Page 1 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)
London. December 18, 1920.
C ora Walcott stared down at the remains of the Chronomancer’s head. A grisly trench of mutilated flesh where his face should have been stared back.
The faceless corpse sat in a chair, knocked flat on his back with knees still bent. Cora toed the limbs with her boot. Stiff with rigor mortis, but rot had not yet begun to bloom on the carnage. The moment a man became formerly sentient viscera had passed a couple hours ago. He’d laid in a pool of his own congealing innards since near midnight.
Amidst the gore glinted a gun. The bullet had ripped through soft pink consciousness and blasted it out of hard white bone, scraping away his face and spraying it across the tunnel walls.
Peering through the veil of time hadn’t spared the Chronomancer this fate. Someone had reduced the once fearsome time mage to meat.
“This is Moriarty, the Chronomancer?” Cora asked.
Behind her in the candlelit gloom, Teddy shifted. His eyes darted to the corners where darkness dwelled. Sweat trickled down his brow despite the underground chill. Her twin didn’t want to be in the tunnels under the Silvertown docks any more than she did.
The once thriving dockyard along the Thames was now an abandoned ruin, shell-shocked from the Great War. Unbeknownst to humans, the docks were also disputed territory between London’s rival gangs of mages, bound by the Covenant to secrecy and hiding their magical misdeeds in plain sight. The Realmwalker himself was vying for ownership.
“Do get on with the communing, Cora dear,” Teddy said into the eerie hush. “Ask the Chronomancer Mother’s questions and let’s get the bloody hell out of here.”
Teddy didn’t need his Animancy to sense that her truest desires were in full agreement. The Walcott twins’s spirits had been woven from the same thread. Animancy and Necromancy, life and death, harmonious in their symmetry.
“Do you have Mother’s interrogation questions?” Cora said.
Teddy handed her the note. Over the pink paper scented faintly of gingerbread their eyes met, and the unspoken truth passed between them. The Chronomancer’s death was the tipping point into another gang war.
The mage gangs battled constantly for dominance. Since autumn had faded to winter, the violence had only escalated. With the aftershocks of the last gang war still reverberating, one didn’t need a Sciomancer to divine the portents of more bloodshed on the horizon.
The prolonged tension that had passed as peace, balanced on the head of a pin, ended tonight.
Cora’s hands shook as she scanned Mother’s questions, gleaning what secrets the Chronomancer had been killed for.
Communing with a faceless corpse would prove challenging. But the price of not doing Mother’s bidding would be taken out in Cora’s flesh. She’d be lucky if a face was all she lost. She crumpled the note in her fist.
Another note. Another favor.
Mother’s note, summoning Cora to the docks, had arrived as they often did—at the worst time.
* * *
It had been near midnight and the jazz clubs were just getting started.
Cora had been halfway through her set playing piano at the Starlite Club, straining to follow the band’s lively tune over the drunken laughter. Payday at the factories meant a rowdier crowd. A feat in and of itself, given the typical patrons of what might generously be called a dive.
The sour tang of sweat and desperation was thick on the stale air. Men, grimy from soot and quiet misery, blew their wages on piss beer and coffin varnish. Flappers, covered in rogue and beads, preened for their groping affections. The band serenaded them all with almost decent jazz.
When the set finished to scattered applause, Cora felt the weight of Mother’s note in her pocket like a tug on a leash. Owens, an ornery crow and Mother’s intermediary, must have slipped the note to her unnoticed while she played. Scrawled in Mother’s spidery handwriting was an address that made her heart pound against her ribs.
The Silvertown docks. A death trap.
Cora wondered what corpse awaited her there and if she’d join them before morning dawned.
Simmering tensions between the Realmwalker and Verek’s gangs were reaching a boiling point, and now Mother was sending her secret Necromancer into the heart of disputed territory. Signing Cora’s death sentence with a flourish of her pen.
What was Cora being punished for? She hadn’t done anything. Lately. Inciting another gang war had certainly not been in her plans for the evening. She shoved the note back in her pocket. Another note. Another favor.
A favor that was not a favor, from a Mother who was not her mother.
