Page 12 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

T ogether, they dragged Teddy’s dead weight, flesh slippery and limbs stiff, across the threshold into the Emerald Club office. Cora felt herself decay from the inside out as she carried her brother. Four days and a lifetime since she’d last held him.

They fell inside. Teddy’s body thudded on the floor. Bane collapsed in an armchair. Cora slammed the door closed and took in the full horror of her twin’s corpse. Sticky sweet rot on bloated limbs. Empty eyes.

If her reanimation abilities were stronger than she’d thought, then maybe… She knelt beside Teddy. After a deep, shuddering breath, she planted her hands on either side of his gaping chest. Sepulchral energy coursed through her black veins. Channeling her magic, she reached out to reweave the decomposing threads of his life.

The awful energy spiked, rotting a blackened perimeter around the hole where his heart had been.

She cried out and fell back. His spirit wasn’t in the Death Realm to reanimate his body. She’d only made it worse. Too late.

“What do I do?” she shrieked. “Oh god, his body! His body is— And your wound—”

“Get Anita Tambo.” Bane winced, grabbing his bloody shoulder. “Upstairs.”

Cora sprinted from his office into the unlit, unoccupied swankiness of the Emerald Club. Bane’s palace of ill-gotten gains held a refined extravagance that made the Starlite look like a backwater hovel. Emerald and gold streaked past as she ran, shouting, “Anita! Help!”

Hunting for a staircase, she rounded the gold-plated bar, crowned by shelves of sparkling glasses and bottles, and wove around mahogany tables and leather chairs, ducking into curtained-off rooms with emerald satin walls and shining mirrors.

At last, she found a staircase. “Anita Tambo! Help!”

Above, a door opened. A pair of heels clacked down the stairs. “This better be bloody good,” grumbled a throaty voice with an East End accent. “Got me a Christmas present I ain’t unwrapped yet.”

A gorgeous woman appeared, wearing only a crimson negligee and a scowl. Her ebony skin and riotous dark curls gleamed in the light spilling down the stairwell. “I’m Anita bloody Tambo. Who’s asking?” Cocking her hip to the side, she eyed Cora up and down. Her plucked brows drew together in puzzlement. She tapped a manicured nail to her siren red lips. “You look real familiar, love. Say, have we fucked?”

“What? No. It’s Bane—he’s been shot. Come quick!”

“Blimey, what’s happened to Mal?”

They dashed to his office. Anita stopped short in the doorway, her dark eyes widening at Teddy’s corpse on the floor and Bane bleeding in a chair. Slouched back with his eyes screwed shut, his dark copper hair swept across his brow, creased with pain. One hand gripped his wounded shoulder, the other hung limp at his side, blood dripping down to the rug.

Cora had seen Malachy Bane unclothed, but she never thought she’d see him like this: Vulnerable.

“What the hell is going on, Mal?” Anita belted a silk robe over her lingerie. “And who’s the broad?”

“Bleeding here, Anita. A little help?”

“Oh, right you are, boss.”

“Something’s off. The bullet is— draining me.”

Anita hovered her hands on either side of his shoulder. When she stepped back, the gushing blood had slowed to a drooling trickle. “Something’s real off about this bullet, Mal. It’s resisting my m—” She glanced at Cora. “I can’t stop the bleeding. Not all the way.”

Realization struck Cora. Anita Tambo was a blood mage. Sanguimancers could control the flow and chemistry of blood. Such powers over the circulatory system lent themselves to certain occupations—medicine, or as was often more lucrative, prostitution.

The blooming flower tattooed on Anita’s forearm suggested the latter. The brand of the infamous Gilded Lily, a world-renowned brothel of Sanguimancers and Animancers amorously trained in blood lust and other carnal artforms. Unbeknownst to their human clientele, of course.

“You’re a blood charmer?” Cora said, and Anita tensed. “Please, you’ve got to do something for Teddy. Preserve his body. Keep him safe. Please .”

Anita stared at her like she’d sprouted a second head. “Mal, how come this human knows so much?”

“She’s Teddy Walcott’s twin.”

Understanding unknit Anita’s brow. The Covenant’s secrecy mandate wasn’t often enforced for close relatives, unless otherwise provoked. A mage’s human sibling recognizing her affinities was much less concerning. Teddy’s decomposing body, however, was another matter.

