Vale shoves his bare hands into the grimy pockets of his coat. He doesn’t wear gloves because they interfere with his blessings, covering his rings and making it difficult to draw on holy power, and the threadbare pockets of his coat are a poor substitute. There’s no snow on the ground, but he can see his breath in the air in white puffs and he knows it’s only going to get colder as the night goes on.
The city of Haven sprawls around him like an old friend waiting for his arrival. It’s a city he’s begrudgingly fond of, like the jokester drunk who insults you without meaning to but also buys you a round, and it grows larger and stranger with each passing year. A thousand years of mortal tradition and magical rites coexist in uneasy, productive friction. Sometimes it works better than others. The mundanes here have adapted to a life that is sometimes more bizarre than they'd prefer, andthey're better for it. Other cities have erected barriers, walled themselves off from those with magical inclination, and in Vale's experience those places suffocate. It's the cohabitation that lets Haven thrive. The sum greater than its parts.
The Order of Holy Templars oversees supernatural law in the city, working alongside the Haven Police Department in a partnership that requires more diplomacy than Vale possesses. He isn't ranked high enough to be involved in the bureaucracy that arrangement entails, and he's grateful for it. It took them centuries just to find him a partner he could tolerate, so he can’t imagine how things would deteriorate if he were involved in peacekeeping tasks. He is not the man you send to shake hands.
He is, however, the man you send for the undead.
Which is why, the moment he steps into the Old City, he can already feel the tremors of death magic beneath his feet. Faint pulses, like breadcrumbs scattered in the dark. Knox would feel a vague prickle at best and wouldn’t be able to visually see it at all. But to Vale, the ghostly threads of spent magic trailing along the cobblestones are vivid and unmistakable.
He draws one bare hand from his pocket and holds it over the remnants. The magic is a sickly green-white, and it recoils from the holy power coursing through his veins, shuddering and contracting beneath his palm. Slowly it resolves into a jagged, luminous thread leading him toward its source, and he follows it into the dark.
The Old City hugs the harbor's edge, a labyrinth of narrow streets and old brick that has stood longer than Vale has been alive. It's the district of choice for anyone in Haven with something to hide—from the Order, from the law, from the world in general. But it's not a bad place. There are honest people here alongside the dishonest, and Vale has never believed in writing off an entire neighborhood just because its residents value their privacy.
People are out despite the late hour, and most of them give him looks ranging from wary to openly hostile. He'd stand out even without the broadsword shimmering with holy light at his back. At six-one, with the red Templar's mark blazing across his grey coat, subtlety isn't exactly an option. He might as well be a fox strolling through a henhouse wearing a sign that readsI'm here for the chickens.Hopefully he can follow this thread to his necromancer without incident. Tracking, he can do. It's the gathering of intel that trips him up.
He isn't charismatic. He doesn't make friends easily, and he's never particularly wanted to. That's one of the reasons they paired him with Knox, who has never met a situation he couldn't charm his way out of, but his partner isn't here to do the digging for him. So that leaves ignoring the suspicious stares and pressing forward, which is coincidentally what he does best.
The thread leads him deeper. Past neon-lit storefronts hawking everything from genuine healing charms to counterfeit love potions, the kind that smell like cheap perfume and dissolve in water because that's all they are. Past bars invisible to mundane eyes, pounding music through walls that shouldn't exist, bass heavy enough that he feels it in the fillings of his teeth. Past crowded tenements where families are crammed three to a room because they can't afford more, where laundry hangs frozen stiff on lines strung between fire escapes and the hallway lights flicker with the telltale inconsistency of siphoned electricity.
A young woman dressed for a nightclub, no jacket, stiletto heels, skin bare to the cold in a way that makes him tired just looking at her, catches his sleeve as he passes. He tilts his chin to look at her, half his attention still tethered to the glowing thread in his palm, and notices her eyes first: luminescent even in the dim spill of the streetlights. Not mundane. Something fae-touched, maybe, or a low-level enchantment. Either way, not his problem tonight.
"You looking for something, handsome?" She leans away from the wall with open interest, the kind that's half flirtation and half transaction. "Maybe I can help."
She can't see the thread. Can't feel the thrum of energy growing stronger the deeper into the district it pulls him. To her, he's just a bloody, grim-faced Templar wandering through her neighborhood at an unreasonable hour, which, to be fair, is exactly what he is.
"Doubtful." Vale glances down at where she's still gripping his sleeve. She takes the hint and releases him, but doesn't step back. "Unless you've seen any moving corpses lately."
"I haven't, so you must be doing your job very well." She gives him a smile that's all straight white teeth and red lips, unbothered by the gore on his coat in a way that speaks to the kind of things she's probably seen living in this district. "Why don't you come have a drink with me? My place isn't far."
"I'm working." He says it flatly, as though the splatter on his coat and the sword at his back don't make that obvious. He adds, because it tends to end these conversations quickly: "And I'm gay."
"Can't win them all." The smile dims but doesn't die. She leans back against the wall and shrugs with the easy grace of a woman who doesn't take rejection personally. "If you're looking for corpses, you're headed the right direction. Don't know that they'll be moving much, though."
"Morgue?" he guesses. It would figure, the trail leading him to a workstation instead of a doorstep. That would be just his luck: two hours of tracking through the cold only to end up standing over an embalming table.
"Cemetery," she corrects, and gestures along the fork in the street. "About two blocks up. Just saw someone else heading that way, too. Busy place for the middle of the night."
Something sharp and electric shivers down his spine. Not magic, but instinct. Three centuries' worth of it, honed on exactly this kind of moment: the thread pulling taut, the pieces clicking into place, the quarry finally close enough to taste. It sounds exactly like the kind of party he's been looking for all week.
He nods in acknowledgment, the closest thing to a thank you she's likely to get from him, and takes the fork she indicated, palm still held out to keep the tether pulled taut. The thread burns brighter with every step. Whoever is at the end of it has no idea he's coming, and Vale intends to keep it that way.
The magic in the air thickens and turns cold the moment the iron fence surrounding the cemetery comes into view.
The wrought gates at the entrance stand slightly ajar, just wide enough for someone small to slip through. They shriek in protest when Vale pushes them wider, and he winces at the sound, but hopefully his necromancer is too absorbed in defiling the dead to notice.
The cemetery is old but well kept. Trimmed grass, orderly hedges, headstones tilting at odd angles from age but surprisingly clean and legible despite their years. A thick mist clings to the ground where there's been no rain, and Vale knows it isn't natural. It's the kind of thing that happens when the veil between the living and the dead has been stretched thin, pulled at like cheap fabric until the threads start to show.
Someone is here. Someone powerful.
He moves silently between the graves, one hand reaching over his shoulder to grip his sword's hilt. The blade is warm, resonating with holy magic that responds to the death-touched energy saturating the air the way a tuning fork responds to astruck note. Templars are built for combating dark magic and unholy creatures, but Vale has specialized in death magic for the entirety of his career. He has killed seventeen necromancers in three hundred years of service. Most of them tried to run. Some tried to fight. None of them succeeded.
This will be number eighteen.
He rounds a crumbling mausoleum and stops dead.
A man is kneeling before a grave, head bowed, his hands resting gently on the headstone. He looks perplexingly young, but you can never tell with mages. Slender build, almost delicate, with short black hair that sharpens the angles of high cheekbones and a graceful neck. Even from this distance Vale can see the tattoos: intricate patterns winding up the man's bare forearms and vanishing beneath his sleeves, dark ink against impossibly pale skin.
He is, Vale realizes with an uncomfortable jolt of clarity, exceptionally pretty.
