Page 10 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)
“J esus, I haven’t seen this much snow since I fought in Russia,” Bane said, driving his sleek Bugatti south on snow-covered streets.
The Christmas Eve storm had dumped a foot of snow overnight. Cora had watched it pile up on the slumbering streets from Bane’s moving house. Going to the Crossbones cemetery would have to wait.
Following their foray into Purgatory, Bane had refused to take Cora back to her flat. He insisted she stay in the Witch’s Cap bedroom atop the library tower for her own safety. Mother was after her, and Verek was after him, which meant he was after her, too.
He cut off her protests with a dismissive, “Don’t be a fuckin’ idiot.” And that was that. The bastard was not one to mince words.
After telling her, repeatedly, she could go anywhere in his house except the locked room on the second floor, Bane left without ceremony. She slept on the couch instead.
The several drams of whiskey she helped herself to didn’t chase away Purgatory’s chill, but they quieted her thoughts enough for a few fitful hours of sleep. Her dreams were of fog and Teddy, the gaping hole in his chest opening and swallowing her.
Christmas morning dawned, and with it a renewed pang in her chest. There’d be no Walcott family celebrations today. Cora wondered how deep this well of misery went. Would she drown before she reached the bottom?
She pulled herself back from the edge. There might not be champagne this morning, but maybe by tonight there’d be something worth toasting. She knew where Teddy’s spirit wandered and where his body laid. She cupped the flicker of hope with both hands against the bitter wind of doubt.
If only the weather would cooperate. The storm didn’t clear until the sun began its descent towards the snow-laden horizon.
Bane insisted they drive rather than traverse to the cemetery. He could only traverse safely if he’d been there before, and unlike Cora, he was not in the habit of frequenting graveyards. The risk of getting stuck in a chimney or plummeting from several stories was apparently greater than one desired. The cemetery would also be warded, Bane cautioned. Using magic would spring what he suspected was a trap.
His plan did not go over well with her.
“Driving will take ages in all this snow. Besides, who’d set a trap for a Necromancer in a graveyard?”
“Exactly.”
They took his Bugatti.
“This is the nicest car I’ve ever been in,” she said to fill the oppressive silence as they got in. Intimately experiencing the nude body of one’s employer lent a certain awkwardness. An awkwardness now palpable in the car’s buttery leather interior.
“I make them,” he replied.
“Legally?”
“Mostly.”
In the rearview mirror, Cora watched his house disappear. Few had likely seen it from the outside. The Victorian Gothic had a gabled roof, stained-glass windows, and a round tower peeking into a spire. Dark fish scale shingles rose from the expansive porch up three stories like a black gauntleted fist. While an imposing structure, it was too small for his sheer multitude of things.
“How is your house smaller on the outside than inside?”
He quirked a brow. “Magic.”
“Fair enough.” She twisted her gloves in the thickening silence. “Did you make the house, too?”
“Won it in a card game off another Choromancer. Originally, it was enchanted to move between set vertices. I expanded the traversing anchors into an irregular polygon around London to increase the interior angles for more spatial flexibility.”
“Naturally.” She had no idea what he’d said.
Cora burrowed deeper into her bloodstained coat and rubbed her hands together in the cooling evening. Bane tossed his scarf at her. After a moment, she wrapped it around her neck, ignoring how his evergreen scent clung to the cashmere.
From memory, she navigated them to the Crossbones cemetery. It was the oldest, and therefore quietest, cemetery in London. Long-dead bones—her favorite kind—decayed silently in their tombs, worn into anonymity over centuries.
The sky’s hard slate had cleared into a cloudless day. Soot-darkened slush gave way to powdery white along the icy Thames. Skeletal tree branches creaked under glistening snow. Flurries, kicked up by the breeze, sparkled like diamonds in the rays of the setting sun. The snow-capped buildings they passed looked like a postcard from St Petersburg.
Remembering his earlier comment, she asked, “Did you fight in Russia during the Great War?”
“Not that one.”
She blinked. The last Russian war she knew of had been the Crimean War decades before. Unless there’d been a mage war she was unaware of.
Twenty years and you haven’t aged a day . She studied his profile. With the silver threading his temples and the furrow marking his near constant frown, Bane appeared to be in his mid-thirties.
“How... old are you?” The Binding Agreement emboldened her tongue, now she no longer feared him cutting it out. Her boldness only seemed to amuse him.