“ That Teddy? Poor sod. Teddy is deady. How’d he croak?” Anita nudged him with her slipper. His body flopped over, revealing the gaping chest and rotting flesh. She drew back on a gasp. “Oi, that’s some bad luck, there. Certainly ain’t the cat’s meow now. Pity.”

“Fuckin’ cake eater,” Bane grunted.

“Cake eater he may have been, Mal. But Teddy was also a connoisseur of eating pussy.”

While Teddy had arguably slept with half of London, that was the last thing Cora had expected or wanted to hear. She shook her head in an effort to unhear the words.

“Oh.” Anita seemed to remember Cora was there. “Sorry. About your brother and all.”

Cora let the condolences slide off her like rain on an oilskin. All anyone could seem to say about Teddy’s death was sorry. It didn’t change anything. “Please. Can you help him?”

Following Bane’s nod, the Sanguimancer knelt beside Teddy and passed her hands over his body. His blue-tinged skin paled as the blood froze in his veins. He looked even more lifeless. Anita shot Bane a worried look. “This what I think it is? God damn . The Profane Arts. This gotta do with the gang war?”

“I think not.”

“Can you sense what cursed him?” Cora asked, desperate.

The Sanguimancer closed her eyes and touched the corpse. Nothing happened. Her brows pinched together. “Huh. I can’t. Real powerful magic block all over the body. I can’t lift it or sense what’s under it. I preserved his blood, though, so he should keep for a few days. Best put him on ice. Oi, Dimitri!” Anita called out. “Dimi, we need you in here!”

Footsteps thudded nearer. A giant filled the doorway. His massive body was banded with muscles that strained against his aquamarine tunic. A heavy brow brooded over the slits of his eyes as he skimmed the room with the stoicism of an experienced killer.

“Dimitri Bocharov, this is— what’s your name, love? Right. Cora . She’s Teddy’s twin.”

“Er, hello.”

Dimitri’s large head swiveled to her. Dispassionate eyes flicked over her and away. “What happen?” he asked Bane in a thick Slavic accent, the tenor of his voice contrasting with his considerable bulk.

“We were attacked in a graveyard while— recovering Teddy’s body.”

“Who attack? Verek gang?”

“No one I recognized. Not mages. They would’ve— used magic to defend themselves. They were human.”

“They seemed bewitched,” Cora said, cautious in a room full of mages. “Like they were in a trance.”

Dimitri and Anita exchanged a look. The mages didn’t want to discuss business in front of the presumed human.

Bane tilted back his head and expelled a pained breath. “Human attackers, but unmistakable taint of the Profane. Not in Verek’s or— Edwina’s style.”

“But the crow—” Cora cut herself off with a glance at the others. A crow in a wintry cemetery might not be suspicious, but she knew it had been Owens. Conveying that would reveal too much, however.

“Who could’ve done it, Mal?” Anita said.

“I’ll entertain theories after I stop bleeding.”

“Savvy. I’ll fetch my kit. Dimi, freeze Teddy well and good, eh? Don’t worry, Teddy’s sister knows about us. Then you mind stuffing the stiff in the walk-in icebox? The one with the special lock.”

Water vapor shimmered into ice over Dimitri’s ham-sized fists. A Hydromancer. Bane must have stolen him from Tomas Ryba’s gang of water and air mages. Enormous hands crusted Teddy’s body in ice. While Cora couldn’t watch, she couldn’t help but hear the hiss and crackle of freezing flesh.

The giant scooped up Teddy’s body as if he weighed nothing and carried him away.

The bitter taste of loss rose in her throat. Cora wanted to chase after him. She’d only just gotten Teddy back. Part of him, at least. And now he was being taken away again. Taken into safety, she told herself, not quite believing it.

“Help me get Mal’s coat off, would you, love? Unless you got a weak constitution. Not gonna faint at a little blood, are you?”

Blood from the living was a pleasant change for a Necromancer. Not that Cora would admit that out loud. So far, Bane’s gang didn’t think she was a freak. Best not to spoil the illusion.

She stood beside them, towering over the Sanguimancer and twisting her hands. All that remained of the gloves she always wore were flecks of black fabric on graveyard dirt and drying blood. She felt like she was missing her skin. At least the necrotic veins had retreated.

