Chapter 1
Thick curls of smoke drift from the blessed sword in Vale’s right hand. The hilt hums against his palm, still thrumming with holy resonance from the battle, and the rings on his left hand are still warm with the remnants of a blessing he’d conjured. Underneath his boots, the concrete floor of the warehouse is littered with ash and bone fragments and blood.
Most of it belongs to the undead, but some of it belongs to the three homeless civilians who had been living in this abandoned warehouse who hadn’t made it out. He’d arrived too late to save them and it tastes bitter in the back of his throat, but now is not the time to linger on it. There are much more pressing matters that are growing more and more concerning as time goes by.
The rift is a massive tear in reality that is still rippling with intent in the center of the warehouse. It’s the color of gangrene and it glows ominously as a reminder of what it's capable of.Nothing is currently crawling out of it, but it breathes, pulsing in slow, hungry contractions like a wound that refuses to close. He’s not capable of sealing it. That sort of thing requires a necromancer, and since he doesn’t keep one of those in his coat pocket for just such an occasion, it’s going to have to wait until later. The best he can manage right now is a blessing ring around the perimeter.
A blessing ring won’t hold against another full onslaught. What it will do is slow the stragglers long enough, tangled up in holy energy like a net, to allow for backup from the Order to arrive. It's the best he can do until he drags the sorry son of a bitch who tore this hole in the world back here to close it—along with the other eight rifts scattered across the city.
It's been a long couple of weeks, to say the least.
He's seen worse. In three centuries of service, he's seen much worse.
There’s the sound of debris crunching under the press of boots from behind him. Vale turns in time to see his partner, Knox, picking his way around the perimeter of the rift with the careful fastidiousness of a man who'd rather not get viscera on his shoes.
"Oh, now you show up?" Vale raises an eyebrow. "It's handled."
"I got here as fast as I could." Knox holds up his palms in a show of peace. His blond ponytail drapes over one shoulder, his coat buckled pristine up to his chin, his mace gleaming untouched at his belt. He'd look like a Templar recruitment poster if he were a little taller, a little broader in the shoulders.
Vale, by contrast, looks like he's been through a thresher. His buckled coat is slick with gore, because purging the undead with holy fire tends to make them rupture in spectacular fits of bone and rotting tissue, and his sword hasn't fared much better. Themessiest fight he's had in months, but they're becoming more common with every new rift.
"These blessing rings aren't going to hold for long." Knox nods toward where Vale's handiwork pulses with pale light around the bulk of the rift. "If we don't find that necromancer soon, we're going to have a real problem on our hands."
"You think I don't know that?" Vale wipes his broadsword against the side of his coat and sheathes it in the scabbard at his back. "I'm working on it. I'm following a trail, but whoever it is stays one step ahead."
He moves to the scorch marks on the floor where the rift had torn through. The patterns are precise, deliberate, and as meticulous as every other set they've found. He crouches beside them and holds his bare fingers a breath above the blackened concrete, not quite touching. He doesn’t need to touch it to feel the residual energy left by the death magic; it’s a cold that can settle into your bones if you let it, so he just skims the surface.
In Vale’s experience all power-hungry necromancers carry their arrogance in the same fashion. Their magic is bursting at the seams with too much uncontrollable power, driven from their bodies by the visions of godhood that seem to spur them all on and made worse by how clever they all think they are. The magic signatures of these mages are usually electric in their madness, but this one is just different enough to be worrisome.
This one the magic feels frantic, distressed. It’s as though whoever cast the spell knows the clock is ticking and they’re burning through what little time they have left. Which makes sense considering how enormously powerful these rifts have been. They’re likely draining the caster at a rate that will eventually be unsustainable. Whoever is casting tearing these rifts open is desperate, which makes them especially dangerous. Whoever is casting these rifts knows that whatever they’re planning needs to happen soon.
Knox is still standing in the same spot, patient as ever.
"Did you want something, or are you just here to get in my way?" Vale glides his palm over the marks, watching for any flicker in the residual magic.
Knox has known him too long to react to his tone. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, wearing the reluctant expression of a man who hates being the messenger.
"I might have a lead for you." A beat. "But I also bring word from Sanctus Cael."
Vale rolls his eyes and stands. His joints protest audibly—he's been pushing hard these last weeks and it's catching up. "I'll take the lead. You can keep Cael's nagging to yourself."
"You can't avoid him forever." Knox clucks his tongue. "He wants this necromancer's head on a pike, and every day it drags on he gets more impatient."
"I won't waste time I could spend searching by sitting at headquarters getting lectured by a man who's never served." Vale crosses the distance between them until he's standing directly in front of his partner, who looks up to meet his gaze without blinking. "Give me what you've got, Knox."
"I traced faint remnants of death magic to the Old City." Knox leans back, one hand resting on the hilt of his mace. "Didn't find anything concrete. You know necromancers aren't quite my forte the way they are yours. It wasn't enough magic to open a rift, but it was enough to leave a trace. Could be worth checking out."
Vale hums and glances back at the scorch marks, at the rift still churning in the air with malignant purpose. Knox is invaluable when it comes to hunting demons, but he hasn't been around long enough to hear the whispers of death the way Vale does. Not yet.
Three hundred years of fighting necromancers has given Vale something beyond skill. It's instinct that runs bone-deep and iscompletely unerring. If there's a necromancer practicing magic in the Old City, traces that are obvious enough for Knox to detect will be screaming for Vale's attention.
"Tell Cael I'm hunting," Vale says. "I'll report when I have something worth reporting."
Knox shrugs like he expected nothing less and says nothing as Vale heads for what's left of the front doors.
The January cold bites at all of his exposed skin the moment he steps out of the building, but he welcomes it.
After spending the last couple of hours in the closed-in reek of the warehouse, surrounded by the smell of ozone and rot and the copper tang of blood, the night air off the harbor is practically a bouquet. The aroma of diesel fuel and brine perfumes the air, with floral notes of industrial waste lingering behind, but he’ll take it. He knows he’s probably got intestines in the grooves of his boots and decaying flesh clinging to his coat, but there’s no time to go home and change. Not if he wants to get ahead of this necromancer before Cael comes calling again.
