Chapter 4
August wakes mid-afternoon on top of the covers, still fully dressed, with a pain in his chest that pulses in time with his heartbeat and a headache to match.
He curls his fingers into the quilt and breathes out slowly, trying to ease himself through the worst of it.
Sleep usually helps, dulls the constant sting that casting causes, but lately the recovery takes longer and the relief goes shorter, the gap between them narrowing.
His body is losing ground it can't get back.
He drags himself upright and manages to sit on the edge of the mattress with his socked feet on the floor, which feels like an accomplishment he'd be embarrassed to admit to anyone.
His boots are at the foot of the bed beside his jacket, and that's the entirety of what he owns right now.
Everything else is in an apartment he probably can't go back to.
He takes a breath, pushes himself to standing, and makes his way to the adjoining bathroom.
The corruption has crawled up his neck overnight.
Thin dark lines thread across his jaw, creeping toward his cheekbones.
His warding tattoos, ritualistic patterns he'd gotten between the ages of sixteen and twenty when he still thought he might have a future worth protecting, are barely visible beneath the spreading darkness.
The circles under his eyes look like bruises. He can't remember the last time he ate.
August splashes cold water on his face and tries not to think about the Templar.
Tries not to think about the conviction in those brown eyes, so full of certainty, as though the man knew exactly who August was and what he deserved.
As though the verdict had been rendered long before August opened his mouth.
The Templar doesn't know anything. Not about August, not about the rifts, not about the person actually responsible for the dead flooding Haven's streets. He knows what the Order taught him, which is that necromancers are monsters, and he'd looked at August and seen exactly what he expected to see.
But that's temporary. Soon he'll know more than August wants him to.
That's how the Order works: relentless, methodical, patient in the way that only institutions with centuries of practice can be.
August has survived this long by being invisible, and now he's been seen.
They'll track his movements, question people in the Old City, piece together his patterns.
It's only a matter of time before they find his apartment, his research, every corner of the careful life he's built.
August needs to be faster than them. Which, given that he can barely stand up without the room tilting, is going to be a challenge.
He returns to the bedroom and spreads his research across the still-made bed.
Maps take up the most space, marked with dates and locations where rifts have opened.
Beneath them are his notes, cross-referenced with historical records he's stolen from the University of Haven's restricted section.
The librarian who'd helped him had been sympathetic to his research without knowing what it was for, and August had felt guilty about the deception in the way he always feels guilty about deception, which is deeply and uselessly.
The pattern has been clear to him for days: the rift sites form a circle around the Order's cathedral, each one corresponding to an ancient ritual location from before the War of Binding.
Mortis Cabal sites. Has to be.
The Cabal had been the most powerful necromantic order in history.
Their artifacts and accumulated knowledge had been sealed in the Order's vault, considered too dangerous to exist anywhere else.
Some of those artifacts were what had allowed the Cabal to endure the cost of necromancy.
Objects that could absorb or redirect the life-draining properties of death magic, enabling their wielders to practice without paying the price in their own blood and years.
For someone like August, they represent something he's never allowed himself to want: the ability to use his gift without it killing him.
He's thought about it. Of course he's thought about it.
On the worst nights, when the pain is unbearable and the veins have spread so far he can barely look at his own hands, he's imagined what it would be like to help spirits without feeling his life drain away with each one.
To do the work he loves without it being a death sentence.
He's imagined it, and then he's put the thought away, because wanting something that badly when you can't have it is its own kind of poison.
But he's not the one trying to steal them.
Whoever is opening these rifts has access to pre-Order knowledge, ritual techniques and site locations that should have been lost centuries ago.
The power required is immense, the method brutal, and the pace reckless.
Whoever they are, they're burning through their own life force at a rate that makes August's slow decline look leisurely by comparison.
They're desperate and they're running out of time, and desperation in a powerful necromancer is the most dangerous thing August can think of. He would know.
He's been tracking them for weeks, since the first rift opened and he'd felt the wrongness of it in the air.
The violent, crude forcing of death magic had made his own power recoil.
He'd started mapping the sites, cross-referencing locations, trying to predict the next breach. He'd been getting close.
And then he'd been so focused on the rifts that he hadn't noticed the Order sending someone after him.
Which, in retrospect, was inevitable. All that death magic in the air had been a spotlight on every necromancer in the city, and August, for all his care, had never been completely invisible. Just invisible enough.
A cold draft sweeps through the room. August's breath fogs in air that had been warm a moment ago.
He isn't alone.
"I know you're there," he says quietly, without turning around. "It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."
The spirit manifests slowly, cautiously.
A middle-aged woman, translucent and flickering, wearing a floral dress with burn marks along the hem.
August recognizes her immediately, a woman who'd died in a fire three blocks away, whose spirit he'd helped cross over six months ago.
He remembers her clearly. He remembers all of them.
She shouldn't be here. She moved on. Unless something pulled her back.
"What's wrong?" August turns to face her, keeping his movements slow, his voice gentle. "Did something bring you back?"
The spirit shakes her head, her form wavering with agitation. She points at August, then makes a gesture that takes him a moment to read.
Someone is looking for him.
"The Templar," August says. "He's asking about me."
She nods. Her form flickers with distress, the edges of her blurring the way spirits do when they're feeling too much. She points at him again, then draws a hand sharply across her throat.
Danger.
"I know." August manages a tired smile, the kind he gives to spirits who are worried about him, which is more of them than he'd like. "Thank you for coming to warn me. You didn't have to."
She didn't have to. She was at rest. She was at peace. And she'd pulled herself back from that, willingly, because she was worried about the man who'd helped her get there.
The spirit drifts closer, bringing with her the familiar chill of ghostly presence.
She reaches out as if to touch his face, her expression sad and maternal in a way that makes something in August's chest ache.
She'd been kind, when she was alive. She'd run the corner store and given free food to anyone who looked hungry, and the neighborhood had mourned her with the particular grief reserved for people who made the world better just by being in it.
Her death had been senseless: a grease fire that spread too fast, smoke inhalation before she could get out.
August had found her spirit three days later, confused and frightened, trying to get back into her store.
He'd sat with her for hours on the curb outside.
Talked gently. Helped her remember who she was and where she needed to go, not with magic at first, just with patience and the willingness to be there.
When she'd finally moved on, she'd thanked him with tears in her translucent eyes, and August had sat on that curb for a long time after she was gone.
And now she's come back. Pulled herself from rest out of concern for him.
"I'm sorry," August says softly. "I'm sorry you had to come back for this. But I promise I'll be careful."
The spirit doesn't look convinced. She points at the notes and maps spread across the bed, then at the black veins on his bare arms, then at the exhaustion August knows is written all over his face, and the look she gives him is unmistakable.
It's the look every concerned person in his life has given him at one point or another, and the dead are apparently no exception.
Stop. Rest.
"I can't." He doesn't expect her to understand.
He barely understands it himself, this compulsion to keep going when his body is begging him to stop.
But the alternative is letting people die, letting spirits suffer, and he's never been able to do that.
Not when he was twelve and terrified, and not now.
"People are dying. Spirits are being ripped from the underworld against their will and forced to hurt the living. I have to stop it."