physical event, a sudden rush of cold air where his body had been, and he's sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to Sidney and his hands in his lap and he's trembling.
Erath is trembling. The god of death, the being who carries the weight of every soul that has ever crossed the boundary between life and the absence of it, is sitting on the edge of a bed in the dark and shaking with the memory of whatever he saw when Sidney's fingers touched his face and his sleeping mind told him it was someone else. He is not in a state to apologize. He is not in a state to do anything except sit there and shake and try to breathe through whatever is happening inside him, and his shoulders are hunched forward and his head is down and he looks, for the first time since Sidney has known him, small.
Sidney doesn't give him a chance.
He doesn't think about it. Thinking would require being present and Sidney is not present. Sidney is operating on thesame autopilot that got him through every bad night in every bad relationship, the emergency protocol that fires when conscious thought is too dangerous and the body takes over and the only directive is go. He is out of the bed and across the room and in the hallway before he registers that he's moving. He doesn't stop for his shoes. He doesn't stop for his coat. He doesn't stop for anything because stopping means being in the room and being in the room means being in the bed and being in the bed means being pinned and the chain of association is so fast and so total that his body will not allow him to be still.
He passes Penny's door. It's cracked and the soft sound of her breathing drifts through and some distant, submerged part of him registers it and aches, but the ache is buried under the noise of his own pulse and the ringing in his ears and the frantic, animal need to put distance between himself and what just happened.
He leaves the house. The underworld stretches around him, dark and vast and green-lit, and the cold hits his bare feet on the cracked earth and he doesn't feel it. He walks toward the tunnel leading up, past the river where the spirits drift and murmur, past the stone structures and the dead landscape, and the spirits that have grown accustomed to his presence part around him the way they always do, but something in their movement suggests unease, as though they can feel the distress radiating off of him in waves and it's disrupting the carefully maintained order of the dead.
The tunnel is dark. The stairs are cold under his bare feet, stone worn smooth by centuries of passage, and he climbs them without thinking about where he's going because he's not going anywhere. He's going away. The direction is away and the destination is anywhere that isn't the bed and the dark and the weight and the sound of his own voice sayingdon'tto a man who wasn't trying to hurt him and hurt him anyway and isn't thatalways how it goes, isn't that always exactly how it goes, the ones who aren't trying are the ones who cut the deepest because you can't even be angry about it, you can't even blame them, you just have to absorb it and keep moving and pretend you're fine.
He surfaces in Central. The city air hits him and it's cold and wet and alive and his feet are bare on the pavement and his arms are bare to the night air and he's shivering before he takes three steps. The streets are empty. Late enough for the bars to be winding down, early enough that morning hasn't started, the dead hours when the city belongs to no one. A streetlight buzzes above him, casting a yellow pool on the wet concrete, and Sidney walks through it and out the other side and keeps walking.
He should go back. He knows he should go back. Erath didn't mean it, and Sidney knows Erath didn't mean it, and the fact that he's walking barefoot through Haven in the middle of the night because a man had a trauma response in his sleep is irrational and unfair and Sidney is both of those things right now and he can't stop being them. He can't reason his way out of the place his body has put him. His mind is already building the case for going back, assembling the evidence that Erath is not the third one and not the second one and not the first one, that Erath was asleep and didn't know what he was doing and was responding to something that happened to him years before Sidney existed. His mind knows all of this. His body doesn't care. His body is four blocks from Willow's and still running, and the pavement is wet and rough under his feet and his teeth are chattering and he is so tired, so goddamn tired of being someone whose first response to being touched wrong is to flee.
He doesn't see them coming.
There's a cloth over his mouth and something in the cloth that burns his nostrils and turns the edges of his vision soft and liquid. His body, already in flight mode, already flooded with adrenaline, fights before his brain catches up. He kicksand twists and bites the hand nearest his face and tastes copper and hears someone curse, but his limbs are already heavy from the cold and the adrenaline crash and the chemical in the cloth is pulling him under fast, faster than it should, because his defenses are already shredded and there's nothing left in him to resist with.
