Page 17 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

C ora sat up in the soft bed. She had emptied herself of tears—for now, at least—and a grim determination had settled within the aching hollowness inside her. She would find the missing pieces of Teddy’s spirit by any means necessary or die trying.

Despair and hope clashed within her. The plan would only get them so far if it was all futile. She banished the thought. Focus on the next step. Think about everything else later.

Wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, she padded across the thick rugs to see where the house had traversed today. A slight tremor in the night had been the only indication the house and everything in it had leapfrogged through space.

She gazed out of the stained-glass windows spinning a brilliant spectrum of color from the bleak winter sunlight. Outside, the streets and roofs were loaded with sooty snow. People hurried by below, dressed in heavy coats against the bitter wind. The Gothic house now jammed between two brick buildings went unnoticed.

With a jolt, she recognized the neighborhood in Camden. Bane’s house was only a half-hour walk from her flat.

On her way to the kitchen, she noticed an unlabeled folder left on a side table. Curiosity nagged at her. She opened it. The name at the top of the first page made her heart clench. The name that Mother had held over her head for years.

Felix.

A clammy hand silenced her scream—

The memory gripped her by the throat and slammed her against the wall. She was helpless against it, taken against her will back to that dark day eighteen years ago when she had learned there were many ways to die.

* * *

London, 1902.

She leapt between shadows on silent feet, hugging the alley walls as she inched towards her mark. The woman, with fat oyster fruits around her neck, had sealed her fate the moment she wandered into this dead-end alley. Those pearls would feed Cora for weeks.

The alley was better lit than she’d like, but starvation made her desperate. Her stomach was sour from hunger. A hunger that cloyed her all day while she prowled for easy marks, and all night while she tossed and turned in her nest made of garbage.

In her twelve years, she had learned the contours of scarcity. Its hollows and crevasses. Mercy had left her vocabulary the day the nuns chased her onto the streets and she was left to fend for herself. The torment of those years still throbbed.

Every day was a struggle. Some nights, she didn’t know if she’d survive until morning. Most nights, she didn’t want to.

If there was one thing the streets of London had an abundance of, it was orphans. Everywhere she roamed, dirty faces filled with tired despair peered back at her from shadowed stoops and rubbish bins. She never stopped searching those faces for Teddy. She sensed her twin was still in London somewhere, a far-off light to guide her lost spirit in the darkness.

For years she had flitted between roving gangs of other unwanted children, banding together for protection and surviving off what they could steal. Crime, from the petty to the heinous, was an ugly necessity of life on the streets.

Together, the unwanted children played games of survival. The only rule was not to get caught. The only reward was to survive another miserable day. Nimble fingers or a swift death.

After years of playing the game, she held no qualms anymore. Starvation had stripped the frivolities of kindness away. Conscience was a distant luxury she couldn’t afford. She was an opportunist. And today, opportunity was a fat necklace of oyster fruits. It’d be all hers, too, since she’d been kicked out of yet another gang when her devilry slipped out. Her secret abomination.

Her palms were slick as she neared her mark. It only took a moment of catching the mark unawares. The mark turned from the vendor towards the mouth of the alley. Towards Cora. Their gazes touched for a second.

Bollocks . She stepped back, preparing to bolt away empty-handed when the mark’s gaze continued to something over her shoulder. Fear swept across the mark’s lined face. Slowly, Cora turned. The shadow of a young man loomed over her.

Caged. He’d caged her in. Now she was the mark. Grasping the switchblade in her pocket, she backed towards the sewer for a hasty escape into London’s shit-smeared catacombs.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the man said with a taunting smile. Leaning down, he lowered his voice. “You see that hat she’s got on? That great big beak of a schnoz? Kike like that carries a gun. She’d shoot you”—he pointed a finger gun between her eyes and mock fired— “before you could kiss your skinny arse goodbye .”

She jumped back, cringing at the slurs he spoke with the casualness of a practiced antisemite. Her hand lashed out to cut him, but he was quick. He gripped her arm with biting force.

