Page 2 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

H er spirit departed her body, sinking through the black veil and into the abyss. Among the enviably dead, at last, Cora was just another incorporeal spirit wandering the Death Realm. Only it was not her death she was seeking.

Spirits in death were tethered to their bodies, and sometimes objects, in the Living Realm. The longer since their death, or less intimate the object, the longer Cora had to search the Death Realm for their spirit, draining her own spirit in return. With a fresh corpse, the search for Moriarty was brief.

She landed in the corner of the Death Realm where the grave for his spirit had been dug. Cora never knew what would greet her when she descended into someone’s Deathscape, the unique landscape of how the spirit remembered itself. What was sown in life was reaped in death.

Cora found herself in a cottage tucked into rolling green hills. Instinctively, she knew this was the Irish countryside Moriarty had grown up in, and the freckled woman smiling beside the hearth was long dead.

“I won’t stop time!” the Chronomancer cried in a thick Irish brogue, pulling on his white hair. His face, as creased as well-worn leather, twisted in anguish. “I won’t make time stop for you!”

Cora reached for Moriarty. The instant her fingers made contact, his death throes started. A highlight reel of the strongest emotions of his life and death. Awash with his memories in a deluge of sensation, she experienced them all as if they were her own.

Some dead felt only anger for the life they’d been robbed of; an agony that frothed from their dead spirit into hers. Others felt inconsolable grief, or the ultimate tranquility of suicide. For a lucky few, death was the peace at the end of a long struggle. Like letting go.

Moriarty had not let go. She relived the turmoil of his final moments. He’d fought against death like a bear in a trap, then finished the job himself before the hunters could collect.

His death throes played, and it was as if both their hands were prying the gun from the Ferromancer’s holster. Swallowing the cold metal barrel. Pulling the trigger with sweat-slickened fingers. The bullet kissed his brain and splattered it across the tunnel walls

His death throes reversed, like a film played backwards in slow motion. The bullet arced back into the gun, pouring the fleshy shrapnel into his reforming skull. Tissues stitched back together, his face reassembled. Deep lines recorded every scowl and laugh in his long life.

Then, Moriarty lunged for the gun, shooting and un-shooting himself. Forward and back, again and again, as if he was reviewing the footage of his own death, searching for a fate that could have led him anywhere but here, in his childhood cottage, blowing his face off.

While the newly dead were often stuck in their death throes, they were also eager to talk, craving any connection to their recently severed life. Which was fortunate for Cora, as time in the Death Realm drained equal time from her life, already limited given that ominous clanging in the tunnels.

“What is Malachy Bane’s weakness?” she asked Mother’s first question.

His death throes replayed, taking his face with him. The open wound of his face spasmed in what might have been words, if he had lips to shape them. Torn flesh flapped. Blood gurgled.

A memory washed over her, of looking into a man’s black eyes, the retinas and pupils inseparable. The Realmwalker. Moriarty’s feelings of brotherhood flooded her.

Cora had glimpsed Bane once last New Year’s Eve, before she was thrown out of the Emerald Club by that irate Irishman—Moriarty, she now realized. The Chronomancer seemed to recognize her at that moment as well. Their memories of the night intermingled.

“Walcott!” Moriarty shouted over the jazz and laughter, elbowing through the dancing crowd. Two faces, mirror images, turned to him in unison. He grabbed the haughty Animancer. “Boss says fuck off, gatecrasher.” He leered at the tall woman beside Teddy. “But your sister can stay.”

Feeling the weight of someone’s attention on her, Cora looked across the sea of churning bodies. Her gaze locked with a pair of obsidian eyes. The devil in a three-piece suit. He winked at her.

More of the Chronomancer’s memories flashed like shards of a broken mirror, a kaleidoscope of disjunct glimpses from across time. Powerful Chronomancers, like Moriarty had been, could leapfrog through time, albeit inaccurately, or worse, incompletely. The shards shifted in an endless permutation of shapes and possibilities. Foreknowledge without memories. Memories without experience. None of which she had time for.

“What is Malachy Bane’s weakness?” she demanded.

Still locked in the replaying loop of his death throes, the gun fired again, tearing open his skull and interrupting the stream of memories. Brains splattered up, then flowed back down. The sinews and cartilage reclasped, and from his reforming lips came a low groan.

“You will be,” the Chronomancer answered in a rough brogue. “He will love you to death.”

Cora stared at him in perplexed silence. The dead never lied, but… Was this the raving of an unsound mind, or a time mage’s prophecy?

Chronomancers glimpsed into what might be. The future could always change. Stepping foot in another time might create a paradox that undid it. Observing the past could alter the present. Scrying a possible future could nullify it.

There was a thin line between prophecy and prophetic gibberish. Given the trauma of his recent death, Moriarty’s ominous words were likely the latter. While he had recognized Cora before, now he must have mistaken her for someone else.

