But the Templar knows about him now. The Order will be watching, tracking, hunting. They think he's the one opening the rifts, which means they'll focus on him instead of the actual threat. It's going to make his investigation harder, but it's not as though he expected any of this to be easy. Nothing about his life has ever been easy. He just keeps going anyway, because that's what you do. You keep going, and you help who you can, and you hope it matters.
He probably can't go back to his apartment. The Templar will trace his magical signature there within a day or two. He can't return to the hospital or the cemetery where he usually helps spirits. They'll stake those out, and the people who come to him for help will be caught in the crossfire. He'll need somewhere new to hide, and he'll have to continue his investigation into the real necromancer while evading the most powerful law enforcement organization in the city.
Perfect. Exactly what he needs. As if the dying and the investigation and the ghosts weren't enough, now he gets to add homelessness and a manhunt to the list. At this rate he's going to need a planner.
August pushes off the wall and starts walking, staying to the shadows out of instinct. His legs feel weak, his head swimming, but he can't stop. He has to keep moving. Has to think.
The real necromancer is out there, building toward something catastrophic. The rifts follow a pattern, one that August has been mapping for weeks, cross-referencing locations with historical records he's pieced together from libraries and stolen glances at restricted archives and conversations with spirits old enough to remember what the city looked like before the Order existed.He's matched them to old ritual sites from before the War of Binding. Whoever is doing this has access to pre-Order knowledge, to magic that should have been lost centuries ago.
And they're building toward a culmination. Some final ritual that will require all of those rift sites active simultaneously. August needs to close them, but he can't fight off the undead pouring through and seal the rifts at the same time. Closing them requires immense power and absolute focus, neither of which is possible while a rotting corpse is trying to tear his throat out.
He needs to figure out what the ritual is, where it's aimed, and get there first. He needs to stop this before more people die, before the city descends into chaos, before the Order institutes something like magical registration and turns every death-touched person in Haven into a target.
He needs to do all of that while dying by his own hand, while being hunted by the most capable Templar the Order could throw at him, and while still managing to help the spirits of the city find rest. Because he's not going to stop doing that. He can't. Even now, even with everything bearing down on him, he knows that if he passes a trapped spirit on his way through the dark, he'll stop. He'll sit with them. He'll help them. It's not a choice anymore. It's just who he is.
August smiles quietly in the dark. When he was twelve and accidentally raised his dead cat in a moment of grief-stricken panic, he'd thought that was the worst thing that could happen to him. He'd spent the next fourteen years learning control, learning to use his power carefully, to help instead of harm. To sit with the dying and the dead and offer them the one thing no one else could: someone who wasn't afraid to be there.
He'd believed, and still believes, that being good matters. That only ever helping people matters. Even if the world doesn't recognize it. Even if the Order never will. Even if the poison inhis veins doesn't care about his intentions and the law doesn't distinguish between a necromancer who eases spirits into rest and one who raises armies of the dead.
A necromancer is a necromancer is a monster. That's what they'll say about him when he's gone.
But the ghosts know better. And August supposes that will have to be enough.
August makes it to Lancing Street.
The building is two stories of old brick with wide windows and a set of wooden double doors painted red. A neon sign above the entrance readsWillow'sand flickers when he gets close, like it can sense him coming and isn't sure how it feels about it. A cluster of women in tall heels are smoking outside, and they give him an appraising look as he approaches, taking in the gore-spattered jacket and the pallor and the black veins crawling up his neck, and apparently deciding it's none of their business. He appreciates that about the Old City. People here know when not to ask.
He pulls open one of the doors and steps inside, and the rush of warm air and stale beer greets him like an old friend. The interior is dim, lit by hanging fixtures that cast everything in amber, the kind of light that's generous to tired faces and questionable decisions. The bouncer at the door doesn't bat an eye. Emerald green booths that have seen better decades line the perimeter, their leather cracked and softened by years of use, while the center of the room is scattered with high tables and stools topped with flickering candles. It looks like the kind of place where your shoes stick to the floor, but it's surprisingly clean underneath its age. Old, yes, but so is everything else in the district, and old doesn't mean unloved.