Felix Rabin, he called himself. A twenty-something from Birmingham armored in a too-small suit and middle-class indignation. He told her a story as he hauled her from the alley, about a place where there was a roof over your head and warm food in your belly. A place where fine people such as himself lived and worked together.

“Felix Rabin ain’t no pickpocket or two-bit lowlife, y’see. I came to London to make it big. My gang runs real games for real dough.”

She didn’t trust his snide smiles or charming words. Over the years, she’d met a dozen Felix Rabins. Second sons and army rejects with delusions of grandeur stuffed into shit-colored suits.

“Bugger off.” She tried using her abomination against him as he yanked her into the shadows. But it only came in spurts and never when she needed it.

Felix’s hand, clammy despite the cold, slid down her hollow stomach and rested above her pubis. She went rigid. Yelling for help would be pointless. She could scream herself hoarse and no one would step out of their own petty miseries to help her out of hers.

His hand drifted lower. “What would you do for a bit of warm food, sweetheart?”

Felix dragged her, kicking and screaming, back to his gang’s squalid squat, a condemned hotel in Limehouse warped and bowed by time, and shoved her into the sty of his bedroom.

That first time, it was as if it was happening to someone else, to another starving girl with frightened eyes, her face pushed into the dirty mattress, her skirts hiked over her waist.

“ No no no ,” the girl cried.

A clammy hand silenced her scream. “Keep it quiet, love.”

There was no love in the way he pinned her down. There was no love in the way he pushed inside of her.

Here, on this tear-soaked mattress in a rundown hotel, was where the girl ended.

When it was over a minute later—a lifetime later—Felix tugged up his trousers, not meeting the bewildered accusation in her eyes.

“Wh-why?” She wiped away the tears, but they continued to pour. “I said no. I said no !”

He shrugged. “You didn’t say no enough.”

She slept in a room with several other children. The roof over her head might leak and the food was far from warm, but she survived. Another miserable day.

Felix said she had it better than she deserved, that she should be grateful. As the abomination she was, she believed him. She belonged in Hell. But when he put his clammy hands on her, night after night, the last thing she felt was gratitude.

Hell, she realized, was only a matter of perspective.

She didn’t dare use her devilry against him. The squat was the first real scrap of stability she’d had since the orphanage. She couldn’t go back to the streets. Not again.

In the moldering hotel lobby was an out-of-tune piano with missing keys. For hours and hours, she played for the other forgotten children. Felix preferred the bawdy tunes she picked up outside pubs while waiting in the shadows for her intoxicated prey to stumble past. She’d play anything if it meant one less second alone with Felix.

She kept a vigilant eye out for him, spending as little time at the squat as possible to dodge his sticky violence. Wraithlike, she was good at disappearing.

She shot up several inches that first year, and several more the next. Reed-thin and flat-chested, she towered over everyone like a lumbering beanstalk. Felix made her slouch so she wasn’t taller than him.

Her devilry grew along with her. As a gangly teenager, it took all her concentration to hide it. If she slipped, something leached from her fingers. She’d glance down at the decay in her hand, wanting to drink from the rot. Dip her fingers in and absorb that awful, tingling current of energy.

She didn’t understand and there was no one to ask. She kept it a dark secret. But she couldn’t hide every accidental monstrosity from the gang’s curious eyes. She heard their whispers, as she’d heard the nun's whispers.

Screwy. Ghoul . Freak.

Felix’s gang played familiar games of survival. With practiced fingers, Cora could pick a lock in under a minute and made herself indispensable. Some hauls she brought straight to Felix, others she kept for herself. The first was a bottle of hooch so acrid it burned her stomach lining and blurred her vision. But it numbed her enough to snatch a few hours of sleep.

A nicked bottle a month became a bottle a week, then a bottle a day. Not downing it in one sitting became a test of willpower. She had to steal more and more to chase the same old nightmares. Soon booze wasn’t enough to quiet them. Her daily bottle was accompanied by whatever she could steal. Marijuana cigarettes, laudanum, morphine, opium, cocaine.