The faceless Chronomancer pulled a skeleton key from his pocket and pressed it into her palm. The key compounded her disbelief. All was incorporeal in the Death Realm. Nothing could pass through the black veil except spirits and their remembered lives. A physical key should fall through her palm like vapor. Yet there it was, a solid weight.

“What is this?” Brow furrowed, she looked from the impossible key to his restitching features. “Why have you given this to me?”

Guttural noises came from his tongueless mouth, air passing through ragged flesh. She was running out of time.

“What is Bane’s weakness right now?”

Out of the pulpy ruins of his throat came what sounded like Coshoy’s Egg .

She didn’t have the chance to ask again. A vice clamped down on her, pulling her back sharply from a great distance and flinging her back into her body.

Cora gasped at the shock of returning from death. Necrotic veins crawled like black vines from where her hands had rotted over Moriarty’s heart.

Hands bit into her shoulders, yanking her up and hurling her across the crypt as if she weighed nothing. She hit the wall, bones snapping, and crumpled in a heap of blinding pain. Broken ribs threatened to puncture her lungs with each shallow, agonizing breath.

In the candlelit gloom, she grappled to make sense of what was happening. Shouts and deafening gunshots reverberated off the earthen walls.

“We didn’t kill him!” Teddy fired his gun at empty air. “It wasn’t us!”

From the darkness emerged a phantom.

Backlit by the flickering candles, the tall figure’s silhouette was cloaked in shadow. In a blur of motion too fast to register, the phantom was there one moment and gone the next.

Terror turned her blood to ice. Each panicked breath felt like broken glass in her lungs. Curled in the fetal position across the crypt, Cora could only watch as the phantom blinked impossibly back into existence several feet away, his long black coat flapping like raven's wings.

Teddy fired. The phantom vanished without a trace. Then, inexplicably, he was careening through the air from above, only to disappear as Teddy shot at him. In the blink of an eye, he reappeared across the crypt and was gone again, dodging bullet after bullet with threatening ease.

The candles guttered out in the breeze of his passing, plunging the crypt into darkness but for a single trembling flame.

“It wasn’t us!” Teddy wailed. “Please—”

The phantom kicked off a wall, flipped with fluid grace, and disappeared midair. The bullet hit the empty space he’d occupied a heartbeat before. He rematerialized, crouched on the ground behind Teddy, and swiped his legs out from under him.

Teddy crashed onto his back. The gun clicked but didn’t fire. Empty. He was out of bullets. Laboring to his knees, he hurled the gun at the phantom with a frustrated howl. It pitched through emptiness and struck the wall.

Above him, the phantom winked into existence and crashed down between his shoulder blades. Teddy collapsed on his face with a sickening thump. The phantom stood on his back until Teddy’s screams turned to wheezing.

“Fuck you in particular, Teddy,” the phantom snarled, leaping off Teddy and kicking him in the jaw. Teddy’s head snapped back, blood and spit flying. Her twin sprawled on his side, limp as a ragdoll.

Cora tried to crawl towards Teddy, but he seemed so far away in the darkness. Her panting sawed through the harrowing silence that fell.

Steps approached her, slow and measured. The phantom kicked her onto her back and loomed over her like a menacing shadow. He pressed a boot heel over her windpipe, choking the scream out of her.

She thrashed and clawed at him uselessly, trying to rot through his clothes to the flesh underneath, trying to reach her knives stashed just beyond reach. The boot heel only ground down harder.

Her broken ribs pierced her lungs. Blackness encroached her vision. In her waning consciousness, she was dimly aware that her enchanted cloak was still intact. A small mercy. He wouldn’t remember what she looked like, if she survived.

The cold fury in his fathomless eyes as he glared down at her promised Cora that she wouldn’t. Bending down, he hissed, “You reek of death.”

An odd sense of calm settled over her. This was it. The death she had sensed earlier had come for her in the form of a tall man in a black coat. Cora surrendered.

Teddy’s whimper drew the phantom’s attention. The crushing pressure on her throat lightened as he turned towards her twin’s prone body.

No! Not Teddy . With Necromancy, she pulled Moriarty’s limbs like a marionette. The corpse flopped like a fish in a puddle of his own blood.

The distraction worked. The phantom reappeared beside the twitching corpse and knelt down. Limned in the last candle’s despairing light, his features were a portrait of grief as he brushed back a bloody clump of hair from the crater of Moriarty’s head. He cradled the corpse in his arms and then they were gone.

Teddy was groaning. Her throat was too bruised to call out. Through the damp and gore, she crawled to him. Every inch was agony. At last, she reached him. He was mumbling something through clenched teeth. Pain? She rested her ear against his lips. Again, the word came, little more than a puff of air.

“Bane,” Teddy whispered in a broken voice.

They had just been attacked by the Realmwalker.