The woman who insisted she call her Mother had taken Cora into her brood thirteen years ago. Mother brought orphaned mages with broken wings and spirits—like Cora, like Teddy—back into her nest and taught them an obedience she called love. Her pets, a menagerie of Bestiamancers, skulked through London and whispered tales of intrigue in her ear while she watched from her perch like the magpie she transformed into.
Mother had been the first to tell Cora the story of magic and mages. It had sounded like a fairytale to her then. But now, smoothing the wrinkles from Mother’s note, she knew it was a nightmare she couldn’t wake from.
Mother’s favors didn’t end in please , but or else . She’d built an espionage empire on such one-sided favors. Cora no longer entertained fantasies of saying no to Mother. The or else implicit to every one of Mother’s favors had burrowed under her skin and taken root.
I have only to make one call, my pet.
Cora was acutely aware how the life she’d invented for herself could be dismantled with a single call.
Money had been tucked inside her pocket along with the note. Twenty pounds. Her throat tightened. Enough to keep the wolves from the door and buy Teddy a Christmas gift.
She eyed the money warily. Mother’s favors were seldom paid, and never such a sum for Cora’s monstrous talents. Not even when she’d made Cora reanimate an exhumed banker for questioning. The corpse had not been fresh. Rancid flesh melted off its bones. Maggots wriggled from its rotting mouth and eye sockets as she tried to extract more than monosyllables from its slack jaws.
For twenty pounds, the Silvertown docks were sure to be a nasty favor. One that would haunt her. One she wouldn’t be able to clean from her hands no matter how hard she scrubbed, unable to meet her own eyes in the mirror.
But the deal was half now, half later. By the end of this wretched night, Cora could be forty pounds richer. An unimaginable sum.
She slipped the money into the pocket hidden near her heart. She’d sold her spirit before for less. Even if she loathed herself for it.
Pulling on the ermine coat she’d purloined from a matron too drunk on cordial to notice, Cora climbed out of the Starlite Club and onto the bustling street. Winter howled at her face. Clouds hung low in the dark sky, promising snow. She turned her collar against the biting chill and set off through sooty slush.
Bars belched their inebriated patrons out into the night. Passing around flasks of hooch, they stumbled back to their miserable lives or the next den of ill repute. This East End neighborhood catered to every kind of debauchery. Jazz clubs, opium dens, and brothels for myriad vices.
Ignoring drunken catcalls, she ducked behind a building and scanned the darkness. Sensing no one, she tapped the brick wall, and a hidden compartment swung open. She’d learned the hard way never to keep things where they were expected. Her supplies were cached around the city rather than the flat she shared with several other working girls.
From the brick wall Cora pulled out her most valuable possession. The cloak had cost several months’ pay and been worth every penny. Enchanted by a memory-siphoning Memnomancer, anyone who saw Cora wearing the cloak would forget what she looked like. They often mistook her tall, slender frame for a grim reaper, coming in the night to pluck from death’s spoils.
Tucking the cloak under her arm, she hailed a cab. “Where to?” the cabby asked as she slid inside.
“The Silvertown docks.”
He met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “You sure, lady?”
“Just drive.”
He pulled away from the curb, his nose wrinkling. “Blimey, what’s that smell?”
Concealing the cloak’s odor was another matter. Permeated with sewer slop, compounded over years of slinking around for Mother’s favors, the cloak was of surpassing filthiness. What some described as the foul breath of death was actually the stench of their own shit tickling their nostrils. She cracked a window.
In silence they passed rows of ramshackle houses and boarded-up factories where the Great War’s boom had busted. The headlights scarcely pierced the thick fog swirling over empty streets.
A premonition of death, resonating like the pluck of a sour note, crept from the corners of her mind to the forefront as they neared the Thames. Was it the cabby’s death? Or her own death, at last?
A familiar helplessness swept over her. She could only sense death when it was too late. No matter what she did, the outcome was always the same. She’d stopped trying countless corpses ago. Necromancy was the ultimate exercise in futility.
