They stretch the way minutes do when every second is a lifetime, when the body is in agony and the mind is barely holding on and the world has narrowed to a single point of endurance. August groans through his teeth, sweat pouring down his face, the rift trembling and pulsing against his hold, trying to widen. Vale’s hand tightens on his shoulder and his blade is still drawn and his eyes are scanning the warehouse, watching for threats, watching for coven members who might regain consciousness, watching for anything that might tip the balance.
Sidney feels himself being pulled in both directions. Toward life and toward death. The rift wants him, wants to use him, wants to tear him open and pour through, and the circle is feeding it, and August is holding it back, and Sidney is caught in the middle, stretched between two forces that are each tryingto claim him. The pain is so immense it has become total. His body has stopped reporting individual sensations. There is nomy arm hurtsormy chest is burning.There is just pain, all-encompassing, a white noise that fills every corner of his being.
He stops screaming because he can’t anymore. He just breathes. Short and ragged, each breath a conscious decision, each exhale a victory. He lies on the concrete floor of a warehouse with a rift in the world pulling at his bones and he breathes and he watches Erath standing there with his hand in his ex-wife’s chest, waiting, and the patience in Erath’s face is the most frightening and the most comforting thing Sidney has ever seen, because it means Erath will wait forever if he has to. He will stand there with his fist around her heart until the end of time if that’s what it takes, and the certainty of that, the absolute, immovable devotion of it, is the thing Sidney holds onto while the rift tries to pull him apart.
Then, across Haven, in a vault beneath the coven mansion, Knox’s mace comes down.
Sidney doesn’t see it. He doesn’t need to. He feels it.
It hits as a shockwave, a tremor that runs through the air, through the floor, through the blood magic that saturates the warehouse and the circle and Angelica’s barrier and everything she’s built. Somewhere across the city, in a room Sidney has never seen, a glass orb pulsing with black light explodes and Annabeth speaks the words that unbind her sister’s power from the phylactery.
Three things happen at the same time.
The blood barrier disintegrates. It doesn’t fall or fade. It fragments into a million particles that dissolve before they hit the ground, and the wall that held Newt and Malik at bay simply ceases to exist.
The circle around Sidney goes dark. The red glow dies, the symbols stop moving, the humming in his veins cuts out asthough someone has pulled a plug, and the pain stops so abruptly that the absence of it leaves him gasping and hollowed out on the concrete. His body is his own again. His muscles are his own. The rift beneath him shudders, destabilized, and the pull that was tearing him apart releases and he collapses flat against the floor, every nerve ending raw and singing.
And Erath’s hand closes around Angelica’s heart and rips it from her chest.
She doesn’t scream.
She looks down at the cavity in her sternum, at the space where her heart was, where there is now nothing, where the stolen power that sustained her should be rushing to repair the damage and isn’t, because there is no power left, because the phylactery is dust on the floor of a vault across the city. And then she looks at Erath.
Her mouth moves. Nothing comes out. Her lips shape a word, or a name, or a question, and the air carries none of it. Her eyes are wide and dark and in them Sidney can see not fear but something more complicated. Recognition, maybe. The recognition of a woman who bet everything on the conviction that she knew this man, knew his limits, knew exactly how far she could push before he pushed back, and has just discovered that she was catastrophically, fatally wrong.
Her knees buckle. Erath catches her with his free hand, his other still holding the heart, dark and wet and steaming in the cold air, and for a moment they are close. Close in the way they must have been once, a long time ago, when she was someone worth holding. His arm around her waist, her weight against his chest, her face turned up to his. An echo of an embrace. A ghost of something that might have been love if love were a thing she’d ever been capable of.
Then the light goes out of her eyes. Her soul leaves her body. It's the snuffing of a candle, the severing of a thread, the quietclickof a life ending and the underworld receiving what is owed. Except this one Erath knows. This one he chose, once, and loved, once, and that makes it heavier than most.
He holds her for a moment longer.
Then he lowers her to the ground and lets the heart fall. It dissolves before it hits the concrete, taken by the underworld the way everything dead is taken eventually, claimed by the domain that Erath governs, pulled down and through and away, and his hand is clean. It was never about the blood.
Malik is at Sidney’s side before Sidney can process anything else.
The demon crosses the warehouse floor in three strides and hauls Sidney up by his arm with a grip that is surprisingly careful for someone who was putting people through walls five minutes ago. His hand is firm on Sidney’s bicep, holding, not squeezing, and he pulls Sidney away from the crumbling remains of the circle, away from the rift that is still groaning in the floor, toward the far wall. Sidney’s legs don’t work properly. They buckle on the first step and wobble on the second and give out entirely on the third, and Malik doesn’t let him fall. He catches him under the arm, takes most of his weight without comment, and half-carries him to the wall. He braces Sidney against it, back against concrete, legs folded under him, and stays beside him. One hand on his shoulder. Steady. Unmoving.
“Stay,” Malik says, and it’s not a command so much as a suggestion delivered with the authority of someone who is used to being obeyed.
Sidney stays. He doesn’t have a choice. His body has been used as a doorway between worlds and it is letting him know, in no uncertain terms, that it will not be cooperating with any requests for locomotion in the near future.
August bears down.
With the phylactery broken and Angelica’s power severed, the rift has nothing sustaining it. It’s collapsing on its own, the edges fraying, the green and black light flickering, but it’s not closing fast enough, and August doesn’t wait for entropy to do its work. He pushes. Sidney can see it in the set of his shoulders, the lock of his jaw, the way his arms tremble and his feet slide on the concrete. He forces the rift closed with everything he has, and Vale’s hand on his shoulder tightens and his knuckles go white and he pours whatever he has into August to keep him standing.
The rift closes with a sound that shakes the walls. A deep, resonant crack, the world stitching itself back together, and the green light dies and the roar cuts to silence and the concrete floor is just a floor again, cracked and stained and cold, but whole.
August collapses against Vale.
Vale catches him. Both arms around him, blade dropped, and he presses his forehead against August’s temple and holds him. August’s hands come up to Vale’s arms and grip and his breathing is ragged and his legs are not supporting him and Vale takes his weight without wavering, solid and immovable, and they stand there in the middle of a warehouse floor that still smells of blood and magic and hold each other and breathe.
Sidney watches them from against the wall. Malik’s hand is still on his shoulder. The warehouse is quiet.
And then Sidney looks at Erath.
Erath is standing over Angelica’s body with clean hands and an expression that Sidney cannot read, and the predawn light comes through the broken windows and turns everything gray. He is looking down at her. At the woman he married, and trusted, and lost his daughter to, and spent centuries recovering from, and just killed with his own hand. He is looking at her and his face is a closed door and whatever is happening behind it is happening in a place that Sidney does not have access to,not yet, maybe not ever, the private interior of a grief so old and so complicated that it doesn’t have a name in any language the living speak.
But Sidney sees his hands. Erath’s hands are at his sides and they are shaking, just barely, a tremor so subtle that no one else in the warehouse would notice it. Sidney notices because he has spent days learning the language of Erath’s body, and the tremor is the same one he saw in the bedroom when Erath pulled away from him and sat on the edge of the bed and couldn’t stop his hands from shaking.