But it was never enough. In the morning, she invariably felt worse. She started reaching for the bottle or pipe earlier just to get through the day.

She did pride herself on how well she hid it. She could be drunk or high or strung out on uppers in a room full of people and no one would suspect. It became another game, to see how fucked up she could get and still pass as normal.

If anyone did notice, they never said. As long as she kept bringing in fat hauls like a smug cat dragging home a dead bird, why should they care? She’d gone from nicking purses and wallets to window jobs, where her lankiness and quick fingers proved useful.

After one job, she didn’t sneak into her room fast enough. Felix had stayed up, awaiting her return by the side door she thought no one knew about. There he sat, illuminated by a single lamp.

“And where d’you think you’re going?” he said with a terrible smile. “Come. Here.”

Her nails bit into his arms but he didn’t relent. A clammy hand silenced her scream.

An awful sensation coursed through her. She smelled the decay before she saw it. On Felix’s forearms were her hands imprinted in his rotted flesh, and on hers were ropes of black veins.

They both gaped in horror. He was the first to scream. “ Abomination !”

Weeks later, most of her bruises had faded. Felix hadn’t sought her out since that night, and she wasn’t going to press her luck. She slipped in and out of the squat undetected, hauling in more than her share and not complaining about her measly cut.

“I have a job for you,” Felix said one evening, tossing her into the hotel manager’s office he’d repurposed as his own. Hands deep in his pockets, he shot her furtive glances from behind the water-stained desk. “There’s a sickness in you, no doubt about it. The devil’s oozing out your fingers and corrupting everything you put your filthy hands on.”

His words were a hatchet to what remained of her self-esteem. She shrunk back.

“But with your sickness there’s also an… opportunity.”

An opportunity? No one had ever said that to her before.

“You’re lucky I ain’t killing you outright after maiming me with your rotten sickness. No one else would give a freak of nature like you another chance. But Felix Rabin ain’t like everyone else. Is he? No, no. Felix Rabin is destined for bigger and better things. And your sickness is gonna come in handy. We’re starting us a freak show and you’re the starring act. We’ll charge a penny a pop to see what all you can rot. You do this, and I’ll be pleased. Don’t you want to please me?”

She still bore the marks of his displeasure, bruises inside and out.

I’m only aggressive out of necessity , he’d explained once while gripping her by the throat and pushing her against a wall. Why do you make me be aggressive with you? She had apologized as he throttled her.

Cora managed a weak nod.

Felix gave his word he wouldn’t hurt her if she cooperated and she was putty in his hands, eager to be molded. She stowed her fear and shame. To Felix and Felix alone, her abomination was an opportunity .

The more Felix learned of her devilry, the more elaborate the games became. Freak sideshows of her rotten spectacles evolved into fake seances when she accidentally revealed how a necklace’s prior owner had died. One touch of the paste gemstones and she felt a bone lodging in her throat and choking the air out of her.

When she’d come to, clawing at her neck on the ground, Felix was staring down at her with a curious expression.

“That necklace was my Aunt Mildred’s,” he said. “She had it on when she died. Choking on a chicken bone.”

He pushed the boundaries of what she could withstand to squeeze their marks dry. Victorian London had no shortage of superstitious toffs with spare change. They exploited them all—the sick, the grieving, the heartbroken—raking in haul after haul with their seances. Well-off matrons were their bread and butter. Those too embittered by love to move past it; wives sick with jealousy or lust for another.

Word spread. The whole gang got involved, under the assumption the seances were a sham. Cora wished they were.

They had the game down to an art. Decked out in shawls, Cora spoon-fed the mark’s desperation back to them, a cycle of regurgitation until they were satisfied with the answers and left, hopefully before realizing they’d been cleaned out by unseen hands.