“Older than you. And too old to fight in another senseless war. They’re all the same. Wealthy men using boys like cannon fodder, dangling the carrot of honor while they die face down in the fuckin’ mud.” He turned the car onto the street winding up to the cemetery gate, the line of his mouth as grim as his tone. “I don’t believe in the petty gobshite reasons men use to justify slaughter for profit.”
Cora considered pointing out the irony of his moral objections to a war he’d profited from, but decided against it. “All right, I’ll bite. What does the Realmwalker believe in?”
His hand swept over the snowy graves raised like goosebumps on a giant’s sloped back. “I believe that millions of years ago, this was all at the bottom of an ocean. In another million years, it all will be again. Anything that happens between now and then is insignificant.”
And people call me cynical. “A nihilist,” she said at length. “Cheerful.”
“Does the Necromancer disagree?”
“Oh, not at all. Humanity is a transitory plague. Bound to drive ourselves to extinction sooner or later.”
He glanced at her with a half-smile. “Cheerful.”
Snow crunched under the tires on the unplowed lane to the cemetery. What remained of the day was a furnace light of sunset sinking into the horizon. Not for the first time, she wondered why Bane was spending Christmas going to a graveyard with a stranger who, until yesterday, had been his enemy.
“If you really believe everything is insignificant, why are you here now? Why bother with, well, any of it?”
“That’s simple. Power.” He looked askance when a laugh escaped her lips. “What? It’s the truth. Either you have power, or you’re controlled by those who do.”
“Oh, I am aware.” Her smile waned. “So that’s it? Power?”
“Not just any kind of power. Money is the easiest currency of power and the least worth having. It’s a lie we’ve all agreed upon. Metal chips and dyed paper that only have worth because we give it worth. But magical power is intrinsically valuable. It’s the hardest power to get and therefore the most worth having.”
“But there are limits to the magic you can wield, Bane. We don’t understand magic enough to increase it beyond those limits.”
“Don’t we? Magic operates on the same fundamental laws of nature as everything else. It takes energy to weave chaos into order and releases energy to unweave it back. It’s the same equilibrium found throughout the universe, from atoms to threads of magic. Everything that exists is a rearrangement of the same basic building blocks.”
Her brows climbed to her hairline at this peek inside the Realmwalker’s head. “You’re really taking the magic out of magic.”
“What’s magic but a natural phenomenon we don’t yet have a scientific explanation for? To the ancient Greeks, lightning was the wrath of Zeus. To us, it’s an electrical discharge when warm and cold air mix. What we call our spirit, a distillation of magic, is just nerves in a meat casing. Give it another century and there’ll be no magic left.”
“After the Great War, a century might be generous.”
“Aye. Technology will only make the destruction more efficient, until magic is just another resource to exploit, a tool wielded by the few against the many. Myself, I’d rather be one of the few than the many.”
“I’m sure many men will feel that way. Do you also suffer delusions of moral authority?”
The whisper of a smile curved his mouth. “Not lately. Though, people aren’t above nature’s fundamental laws. We’re only more complicated apes.”
She caught her own mouth curving. It wasn’t every day she chatted about the end of mankind with someone as jaded as herself. “Oh?” she found herself saying with a growing smile. “Pray tell.”
He glanced over, and his lips rose with hers. “Take romance, for example. Romance is an unnecessarily elaborate mating ritual. Marriage is mate-guarding behavior codified on paper, a financial transaction to ensure paternity for the inheritance of shite we don’t need to people we don’t care about.”
“I can only imagine your take on sex.”
Perhaps it was the temptation of his near-full smile, or the car’s warm intimacy, or temporary insanity that made her blurt the words. Words that lingered in the crackling silence as her face heated.
His gaze slid to hers. A sly grin tugged on his mouth. “Reproductive instinct driven by involuntary muscle spasms.”
Cora laughed. “I didn’t take you for such a romantic, Bane. You are… not what I was expecting.”
“And what’s that?”
“Honest. Maybe a bit too honest.”
“No such thing. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone just said what they fuckin’ mean.”
“ Horrendous .” Another laugh escaped. “Absolutely horrendous, that’s what it would be like. Hearing the unfiltered thoughts of the dead is bad enough. To hear that from the living like Teddy does—”
Her laughter died. Sorrow slashed through her. They’d come to collect Teddy’s corpse. He wouldn’t be hearing anything again unless they somehow managed to pull this off.
They pulled up to the cemetery gates piled with snow. Turning off the car, he slung an arm over the seat back and faced her. His fingertips brushed her shoulder, and she shifted away, feeling flushed despite the cold fogging their breath. His nearness accosted her senses.