“Blimey, you’ve got gams a mile long.” Anita whistled. “Some blokes at the Gilded Lily would’ve paid good bees and honey to have a go between ‘em.”

“Thanks?” Cora’s eyes dropped to her flower tattoo.

“Oh, I don’t do that kind of work no more. Not since Mal brought me on before the war. But I’ve been known to still throw an artery party.” Anita flashed a vulpine smile. “Got me a big bed upstairs with a handsome bloke tied to it. You as fun as your brother was, love?”

Cora stiffened. “Afraid not.”

“Pity. Well, I use my gifts different now, anyway. I can sober a bloke up or bring him to his knees. I can make a lady’s courses stop. Or start again.” She gave Cora a meaningful wink.

“Jesus— still bleeding here.”

Anita shot Cora a look of female camaraderie over his head. Together they removed his long coat and suit jacket and cut away his bloodstained shirt to reveal the gory pit in his shoulder. Metal shards glinted like teeth amidst flaps of ragged flesh.

“Did the bullet go through?” Bane’s jaw clenched as Anita prodded the wound with a pair of tweezers.

“Parts of it.”

Bane spewed profanities—Irish, English, and invented—while Anita extracted a metal shard. Matte silver with hooked edges, burrowed into the meat of his shoulder. Cora had seen Bane dodge bullets with ease; yet instead of traversing away, he’d wasted a critical moment putting her behind him. He’d taken a bullet rather than leave her in the cemetery.

He was only securing his investment. Besides, if he’d known the bullet would do this to him, he would’ve left her without hesitation, Binding Agreement notwithstanding.

“I ain’t seen nothing like this before.” Anita held a piece of the bullet that had taken down the Realmwalker aloft in the lamplight. Its curved teeth were trimmed with his torn flesh. “It’s like it’s absorbing my magic.”

“Some kind of magically inert alloy?” Bane said.

Cora took the shard and pondered it in her hand. The metal felt irritating, like the moment before realizing an itch was a mosquito bite. She guarded her reaction. “If it drains magic,” she ventured, “it couldn’t have been made by a mage, could it?”

The unspoken implication reverberated in the silence. Magic-draining bullets of human manufacture. Fired by humans at mages they shouldn’t even know existed.

“Jesus.” Bane gestured to Dimitri as he returned. “Ever come across something like this?”

The shard disappeared in the mitt of the Hydromancer’s hand. “No. I take to Gallagher. Metal mage will know. We learn.”

“Whatever it is, I can’t use my magic to pull it out or block the pain.” Anita handed Bane a bottle of whiskey. “I’ll have to pull it out the old-fashioned way. And you’ll have to heal the old-fashioned way.”

“Very well.” Bane uncorked the bottle with his teeth and drank the whiskey like it was water.

Anita pried out another shard and plinked it into a bowl. Bane, features contorted in pain and sweat beading down the taut tendons of his throat, glugged whiskey.

Glug . Plink . Glug . Plink .

Uncertain what to do with herself, Cora fisted her hands to keep them from shaking. The awful energy was receding, leaving behind a jittery fatigue. She was running on the dregs of her magic.

“How escape attack?” Dimitri said.

“Cora saved us,” Bane gritted out.

Dimitri and Anita turned to her in disbelief. The giant stared down at Cora—something few could do—like she was a pest in need of squishing; something most did.

“No offense, love. But…” Anita eyed her. “How?”

“Luck,” Cora said before Bane could respond. “And his Portal Key.”

The Sanguimancer and Hydromancer exchanged a glance.

“Say, how’d you and Mal meet exactly?” Anita asked Cora.

“I thought he killed Teddy. So, I, er, tried to kill him. Then he offered me a job.”

Anita tossed her head back in a wave of shining curls and laughed, the sound a throaty, full-bodied seduction. “You are having some week, Mal.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” An alarming amount of whiskey had brought color back to his face and eased the lines of pain. “Something is afoot. Humans attacked us in the cemetery Teddy’s body was taken to, but only a mage could’ve cursed him with the Profane Arts.”

