Page 11 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

W hile the western horizon swallowed the sun, the eastern horizon birthed a full moon. The menacing orb rose, casting a haunting luminescence over the Crossbones cemetery.

The moaning wind blew flurries around Cora as she waded through shin-deep snow to Bane. The iron gates were locked, of course. Rather than rusting the lock off and risking the suspected wards, Cora set upon it with her picks. With the nimble fingers of a street-vetted thief, she listened for the delicious snick of tumblers falling into place, picking the lock in under a minute. The gates creaked open with the protest of rusted hinges.

Mausoleums and crypts, their names lost to the march of time, rose like weathered knuckles through the blanket of snow. Smaller graves peeked through, their stones rolled out of the Thames and carved by chisel, if they’d been carved at all. There was little grandeur for the paupers interred in this unconsecrated ground.

Death was a faint current humming against her skin. The centuries-dead were peaceful. Muffled by time and stone, their names and voices had faded into obscurity. Atop a knoll, the gloomy sepulcher Teddy’s damned spirit had shown her came into view. A forlorn edifice, grimy from soot and neglect, the engravings were a forgotten memory.

She wouldn’t let herself think: What if Teddy isn’t there?

A sudden sense of foreboding crackled like lightning about to strike. The air was laden with the Profane.

“Stay close.” Bane interlaced their gloved fingers. “Might need to traverse away quickly.”

The slog up the knoll was grueling. Her shins seemed to find every single snow-buried headstone. Clumsy as a newborn foal, she tripped and trudged behind Bane with considerably less grace.

“Jesus, woman.” He hauled her up after she stumbled again. “Do you want to get frostbite?”

Boots soaked, teeth chattering, and frozen limbs bruised, Cora thought perhaps the numbness of frostbite would be preferable.

A woman’s bloodcurdling scream filled her ears and stopped her short. “Did you hear that?”

Shaking his head, he scanned the moonlit cemetery. A dead woman’s scream, then.

While the newly dead clambered for any connection to life, the centuries-dead were reticent. Coaxing a word out of a desiccated corpse could take hours. Some might quietly pine for life, craving its remembered sensations, but this corpse demanded it. From her unmarked grave beneath the snow, she screamed her death’s injustice. Murdered at the hands of her lover, vengeance kept her tethered to the Living Realm by a single, furious thread.

A booming caw startled Cora. The crow flew overhead, a black streak across the full moon, and landed on a skeletal branch. Cocking its head, the crow watched her with a lambent eyeshine that made her pulse race. One of Mother’s pets, come to peck at their entrails.

“Owens,” she whispered. “Mother’s second.”

They exchanged a look. Bane bent down and hurled a snowball. The crow flew away with an affronted squawk. Definitely Owens.

Cor-a , came a voice like liquid darkness. Cor-a …

Fear clawed at her. Had someone spoken, or had the voice insinuated itself into her mind? Whipping around, she searched for the voice’s source amidst the graves, but the moon’s glaring reflection on the snow blinded her. She stumbled into a buried headstone and fell on her arse in a puff of snow.

Grumbling, Bane reached down to help her. She went to take his hand when her gaze honed on movement over his shoulder. She gasped.

He spun, putting her behind him. “It’s a tr—”

The gunshot sent him flying backwards. He hit a crypt with a brutal thud and sprawled at an unnatural angle. Grimacing, he rolled onto his side and clasped his bleeding shoulder.

She dashed over and took his arm. Warm blood gushed through her fingers, dripping onto snow and melting small crimson craters in the white. “Traverse away! Now .”

“I can’t,” he said between clenched teeth, his face pale and drawn. “Something’s wrong— The bullet is— draining me.”

On the periphery of her vision, she saw something that skidded her heart to a stop. Emerging like ghosts from the crypts were half a dozen men. Their clothes ranged from fine suits to worker’s rough-spun, but their masks were identical. Smooth, bone white ovals with slitted eye holes and the lipless suggestion of a mouth.

Cora was outnumbered and Bane was incapacitated, brought down by a horrifying bullet. She reached for the knives she’d recovered from Bane’s office, her frantic eyes searching for a lock for the Portal Key.

More masked men poured out of sepulchers. Insidious and insectile, they staggered and lurched like two-legged praying mantises. Cora flung a knife into the nearest man’s chest. Even with the metal buried hilt-deep between his ribs, he kept coming, as if in a trance.

Cor-a , came the voice from nowhere and everywhere. Cor-a …

“Reanimate.” Bane gnashed his teeth as he struggled to unholster his gun. “I’ll— get Teddy. Do it .”

“I can’t!”

Reanimation was tricky even with a fresh corpse. The dead had to be obliging and the threads of their life intact enough to reweave their body and spirit. Willingness and intactness plummeted after centuries in the ground. The long dead couldn’t be bothered from, if not their eternal slumber, then their eternity of non-existence. The threads of their lives had been unwoven long ago. The long dead stayed dead.

The masked men were closing in. They were surrounded.

Over her drumming heart and their plodding footfalls, Cora heard the murdered woman’s scream. Instinct kicked in. Eyes rolling back and necrotic veins webbing, she called out to the dead in their nameless graves.

The earth pulsed with their bones, faint and distant. Cora beckoned the murdered woman. The rage infused into her bones stirred in reply. With immense concentration, Cora’s death magic grasped that single, furious thread.