Worry curdled to dread by the time they parked outside what remained of the Silvertown docks. Her hand hesitated on the door handle, half-concocted excuses tumbling in her mouth. She could tell the cabby to take her back. Tell Mother the docks had been occupied, and she’d had no choice but to leave. Take the twenty pounds and buy her and Teddy the first train tickets out of London.
But if she returned empty-handed, Mother would make her pay. The next favor would be crafted for her torment. Perhaps by making her commune with another slain child. Lord Winthrop’s drowned son, a casualty of his father’s politics, frequented Cora’s nightmares. Her hands had sunk into the small cadaver’s gray flesh like wet paper, only to ask the frightened boy’s spirit questions he didn’t know the answers to.
Another senseless death.
Cora parted with two precious quid and watched the cab disappear into the fog. Donning the fetid cloak, she pulled the hood low and fastened the mask. It was the witching hour. Even the birds were silent in this still moment between night and morning. A dirty breeze drifted off the dirty water, redolent with death.
Ruins loomed in the darkness. Piers jutted out like broken finger bones into the mist-wreathed Thames. Skeletons of warehouses rose from the rubble-strewn muck like fractured rib cages and splintered spines.
Beneath the gutted foundations laid a labyrinth of tunnels, dug during the Great War under threat of German attack. Ironically, the Jerrys hadn’t bombed them; they’d bombed themselves. The ruins were a silent testament to a moment’s explosive mistake.
Little had survived the accidental TNT detonation except the tunnels underfoot. It was a smuggler’s paradise on the Thames, a blank canvas upon which to paint a masterpiece of capitalism. No wonder the Realmwalker and Verek were so eager to shed blood for it.
Cora slunk through shadows, tendrils of mist chasing her ankles, towards a precariously intact warehouse when a distant scream rent the night. She stiffened. The scream might have come from across the Thames or across the years to scrape her eardrums. In places as saturated with death as this, there was no telling the screams of the living apart from the dead.
Echoes of another scream, and another, joined in. A chorus of agonized voices rose to a shrill crescendo, then cut off. An aborted nocturne from victims silenced by the explosion.
And there, amidst the swirling fog, the rattle of an impending death grew louder. A promise in the night. The dire sensation pervaded her senses.
Her gaze swept the decimation for apparitions in the fog, but the death’s origin eluded her. Any manner of creature might be lurking in the darkness along with her. A hapless human, or an Umbramancer, a shadow amongst shadows. She searched for the glimmering outline of an illusion-casting Lumomancer or the lambent eyeshine of a Bestiamancer.
There was nothing but her fears and the fog.
It must be the rattle of her own death, beckoning her across the mud. Foreknowledge never circumvented death. She had learned that terrible lesson by now. Powerlessness was a familiar ache. Pulling the cloak tighter, she hastened around the warehouse and froze.
Voices. There were voices in the mist.
Cora flattened herself against a rusted shipping crate. Craning her neck, she saw two men huddled beneath the lone streetlamp’s halo of light, their hushed words pluming in the frigid air. Dread trickled down her spine. A clandestine meeting in disputed territory did not bode well.
One man shifted from foot to foot, his eyes darting beneath the low brim of his cap. On his jacket sleeve was stitched a golden triangle engulfed in flames, and on his hip glinted a Ferromancer’s wicked scimitar. The emblems of Verek’s gang. The metal mage was one of the Pyromancer boss’s thugs.
Apprehension forced Cora deeper into the shadows. No one could bear witness to her Necromancy except the dead. Especially not a mage from a rival gang.
The other man stood with his back to her, but she knew his face better than her own. Tall and willowy, Teddy Walcott was the polished mirror image of herself. With his cultivated flamboyance, her twin carried himself with a grace Cora had always lacked. His hands, often whimsical as he spoke, were crammed into the pockets of a plum coat that would’ve looked garish on anyone with a fraction of his self-confidence.
As Mother’s favorite pet, Teddy did her favors more openly than Cora ever had or ever would. While Cora heard the secrets of the dead, her twin heard the secrets of the living. With a touch, Teddy’s Animancy could play someone’s heartstrings like an instrument. Rile tempers. Coax fears. Inflame passions.
