He goes. He crosses the underworld with a stride that sends two hellhounds scrambling sideways and a stray spirit flickering out of existence entirely, which isn’t ideal, but he’ll sort that out later. The entrance to the above is a wide set of stairs that leads up to a subway station in Central, flanked by walls of old stone that sweat condensation in the damp. It’s not visible to mundanes. The supernatural know better than to go down it. No one voluntarily enters the underworld. For one, aside from Erath himself and those under his authority, no one who descends those steps walks back out again. For another, the air emanating from the staircase is cold, and heavy, and carries with it the weight of a place that is not interested in visitors. There are more pleasant ways to die, is the thing.
He surfaces in Central and it’s late. Past two, maybe closer to three, but time has never been a concept Erath has had much use for. The city is quiet the way cities are quiet at this hour, not silent but muted, the sounds pushed to the edges, the living retreated into their buildings and their beds. He pulls the hood of his jacket up and shoves his hands in his pockets and walks.
Amelia’s apartment is warded off in holy tape when he arrives, white strips across the door frame that glow faintly with residual power, meaning the Order has been by. The Templars are efficient. The body has already been removed, the spirit released, and there’s no one stationed outside watching the scene. There’s nothing left to watch. Erath goes past the tape. It parts for him because everything parts for him, and the dooropens because all doors open for him, and the apartment is dark and smells of copper and something chemical. He doesn’t linger. He finds the sunflower backpack on the hook by the door, the one with Penny’s name stitched into the front pocket in crooked letters because she’d insisted on doing it herself, and he loops it over one shoulder and leaves.
The trail starts at the apartment door.
Petunia petals. Small, translucent, the color of watered-down ink. They’re scattered down the steps and across the sidewalk and out into the city, and they’re not visible. Not really. Not to anyone but him. He’d given Penny this when she was smaller than she is now, when he’d had to accept that she couldn’t stay with him all of the time, that half of her belonged to the world above and half to the world below and there was nothing he could do about that. The petals were his way of saying I’ll always know where you are. His way of saying if you need me, I will come for you.
She needs him now.
He follows the trail down the stairs and into the Old City, where the streets narrow and the buildings lean against each other and the cobblestones are older than the city itself. The petals lead him to a bar. Closed, dark, a neon sign above the door turned off for the night, and Erath pauses there on the sidewalk and stares at the sign and wonders what his five-year-old daughter was doing at a bar. He doesn’t spend too long trying to understand. The important thing is that the trail doesn’t stop here. It continues, around the corner, down a side street, and he follows it.
A five-story brick building with ivy growing up the side and a secured door that requires a code. Erath presses his hand flat against the lock and the mechanism clicks open with a sound that is less a mechanical release and more a reluctant surrender.All doors let him in. They always have. They don’t know why they’re keeping him out.
Four flights. The ugliest mauve carpet he has ever seen, and he has seen civilizations rise and fall and the aesthetic choices of none of them have offended him as deeply as this carpet. The petals cluster at a door on the fourth floor, an aging wooden thing with a handle that’s older than the deadbolt keeping it closed, and there they stop. She’s here. He can feel her now, the warmth of her presence, the way the air shifts when his daughter is near. She’s alive. She’s sleeping. She’s safe.
He could open the door. He could walk in and take her and leave without a word. But Penny is on the other side, and he doesn’t want to scare her, so he knocks.
Firmly.
A pause. The sound of movement, soft footsteps, the shuffle of someone who was not asleep but wasn’t expecting company. The deadbolt turns. The door opens.
It’s a man.
Erath’s expectations rearrange themselves in the space of a heartbeat. He’d expected a waitress from the bar, maybe. A woman walking home from work who’d found a lost child and done the decent thing. He had not expected this. The man is mid-twenties, with blond hair that falls to his chin and is tucked behind one ear, and he’s wearing a t-shirt and pajama pants and he’s holding the door open with one hand and looking at Erath with an expression that is less afraid and more annoyed, the annoyance of someone who has been interrupted during a long night of doing something he didn’t plan on doing and is not in the mood for whatever comes next.