“Try it,” he said. “It’s liberating. I’ll ask you a question. You tell me the truth. The unvarnished truth.”
The corners of her mouth lifted at the absurdity. “All right.”
Gilded by the setting sun, the angles of his face were too hard to be strictly handsome, but there was a devilish allure to the curve of his mouth, the feel of his body sliding against hers in a tub of pure gold, a firm ridge pressing into her belly.
“Do you want to fuck me?”
“ What ?” Breath rushed out of her lungs and her heart took off at a gallop. “Wh-why are you asking?”
He gazed at her with the full intensity of his regard, as if she mystified him. “Because I’m not sure.” His eyes fell to her lips, parted on an indrawn breath. “And I want to be.”
The hypnotic pull of his gaze held hers captive, conjuring dark promises of tangled limbs and the slick heat of unrealized pleasures. Anticipation permeated the air between their swirling breaths. Silence, but for her thundering heartbeat, grew heavier.
For a moment—only a moment—Cora entertained the impossibility. What if she said yes? How would it feel to unravel the self-control of the most powerful man in London? The temptation that had been ignited in her veins was now aflame. An incriminating blush lit her cheeks.
Decades she’d spent fortifying her defenses, and he’d toppled them with a single question. A question that burned in his depthless eyes as he weakened her resolve, brick by brick. A question she had the urge to answer by crushing her mouth against his.
Unthinkingly, she had drifted closer. He reached out and stroked her cheek with a featherlight touch.
The memory attacked without warning. A clammy hand silenced her scream. She was pushed onto her knees, her tears soaking the stained mattress —
Cora gasped. She reared back until the door handle bit into her spine. Bane stilled, eyeing her like a skittish animal he was trying not to spook. His hand fell.
She dragged in a breath before panic took flight. She wasn’t in Felix’s squat, but in Bane’s Bugatti, with her new boss who was trying to manipulate her. As Felix had. As Mother had. He might be caressing instead of coercing, but he was prodding for weaknesses to exploit all the same. And she’d melted into a puddle at his crude question.
Cora conceded that, in that isolated moment, she’d felt attraction towards him. Irrational, foolhardy attraction. But attraction was a concession she was unwilling to make in their relationship. However irregular of a polygon that relationship might be.
The twinge in her side reminded her that a few days ago, this man had broken her ribs and labeled her a vinegary spinster as she fell apart in her brother’s empty flat.
Still, the attraction remained. Bloody idiot spinster. “I won’t,” she answered finally.
Intrigue flared in his eyes. Her answer had given too much away. He saw her long silence for what it was—consideration. He heard her terse words for what they were—confession.
Leaning closer, his gaze roved over her wary features and lingered on her lips. “That wasn’t the question,” he murmured. “Yes, or no?”
The answer haunted the tip of her tongue as her traitorous body slanted forward. “I won’t.”
“Why?”
You scare me. She shrank back not because of the things he’d done, but the possibilities of what he could do to her. What she wanted him to do to her. All the unspoken pains and pleasures and dark desires smoldering in his eyes that begged to be satisfied.
“This is…” She licked her lips, and his gaze followed the arc of her tongue. “A business relationship.”
His mouth, a whisper away, stole her breath. For a long moment she feared and hoped he would kiss her.
“Very well.” Pulling away, he cleared his throat and adjusted his tie. The embers of desire were banked as his impassive mask slid back on. “That’s sorted. Think of how much time we just saved.”
The uproar inside Cora made her think it was anything but sorted or timesaving. But the brief fantasy had burst, and reality crashed down in its place.
She flinched when he withdrew his arm. His brow creased. With a slow, deliberate motion, he reached into his pocket and handed her the Portal Key. “In case anything happens.”
She pocketed it. “Does everyone in your gang have a Portal Key to your house?”
“No, that’s the only one.”
“Don’t you need it?”
“I don’t need a fuckin’ key to get anywhere.” The Realmwalker stepped out of the car. Cold air blasted her as the door slammed shut.
She released a long breath, her composure in tatters. The moment was effectively over. In the yawning silence, she chastised herself for how easily he’d disarmed her. She’d need to be more careful. Yet, watching him round the car, a tendril of regret tugged on her. One she promptly severed.
Whatever that was, she was not fond of the development. She mentally laid the brickwork for more and higher walls.
Climbing out of the Bugatti, she pulled her ermine coat tight against the chill. Brisk wind hit her face like the slap she was in desperate need of. She was here to collect Teddy’s corpse, not fantasize about her boss.