Vale snorts. "That didn't last long, did it?"
"I started seeing spirits everywhere. My house, my school, the streets. All of them suffering, all of them trapped. And no one else could help them." August meets Vale's eyes. "What was I supposed to do?"
"Most people would have thought about their own safety."
"I did think about it. I just decided the safe path wasn't the moral one." He takes another sip of tea. It's still warm. "My parents tried to stop me at first. But they saw what it was doing to me, seeing all that suffering and forcing myself to ignore it. Eventually they accepted it. Made me promise to be careful. To hide."
"Are they still trying to stop you?"
It isn't a question he wants to visit, but August answers anyway. "They died three years ago. Car accident. Nothing magical, just bad luck." His throat tightens. He takes a breath. "I helped them pass on. Made sure they weren't confused. That they weren't afraid. That they knew I loved them."
He stops. He doesn't talk about this. He doesn't talk about the hours he spent sitting in the morgue after closing, holding their hands, speaking to spirits that looked exactly like the parents who'd raised him and loved him and worried about him every single day. He doesn't talk about how his mother's ghost had touched his face and told him to eat more, or how his father had just held him, the same way he'd held him when August collapsed in the entryway. He doesn't talk about how lettingthem go had been the hardest and most important thing he'd ever done with his power.
Something shifts in Vale's expression. A softening that's there and gone, quick enough that August might have imagined it if he weren't watching so carefully. But he is watching, because he can't seem to stop, and he sees it.
"You're on your own then," Vale says.
"Mostly. I have friends who look out for me, but I don't involve them in what I do." He thinks of Sidney, who probably thinks he's dead in that subway station, and guilt hits him hard. He needs to get word to Willow's. "People I care about. People I don't want the Order anywhere near."
Vale gives him a moment of silence, enough space to breathe through the sting of it, and then moves on. He does it with the practiced ease of someone who knows when to push and when to let a thing rest, and August is grateful for it in a way that surprises him.
"Tell me about the rifts. What makes that kind of necromancy different from what you do?"
"Everything. When I work, it's precise. Controlled. I'm creating a small, temporary connection to the realm of the dead, just enough to communicate. The rifts are the opposite. Violent. Crude. Someone is tearing reality open with brute force and holding it there."
"We know who," Vale says. "The question is whether his technique tells us anything about what comes next."
August nods, still adjusting to the strangeness of having a collaborator. Of being able to say things and have someone understand. Of not having to explain from the beginning what death magic is and why it matters, because Vale already knows. Not from books, not from doctrine, but from three centuries of facing it.
"The fusion of holy and death magic you described, that explains the instability. He's forcing two opposing energies through the same channel. It works, obviously, but it's messy. The rifts are crude because the technique is crude. He's not a trained necromancer, he's a Templar who taught himself death magic four years ago using whatever texts he stole before he deserted."
"Which means he's powerful but not practiced."
"Exactly. And that's actually more dangerous, not less. A skilled necromancer manages the cost, rations their life force. Voss is burning through his with no intention of conserving it. He's betting everything on reaching the vault before the corruption kills him."
"How long do you think he has?"
August considers it. "If he's been combining holy and death magic for four years, with the accelerated corruption that fusion causes? He's in worse shape than I am. Maybe months. Maybe weeks. It depends on how much he's been casting."
"He's been casting a lot," Vale says grimly.
"Then he's desperate. And desperate is the most dangerous thing a dying mage can be." August would know. "He has nothing to lose and everything to gain, and every day that passes pushes him closer to the edge."
Vale makes a note. The scratch of pen on paper is oddly domestic in the quiet of August's kitchen, and August lets himself notice it, lets himself feel the strangeness and the unexpected comfort of another person in his space, sharing his work, taking him seriously. It's a small thing. It shouldn't mean as much as it does.
"Can you close the open rifts?" Vale asks.
There it is. The question August has been dreading, the one that reveals more of his capabilities than he's comfortable sharing. He weighs his answer carefully.
"If someone is protecting me while I work, yes. I can't close a rift and fight off what's coming through it simultaneously. It requires too much focus."
"How many?"
August's brow furrows. "How many what?"
"How many rifts can you close?"
"All of them." August says it plainly, because there's no point in being coy. Not now. Not after everything. "If you can guard me while I work, and if the healing effect holds so I can recover between them, I can close every rift Voss has opened."