Unweaving came naturally to her—sometimes too naturally—but reanimation required the precision of weaving, like threading the eye of a needle with her non-dominant hand while hanging upside down. It was so much easier to tug than tie.

Gunshots burst. Fists thwacked. Footsteps approached.

She was out of time.

One by one, her magic pulled the unraveled threads of the woman’s life tight. But the threads, in deep states of decay, unwove as quickly as she wove them.

An arm grabbed Cora and she pitched sideways. The threads unraveled. She tapped into her magic reserves and drained them, frantically weaving the threads of the woman’s life back together, knitting decrepit body with its betrayed spirit.

The woman’s withered remains crawled out of the earth. Yellowed bones on white snow stacked into a crumbling, shambling skeleton. Cora tugged the woman’s skeleton by her threads and launched her at the man who’d grabbed her. The skeleton tackled him and without a sound they fell, old bones snapping and falling apart on top of him.

The other dead remained taciturn in their nameless graves at Cora’s desperate summoning. They’d spent far longer dead than alive; their bones were no longer eager vessels to pour their spirits back into. Accustomed to the darkness, they were reluctant to return to the light.

Cora didn’t give a damn. Her summons was a command, not a question. She forced her will upon them like an unmoving boulder. Blood thudded in her ears and the awful energy of death coursed in her veins. Grave by grave, she overpowered their resistance.

The earth shifted. Ancient bones clawed out of the snow. The entombed remains convened aboveground, reassembling as her skeletal marionettes, pulled by the strings of their death.

Cora unleashed the horror of her undead protectors. The tide of death surged upon the living under the luminous orb of the full moon.

Masked men fought skeletons in an eerily quiet skirmish. The crumble of bone. The crunch of snow. The grunt of impact as the men were dragged down under a pile of writhing bones.

The living’s weapons were useless against the dead. Even with femurs and skulls lopped off, the skeletons were undeterred.

Their dismembered pieces thrashed and came back together, but incorrectly. Cora lacked the finesse for weaving even in the best circumstances. Now, she was overtaxed, her concentration spread too thin for such intricacies. She wove together whatever threads were closest. Speed over accuracy.

Ribs reattached to femurs. Mandibles to clavicles. Finger bones to vertebrae like crooked fins.

The result was an ambulatory atrocity of tangled, mismatched limbs. A tottering army of human bones in inhuman configurations. Mountains of shambling skeletons swallowed up the fallen masked men.

Splintered bones pierced flesh. Blood and moonlight spilled on the snow while the dead plodded onward.

Cora gorged herself on the energy released from the men’s deaths, replenishing her drained reserves. She shivered at the unsavory delight. Channeling the awful energy pumping through her necrotic veins, she wove the dead’s frayed threads like a cat’s cradle, reassembling skeletons and summoning more to rise.

Cor-a …

Something knocked her back. Concentration broken, the skeletons crashed to the ground. All but the murdered woman. Anger kept her alive. She flung herself at Cora’s attacker and together they collapsed, pulverized bone mixing with snow flurries.

The bones not yet turned to dust reformed into a misshapen monstrosity. Hip bone reattached to skull. Shoulder blades to kneecaps. Tibia to sternum.

Cora looked down at her fallen attacker. His white mask was cracked, revealing a haggard face and closed eyes, moving rapidly from side to side.

On a groan, the man’s glassy eyes slitted open. He staggered onto his elbows and looked down at the partial skeleton pinning him. Horror dawned on his features. Flailing, he screamed like he’d awoken from a nightmare to find himself in a worse one.

Another man dropped at her feet. Now unmasked, his features were slack and his eyelids fluttering. A skeleton impaled him with the jagged edge of a broken humerus. His eyes widened, darting between the weapon in his hand and the bone in his belly. Whimpering, he slumped over in a puddle of his own innards.

The skeletons lurched and bowled the masked men down, clearing a path for Bane. Hunched over his wounded shoulder, he trudged through the bloodied snow to the sepulcher. Groans and cries pierced the night.

The last masked man fell.

Riding a wave of rancid euphoria, Cora relaxed her stranglehold on the dead. They crawled, in bits and pieces, back to their graves. She looked around in mortification. The cemetery had been desecrated with the remains of the long and freshly dead.

On shaking legs, she followed the trail of Bane’s blood to the sepulcher. Breathing hard and fast, she staggered the final steps to where he leaned against the grimy tomb, grimacing in pain.

A metal grate blocked Cora from where her brother’s body might not lie. After feasting on death, she rusted the grate into flecks with a brief touch. The heavy stone door she struggled to pry open, feeling Bane’s gaze on her profile.

“You are— a fearsome thing to behold, Cora.”

Ignoring his morbid awe and the flip of her stomach, she shoved the stone aside and tumbled in. The stench of decay, though familiar, was a test of her fortitude. Bile rose. She covered her mouth.

Oh god, am I too late again?

Death had never felt so permanent as she took in Teddy’s decomposing body on the stone slab.

Winter had not prevented the onset of putrefaction. Rot bloomed on blue-tinged flesh. The hole in his chest had sunken into a festering cavern where his beautiful heart had once beaten. Indisputably, Teddy had perished.

Her twin, her only hope, rotting alone in a cold tomb.

Bane hoisted Teddy’s body off the slab. “The key!” came his voice from far away, strained and urgent. “The key— take us to the club.”

Cora unfroze. The nearest lock was a gate around the neighboring tomb. She jammed the Portal Key into it and turned right.