Mother wouldn’t risk sending her beloved Animancer into disputed territory unless their target was terribly important and supposed to be alive. Something had gone wrong. Somewhere, a corpse awaited Cora.
“You’re bloody hours late,” said Verek’s thug.
“I am never late, my dear Horace. I arrive precisely when I intend to,” Teddy said, his voice low and husky, like her own. Raking back his artfully tousled hair, his gaze swept the ruined dockyard, latching on slow shadows. “The Chronomancer is in the tunnels?”
“What’s left of him. What d’you want with his body, anyhow?” Peering around, Horace lowered his voice. “That Necromancer coming? The Unweaver?”
The moaning wind carried the name, uttered with reverential disgust, to Cora’s ears. Her nickname, courtesy of sensationalized newspaper headlines about the cloaked killer stalking the London streets, had become less grating over the years. She’d been called much worse, after all.
Only a few of the living and scores of the dead knew who the Unweaver really was. If anyone discovered Cora, mages would condemn her as an abomination and humans would execute her as a murderer. She was fairly confident she was only one of those things.
With her twin as a mage, fortunately no one suspected what she was. For now. Magic wasn't inherited, but a random happenstance of birth. Magical affinities rarely manifested more than once in an extended family. Even identical twin mages were unheard of.
And Cora intended to keep it that way. Necromancy was a secret she’d take to her grave. If only she could stay in it.
“Even a dead bird can sing,” Teddy said.
“I heard the Unweaver can raise the dead.” Horace dropped his voice lower. “He killed again last week. His filthy handprints were all over the bloke’s chest. Rotted right down to the bone, he was.”
A by-product of communing with the dead had become the Unweaver’s unwitting trademark. Her rotten handprints commemorated where death’s magic had unwoven the threads that bind.
Like most reputations, the Unweaver’s was built on misunderstandings. Cora wasn’t killing her alleged victims; only herself, piece by piece, with each death. The dead didn’t stay dead for her.
Although, in a dark, nasty part of herself, she couldn’t deny the grim satisfaction of pulling a thread and watching the tapestry unravel. Feeding from the awful energy born of entropy, as order was reduced to chaos, as lives were unwoven to waste heat that her magic channeled and corrupted.
“I feel compelled to remind you, dear Horace,” Teddy said, “that Mother wanted the Chronomancer alive. Instead, he is quite unalive. Which begs the question of how you failed in this particular endeavor.”
“Er, what?”
Teddy gave a long-suffering sigh. “How’d he die?”
Horace held out his gloved hand. Grumbling, Teddy handed him money that disappeared quickly into the thug’s pocket. “Cocky, time-warping bastard deserved it, strutting alone in our territory.”
“I would be remiss not to enlighten you, my intermittently bright Ferromancer, that the specific ownership of this particular…” Teddy swept a hand over the devastation. “Hellhole, is still a matter of contentious debate.”
“Try telling that to Verek.” Horace huffed a humorless laugh. “Boss is set on building another steel factory here, the Realmwalker’s claim on every bloody dock, railway, and road in London be damned. Well, after we nabbed us the Chronomancer for a bit of conversation—which you were late for—he, er, died.”
Died with his hands tied behind his back , Cora thought. Verek’s gang specialized in brutality. During the war the cutthroats had monopolized steel manufacturing. Verek’s Ferromancers lowered the metal’s melting temperature while his fellow Pyromancers kept the fires burning hot.
But nothing came in or out of London without passing through the Realmwalker. Mages and humans alike felt Malachy Bane’s stranglehold on transportation.
“How very inconvenient,” Teddy said. “Did you perchance acquire the Chronomancer’s Portal Key before his vague demise?”
When Horace shifted away. Teddy grabbed his arm, magic rippling from his fingers. Animancy wove patterns in the chaos of people’s innermost urges. A simple task, according to Teddy, as they all boiled down to three categories: eating, drinking, and fornicating.
The petty musings of flesh , he called it. But Cora knew how it haunted him, being privy to the secrets people kept hidden even from themselves.
