Page 35 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

“I buried you today, Teddy.”

Her twin stiffened, his features hardening as he glanced away. Cora had expected this response. The dead didn’t take well to news from the living. Especially when that news was their funeral.

Thirteen days had passed since Malachy closed his midnight blue eyes and his gang pulled them from the ruins of Mother’s house. Thirteen days of spending more time in Death than Living, of speaking with Teddy about everything except reality.

In the ebb and flow of their easy banter, Cora walked on eggshells around the awful truth she struggled to reconcile. She wasn’t catching up with her brother after a heart-wrenching absence; she was communing with his dead spirit.

Teddy was gone. Truly gone. His light had been snuffed out, leaving behind only a void in his shape. The foundation had caved in beneath Cora, and amidst the wreckage the Teddy-shaped void sat beside her, trailing after her as she went through the motions, teeming with a misery that ate her alive.

Anytime his death was broached, however, Teddy changed the subject. So they didn’t speak of the Specter’s Scourge or the Oracle Ruby or the demon Cora had made a deal with in a futile bid to save him. A deal that died with Ikelas. Hopefully.

After several heated arguments, the Realmwalker also became a forbidden topic. Teddy insisted he was a heartless monster, regardless of what she said. But Malachy was her monster, and he was far from heartless. She ached at his absence.

In the aftermath, Cora didn’t know which was worse: The world outside or the world within.

Splashed across the headlines was human and mage panic alike. Newspapers piled up on Bane’s table, though she couldn’t bring herself to do more than glance at them. The nightmare in her head was stronger than Ikelas’s had been.

Cora relived it over and over. Watching Teddy’s spirit depart. Watching his body buried by sodden earth. It had always been too late. The well of sorrow was bottomless. Just when she thought she’d reached the end, she continued to sink.

Outside, the world was in uproar.

The London Nightmare , the newspapers dubbed the collective dream localized around “an oddball orphanage,” as one neighbor described it. Speculation abounded about the nightmare’s cause. At the forefront were suspicions of hallucinogens in the water supply.

For those not killed in the London Nightmare, two fates awaited the dreamers. Either they awoke, dazed but otherwise unharmed, or they slept on in an unending fugue.

Sleeping sickness , they called it. A malady of the mind. A blight of bedrest. Those affected wasted away in their slumber. Every day reports surfaced of more sleepers who couldn’t be roused. A pattern emerged. Those who had been awake when the nightmare began awoke after. The sleepers didn’t wake. Sleepers like Malachy.

Thirteen days ago, he had closed his blue eyes. They hadn’t opened again.

When not in the Death Realm, Cora slipped inside his bedroom to reassure herself he was alive, and this day was not just a continuation of the nightmare.

She sat at his bedside and stroked his hair back from his pale face. His features were softened in sleep, yet the lines were deeper around his eyes. More silver threaded his temples. Her fingers memorized the new scar over his heart. White vines thick with thorns, nestled among coppery chest hair.

Sometimes she caught herself talking to him, about banalities and the agony swallowing her. The metronome of his heartbeat was the only reply. Each day he didn’t wake fed an insidious fear that he never would again. And if he did, what if the man she’d resurrected was only a shell of himself?

Not even Anita had been able to revive him from his unnatural slumber. She had painstakingly removed every shard of the bullet from his wound, yet some Sephrinium must remain in his system, trapping the Realmwalker in a prison of dreams. His last words replayed in Cora’s mind on an endless loop. Sephrinium . Can’t ...

“Just sleeping off his injuries,” Anita said with forced cheer, but Cora didn’t miss the pity in her eyes. “He’ll be up before you know it, love. I’d bet my favorite leather whips on it.”

The gang had filtered through his house like a funeral procession. Every visit felt more like a wake than a homecoming. They avoided Cora, haunting the hallways like a ghost.

Anita filled her in on the Oneiromancer’s fallout. What the newspapers described as a surge in gang violence was a power vacuum of London mages. The status quo had been upended since the top gang bosses—Verek, Mother, and now Bane—were all off the board. Dozens of pawns had since been sacrificed in the senseless violence to reclaim it.

Rune Borges still grappled to subdue the Pyromancers and Ferromancers. Mother’s pets, not killed or asleep, were running around like headless chickens. New gangs were moving into town. A gang of Lumomancers and Umbramancers was gaining a worrisome foothold.

John O’Leary, the Memnomancer solicitor, had arrived on that first day and inquired after their boss’s condition. In an empty voice she told him what he could see for himself.

O’Leary wrote it down dutifully, readjusting his golden spectacles on his pinched face. “I see,” was his only comment.

Bane had foreseen the unforeseeable, of course, and had contingency plans in case of his incapacitation. O’Leary would operate in his stead while he was “otherwise indisposed.”

When he stood to leave she clung to his sleeve like a child. “What do I do now?” she asked with enough desperation to fill an ocean. A simple question with a deeper meaning. What she really meant was: What do I live for?

The solicitor patted her hand awkwardly before removing it. Looking everywhere but at her, he mumbled he had nothing for her. Bane’s schemes had not included her.

Hope, hanging on by a fragile thread, snapped under its own weight. “Oh,” she said. A world of disappointment in one word.

O’Leary hadn’t come back.

Avoiding Anita’s pity and Dimitri’s stilted condolences and Kevin’s purring affections, Cora was left alone with her thoughts. Some grew louder in the silence. Bane had others to enact his schemes and attend his bedside vigil. She wasn’t needed. She wasn’t wanted.

Try as she might, she couldn’t scrub the nightmare from her mind or the blood from her hands. Teddy and Bane and all the sleepers who might never wake up. In one fell swoop, she had lost everyone who mattered to her. What remained of her heart compacted in her chest, growing smaller and harder every day.

