Seth started out of his sleep, breathing hard. Gentle sunlight was on the horizon through the windshield, but the sky was still only just giving way from star-speckled black to the soft purple haze that would become the crystal blue of day. The ever present smell of coffee filtered into his nose. Jessica looked over at him, she already had her Ray Bans on for the drive. “You okay?”

Seth nodded, reaching down and turning the switch to bring his chair upright. “Just another dream about Emma.”

Jessica made a concerned face before looking back to the road. Ahead of them stretched endless highway, capped on the horizon by a dark line of snow-mantled peaks through which the beams of the morning sun shone. All around was a relatively empty plain, speckled with snow that hadn’t quite yet stuck for the winter. Seth looked at the temperature on the dashboard. Twenty degrees. Not bad for dawn, he guessed.

“You really need to let yourself stop worrying about it,” said Jessica. “She’s safe, and that’s all that matters for now. She could be in a place a whole lot worse.”

“The place she’s in is still pretty bad.”

Jessica sighed. He could see her cranking her grip on the wheel. “It’s not like we had any other options. Especially not once I told the Order what happened.”

“When do you think the Order will be able to get… whatever it is out of her?”

“Honestly? Not until next All Hallow’s Summit.”

Jessica referred to the reason Ben and Olivia had been less than helpful a few months ago during the incident with the shamans and coven. It was some worldwide gathering of all magicians, apparently so important that only active field agents like Jessica were allowed to not attend. “That’s a year away.”

“And it might be longer. You need to understand that what’s inside her isn’t just some demon taking her for a joyride. Exorcisms like that are a joke, and she’d be right back on her feet already. It’s not even a demon-lord inside her. What’s inside her is something my Order doesn’t deal with. That’s why the other Orders helped make the vault.”

“But maybe I could have done something differently. Maybe if I hadn’t run off with Nicole…”

“Hey, I’m the one who needs to take the blame for that. You checked out of the hospital early and I failed to notice.”

The miles continued to fade away, the mountain and the town beneath it growing on the horizon. Grand Junction 1 mile. “That’s not your fault. I was the one who followed her.”

“In the middle of a mass shooting by rogue hunters. I don’t think you can rightly take blame for that.”

“I should have known something was wrong.”

“She pulled the same shit with a kid in Missouri. She’s good at what she does, and very strong. I don’t know how much of her capabilities you saw, but liches aren’t anything to fuck around with. They’re abnormally strong in one specific area of magic, based upon how their phylactery is built. For all you know hers could have been enchantment or illusion. You’re not to blame.”

Seth turned the heat in the car up just a little bit more. “Then what does that make me? Aside from her trick where she paralyzed me… It wasn’t like it was the toughest fight of my life or anything?”

“Lucky,” said Jessica. “Lucky she’d only had a year or so to get used to her abilities, and clearly without training. That’s why I’m teaching you magecraft. When she comes back, she’ll be stronger. A lot stronger. A year displaced from the Intersection is a lot of time to journey and learn. Some liches choose to do it of their own volition in order to increase their strength.”

“Great vacation talk.”

There was a long pause before Jessica laughed. “Right.” The road curved southeast. “Look. Don’t dwell on what happened. Emma is safe, and she will taken care of the moment the Orders figure out how to do so safely. Okay?”

“Okay.” Seth watched as the mountainous landscape moved by, growing ever brighter and brighter under the coming light of day. The Colorado landscape was beyond gorgeous.

“Oh, holy fucking hell!” He shouted, grabbing his forehead as pain lanced between his eyes.

“Seth?” Jessica immediately began to pull off to the shoulder.

He ducked down, almost putting his head between his knees. His skull felt like it was locked in a squeezing vice, and the greatest point of pain was right in the center of his forehead. This wasn’t a wasp-sting like he’d felt when first opening his third eye—this was full-on burning, blistering agony. Seth clutched at his head, eyes screwed shut as the car rolled to a stop, then threw open the door and crawled out on his knees, heaving his guts into a patch of snow.

The pain surged even brighter in his head and he heaved twice more, then lay there curled up into the fetal position, unaware of anything around him. He heard a ringing, rushing roar in his ears, and his heart pounded in his chest. He heaved again, this time with nothing to expel from his stomach, only wracking dry heaves.

Through the roar he could just barely hear Jessica chanting spellwords, but whatever she was doing had no effect. The pain spread throughout his entire body, his muscles spasming, his joints twisting. Then he heard a single word cut through it.

“Somni.”

The world blinked out of existence.

***

When Seth came to, his throat felt raw from bile, and his entire body felt sore from the seizure. He blinked slowly, looking around. He was in a motel room, wood-paneled and looking like something someone on the run from the law might stay in. The bed to the right of his was unoccupied, but Jessica’s jacket lay on it.

He groaned, then pushed himself out of bed and walked to the bathroom, where he started rinsing his mouth out. Second-round gas station jerky did not taste good at all. He looked at his reflection in the mirror and jumped. The mirror had a yellow haze all over it. He recognized that. That was an aura of divination. His eyebrows arched high. His third eye was open again! He wheeled around, concentrating, looking for other magic in the air.

