Page 16 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

I n the span of a few days, Cora had been shot at, choked, and ambushed several times over. But waking in a soft bed to a new view of London each morning, she had to admit that working for the Realmwalker had its perks.

His house’s magic was a continuously unfolding wonder. She’d fall asleep in Knightsbridge and awake in Lambeth with only the slightest tug behind her navel. For all she knew, they’d traversed not just across London but into an alternate Realm where a different Cora Walcott lived.

With a contented sigh, she emerged from the cocoon of blankets so silken their sumptuous caress on her skin felt criminal. The stained-glass windows lining the Witch’s Cap bedroom atop the library tower spilled prisms of color across the lush rugs and comfortable furniture.

If she was Bane’s prisoner, this was a superb cage.

Privacy, she soon learned, was an unsurpassed luxury. She’d never soaked in a tub—let alone a solid gold one—without a line of people banging on the door for her to hurry. She’d never eaten from a well-stocked pantry without stealing. She’d never played such a gorgeous piano as the Steinway in the parlor, losing herself in its resonant smoothness until long after the moon rose.

Fortunately, Bane was not often at home. There truly was no rest for the devil. She hadn’t seen him since she’d followed him up the dizzyingly high spiral staircase into the Witch’s Cap. Half-listening to his litany of rules, her concentration had been on not missing a step and plummeting to her death two stories below.

“Don’t go out alone. Don’t contact anyone without my explicit approval. Don’t fuck with anything in my house or I will know.” He halted on the top step, lowering his face until he was inches away. “And don’t go near that locked door again.”

“I won’t.”

He pinned her with a stare bordering on vivisection before returning to his litany.

To her relief, they hadn’t spoken since. But she had sensed him. For some reason—the Binding Agreement? —awareness prickled her whenever he was near. The entire house shifted in response to his presence, like the groaning relaxation of long-tensed joints.

Bane had left her an icebox of meticulously labeled body parts and a note written in a precise hand:

Rest up. NYE planned. Communing questions attached. Don’t fuck anything up.

So, she communed with the dead and rested. The relief of not having to perform the ritual of herself for others was lessened by guilt. While war raged outside and Bane was preoccupied, she was pruning herself in the bath. The tarry aftermath of Verek’s death still clung under her fingernails.

After a lifetime in cramped squats and crowded flats, though, the solitude was peaceful. Refreshing. She couldn’t remember a winter when she’d been so warm and… comfortable .

It was unsettling. She waited for the other shoe to drop.

While Bane was away, she had free reign of his house. More or less. A lifelong contract written in their blood did inspire a certain level of trust, though her misgivings of his intentions in housing her remained. Was he keeping her close to control her?

Unparalleled access to the Realmwalker’s inner sanctum was not an opportunity she’d waste, however. Taking advantage of his frequent absence, her snooping commenced in earnest.

First, she scoured the house for observation devices and enchantments. She felt herself being watched, and by more than the surly cat.

The portraits of people neither related to each other nor Bane were painted in various styles and fashions, sharing only a life-like luster to their eyes that seemed to follow her. In the Witch’s Cap, the portrait of a shepherd boy stared straight at the bed.

“Fuck”—she turned the portrait to face the wall—“that.”

While she didn’t detect any observation devices, her gut told her Bane was watching.

It took a day to uncover the house's many enchantments. She learned the hard way that touching certain objects transported her back to the Witch’s Cap. One moment, she was testing the drawer of an antique armoire, the next she was standing in the bedroom, feeling queasy. Bloody portal mage.

Each room brought its own temptations. Hundreds of records. Thousands of books. Priceless relics that would fetch enough on the black market for her to climb out of the escape hatch of her life and disappear with. Her palms itched to nick such tantalizing riches, then burned when she grabbed them with the intention to do exactly that. Blasted Binding Agreement.

Of the countless things in Bane’s treasure trove, not one was personal. He’d collected memorabilia from others’ lives but none from his own.

All except for a single photo, browning with age, where he stood somber before ancient pyramids with a young man, both clad in outdated suits. The photo was in his bedroom, dominated by a four-poster bed with crisply made sheets, which she wasn’t bold enough to rifle through.

Every door in the house was unlocked except for the one. Curiosity whispered to her, begging her to follow it. More than once she found herself standing before the forbidden room, her feet moving of their own accord and her fingers outstretched to the rhythmic thump calling to her.

The locked door was a test. One she failed immediately.

She descended upon the lock with picks and furtive glances over her shoulder. More than metal or a simple enchantment secured the door. She’d never found a lock she couldn’t pick with enough time, and time she did not have. Every creak of the house, ricocheting through the quiet, could signal Bane’s arrival. He’d do more than scold her if he knew what she was doing.

After the house gave a particularly violent shudder, she abandoned the attempt. For now.

Only the random slamming door or crashing object—outbursts of either the temperamental house or cat—interrupted the quiet.

And quiet was fertile ground for dormant fears to grow. She picked at thoughts of Teddy like a scab. If they pulled it off, would her twin only be a reanimated shell of himself?

In the library, she scaled spindly ladders to bowel-liquefying heights and rummaged through dusty tomes for any insight into Teddy’s curse. The more she looked, the more she found, and the less she understood. At the end of the day she had little to show for her efforts except a headache.

Bane had several forbidden texts on the Profane Arts, of course. She combed through the more promising titles for a curse where the victim’s heart was removed—there were many —then for Coshoy’s Egg.

She gleaned little about the former and nothing about the latter. The only references she found were to something called the Hag’s Egg, a dark magic relic like an external womb. For what nefarious purposes, she could only imagine.

For hours, she puzzled over a manuscript detailing a Necromancer’s journeys into Purgatory. The Necromancer, named only as Rasputin, had full conversations with expurgated spirits, whereas Teddy’s spirit hadn’t spoken a word to Cora.

The fog-wraith of her brother had seemed incomplete, she realized with dawning terror, because his spirit was. Only a piece of him existed in Death’s waiting room.

The manuscript mentioned spirit splitting in passing. That a person’s essence could be fractured at all was its own bottomless well of horrors. With an infuriating lack of detail, the vague Rasputin hadn’t clarified how or why spirits were split, let alone where the pieces went afterwards.

If Teddy’s spirit wasn’t in the Death Realm and only a fraction resided in Purgatory, where could the rest be? Trapped in yet another Realm, or in an impenetrable prison in this one? Or was it still within his missing heart, clutched in his murderer’s hand?

Her tears spilled onto the yellowed pages. To have his spirit hacked into pieces and strewn across Realms was truly a fate worse than death.

How could she possibly bring him back now?

Reshelving the manuscript, she climbed upstairs and crawled into the soft bed, hoping no one overheard as she cried herself to sleep.