August makes his way to the bar, where a handful of people are nursing drinks in their own private orbits. An enormous bearded man drinking a beer who doesn't look up when Augustapproaches, though he gives the unmistakable impression of being aware of everything within twenty feet and having opinions about most of it. A pair of sharp-toothed men in dark clothes sharing cocktails, emanating an aura of death that August can feel but that doesn't register him in return, which is either a professional courtesy or an oversight he's not going to test. Further down, an older woman with a crow perched on her shoulder who gives him a brief, acknowledging nod that August returns.
He isn't interested in any of them. He heads for an empty stretch of bar directly in front of the bartender, who is drying a stack of glasses with the practiced efficiency of a man who has done this ten thousand times and will do it ten thousand more. He's taller than August, with blonde hair shaved close on the sides, and notably free of the tattoos, piercings, and strangely humming jewelry that seem to be standard issue in the Old City. No magical aura. No otherworldly glow to his blue eyes. He's dressed simply, denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black jeans. As obviously, unremarkably normal as a person can be in a district that prides itself on being anything but. In the Old City, that kind of normalcy is its own form of rebellion.
He looks up when August approaches, and his face softens with recognition. Then it tightens with concern, which means August looks exactly as bad as he feels.
"August." He sets down the glass and rests his palms on the bar. "You look ragged. What the hell happened?"
August slides onto the empty stool and slumps against the bar with the graceless relief of a man who has been running on adrenaline and stubbornness for the better part of an hour and has finally run out of both. It's not the first time he's turned up at Willow's looking like death, which is a joke he'd appreciate more if it weren't so literal. This is at least one place the Templar won't find him. Sidney doesn't register on any magical radar, thebar has no supernatural signature to trace, and the Old City's residents have a long and proud tradition of not cooperating with the Order.
"I'm being hunted by a centuries-old Templar who won't listen to reason," August says, accepting the glass of water pushed his way. He drinks half of it in one go, and the cold of it steadies something in his chest. "I need a place to hide for a while, Sid."
Sidney, the bartender, his friend, possibly the only fully mundane person in the Old City who knows what August is and has never once flinched from it, shakes his head. "For a while? They're not exactly known for giving up and moving on. You need to rethink your career choice."
"Hard to do that while there's a lunatic on the loose ripping open portals to the underworld." August sets the glass down and lets out a breath that carries more weight than he'd like. "The Order is so busy hunting me they're not even looking for the person actually responsible."
"And you're the better candidate to hunt down a madman?" Sidney raises an eyebrow. The question is gentle despite the skepticism, the way Sidney's questions always are. He has a talent for saying difficult things without making them sound like accusations. "You've been pushing yourself too hard. You can't keep going like this."
He's not wrong. It's nothing August doesn't already know, and nothing he hasn't told himself a hundred times in the dark between uses of his magic, pressing his hand to his chest and counting the new veins like a miser counting coins. But the options are thin. The power required to open rifts to the underworld is immense, which means whoever is doing it is extraordinarily dangerous, and extraordinarily dangerous necromancers don't tend to stop on their own. If the Templars can't locate them in time, if they're too busy chasing August through cemeteries and back alleys, it falls to him.
It always falls to him. He's stopped being surprised by that.
"What other choice is there?" he asks, and it's not rhetorical. He'd love an answer. He'd love for someone to tell him there's another way, that he can rest, that the world will keep spinning without him grinding himself down to nothing to keep it turning. But Sidney just looks at him with that quiet, steady concern, and August knows there isn't one. "I just need to pace myself better."
Sidney doesn't argue, because he knows August well enough to know when arguing is a waste of breath. Instead he reaches into his pocket and produces an unremarkable, unlabeled key, setting it on the bar beside August's water with a soft click. "The back room is always open, you know that. Get some rest. Eat something. If any holy men come knocking, I'll let you know."
The kindness of it settles into August's chest like warmth from a fire. He doesn't deserve Sidney. He's not sure what he did to earn a friend who opens his door without hesitation every time August shows up battered and hunted and slowly dying, but he's grateful for it in a way that goes deeper than words.
"Thanks, Sid." August takes the key, finishes the water, and slides off the stool.