“No using your magic on me, Animancer.” Horace jerked out of his grasp. “Even if we did find that Portal Key, you think we’d be handing it over to you? That key’s the only way to get to the Realmwalker.”
Cora shuddered, pulling her cloak tighter. The pieces slotted together into a full conspiracy. The dead Chronomancer had to be Moriarty, the Realmwalker’s second, the right hand of the devil himself. Verek’s thugs had done the killing and Mother’s pets were there to pick the bones clean.
Moriarty’s death was a torch tossed onto kindling dried with rivalry and cured with bloodshed. Forty pounds no longer seemed enough. No amount of money would matter if the Realmwalker killed her tonight.
As Bane expanded his Dublin smuggling empire, he had descended upon London like a dark reckoning and shoved out the competition, sometimes by unspeakably sinister means. Cora had communed with enough of Bane’s victims to know he wouldn’t make it quick or painless. One victim, after filching on a shipping contract, had been disemboweled. Slowly. Another victim, a business rival, had been dropped from ten stories through the Ritz Hotel’s glass atrium in a deafening crash. They’d found his teeth in the dining room.
In the mists on the Thames, the rattle of death grew louder.
“Is Bane aware of his Chronomancer’s untimely expiration yet?” Teddy’s light tone was coated in fear. He’d been on the receiving end of the Realmwalker’s wrath one too many times.
“You think we’d still be breathing if he did?” Horace said.
“Are you even the least bit cognizant of where Bane is right now?” Teddy said with a bite of impatience. “I thought your flaming overlord Verek was supposed to hit the Realmwalker tonight as well.”
Cora inhaled sharply. What web was Mother tangling them in? The gossamer threads of conspiracy glimmered between the gang bosses. She felt the sticky threads reaching out to ensnare her.
“That was the bloody plan,” Horace said. “We tried Bane’s office at his ritzy Emerald Club. Blasted the door open, we did, and it was just a sodding brick wall. Verek and me was in that office not but a day ago, arguing about that steel he refused to ship into Ireland. Bastard portal mage must’ve warded the door against uninvited guests.”
Teddy swore colorfully. “Did you try his personal abode?”
More money exchanged hands before Horace answered. “Got a report about where the Realmwalker’s house was tonight. Verek sent some blokes out to nab him. They said, sure enough, there it was—that Gothic house of his crammed betwixt two townhouses in Mayfair. When they got closer, it… disappeared.”
“Disappeared,” Teddy repeated in a flat voice.
“You know the stories, mate. That house of his moves .”
Cora had heard the rumors. Supposedly, the Realmwalker’s house could only be found if it was seen and only seen if it was found. Traversing to a new location across London every night, the space-distorting Choromancer’s house was virtually unfindable.
“So, Bane is alive and his second is dead?” Teddy said. “My hearty congratulations, Horace, to you and your comrades on mucking this up so spectacularly. You’ve quite blown the truce to hell. Well done.”
Memories of the last gang war were fresh beneath Cora’s eyelids. Before the human’s Great War erupted across Europe, the London mages had been embroiled in their own bitter infighting. The longstanding conflict between gangs had been like a tripwire. A strand of hair could have triggered mass bloodshed.
Instead, several strands of hair, attached to the head of Malachy Bane, had catapulted the gangs into war, leaving dozens of mages, along with a pile of curious coppers and humans, dead in its wake.
The conspicuous carnage had drawn the wrathful Mage Tribunal to London like a noose to a hangman. The nebulous group of Master mages had survived since the medieval ages as the only semblance of magical law and order. The Tribunal enforced the Covenant, often lethally, ensuring mage secrecy across generations. Their message to the London bosses was clear: peace or death.
In the smoldering aftermath, parley was called. The hierarchy of gangs had been shaken up, but together they forged a reluctant truce and divided up territories. The top three gangs—under Mother, Verek, and Bane—took the lion’s share for themselves. Lesser gangs fought over their scraps.
The truce, like most compromises, had left everyone dissatisfied.