The temperature drops. Erath doesn’t do it on purpose. It’s involuntary, tied to his mood, and his mood is deteriorating rapidly because there is a strange man standing between him and his daughter and his daughter is alone in this man’sapartment and the last time someone stood between him and Penny it had been Angelica, and that had ended with a knife in his throat and six months of silence. He watches goosebumps break out along the man’s bare arms, watches him shiver and pull the door a fraction tighter. The man doesn’t understand what the cold means. He doesn’t understand what Erath is. He just shivers and looks him up and down with the evaluative suspicion of someone assessing whether the person at the door is a threat and raises an eyebrow.
“Can I help you?”
Erath has always been the picture of composure. It comes with the job. You cannot oversee the transition of every soul from the living world to the dead and lose your temper about it. Patience is not a virtue for him. It’s a requirement. But the idea that this man has his daughter alone in his apartment, that his daughter is somewhere behind this door in the company of a stranger with bare arms and bedhead and a jawline that Erath’s gaze has tracked twice now without his permission, is doing something to his composure that hasn’t happened in a hundred years. The urge to reach into this man’s chest and rearrange the architecture of his skeleton is sudden and vivid and so close to the surface that Erath can feel it in his fingertips.
He doesn’t know why he hesitates.
One minute he’s thinking about pulling this man apart, and the next he’s not. He hesitates the way he hasn’t hesitated in centuries, the way that suggests something beneath the violence is pushing back against it, something that understood before his conscious mind caught up. His gaze drops, an involuntary sweep, and he catches a flash of bright pink at the edge of his vision. He looks down.
The man is standing barefoot in the threshold of his apartment. His toenails are painted. Hot pink, uneven, splotchyin the way that indicates the person applying the polish had very small hands and very large ambitions.
Erath stares at the pink toenails. He stares at them for long enough that the man shifts his weight and the annoyance on his face sharpens into something warier, the expression of someone who has just noticed a large stranger staring at his feet at three in the morning and is recalculating the threat level accordingly.
The violence recedes. It doesn’t leave. It banks itself, pushes down beneath the composure, and what surfaces in its place is something Erath doesn’t have a name for.
He takes a breath. Not calming, not exactly, but the kind that creates a space between impulse and action, and in that space the thing without a name settles and stays.
“Is my daughter with you?” he asks. Quietly.
The man’s posture changes. Instantly. The annoyance drops away and what replaces it is something alert and protective and entirely different from anything Erath expected, because the man doesn’t step back or go pale or fumble for an explanation. His shoulders square. The door pulls inward, narrowing the gap, not enough to block Erath’s view but enough to make the intention clear: he is prepared to shut this door. He believes he can. He can’t, not against the god of death, but the instinct is remarkable. This man’s first response to a stranger claiming to be the father of the child in his apartment is not compliance. It’s verification.
“Maybe.” His voice is careful now, stripped of the casual irritation, and there’s something in the way he says it that makes Erath’s chest do something inconvenient. The man is protecting Penny. He is standing in the doorway of his own apartment at three in the morning in his pajamas with pink toenails and he is screening Erath before letting him near the child behind the door. “What’s her name?”
“Penny.”
“What’s she look like?”
Erath huffs out a breath that is almost, but not quite, a laugh. The laugh surprises him. Nothing about this situation should be funny, and yet this man’s absolute refusal to be impressed by or afraid of the literal god of death standing on his doorstep is getting under Erath’s skin in a way he does not care for and cannot seem to stop. “Me, but tiny.”
The man studies him. There’s a calculation happening behind those eyes, rapid and thorough, an assessment of threat and trustworthiness and intention that is far more sophisticated than it has any right to be coming from a twenty-something in pajamas. His gaze moves from Erath’s face to the sunflower backpack on his shoulder and stays there, and Erath can see the recognition land. The backpack is the proof. Penny’s name is on it, in her own crooked stitching, and the man has obviously seen it, or at least the girl it belongs to, and the backpack in the hands of a man who looks like Penny is enough.
