“Yeah?”
“Is my dad going to come get me?”
The question is quiet and it comes from somewhere deep, somewhere she’s been holding it in for a while, and the weight of it settles over the room. Sidney shifts so he’s facing her, his arm resting on the cushion near her head.
“I’m working on it, kiddo. We’re going to find him.”
“Promise?”
He shouldn’t promise. He doesn’t know her father. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know anything about this situation beyond what a five-year-old and a phone call with August have told him, and promises are heavy things that he doesn’t throw around. But she’s looking at him with those dark eyes, the old-behind-the-young ones, and her braids are messy from the longnight and there’s glittery purple polish on her fingernails and hot pink polish on his toes and she needs someone to say yes right now. She needs it the way she needed the chocolate milk and the markers and the booth and the not-being-alone. She needs a yes the way a person drowning needs a hand.
“Pinky promise,” he says, and holds out his little finger.
She wraps her small finger around his. The grip is tight. Her hand is tiny against his, her whole fist smaller than his palm, and the pinky promise holds for a moment, firm and serious, and then she lets go and nods once, satisfied. The matter is settled. The promise has been made. She is five years old and she takes these things at face value and Sidney is going to keep this promise because he made it and because she’s looking at him with the trust of a child who has decided, against all evidence, that this person will do what he says.
She’s asleep in under a minute. Her breathing evens out, her body goes loose and heavy, and one of her braids falls across her face. Sidney reaches over and tucks it behind her ear. It’s an absent gesture, automatic, the same motion he uses on his own hair when it falls in his eyes, and he doesn’t think about it. He just does it.
He sits on the floor for a while. His back against the couch. His feet pink on the hardwood. The cartoon plays on, tinny and bright in the quiet apartment. Outside, a siren passes somewhere in the distance and fades. The apartment settles around them, all its small noises, the hum of the fridge, the tick of the radiator, the creak of the building adjusting itself in the cold.
He thinks about calling August again. He thinks about the Coven, about the father, about the long chain of events that brought a five-year-old to a bar in the Old City at midnight with a dead guardian and nowhere to go. He thinks about the woman whose head was pulled off and what kind of death that is andwho does that to a person and why, and he thinks about the two women who came to collect Penny the way you collect a package and the look on the older one’s face when she’d given Penny that last appraising glance and what that look meant and what it promised.
It can wait. All of it. The questions and the plans and the phone calls and the reckoning with the fact that he’s invited the supernatural world’s problems into his apartment along with a kindergartener and a bottle of vintage nail polish. It can wait until morning.
At some point during the night Penny’s hand finds the collar of his shirt and holds on. Small fingers curled into the fabric, gripping the way you grip something you’re afraid will leave if you let go. Sidney feels the tug of it against his neck, the slight pull, and he doesn’t move. He lets her hold on. He stays exactly where he is, on the floor, his head tipped back against the cushion, his feet pink, his shirt held by a child who has decided, for reasons he doesn’t understand and didn’t ask for, that he is safe enough to hold onto while she sleeps.
He lets her hold on. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t sleep, not really, not yet, but he stays.
He stays.
Chapter 2
News travels slow to the underworld.
New businesses, new mayors, new world orders. News trickles down through word of mouth, mostly, and those mouths are usually rambling and arguing and trying to convince him that they don’t belong in the land of the dead and that the fourteen bullet holes currently occupying their chest are just a minor inconvenience they fully intend to recover from. Which is to say it takes a long time for Erath to know what is happening above his head in the land of the living. Days, sometimes. Weeks, if whatever has happened doesn’t concern him directly. The dead bring their stories with them, but those stories are garbled and self-serving and filtered through the brand of denial that the recently deceased specialize in.
So when Amelia shows up on the brittle gray dirt of the underworld with her head cradled under her arm and an excuse already forming on her tongue, Erath knows two things immediately. One, whatever has happened is not good. Two, it involves Penny.
He doesn’t let her speak.
“Where is she?” he asks.
Amelia’s mouth opens and closes. Her head, tucked against her hip the way you’d carry a melon, blinks at him with glassy, disoriented eyes. The body is still adjusting. It takes the newly dead a while to reconcile with their condition, and decapitations are ly disorienting. Her spirit is intact, at least, which means whatever killed her did it quickly enough that the soul didn’t have time to scatter.
“She ran,” Amelia says. “I tried to stop her but she ran, and it wasn’t my fault, I need you to understand that the Coven promised me…”
He walks past her.
He doesn’t need to hear it. He already knows. The Coven had promised Amelia something, immortality or power or whatever scrap they’d dangled in front of a woman too weak to refuse, and Amelia had agreed to hand over the most precious thing in Erath’s existence in exchange for it. The details don’t matter. The details have never mattered. What matters is that his daughter is somewhere in the mortal realm, alone, and the people who want her are not the kind of people who stop looking.
Amelia is not family. She’s not Penny’s blood, not Angelica’s blood, not anyone’s blood that matters. She’s a low-ranking member of the Hargrove Coven who was appointed as Penny’s foster guardian in Haven, an arrangement Angelica had insisted on and Erath had reluctantly agreed to because his options for the months Penny had to spend in the mortal realm were vanishingly thin. The Coven had presented Amelia as a neutral party. Adequate, they’d said. Trustworthy. Erath had always been suspicious, but he’d lacked a better alternative, and Amelia had been fine enough for the first few years. Fine, apparently, right up until the moment she wasn’t.
He leaves her to be handled by Vivi, who is currently elbow-deep in the river of souls trying to untangle something that died badly. Vivi looks up as he passes, reads his face, and straightens.
“Problem?”
“Amelia is dead. Penny is above.”
Vivi’s expression doesn’t change, but her jaw tightens. “I’ll deal with her. Go.”