“What about Madam Kalandra?” Anita spoke the name in an undertone, as if the Gilded Lily’s proprietress was a demon not to risk summoning. “Teddy was her biggest competition as a fellow Animancer. And there ain’t a shortage of humans going in and outta the Lily.”

“Kalandra wouldn’t risk her business like that.”

“I dunno, Mal. She’s a real cunning cunt.”

Dimitri crossed his trunk-sized arms over his chest. “Rogue mage?”

“Might be,” Bane said. “Look into it, Dimitri. Take Sloane for shadow-cloaking and scope out the Crossbones cemetery in Southwark. Should be bodies. And my car. Bring back both.”

The giant plodded out of the office without a word.

What Anita couldn’t seal with her magic, she sewed shut. “Good as that’s gonna get, boss. Should get the feeling in your arm back in a couple of hours, I reckon.”

“Thank you, Anita.”

“Any time you’re bleeding, Mal.” She flashed a beaming smile and turned to Cora. “It’ll be dangerous for you out there, love. You got a safe pad to crash? Me and Sloane live above the club. Sloane’s a shadow mage and Mal’s spymaster. Ain’t that a treat? The spare bed upstairs ain’t bad if you don’t mind some, ah, nocturnal entertainment.”

“She’s staying with me,” Bane said.

“Brilliant. Loads of us have crashed at Mal’s when we’d no place to go.”

Cora was both relieved and strangely disappointed this wasn’t an uncommon arrangement for his gang. She had been entertaining misconceptions about his generosity when she was just another stray he’d taken in. The Realmwalker never did anything without a reason—his hospitality was probably to keep a close eye on his gang, make them dependent on him.

Was he in the habit of propositioning, as well as housing, his gang? Had he asked the former courtesan the same question he’d asked Cora in the car? Had Anita said yes?

Cora studied Bane. Eyes closed, his long lashes were dark half-moons resting on pale cheeks. Blood trailed down the corded muscles of his injured arm, bared from the ripped sleeve. On his thigh, his other hand clenched and unclenched. She remembered the feel of those hands gripping her hips. The feel of a hard—

His eyes snapped open and locked onto hers.

She looked away, catching Anita’s brows lifting with intrigue as she glanced between them. Cora couldn’t lie about the blood pounding in her veins to a Sanguimancer.

“Say,” Anita began with a mischievous smile. “Do you two—”

“Isn’t there a man tied to your bed right now?” Bane interrupted.

“ Bollocks . Best be getting back to unwrapping my Christmas present. Poor bloke doesn’t appreciate delayed gratification like some of us, eh? You finish up, love.” Anita handed Cora a roll of bandages and closed the door, leaving them alone together.

Uneasiness settled in her gut as Cora faced Bane, his eyes closed again. His blood-soaked shirt was torn off at the shoulder, but more would have to come off to properly bandage the wound.

“Can you, er, take your shirt off? For the bandages.”

“You take it off,” he said without opening his eyes.

She hesitated. With one functional arm, he couldn’t wrap the bandages himself. Leaving him to bleed and fester wasn’t a fair repayment for taking a bullet for her, even if she was slightly tempted. “This wasn’t part of our agreement. You owe me for this.”

She came to stand between his splayed legs. He didn’t bother widening to make room and their thighs brushed. Awareness tingled along her nerves. His jaw tensed.

Flustered, she undressed Malachy Bane. Unwinding his silk tie and stripping his waistcoat, she unbuttoned his shirt and helped him shrug out of it. Skin grazed skin in an alarming thrill.

Her gaze traced his scars and rune tattoos, symbols of a long-dead language written on his lean body in iridescent ink. Beneath his coppery chest hair, over his heart, was a scar, white with age. A lethal wound. On the sculpted planes of his abdomen was a fresher scar, the puckered flesh of a deep gouge over his kidney. Another lethal wound.

That trail of dark hair drew her eyes down the firm lines and angles of his torso to where his thighs bracketed hers.

“Maybe you owe me for this,” he said in a low voice. Head tilted back, he had been watching her ogle him through half-lidded eyes.

Her gaze jumped up and met his smirk. Smug bastard . She poured whiskey onto the wound—for disinfection, partially. He hissed in a sharp breath. Her gratification was fleeting as a paired pain ignited in her own shoulder. Damned Binding Agreement. She regretted it more by the minute.