The ever-present ambient magic floated like dust motes in the air, and all the colors seemed sharper and brighter than before, just like the first time he had opened his third eye. Forgetting all about the last bit of the taste, he left the bathroom and the motel room, walking out onto the balcony that surrounded the building. Across the parking lot, he could see Jessica and her intense blue-white aura talking to a man at the office of the motel.

Jessica looked up to see him, and waved before returning to her conversation. This was good. This was progress. He’d started to worry that the blindness would be permanent. Apparently all it took was a seizure. Seth rubbed his lower back. Still stiff and sore.

But the splitting pain in his head was entirely gone, along with the waves of nausea it had induced in his stomach. He could handle sore. Seth rested his elbows on the railing, staring out at the mountains that overshadowed the town to the south—endless waves of stone and snow marching on to the edge of the world.

He was about to close his third eye when he saw something. The sky changed. For a brief moment, the clear blue of early morning flashed orange, like the ambiance of an enormous explosion. A moment later it was all back to normal. Seth swallowed and closed his third eye. Jessica was on her way up, and when she got there, she saw my puzzled expression.

“What’s going on, Seth?”

“I just saw an enormous aura,” he replied, scratching my head and staring over the mountains.

“What color?” Jessica leaned on the railing as well.

“Orange.”

She rubbed her face, sighing.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the color of necromancy.”

“Like zombies and stuff?”

“Yeah.” She stared out at the southern horizon for a long moment. “Nothing to do about it, though.” She turned and walked back into the room, leaving me confused. Seth followed her.

“Nothing to do?”

“Yeah.” Jessica grabbed her jacket off the bed and paused there, one hand over her shoulder with the jacket, the other on her hip. “Wild magic happens all the time, especially in places without a lot of people. There’s no telling what caused that—there are dozens of creatures that give off auras like that. It’s not our job to hunt them. That’s what the Green Wardens and the Bloodknights and the Enclave of Saint Brigid do. That’s what Hunter-33 does. And if we did, we’d just be stomping into its territory unprepared and would probably die.”

Seth nodded. “It just seemed… big.”

“Even more reason to not mess with it. Come on. We’re less than a day from Telluride. We’ll get there by late afternoon.” Jessica looped her arm through his as she walked past and they left the motel room together.

***

They rode the entire way through a series of snow-encrusted valleys, giant drifts off the side of the road. Nature had decided to unload here. Good for snowboarding, not so great for Seth’s growing aversion to the cold. He resisted the urge to open my third eye the whole way. He didn’t want to see another giant orange flash and be beset by simultaneous streams of curiosity and concern.

“So you’ve never really talked about necromancy before.”

Jessica gave him the most serious look he’d seen from her the whole ride.

“What?”

“It’s not really a great subject.”

Seth felt a sense of morbid curiosity. “Why?”

“Well, for one, it’s a field of theory a lot more than it is of practice. Necromancy is under heavy regulation by the Orders.”

“Why?”

“You really pulling a five-year-old on me?”

He shrugged and tried to offer an innocent grin. She rolled her eyes.

“We’ll start with the basics then. One. Necromancy causes cancer. And that’s just being adjacent to or doing the casting of quote-unquote traditional necromancies. Being targeted by necromantic-charged energy is even worse. Like lying under an X-ray for twenty-four hours. Though, there is strong debate over whether that’s actually necromancy doing that or the fact that you’re pulling energy from the Negative Plane nine times out of ten to use necromancy.” She looked over to me. “I wasn’t wanting to hold class while we were on vacation, you know.”

“And I wasn’t wanting to have a seizure.” Seth smirked. He was even more curious now, as his understanding of magic was extremely limited—childlike, even—compared to Jessica who had been training her entire life.

She let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s governed by what are called the Grimm Laws. They were agreed upon during some Summit in the eighteen hundreds. Haven’t changed much since.”

“What are they?”

“Last question. All they are is a set of rules that makes practicing necromancy… palatable. Hard limits on how much life force of creatures you can use, what creatures you can use, what you can call up, things like that. Also limits evocation, too, because several necromancy spells are technically evocations. You’re not allowed to use them offensively, though exceptions are made in situations of life-and-death.”

“You know any?”

“I said last question. But yes, I know how to cast a few.”

“Can you teach me?”

Jessica looked at him with a single raised eyebrow. “Absolutely not. Especially not until you’ve learned to not backblast. Like at all. You don’t want to get hit with a Negatively charged evocation.”

“Fair.”

“You done? I don’t like talking about necromancy. I just… Don’t.”

Seth stared out at the road ahead as they drove east. It was nearly noon, and they were nearly there, but he had a strange feeling. He glanced over at Jessica. Her eyes were on the road, not on him. Hiding his concentration as much as he could, he opened his third eye. Seth just wanted to see if the aura would still be there, if it was a one time thing or not. The veil was lifted from his eyes, and he saw the world in its full magical glory once again.

The sky was glowing orange and black.