When the winter’s blight left a wake of bereaved, the gang made a killing off it. They ran seances day in and day out, manufacturing miracles for a quid each. Few noticed that the ghostly presences were actually ragged children flickering the lights and shaking the table when Cora said certain phrases.

The game changed with the mark. Sometimes she guessed what they’d die of. With alarming accuracy, she later discovered. People paid good money for that morbid knowledge, delusional to the end they could change their fate.

Sometimes she met the marks at allegedly haunted places. Graveyards. Abandoned houses creaking with memories. Cobwebbed attics and the dusty bedrooms of dead children frozen in time. She sensed the echoes of death, and if she listened carefully, the walls and graves whispered their secrets to her. She charged extra for that. Felix was delighted.

Other times, she conjured visions of the dead for their mourners. Withered old stalks of women who hadn’t been lucid in years, and yet they were still plagued by memories of those who had abandoned them in their youth. Clutching a beloved hairpin or cuff link or toy, she communed with their dead. A quid a question.

Once, after she’d accidentally brought a dead cat back to some semblance of life, Felix forced her to reanimate a woman’s dead son. Those awful, vacant eyes. The mother’s screams as she tore out of the room, without paying.

“Please,” Cora whimpered afterwards. “Don’t make me do that again.”

Felix didn’t listen. The next time, she pretended she couldn’t do it. The mark left without paying again, disappointed rather than mortified. Felix took what he was owed out on her bruised flesh. Too numb to fight back, she—

Bane’s house trembled, wrenching Cora from her terrible reverie.

Breathing hard and swiping away tears, she stared at the unmarked folder. In her shaking hands was the death certificate of Felix Rabinowitz. The biggest antisemite she had ever met had himself been Jewish.

She hadn’t sensed Felix’s death coming. She wondered why.

Then horror raced through her. Bane had a detailed file on Felix. How much else did he know? How would he use it against her?

Of one thing she was certain. The other shoe had dropped.

Her suspicions of Bane grew dire. The intentions behind his generosity were no better than Mother’s had been. She slammed the folder down. Why couldn’t Felix stay dead?

The urge to flee was overwhelming. Her mind in upheaval, she paced to the window and pried it open, desperate for fresh air.

Outside, people bustled and milled about, unaware of the Gothic house they passed and the turmoil inside it. The familiar Camden neighborhood was near her flat. An overpowering temptation.

She had supplies cached throughout the city, including her enchanted cloak, but most of her meager possessions were at the flat. Her clothes and the miniscule library of dog-eared books she’d stolen from other shelves to line her own; stories that had nourished her heart in darker hours.

And most importantly, all her money was stowed in a loose floorboard under her bed. That money was her only backup now this living situation had inevitably proved too good to be true.

Rent had been paid through the end of the month so her things should still be there. Surely her flatmate Mary had noted her absence by now. Did she care that Cora was missing? Or was Mary pawing through her belongings before the other girls got the chance? Mary was the closest thing Cora had to a friend, but she was also pragmatic.

This time of day, most of her flatmates would be at one of their many jobs. Avoiding them and their questions was appealing. She didn’t know how to begin explaining what had happened to her.

Cora glanced down at her filthy dress and coat, both irredeemably stained. Wearing them for the third day in a row was the deciding factor. She’d pop into her flat, grab her things, and be off in an hour, tops. Long before the Realmwalker noticed. There might even be time to pick up her enchanted cloak and last paycheck from the Starlite Club. Those arseholes.

With a lifetime of experience in being overlooked and an intimate familiarity of London’s alleys and sewers, Cora could dodge Mother’s pets for a quick jaunt through Camden. Besides, Mother wouldn’t waste energy on the lost cause of the Unweaver after she’d defected. Not enough to tail her from Bane’s unfindable house, at least. Cora would spot any of the late Verek’s thugs from a mile away. His gang was known for their brawn, not their brains. Without their boss, they’d be too preoccupied with infighting to focus on her.

In and out, she resolved, donning the stained coat for what she hoped was the last time.