“Yeah, yeah, Teddy. Save your breath. That truce was bullshit anyway. Now pay up and bugger off. I’m freezing my bollocks off out here.” Horace swiped the remaining money and offered Teddy a hand torch. “You’ll need this in the tunnels, mate. Though you might not wanna see.”
The thug beat a hasty retreat. Teddy’s parting threat was lost to the night.
Horace passed within arm’s reach of Cora. She pressed against the crate, her lungs burning from a held breath. If he glanced over, he’d see the Unweaver, not Cora Walcott. Only one of them would take comfort in that.
When his footfalls retreated, she peeled away from the shadows and into the streetlamp’s spectral light. Teddy was staring at a door gaping open like a mouth into the bowels of darkness. Upwind of her, he didn’t sense Cora until she was beside him.
“Bloody hell!” Eyes wild, Teddy jumped and swung a blow she barely sidestepped in time.
“Teddy, it’s me.” Tugging back her hood, she held up her hands and leapt away from another swing. “It’s only me. It’s all right. Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
He flinched away from her cautious touch, his quick breaths rising in billows. She dropped her hand, cursing herself. She knew better than to sneak up on him.
The indolent young man who had gone off to war had returned a hardened shell of himself. Horrors Teddy wouldn’t speak of had muted his exuberance, whittling him down to his animal instincts of fight or flight. He had a temper like the grenades lobbed at him in the trenches. Unexpected and destructive.
Both just shy of six feet tall, they stood at eye-level as she searched his averted face. They shared the same subtlety of features, more interesting than striking, save for their eyes. To Teddy, they were agate gemstones, hazel limned in turquoise, set within thick lashes. To Cora, they were blue pools with rotten centers.
Eyes were the window to the spirit; Cora’s had been calloused by a thousand cuts, but Teddy’s had not always been so jaded. His once brilliant eyes were now sunk into weary hollows, ringed by dark circles in the pallor of his haggard face. He looked like he’d aged years in the past month.
“Breathe, Teddy. It’s all right. Just breathe.” With careful movements, she brushed back his unruly waves of chestnut hair that matched her own. He winced but didn’t withdraw, breathing raggedly until his expression unclouded.
“I really ought to put a bell on you, Cora dear.”
She managed a weak smile. Still the consummate hedonist despite the wars, Teddy’s vibrancy was dulled tonight, and by more than a hangover, she feared. His pupils were blown wide like dark portals into the unknowable turmoil of his thoughts.
A man of appetites , Teddy called himself. Appetites that were growing more uninhibited since he returned from France.
He often regaled her with the sordid details of his amorous conquests. It wasn’t his revolving door of lovers that worried her—men and women, mages and humans; Teddy’s tastes were non-discriminating. It was the opium dens he met them in.
Was he backsliding into the pit of addiction she’d just pulled him out of? For weeks, she had watched him grow paler and thinner, screaming in his sleep, soaking the sheets in cold sweat.
Cora didn’t judge him. He had pulled her out of the pit before, too. What she considered as a weakness of character in herself, she saw as a cry for help in her twin, too proud to admit he was suffering.
“Teddy bear.” She cupped his face. “You are my favorite part of us. I’m worried about you. Are you…using again?”
He jerked away. “Oh, sod off.”
Her hand fell. Now wasn’t the time to determine whether his anger was born of fear or a relapse. “Mother’s got us tangled in something right nasty. What’s the old bird squawking about now?”
“Ah. Right. We’d best do Mother’s bidding before she pops a blood vessel.” From the pocket of his plum coat, he pulled out a familiar-looking note. “Mummy dearest sent me the conversational starters for our chat with the chap down below. Afraid he’s no longer among the living.”
“So I heard. What the hell is Mother doing with Verek? Gunning for the Realmwalker?”
“ Politics .” He offered her his arm with a flourishing bow. “I do believe Mother is most eager to hear the Chronomancer’s secrets. Shall we?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this. I sense death nearby.”
“Oh, you’ve been saying that for years. You really ought to consider a new cryptic warning.”
“We don’t have to do this, Teddy. We can feed Mother some bullshit story, go grab a drink.”
