But his shoes are by the door, and Sidney is not wearing them.
He can’t feel him. He extends his awareness into the above and reaches for Sidney through the bond that connects them, the tether that Penny wove between them without asking, and the frequency is there but it’s muffled. Dampened. As though something is wrapped around it, insulating it, cutting the signal to a whisper. Sidney is alive, Erath can feel that much, but the rest is static, and the static is not natural. It’s deliberate. Something is blocking the connection.
A door creaks open down the hall.
Small footsteps. The soft drag of a stuffed animal across the floor. Penny appears in the hallway in her pajamas, a stuffed animal held against her chest with both arms, and she looks up at Erath with eyes that are too old for her face.
“Sid’s in trouble,” she says.
Erath goes very still.
He kneels in front of her. His hands find her shoulders, small, bony, impossibly fragile, and he holds her there, careful not to let the urgency in his chest bleed into his grip. She is five years old and she is looking at him with an expression that no five-year-old should have, the expression of someone who can see things that haven’t happened yet, or are happening now, or exist in the space between the two where the living and the dead overlap and the distinction betweenisandwill beloses its meaning.
“What do you see, Penny?”
Penny’s face scrunches. It’s the same expression she makes when she’s trying to read a word she doesn’t know, brow furrowed, nose wrinkled, lips pressed together, except her eyes are doing something different. The focus drains out of them and what replaces it is something Erath recognizes, because he’s seen it in the dead, in the spirits who linger between worlds and see in both directions at once.
“He’s sleeping,” Penny says. “He’s on the ground.” Her voice is small and concentrating. “There’s circles. On the floor.” She blinks, her eyes moving as though tracking something he can’t see. “Mama’s there.”
Erath’s grip on her shoulders tightens. Just slightly. He eases it immediately.
“What else?” he asks. His voice is level. Steady. It costs him everything to make it so.
“A building. It smells bad.” Penny wrinkles her nose, a real reaction, physical, as though the vision carries sensory information. “Big windows. Near the water.”
The warehouse. The one where Jayson Voss opened his rifts.
Erath knows it before she finishes describing it, because of course Angelica would go back there. The wards are already weakened. The veil between life and death is already thin in that space, worn down by what Voss did to it, never fully healeddespite the Order’s efforts. It’s the path of least resistance, and Angelica has never been one to work harder than she has to when she can exploit what’s already been broken.
He sends a message to August. Not through conventional means, because there is nothing conventional about the connection between the lord of the underworld and a man who has walked in his domain and returned and carries the residue of that passage in his veins. The message travels through the thread that links them, the resonance that exists between Erath and anyone who has dealt in death under his watch. It is brief and precise:The warehouse where Voss opened the first portal. Come now. Send word to Knox.
He picks Penny up. She wraps her arms around his neck and she doesn’t ask where they’re going, because she already knows, or because she trusts him, or because she is five and the distinction between those two things doesn’t exist yet.
Erath carries her through the underworld at a pace that sends spirits scattering. The murmur and shuffle of the dead parts before him, shades pressing themselves against the walls of the passageway, wisps of consciousness flattening into the dark, and he doesn’t slow for any of it. His stride is long and purposeful and the underworld responds to his urgency, corridors shortening, passages aligning, the structure of death rearranging itself around him because it is his domain and it answers to his need.
He surfaces in Central. The city is gray and predawn and holding its breath, that suspended hour between the bars closing and the morning beginning when the streets belong to no one and the silence has a quality of waiting, the whole city poised for permission to start again.
He goes to Willow’s.
Sidney was right about one thing. About many things, actually, he is right about most things, which Erath has catalogued with ameticulousness that borders on compulsive and will never admit to. But he was specifically right about Xela. Xela is a banshee who would tear apart an army if it stood between her and the people she considers hers, and her love is a violent, possessive, territorial thing that she hides behind sharp words and sharper looks, and she would burn everything in the world to cinders for the bartender she has claimed as her own.
The bar is closed. Sign off. Windows dark. Door locked, and Erath doesn’t need doors. He passes through the back entrance the way he passes through every physical barrier, because walls are for the living, and finds Xela in the storage room counting bottles on a shelf with a clipboard in one hand and a pen behind her ear.
The normalcy of the task is so at odds with the emergency screaming through his veins that it nearly stops him. Nearly.
Xela whips around when she hears him. She is snarling before she fully turns, lips pulling back, eyes flashing, her body shifting into something that is two degrees from violence and closing fast, because something has entered her territory without invitation and every predatory instinct in her is at full alert. Then she sees Penny in his arms and stops.
The snarl dies. The violence retreats. Her eyes move from Erath’s face to Penny’s, to the way Penny is clinging to his neck, to the expression on Erath’s face that he knows is not the expression he normally wears, and something in her own expression shifts from threat assessment to recognition that something is very wrong.
“Sidney has been taken by the Coven,” Erath says.
The words land in the storage room with the weight of a physical impact. Xela’s hand tightens on the clipboard. Her knuckles go white.
“I need you to watch Penny while I go to get him.”
Xela’s face goes through fury first, hot and sharp, a flash of rage that distorts the air around her and makes the bottles on the shelf rattle against each other. Then fear, brief, almost invisible, a flicker in her eyes that she kills nearly as fast as it appears. And then a cold, calculated determination that settles over her features and stays there, the expression of someone who is choosing not to lose control because losing control would waste time, and time is something they don’t have.
She sets the clipboard down. She crosses the room and holds out her arms and Erath transfers Penny to her with a care that belies the urgency, making sure she is settled. Xela holds the child against her hip with a strength and a gentleness that exist in the same motion, and Penny, who has met Xela exactly twice, tucks her head under the banshee’s chin and closes her eyes as though she’s found a second home.
