The man hadn’t moved away.
Maggie’s neighborhood is quiet. It’s always quiet. The buildings are older, set back from the street, with window boxes and iron railings and the general air of a place that has been respectable for long enough that it doesn’t need to prove it anymore. Maggie’s walk-up is on the corner, second floor, and the light in her kitchen is on because Maggie is seventy-three years old and hasn’t slept through the night since 1997.
She is not related to Penny. She’s not related to Angelica or to anyone involved in any of this. She is simply a woman Erath trusts, and the list of people Erath trusts could be written on a matchbook with room to spare. How they know each other predates Angelica, predates Penny, stretches back through years and favors and a night in 1983 when Maggie had been the only person in a hospital waiting room who’d spoken to the strange man sitting alone in the corner, and Erath had been curious enough about a human who wasn’t afraid of him to remember her name.
A human who wasn’t afraid of him. The parallel lands in his chest and sits there.
He knocks. Maggie opens the door in her bathrobe, reading glasses perched on her nose, a paperback in one hand. She takesone look at Erath and the sleeping child and holds the door wide without a word.
He carries Penny to the guest bedroom, the one with the quilt that Maggie’s mother made and the nightlight shaped like a mushroom that Penny had picked out herself. He lays her down and pulls the quilt over her and places the sunflower backpack at her feet because she’ll want it when she wakes up. She stirs, rolls onto her side, pulls the quilt to her chin. Doesn’t wake. He stands there for a moment and watches her breathe and counts breaths the way he used to when she was an infant, when she was so small and so alive and so bewilderingly fragile that he couldn’t believe anything this breakable was half of him.
He goes back to the kitchen. Maggie is leaning against the counter, arms crossed, waiting.
“Amelia is dead,” he tells her. “I need some time to figure out an alternative.”
“Don’t you worry about us,” Maggie says quietly. “We can camp out for as long as you need. I’ve been teaching her to crochet and she’s loving it.”
“I’m not worried about inconveniencing you. I’m worried the Coven may come looking.”
“Let them.”
A human who isn’t afraid. The parallel lands again, harder this time.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he says.
“Take your time.”
He leaves through the front door, the way a normal person would, because Maggie has always treated him as a normal person and he has always tried to return the favor. He walks down the stairs and out into the street and starts the long walk back to Central, to the subway entrance, to the staircase that descends into the dark.
He descends. The cold wraps around him. The dark pulls him in. He goes back to the underworld, back to the dead, back to the work that never ends and never changes, and he puts the bartender in the back of his mind and closes the lid and tells himself that is the end of it.
Chapter 3
Sidney has only been at Willow’s for an hour when August walks in looking like he’s about to deliver bad news to someone he cares about, which, historically, is not an uncommon expression for August to wear, but today it’s pointed directly at Sidney and that’s new.
He’s got his black coat on, the one that’s too long for him and makes him look like a Victorian undertaker who’s been reincarnated as a philosophy student, and there’s more color in his face than there used to be. The tattoos are still there, of course, winding up his neck and down his wrists, but they look different now. Less imposing. When August had been practicing necromancy the ink had seemed to move, a low crawl of symbols shifting when you weren’t looking directly at them, but he’s been clean for months and the tattoos have settled into something static and ornamental. Just ink. Just art on skin that used to be a warning.
His relationship is helping him. Sidney can see it in the way August carries himself, the set of his shoulders, the fact that he doesn’t flinch at loud noises anymore. He’s been with theTemplar for a while now, long enough that the sharp edges have started to smooth, and Sidney is happy for him. He’s only met Vale briefly, a tall, severe man with old eyes and a posture that suggested he could kill everyone in the room and was choosing not to out of politeness, but August seems to orbit around him with a steadiness that hadn’t been there before. Sidney doesn’t get involved in the relationships of his friends. They don’t need his opinions or his judgment. They can make those choices for themselves.
August is happier these days. That says a lot. But today he looks like he’s swallowed something sour and it’s sitting in his stomach and he’s trying to figure out how to bring it back up without making a mess.
He walks up to the bar and leans against it. “I need to talk to you.”
Sidney sets down the glass he’s polishing. The lunch rush, such as it is, has already come and gone, and the bar is mostly empty. A couple in the corner nursing beers. Gerald at the far end, who is here every day from noon to four and has been for longer than Sidney’s been alive and who will presumably continue to be here after Sidney is dead, outliving the bar and possibly the building itself. Xela is somewhere in the back doing inventory, which she hates.
“Okay,” Sidney says. “Let’s talk.”
August glances around the room. Then he takes Sidney’s arm and steers him toward the back hallway, past the bathrooms and the supply closet, into the narrow space between the stockroom door and the fire exit where the light is bad and the privacy is good. Sidney lets himself be steered because August has that energy about him, the energy of a man who has something to say and has been rehearsing how to say it and will combust if he doesn’t get it out soon.
For one genuinely alarming moment, Sidney thinks August is about to tell him he’s pregnant with a Templar baby.
Instead, August squares his shoulders, takes a breath that looks like it costs him something, and says, “Did you know that the girl you called me about was the daughter of the lord of the underworld?”
Sidney blinks. He crosses his arms. “Who? You mean Penny?”
August raises an eyebrow. “Did you have any other little girls in your bar last night?”
“No, but…”