“I fear Mother personally insisted I come. If I don’t follow through, she’ll have my head. Or worse, my balls. I am inordinately fond of them. I’m just doing Mother a—”
“A favor,” she said bitterly. “I know.”
“My dear, odiferous sister.” He held a hand to his chest. Humor sparked in his eyes like a banked fire. “I merely seek to escort you upon your sepulchral duties. Would I disgrace the illustrious Walcott family name?”
The Walcott family did not, in fact, exist. Walcott was the name of the street the Sacred Heart orphanage was on, used as a placeholder on their intake paperwork. The nuns were not known for their creativity.
Teddy’s mouth curved into a sly smile. A smile that evoked a lifetime of memories. Cora found herself, as she often did, returning that smile. Glimpsing the old Teddy again, some of the unease left her. She took his arm. A tingling energy seeped into her skin. The brush of his Animancy on her heart quelled her suspicions, soothed her fears.
“No magic,” she said, squeezing him tighter when he began to pull away. She wished she could absorb the poison in his blood. Take the burden from his shoulders. Exorcise his demons.
Teddy wrapped her in a sudden, fierce embrace. She stilled. Were these the resurrecting demons of his dope habit? Without Animancy, reading his moods was like divining tea leaves. She embraced him back, basking in his warmth on this cold night. She was a dark house, empty save for its ghosts, and Teddy was the light in the window. Even if that light had dimmed.
Just as suddenly, he let her go, stepping towards the gaping maw into the tunnels. Death rattled in her ears.
“Teddy—” But her fingers were outstretched to emptiness.
Pulling her hood low, she descended the narrow stairs after him and plunged into darkness, inklings of death nipping at her heels.
Only the torch in Teddy’s hand lit their grim procession through a maze of pitch-black tunnels. Shadows deepened. Through cracks in the cement walls, the Thames leaked.
The Unweaver’s cloak was a bouquet of roses compared to the dank gloom’s potpourri of shit and decay. The stench was tangible.
A raw scream ricocheted through her senses. Cora halted midstride. “Did you hear that?”
“No, darling.” He slipped his hand into hers and a current of calming energy flowed through their interlaced fingers. This time, she didn’t stop him. Some of her fear faded as he lightened its yoke. At least she wasn’t alone in this nightmare. She fit in her skin when she was with Teddy.
With a trembling hand, he pulled out the long-stemmed cigarette holder he was never without and started smoking. “Christmas is only a week away,” he said with attempted casualness. “Shall we carry on the Walcott holiday tradition?”
“Getting sloshed before noon? Absolutely.”
“It’s how Jesus would want his birthday celebrated.” He turned to her with a hopeful expression. “Perhaps we could even stop by Mother’s house?”
“On purpose?” she groaned. “That beast doesn’t deserve your devotion, Teddy.”
“You ought to be grateful. Imagine where we’d be if Mother hadn’t taken us under her wing.”
Cora didn’t need to imagine what the fate of unwanted children was. Those not sold into the flesh trade were swallowed by the slums, chewed up and spit out into rag-covered rubbish heaps.
Descending through dark tunnels in the hotbed of disputed territory, however, Cora struggled to dredge up any gratitude. Mother would only twist it into obligation, anyways.
“I will only go to Mother’s house to burn it down,” she declared. “I’d love to set that old bird’s feathers on fire.”
He heaved a sigh. “Fine. Be cynical, as usual. But, dear baby sister, there’s also the important matter of our birthday to consider. New Year’s Eve is right around the corner.”
One day as children, Teddy had decided to change their birthday from December 21 to December 31. There’ll always be a party , Cora dear, he’d explained with a wink.
“Right you are, dear older brother. Any New Year’s resolutions?”
“My resolution is to be irresolute. Dissolute. Why make a deal with the future when the present is infinitely more titillating? Though I can’t believe we’ll be thirty.”
“Practically dead.”
“We’d best enjoy the blossoms of our youthful charms before they wilt and all our bits sag. What heights of hedonism shall we summit? What depths of debauchery shall we plunder?”
“Teddy,” she admonished, her mouth lifting in a wry smile. “What would the nuns say?”
