The void stretches before him. Thirty feet of abyssal darkness separating him from the rift's entrance on the far side. The rift itself hovers above the center of the void, a vertical tear in reality pulsing with green-black energy, its anchoring points visible to August's senses as nodes of concentrated power. But the platform beneath the rift is gone. The ground is gone. There's nothing between August and the rift but the void itself. A drop into the underworld that isn't a threshold to be crossed but a fall that goes down and doesn't stop.
Every previous rift had been a tear in the air. A doorway, a threshold. August had stepped through them the way you step through a door. But this one has consumed the ground itself, and the only way to reach it is to drop into the abyss.
"I can't get in," August says, and the words taste of failure. He turns back to Vale, and he knows the desperation is visible on his face. "The void. It's not like the others. There's no threshold to cross. If I step into that, I don't think I'm stepping back out. I'll fall into the underworld."
Vale is at his side in seconds, assessing the void with the tactical clarity of a man who has been solving impossible problems for three centuries. His jaw tightens. August watches him calculate distances, angles, trajectories.
"The rift entrance," Vale says, pointing. "It's hovering above the void. There's a ledge, the old platform edge, on the far side,directly beneath it. If you can reach that ledge, you can enter the rift from the other side."
"There's thirty feet of abyss between me and that ledge."
"I know." Vale turns to him. "I can throw you."
August stares at him. "You canwhat?"
"Throw you. Across the void. To the far ledge." Vale says this with the absolute matter-of-fact certainty of a man who has apparently been calculating the aerodynamics of launching a necromancer across a chasm and has found the mathematics acceptable. "You weigh next to nothing, I have three centuries of enhanced strength, and the ledge is wide enough to land on."
"And if you miss?"
"I won't miss."
"And if I miss? If I don't stick the landing?"
"You'll stick the landing." Vale's hand grips his shoulder. His eyes are steady. "August. Do you trust me?"
It's the same question, in different words, that Vale has been asking.Do you trust me.And every time, August's answer has been the same. Not because the fear has diminished, but because the man asking has proven, again and again, that the trust is warranted.
"That's a dirty question and you know it," August says.
"Is it working?"
"Unfortunately." August blows out a breath. "Fine. Throw me across the abyss. Just don't tell anyone about this. Ever."
"Knox is going to tell everyone."
"Knox is twenty feet away fighting skeletons."
"Knox has exceptional hearing and zero discretion."
"I hate you," August says, and turns toward the void.
Behind them, the rift pulses, and a fresh wave of undead begins to emerge. And behind the undead, pulling itself from the void with a grinding, deliberate menace that makes August's blood freeze, a guardian construct.
Bigger than the one at the railway station. Fourteen feet of fused bone and black iron, skull-face blazing green, bladed arms swinging with killing intent. It hauls itself onto the platform edge and turns toward them with the patient inevitability of something that has all the time in the world.
"Go!" Cassidy shouts, already charging the construct with Knox at her side. Her longsword blazes. Knox's mace connects with the construct's leg with a crack that echoes through the station, his coat streaked with dust and gore from the earlier fighting. "We've got this. Close the damn rift!"
Vale doesn't hesitate. He grabs August by the waist, one arm, effortless, and positions him at the edge of the void. "On three. Tuck your legs for the arc, extend for the landing. Aim for the center of the ledge."
"I'm a necromancer, not a gymnast."
"One. Two. Three."
Vale throws him.
For a single, suspended, absolutely terrifying moment, August is airborne above the void. The abyss yawns beneath him, an infinity of green-black nothing that pulls at him with a gravity that has nothing to do with physics, and every instinct he has screams that he is going to fall, that this is how he dies, thrown across an underworld abyss by a Templar he's been sleeping with.
His feet hit the ledge.
