He opens the door.
“She’s asleep on the couch,” he says, stepping back to let Erath in. “We were watching cartoons.”
The apartment is small. One bedroom, a narrow kitchen, a living room with a couch that has seen better decades. The TV is still on, volume low, something animated playing to an audience of no one. There’s a glass of milk on the coffee table with a ring of chocolate at the bottom and a plate with golden crumbs and a piece of paper with marker drawings on it, a circle with legs that could be a dog or a spider or something entirely outside the taxonomy of known animals. And there, on the couch, buried under a blanket that’s too big for her with her braids messy and her mouth slightly open and her fist holding the edge of the blanket the way she holds everything, with a grip that doesn’t know how to let go, is Penny.
The inside of Erath’s chest collapses. There is no other word for it. Every piece of scaffolding he’s been using to hold himself together since Amelia’s headless spirit appeared on the dirt of the underworld gives way at once, and what’s left is raw and open and so relieved it borders on pain. She’s fine. She’s sleeping and she’s whole and she’s alive and the blanket is pulled to her chin and there’s chocolate on her mouth and she is, without question, the most important thing that has ever existed in any realm he has jurisdiction over.
He crosses the room and shifts the backpack. The man is watching him. Erath can feel his gaze, attentive and guarded, and he notes, distantly, the way the man has positioned himself. Not blocking the door. Just occupying the space between Erath and the exit. Aware. Ready. As though even now, even having let Erath in, even having verified the backpack and the resemblance and the name, some part of him is still standing between the child and the potential threat.
This is the second time this man has put himself between Penny and something dangerous. The first was the Coven. The second is Erath. And the man doesn’t even know what Erath is.
He leans down and scoops Penny up. She’s light, and she stirs against him and makes a small sound and tucks her face into his neck without waking. Her breath is warm against his skin. Her fingers find the collar of his jacket and hold on, the same grip, the grip that doesn’t know how to let go, and Erath adjusts her weight and presses his mouth against the top of her head and breathes.
She smells like chocolate milk and cookies and something floral that’s probably cheap shampoo, and underneath all of it she smells like his, the scent of his blood and his power that lives in her cells whether she’s in the mortal world or not. She smells alive. She smells safe.
He straightens and turns toward the door, and the man is watching them. The blond is standing with his arms crossed, leaning slightly against the kitchen doorframe, and the expression on his face is not one Erath was prepared for. It’s not suspicion, not anymore. It’s not wariness or relief or any of the things Erath would expect from a stranger watching a man collect his child from their apartment. It’s something quieter. Something tender, and complicated, and quickly hidden, the expression of someone who is watching a father hold his daughter and is feeling something about it that they don’t want to feel and don’t want anyone to see.
Erath sees it. He sees it and the thing without a name in his chest shifts and expands.
“Thank you for taking care of her,” he says. His voice is low, conscious of the sleeping child against his chest.
“Yeah, of course.” The man shifts his weight. The casual ease is back in his posture but there’s something underneath it, a discomfort that Erath reads as the awkwardness of someone who has done a kind thing and doesn’t know how to be thanked for it. “Sorry about, um, the woman. Or whatever.”
Erath doesn’t respond to that. Amelia is dead and Amelia is his problem.
The man seems to reach a decision about the next thing. His jaw sets. His arms tighten across his chest. And his voice, when he speaks again, is different. The casual register is gone and what replaces it is something with edges, something that tells Erath this man has opinions about the thing he’s about to say and none of those opinions are gentle.
“You should know there were people looking for her. From the Hargrove Coven.”
Erath doesn’t move. “You saw them?”
“Yeah, they came to my bar. That’s where I found her, she was…” He stops, recalibrates, skips past something. “Anyway,they came in and said they were there to collect her.” His mouth does something specific on the word collect, a tightening, a disgust that reshapes his whole expression. “Collect her, like she’s a fucking stamp or something, and I told them to touch grass.” He pauses. “I doubt they’ll be gone long.”
Erath stares at him.
The man stares back. He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t fidget or qualify or soften what he’s said. He stands in his own apartment, in his pajamas, with his pink toenails and his stubborn jaw and his hair tucked behind one ear, and he looks at the god of death holding a sleeping child and he does not flinch.
This man. This human. This bartender who is barely eye-level with Erath’s chin and has no defenses to speak of, no magic, no wards, no power of any kind beyond the ordinary stubbornness of being alive. This person looked at two members of the Hargrove Coven, who are among the most dangerous practitioners in Haven, who could have twisted his spine backwards and left him convulsing on the floor of his own bar without breaking a sweat, and he told them to fuck off. Not because he knew what was at stake. Not because he understood who Penny was or what she meant or what the Coven wanted with her. But because they’d threatened a child he didn’t even know.
Erath cannot fathom it. He is grateful in a way he does not have the infrastructure for, gratitude being an emotion he has not had cause to exercise in a very, very long time. But the gratitude is tangled up in something else now, something that started with the pink toenails and expanded with the door-screening and is currently being made worse by the way this man is looking at him with absolutely zero deference, zero fear, zero anything that Erath is accustomed to receiving from mortals who should, by all rights, be terrified of him. This man is not terrified of him. This man is annoyed and tired andprotective and he has opinions about the Hargrove Coven and none of those opinions are favorable, and Erath is holding his daughter in his arms and thinking about the way this man’s jaw tightens when he’s angry and he knows, he knows, this is exactly how the trouble starts.
“You need to be very careful around them,” he tells the man.
The man raises an eyebrow. The eyebrow implies that he has heard this kind of warning before and has found it, historically, unhelpful. “It’s not my little girl they’re after.”
“No,” Erath agrees. “But they tend to hold a grudge.”
He could say more. He could warn him properly, explain what the Coven is capable of, tell him that a human bartender who inserted himself between them and their objective is now carrying a target he can’t see. He should say more. This man did a good thing, an extraordinarily good thing, and the good thing has put him in danger, and Erath owes him the information that would help keep him alive.
But Penny is warm against his chest and her breathing is steady and the man is looking at him with those eyes, the ones that aren’t afraid, the ones that are tired and stubborn and something else he keeps catching in flashes and then losing, something soft behind the hard exterior that surfaces and retreats and surfaces again, and the longer Erath stays in this apartment the harder it’s going to be to leave.
He leaves.
He walks down four flights of the terrible carpet and out through the secured door and into the night air, and he doesn’t look back. The door shuts behind him and it should feel final. An interaction completed. A transaction closed. His daughter has been retrieved. The human has been thanked. There is nothing else to say and no reason to return and the bartender with the brave mouth and the pink toenails and the eyes that aren’t afraid is someone Erath will never see again.
The door shuts behind him and it doesn’t feel like the finality that it should.
He carries Penny through the Old City and out of it, past the shuttered shops and the amber streetlamps and the occasional figure moving through the dark who takes one look at him and crosses to the other side of the street. It’s not the jacket or the hood or the child. It’s something else, something that lives in the air around him, a coldness, a wrongness, the discomfort of standing too close to the thing that will eventually come for everyone. People feel it. They don’t understand it, but they feel it, and they move away.
