They've been partners long enough that Vale knows when to press and when to accept the deflection, and tonight the deflection is a kindness to them both. They have enough to worry about.
They walk in companionable silence for a block. The food truck they're heading toward is on the corner of Hazel and Ninth, a place Knox discovered years ago that serves dumplings and noodle bowls that are, in Knox's professional opinion, worth committing minor crimes for. Vale doesn't have strong feelings about food, which Knox considers a personal failing.
The silence is comfortable. It's always been comfortable between them, one of the foundations of a partnership that has survived four decades. They don't need to fill space with words. But Vale can feel the other silence underneath the comfortable one. The questions Knox isn't asking, the observations he's filed away, the conclusions he's drawn from bruises and burned wrists and the way Vale had knelt on a subway platform and held a necromancer like the world was ending.
Knox has always been patient. He doesn't push, doesn't pry, doesn't demand explanations he hasn't been offered. It's one of his best qualities as a partner and one of his most infuriating qualities as a friend, because it means Vale has to be the one to open the door.
"You might as well ask," Vale says.
Knox looks at him. Then he holds both hands up, carefully, the right one emerging from his pocket with a stiffness he immediately smooths over, in a gesture of exaggerated surrender.
"I already know more than I want to," Knox says, with the particular emphasis of a man who has been carrying visual evidence of his partner's romantic life and would very much like to set it down. "I don't need the details, Vale. I really, truly, with my whole heart, do not need the details."
"I wasn't going to give you details."
"You are exactly the kind of person who would give the details."
Vale almost smiles. "You're a terrible confidant."
"I'm an excellent confidant. I'm also a man with boundaries, and one of those boundaries is not knowing what my partner of forty years does in bed with a necromancer." Knox pauses. "That said, and I want to be clear that this is as far as my curiosity extends, he's good for you."
Vale looks at him.
Knox nods, like that's all he’s going to say on the matter, and doesn't elaborate.
They reach the food truck. The line is short. A few university students, a couple arguing amiably about movie choices, an old man with a small dog tucked inside his coat. Knox orders for all four of them with the practiced efficiency of someone who has memorized the menu, and Vale pays because Knox always forgets his wallet and has been getting away with it for decades.
They step aside to wait. The evening traffic hums past. Somewhere in the distance, the Cathedral bells toll seven, and Vale feels the sound in his chest the way he always does. A resonance that's part holy magic and part muscle memory, the particular frequency that has marked the hours of his life for three hundred years.
Knox is leaning against a lamppost, arms crossed, his right hand tucked against his body in a way that's meant to look casual. His sleeve has ridden up slightly, and in the yellow light of the street lamp, Vale can see the marks on his forearm.Reddened, irritated patches where his own holy energy had rebounded against August's corruption-traced skin and burned him from the inside out. They're not as severe as the burns on August's wrists, but they're there. Clear. The cost of doing the right thing written on his skin.
But that's not what Vale is looking at.
He's looking at Knox's hand. At the fingers that had gripped August's wrist. At the arm that had reached into the void, into the abyss, into the rift space that opens directly onto the underworld, and pulled a living man out of it.
Vale's thoughts slow down. Rearrange themselves. Click into a configuration that makes his breath catch.
Templars cannot enter the underworld.
It's not a guideline or a preference. It's a fundamental incompatibility. The interaction between holy magic and the death energy of the rift space produces an immediate, violent rejection. Vale has felt it himself, standing at the edge of every rift they've encountered. The threshold pushes back. The veil resists. A Templar can stand at the boundary, can fight the undead that emerge, can maintain blessing circles and pour holy energy into containment, but crossing the threshold is physically impossible. The holy magic in a Templar's body and the death energy of the underworld repel each other the way identical magnetic poles repel, an immutable law of magical physics that has held true for as long as the Order has existed.
Vale had stood at the edge of the void tonight and watched August fall, and he had not been able to follow. Had not been able to reach in. The rift's boundary had held him back the way it always does, the way it holds back every Templar, and the only reason August hadn't fallen forever was Knox.
Knox, whose hand had reachedinto the voidand closed around August's wrist.
Knox, whose arm had crossed the threshold that no Templar can cross.
Vale stares at his partner. The realization assembles itself with the slow, inevitable certainty of a structure whose foundations have been there all along, hidden in plain sight for four decades.
Knox senses the attention. He shifts against the lamppost, uncrosses his arms, and frowns. "What?"
Vale doesn't answer immediately. He's turning the pieces over. Knox's hand in the void. Knox's arm across the threshold. The burns that prove the contact was real, that Knox physically entered the rift space, however briefly, to make the catch.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Knox's frown deepens, and underneath the mild irritation, Vale can see the first flicker of something else. Something watchful.
"Your hand went into the rift," Vale says.
Knox goes still.
