Xela looks at Erath over Penny’s head. Her eyes are hard and bright and there is a promise in them that doesn’t require words, but she says them anyway.
“You bring my human back.”
“I will.”
“You bring him back whole. Not broken. Not damaged. Not traumatized beyond what he already is. You bring him back the way he left.”
The way he left.Barefoot. Panicked. Running from Erath’s hands. The sentence hits Erath in a place he doesn’t have armor for, because the way Sidney left was already broken, already damaged, already traumatized by what Erath did to him in the dark, and bringing him back whole means undoing something that Erath caused, and he doesn’t know if that’s possible. He doesn’t know if Sidney will let him close enough to try.
“I will,” he says again, and means it in both directions: the rescue and the repair.
“If they’ve hurt him,” Xela starts, and then stops herself, because the end of that sentence is something that shouldn’t be said in front of a child. She swallows it. Her jaw works. She holds Penny tighter. “Go.”
Erath goes.
He leaves through the back of Willow’s and steps onto the street and the temperature drops in his wake. Not gradually, not the slow dissipation of warmth that accompanies a cold front. This is sudden, specific, the kind of cold that has nothing to do with weather and everything to do with proximity to death, the air contracting around the passage of something that doesn’t belong in the world of the living and knows it. Streetlights flicker. One of them pops, the bulb blowing out in a shower of sparks that die before they hit the ground. A stray cat hisses from beneath a dumpster and bolts into the dark.
Erath walks.
His stride is measured and even. He is not rushing, because rushing suggests panic, and what Erath is feeling is not panic. Panic is disorganized. Panic flails. What Erath is feeling is focused and precise and directional, a force with a fixed point of origin and a fixed destination, and every step between those two points is deliberate. The city responds to him the way it always does, by getting out of his way. Traffic lights change. Doors lock themselves. A man sleeping in a doorway presses himself against the wall without waking, making room on the sidewalk for something his unconscious mind knows not to be near.
He encounters August and Vale two blocks from the warehouse.
They are standing at the corner of an intersection that smells of the river, brackish and industrial, tinged with rust and decay. August is in his coat, and his face has the tight, focused expression of a man who received a cryptic message from a cryptic man and is not looking forward to whatever is going tohappen. Vale is beside him, as he always is, armed and looking displeased.
“Angelica has Sidney,” Erath says.
August’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t ask how or why, because the how doesn’t matter and the why is obvious, and Erath is grateful for this, because he is not in a state to explain and the explaining would require him to say things he is not ready to say. August nods once.
Vale is pulling a communication rune from his pocket, pressing it to his ear, listening, speaking in a low voice. After a moment he lowers it and says, “Knox contacted me an hour ago. He and Dimitri are with Annabeth at the Hargrove mansion. They’ve been searching for Angelica’s phylactery, the object anchoring her power. Annabeth believes it’s in the vault beneath the house.”
The phylactery. Of course. Of course Angelica would have one, because Angelica has always been meticulous in her cruelties, always careful to build a failsafe into every scheme so that even if she is confronted directly, even if someone tries to kill her, the phylactery will sustain her. It will feed her body with stolen power and keep her magic intact and she will not die. Not while it holds.
“Without the phylactery, Angelica’s blood magic collapses,” Vale continues. “She won’t be able to use Sidney or Penny as a conduit. She’ll be vulnerable.”
“Then Knox needs to find it,” Erath says. “And we need to get to Sidney before Angelica finishes the ritual.”
He starts walking. August and Vale fall into step on either side of him, and the three of them move toward the waterfront.
Two blocks. The warehouse comes into view at the end of a dead-end street, a hulking industrial structure, dark and angular against the predawn sky, with high windows that are mostly broken and a loading dock that faces the water. It looksabandoned in the way that places look abandoned when terrible things have happened in them, the kind of emptiness that isn’t empty at all but full of residue, full of the echoes of what was done here and what was opened here and what came through. The veil between life and death is so thin in this space that Erath can feel it against his skin, a gauze he could tear with a thought.
The doors are closed. From inside, muffled but unmistakable, comes the sound of voices. Of chanting. Of something being prepared.
Erath doesn’t slow down.
Chapter 23
Sidney comes to on a cold floor.
His head is pounding. Not the dull ache of a hangover or the sharp throb of an impact but something deeper, chemical, a wrongness that sits behind his eyes and pulses in time with his heartbeat. His arms are numb. His fingers feel thick and distant and when he tries to move them they twitch but don’t obey. When he tries to move anything, his legs, his torso, his head, his body won’t cooperate. Not because he’s restrained. There are no ropes, no cuffs, nothing physical holding him down. His body simply won’t listen, as though the signal between his brain and his muscles has been rerouted through something that is intercepting the commands and swallowing them whole.
There’s a buzzing in his veins. A vibration, low and constant, running through him, and every cell in his body is being tuned to a frequency it was never meant to sustain. It hums in his teeth, in his fingertips, in the marrow of his bones, and it feels wrong. Not painful, not yet, but fundamentally, deeply wrong, the way a note played on a broken instrument is wrong. Close to the right sound but off in a way that makes everything around it distort.
He opens his eyes.
The ceiling of a warehouse. High, industrial, crisscrossed with steel beams and rusted piping. Broken windows let in the gray light of predawn, thin and watery and colorless. The floor beneath him is concrete, cracked and stained with things he doesn’t want to identify, and the air smells of rust and damp and something else, something underneath, something that smells the way the underworld feels, heavy and old and too close to death.
Around him, glowing faintly red in the dim light, is a circle.