“The same thing the Catholics always say,” he drawled. “If it feels good, stop.”
She grinned. “Should we crash the New Year’s party at the Emerald Club again?”
Cora regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth. Teddy’s smile dropped at the mention of the Realmwalker’s posh club.
Last year, they’d snuck into the Emerald Club with the passcode slipped by Ravi Shah, the Aeromancer Teddy was buggering in the Realmwalker’s gang. Slugging champagne and snorting the Phytomancer-enchanted cocaine that fell like snow, they’d twirled on the crowded dance floor, laughing so hard they’d cried.
But they had brought in 1920 shivering on the sidewalk. An irate Irishman had thrown them out just before midnight. Fitting revelry, as it had been the first New Year they’d celebrated since Teddy had come back from war.
In silence they entered a tunnel that dead-ended in a heavy door banded with iron. The deepest tunnels were incomplete, without beams to brace the earthen walls. The only thing between them and the Thames was a slab of dripping mud. She heard only their footfalls and the faint screams of the dead as they approached the door.
Teddy drew a shaky breath. The door opened with a groan of rusted hinges. “Are you scared?”
“No.” She took his torch. “I’m terrified.”
Cora stepped inside. Death crashed over her.
Sputtering candles illuminated the crypt scraped out of the mud. Elongated shadows twined on the walls peppered with gore. From a dark corner came a steady drip, drip, drip .
Death tugged Cora deeper inside. Something squelched underfoot. Blood and sinew and chunks of bone. She followed the trail to a human-shaped lump lying in a chair on the ground, as if it had been knocked backwards while sitting. Around the body glimmered a pentagram.
Teddy stepped into a puddle of gore and cursed. “I just know this will stain,” he muttered with a disgusted sound, shaking off his patent leather Oxfords.
Slowly, she neared the corpse, bracing herself for that familiar rictus grin on the face. Except, there was no face. It had been blown off, along with the top of the skull. A pulpy crater remained where the bullet had cleaved through. The shock of white hair, soaked with brains and blood, was the only suggestion of the corpse’s former humanity.
Forty pounds , Cora told herself, fighting back a wave of nausea.
A shadow flickered over them. They whipped around.
A candle. It was only a candle.
With Mother’s questions in hand, she knelt in the pool of congealing blood and removed the gloves she always wore. No sense in rotting off yet another pair. Her hands hovered over where Moriarty’s heart, the vessel of his spirit, had once beat.
She hesitated. Communing with a spirit was like living their obituary for herself. People whose lives she’d never known, whose deaths she’d never forget. The fodder for her nightmares.
Death was jarring for even the mildest of departed spirits. Communing with the newly dead was particularly unpleasant. They were not yet accustomed to the reality that all their aspirations and failures had culminated in this: a body with broken, rotting parts, a spirit drifting through the black veil into the Death Realm.
Life was the gradual return to nothingness, and death was the end of possibilities, all as inevitable as leaves falling. Yet few willingly succumbed to death’s embrace. They struggled to reconcile that their plans would go unfulfilled. Problems unresolved. Potential unrealized. Once the horror of dying subsided, though, death could be like dreaming an endless dream.
Having his face shot off would not improve the Chronomancer’s transition into the Death Realm. Steeling herself for the nightmare, Cora lowered her hands.
A clanging noise above startled them. She fell back, and Teddy steadied her before she collapsed in the gore. The shadows in the crypt seemed a living thing.
She strained to hear over her pounding heart and ragged breaths. “What was that?”
“I don’t know and I don’t want to stay to find out. Commune with him. Now .”
“It’ll take a while. His death was… traumatic.”
Teddy grimaced down at the faceless corpse. “You don’t say.”
The clanging sounded again. Either an omen of structural collapse or a very punctual Realmwalker.
“Hurry,” Teddy whimpered, guiding her hands onto the corpse.
Necrotic veins spread up her arms. Her eyes rolled back. The black threads of death pulsed in an unheard symphony, part of the countless threads woven like a veil between Realms.
Her magic reached out to part the black veil. Death reached back.