“How is that possible?”
“We’ll get to that. Right now I need to know about Jayson Voss.”
August blinks at the subject change. Then he steps aside. “Come in.”
The apartment is clean, lived-in, warmer than Erath’s house in every sense. There’s a coat draped over the back of a chair, too large to be August’s, and a pair of boots by the door that are scuffed and heavy and belong to someone who uses them for more than walking. The Templar is here. Erath can feel him, the hum of holy energy that Templars carry, muted but present, threaded through the walls of the apartment the way Sidney’s warmth is threaded through the walls of Erath’s house. He notices the parallel. He doesn’t want to notice the parallel. He notices it anyway.
Vale appears from the hallway. Tall, dark-haired, severe in the way of someone who has been alive for three centuries and has stopped pretending to be casual about it. His eyes are old. The rest of him looks twenty-eight. He sees Erath and his posture adjusts, deferential to the complicated hierarchy between a god and a Templar who are meeting in a living room with throw pillows.
“Lord Erath.”
“Vale.”
They sit. August on the couch, Vale beside him with their shoulders touching, Erath in the armchair across from them. He watches the way August’s body angles toward Vale without conscious effort, the way Vale’s hand rests on the arm of thecouch between them, close enough to touch but not touching. They orbit each other. The gravity between them is quiet and sure and established, and Erath thinks about the pull in his own chest, the one that responds to Sidney, and wonders if this is what it looks like from the outside. Two people caught in each other’s field, held there not by force but by the quiet physics of wanting to be close enough to reach.
“Jayson Voss,” Erath says. “Tell me what happened.”
August straightens. The shift from August-at-home to August-at-work is subtle. He explains. Voss was a Templar turned necromancer who tried to steal relics from the Order’s vault, artifacts that could grant immortality or something approaching it. He opened rifts between the mortal realm and the underworld to undo the wards sealing the vault. August, Vale, Knox, and Cassidy sealed the rifts, banished the undead Voss had summoned, and killed him in combat. August says this last part without inflection, the way you report a fact that changed your life but that you’ve had enough time to stop performing about.
“What about the relics?” Erath asks.
“Secure,” Vale says. “Locked in the vault. Protections have been reinforced since Voss. No one who isn’t a Templar can access them. Voss only got in because he knew the weaknesses from the inside.”
“Unless another Templar defects.”
Vale’s jaw tightens. “That won’t happen.”
Erath lets the assertion stand without challenge, because arguing with a Templar’s certainty about his own order is not a productive use of anyone’s time, and moves on.
He lays out what he knows. The Coven is currently being run by Annabeth Hargrove, daughter of Mathilde and Jayson Voss. His ex-wife and Annabeth’s sister, Angelica, is either advising Annabeth or positioning herself to take over. Angelica was with a member of the Coven before she met Erath. She had a son, Newt,who has since extricated himself from the Coven’s grasp. Amelia, Penny’s foster guardian, was a Coven member arranged through Angelica, a way of keeping proximity to Penny during her time in the mortal realm. The whole arrangement, from the beginning, was a leash.
The room is quiet when he finishes. Vale and August exchange a look that contains an entire conversation conducted in the language of two people who have been through something terrible together and emerged on the other side of it still holding on.
Erath lets the silence settle. Then: “If the Coven gets their hands on Penny, blood magic will be the least of our concerns.”
August’s brow furrows. “What do you mean?”
“Penny exists between worlds. She can shift between life and death. In the Coven’s hands, she could be used as a conduit.” He watches both of their faces as the implication lands. “They could use her to bring Jayson and Mathilde back.”
Vale goes very still. August’s hand finds Vale’s knee, an unconscious motion, grounding, and the gesture is so natural and so immediate that Erath feels something tighten in his chest that responds to the way August’s fingers curl against Vale’s knee without looking, without thinking, just reaching for the person beside him because reaching is what his body does when the world gets heavy.
Sidney does this. Sidney reaches for things. The collar of Erath’s jacket. The edge of a blanket. The fabric of his shirt. Whatever is closest, whenever the world tips.
Erath blinks. Refocuses.
“That can’t happen,” August says.
“No,” Erath agrees. “It can’t.”
He tells them to keep their eyes and ears open. To watch the Coven’s movements from the mortal side while he works the problem from below. Vale nods, already strategizing, alreadyrunning through Templar resources and patrol rotations in his head with the skill of someone who has spent centuries solving exactly this kind of problem. August nods too, but his attention is split, and Erath can see the other thing building behind his eyes, the thing that has nothing to do with the Coven and everything to do with the name Erath dropped at the beginning of this conversation.
Erath stands. He thanks them for their time. He walks to the door.
“Erath.”
He stops. August is behind him, having followed him to the hallway, and Vale has stayed in the living room, giving them space. The giving of space is deliberate. August wants this conversation to be private, which means whatever he’s about to say is personal, and Erath has a fairly good idea what it’s going to be about.
August’s arms are crossed. His expression is the combination of determination and discomfort that people wear when they’re about to say something they know might not be well received and have decided to say it anyway.