These moments with Teddy in the Death Realm were all she lived for. Chattering inanities while the world fell apart. At first, Teddy was garrulous. Her heart swelled to see the whimsical movements of his hands again, to hear his cackling laughter. Even subdued in death, she basked in his brightness. Content in this unreality, she could almost forget where they were and why.

“I buried you atop a hill near the sea,” she said softly, reaching out as Teddy turned away. “Like you wanted.”

For a man of a thousand conquests, Teddy’s last was a small hole in the ground. For a man of a thousand acquaintances, only three were there to bury him. The two who had loved him in life and the Hydromancer who had only known him as a corpse. In silence, Ravi levitated the casket into the grave and Dimitri shoveled frozen mud over it.

“You okay?” Dimitri asked as they departed the graveyard.

“I’m fine,” Cora said, not meeting his eyes.

He shook his head. “Not fine,” he said gently.

Cora had blinked back tears and walked away.

“Please tell me, Teddy,” she begged. His spirit was retreating farther, but she couldn’t let him go. Not again. “What really happened to you?”

His livid features grew weary as he gazed into her watering eyes. He blinked away and stuffed his hands in his pockets.

After a long moment, he said, “A… woman spoke to me in my dreams. She promised an end to the daily torture. She promised an eternity of peace. I thought if I removed my heart, it wouldn’t hurt anymore.” He laughed, harsh and bitter. “And now look at me. Look at me , Cora. I am nothing. I am less than nothing. After all the pain and the nothingness of Purgatory and that blasted ruby, I would kill to feel again. To feel anything again.”

“You… You knew? About the Specter’s Scourge? About the cost of the Profane Arts? You knew the entire time?”

He crossed his arms. “I may have dabbled in dark magic from time to time. Who hasn’t?”

Her heart broke into too many pieces to ever put back together.

Teddy hadn’t been a victim, but a willing participant. He hadn’t been taken from her; he had chosen to leave her. Trying to undo the fate Teddy had sealed for himself had been a fool’s journey.

The sheer futility of it all crushed her.

Cora looked at him with eyes hollowed by grief. Her other half had chosen death over living with her. “You did it to yourself.”

Bane had been right from the start. And now he would never have the satisfaction of hearing her admit it. After a fortnight, it was time to accept he wasn’t going to wake up.

“Don’t you dare judge me,” Teddy seethed. “This wasn’t my fault. She promised me eternity without pain. It’s not my fault she fucked up.”

“Ikelas was a dream demon, Teddy. She tricked everyone. She killed Mother.”

His head whipped up. “Mother’s dead? Oh, thank god! Finally, I can have some decent company down here.”

Cora could only stare at him, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I thought the dead couldn’t lie,” she whispered. “But they can lie to themselves.”

“Well, my dear,” he bristled. “Maybe you can go to hell.”

Teddy had spoken, but it was Mother’s voice she’d heard. Even as an incorporeal spirit, he was still Mother’s favorite pet. But he was also her twin. Her only lifeline. “Please… don’t do this.” Melancholy bled into her voice. “I’ve loved you your entire life, Teddy. I’ll love you your entire death. Please—”

“Now you’re flaunting your aliveness? Get out!”

“Teddy bear,” she sobbed, clinging to him, unable to let go. “ Please . I love you. Don’t leave me again. Oh, Teddy, why did you leave me?”

He slapped her hands away. “Why is it always how I feel about you and never how I feel about myself?”

“Please.” Her plea was scarcely more than a whisper as he pushed her farther away. “Please don’t leave me again—”

Teddy foisted her through the black veil of death. Cora fell back into the prison of her body. The last piece of her heart shattered.

Alone, she was forced to confront the bitter truth. Unlovable . Failure . Abomination.

She couldn’t save Teddy from himself, or Bane from the sleeping sickness, or London from the escaped demons. But she could save the world from herself. Cora was poison. The only way to stop its spread was to cut it off at the source.

All she felt was numb exhaustion as she staggered to her feet. She was tired of trying to survive as an ugly thing in an ugly world. Her mind detached from her body. She watched as a woman wearing her face walked to the midnight blue bathroom and pulled out her sharpest knife. Metal glinted in the candlelight. Inevitable.

The woman’s empty eyes met her gaze in the mirror.

How long can you live without hope?

Turning on the faucet, the woman climbed into the golden tub, fully clothed. She contemplated the knife as the bath filled with cold water. Thirty years she had haunted the Living Realm as a person-shaped emptiness. She had never lived. She’d died before she was born. The purposeless tragedy of this non-life ended today.

With hands not her own, she pushed up her sleeves. Pale flesh webbed with black veins and white vines. To drain the poison, the cut needed to be deep.

Metal bit into tender flesh. The wound opened like a sigh. On the left wrist. The right. Sensation dripped out. Eyes drifted shut. Grip loosening, the knife slid into waters that ran crimson.

Distantly, the woman felt her body shaking. Water splashed onto the mosaic tiles. Doors slammed. Glass jars broke into pieces that would never be whole again.

Deeper she sank below the surface into blissful darkness. It felt like going home.

Unconsciousness enveloped her and she slipped through a gossamer veil. Falling, floating, she saw a sea of dreamers in a cocoon of night. A man rushed forward as the black veil neared.

“Cora.” His blue eyes brimmed with relief. “The Sephrinium— I’m trapped here.”

Malachy reached for her, and with the last shred of her fading life’s energy, she reached back. Their hands almost touched as she sank further away.

Horrified understanding dawned on his face. “Cora, no! NO—"

But it was too late.