Hands. Several of them. Dragging him off the street. The wet pavement scraping against his bare feet as they pull him sideways into an alley. He tries to reach for the bond, for Penny, for the tether between them that should be sounding every alarm in the underworld, but the chemical is wrapping layers of static around the frequency, dampening it, muffling him, and he can feel himself going dark the way a radio goes dark when you drive too far from the station.
The last thing he sees before the black comes in from every side is the face of a woman he doesn't recognize, pale and sharp and looking at him with the clinical detachment of someone inspecting a tool they're about to use. She says something he can't hear over the roaring in his ears. Then the dark takes him, and the last coherent thought he has is not about Erath or Penny or the Coven or the danger he's in.
It's about the look on Erath's face when he realized what he'd done. The devastation in it. The way he'd pulled away so fast. The way he'd been shaking.
Sidney thinks:He was scared too.
And then nothing.
Chapter 22
Erath doesn’t go after him.
He should. He knows he should. Sidney is running scared through the underworld, and Erath should be behind him, should be chasing him, should be doing something other than sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands in front of him staring at the way they tremble. They are shaking and he can’t make them stop. He presses them together, presses them flat against his thighs, curls them into fists, and nothing helps. The tremor lives deeper than muscle. It lives in the part of him that makes decisions before his mind is consulted, the part that felt fingers on his throat in the dark and became something old and terrible and acted accordingly.
He is not thinking about Sidney. He is trying to think about Sidney and instead he is thinking about Angelica. Her hands. The blade.
Except it wasn’t her. It was Sidney. Sidney’s hand, gentle and light, tracing the line of his jaw with the careful reverence of someone who just wanted to touch him. Sidney, who has never once reached for Erath with anything other than tenderness,whose hands are incapable of the kind of cruelty Erath’s body remembered, and Erath’s body did not know the difference. His body felt the contact and it reacted with the speed and the violence of something that has been waiting for years to defend itself against a threat that no longer exists, and he had Sidney pinned to the mattress before he was even awake.
Please don’t.
The words repeat in his skull and each repetition cuts deeper. Not because of what they said but because of how they sounded. The smallness of Sidney’s voice. The way it cracked. The way it came from somewhere deep and rehearsed, a phrase spoken so many times that it emerged automatically, a reflex as ingrained as breathing. Sidney didn’t say it to Erath. He said it to every man who ever gave him a reason to learn those words, and Erath was another one. For those few terrible seconds, for the space between asleep and awake, Erath was just another body pinning him down in the dark.
His hands won’t stop shaking.
He sits there. He doesn’t know how long. Time moves differently for him, has always moved differently, and in this moment it’s meaningless, just a series of breaths he doesn’t need to take drawn in and released in a rhythm that does nothing to settle the fracture in his chest. He should get up. He should go after Sidney. He should find him and explain, and apologize, and hold him, except holding him is the last thing Sidney needs right now because the last thing Erath did with his hands was use them to shove a man onto his back and hold him down and Erath cannot look at his own hands without seeing that.
By the time he gathers himself, the bed is cold where Sidney was.
Not the gradual cooling of a recent departure, where warmth still lingers in the dip of the mattress and the pillow still holds the shape of the head that rested on it. This is absence. Thesheets are flat. The pillow has lost his impression. The air has stopped carrying his scent. Sidney has been gone long enough for the bed to forget him, and the distinction betweenjust leftandgone for a whileis the thing that converts Erath’s guilt into something colder and more urgent.
He is on his feet. He checks anyway, because thinking he's gone is not the same as being certain and he needs certainty. Kitchen: empty. Living room: empty. Bathroom: empty. The hallway is dark and still and there is no sound except the ambient hum of the dead and the soft rhythm of Penny’s breathing behind her closed door.
Sidney’s bag is in the corner of the bedroom where he always keeps it. Packed and ready, the way Sidney keeps everything, prepared, organized, arranged for a quick exit that he never intends to make but can’t stop planning for. The bag is here, which means he didn’t plan to leave permanently.