“I will do this without your commentary, thank you,” she said crisply. With the clean towel Anita had left, she wiped the blood away, none too gently, and heaped gauze on the stubborn trickle of blood. “I don’t sense necrosis. But this will leave a nasty scar.”

“Needn’t matter. It’s only flesh.”

Bandaging the wound required even closer proximity. She had to press against him, hard and warm and too close, to wrap the bandage around his broad shoulder, across his back, and under his arm. Firm muscles tautened under her touch. The tips of her breasts felt the stir of his every breath.

The intimacy unnerved her. She rambled to fill the charged silence. “So. Now that we have Teddy’s body and know where his spirit is, we just need to break the curse and reunite them. And find his heart, now that I think about it. A heart seems important for true reanimation. D’you think whoever cursed him kept his heart? Vile, twisted bastard. And those humans with their magic-draining bullets? That’ll be a complication.”

Bane gave a noncommittal hum. Shifting, his thigh slid along hers.

“Er, what does this symbol mean?” She touched a shimmering tattoo on his bicep. “And why does the ink… swirl?”

“Visibility hieroglyphic to see shadow-cloaked Umbramancers. It’s Phytomancer-enchanted ink.”

She’d heard of such tattoos. Few risked the potential complications of the plant mage’s ink seeping into their veins and polluting their blood. By the look of it, Bane had risked it a dozen times.

Winding the bandage once more around his shoulder, she touched a tattoo on his upper back. “What about this?”

“Celtic protection rune.”

“Protection against what?”

“A memory demon.”

She gaped at him, dropping the bandages. She fumbled to grab them before they hit the floor, flattening her chest against his bare torso. When she had recovered herself and the bandages, she pulled back and exclaimed, “Demons are real?”

He hesitated for a long moment. “In their own Realm.”

Her brain stalled. She’d heard fables of demons—dark mages with spirits corrupted by the Profane Arts, wreaking havoc in the Living Realm until they were damned into a demonic prison. But until this moment she’d thought demons were a cautionary tale.

Searching his face, she saw only grim sincerity. “Can you traverse there? The Demon Realm?”

“I try not to.”

“Can they come here?”

“Only if there’s a rift in the veil between our Realms. The Tribunal makes sure that I make sure there isn’t one.” He cut off her next question with one of his own, gesturing to her wrist. “What happened?”

She tensed. Her sleeves had drifted up, revealing the scars. White vines thick with thorns slashed across both wrists. Cursing her lost gloves, she shoved her sleeves down and said nothing.

“Those scars look deep,” he said. “How did you survive?”

I didn’t.

Evading his intent gaze, she tied the bandage with unnecessary force. A matching pain erupted in her shoulder.

“They’re more than scars.” He stared at her with a peculiar intensity. “Aren’t they?”

Her pulse leapt. She stepped back but his good hand wrapped around her waist, gripping her in place.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She pulled out of his grasp, and he let her go. Putting a much-needed distance between them, she shoved the Portal Key into the door and turned left, holding it open for him.

He didn’t move, searching her features for something he couldn’t seem to find. With a sigh, he polished off the whiskey, stood, and strode to the door. He’d drunk a pint of whiskey in under an hour and it hadn’t sapped an ounce of his sobriety.

“How are you”—she gestured from the empty bottle to his steady posture—“upright?”

“I’m Irish,” he said as if explaining the obvious to a dimwit. He brushed past her into his library and dropped into a wingback chair before the fireplace with a weary exhale. The fire’s glow softened the hard angles of his tense face and bare torso.

Panic from the day had subsided, leaving exhaustion in its wake. Cora sank onto the opposite chair and closed her eyes. The events of the day were projected onto the back of her eyelids. Pressing her palms into her eyes didn’t keep the memories from replaying.

But she had Teddy back. Parts of him. Soon , she told herself. Soon .

Movement drew her attention. The Persian cat had leapt onto Bane’s lap. Kevin trained his wide-set yellow eyes on Cora while he extended and retracted his claws. Bane, slouched in the embrace of his armchair, cracked an eye open as if sensing her gaze.

A tired smile tugged at her lips. “Happy Christmas, Bane.”

Groaning, he rolled his head away. “Speak for your fuckin’ self.”