Page 38 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

February 1921.

T he clock in his office marked an hour of Malachy Bane’s wasted time. The Doomsday Watch in his pocket, however, marked a more sinister time. One tick shy of the countdown’s end.

The end of what remained to be seen. If only it was the end of this pointless meeting.

Fallout from the “London Nightmare” was still crashing down, and largely on Malachy’s head.

While he’d been trapped in the Dream Realm, word of Ikelas’s nightmare had spread across Europe like wildfire, devastating for humans and mages alike. Humans, frightened and desperate for an explanation. Mages, on the verge of being revealed after centuries of institutionalized secrecy and gripped by the fear of impending slaughter. It was not a question of if, but when they would be hunted. Persecuted, like the witch trials all over again.

The end of the world was nigh, and he was stuck in a fucking meeting.

What remained of the London mage gangs had gathered at the Emerald Club to discuss their eventual doom. Unfortunately, the Tribunal had sent their most rabid rule-follower, Master Otto Bittenbinder, to personally chastise Malachy. The Lethe , the German Memnomancer was called, after the underworld river that drained memories.

Master Bittenbinder, with his gunmetal gray hair cropped short and his starched suit spotless, was the petty tyrant of blustering bureaucrats. Stiff-backed and thin-lipped, he held the perpetual expression of someone trying to un-shit their trousers.

The Lethe would cut an intimidating figure, if Malachy hadn’t dug up certain dirt on him.

“Not informing the Tribunal at once of this errant Oneiromancer, Mr. Bane, was in breach of several of our established protocols. Shall I enumerate how you have violated Code 14, section 3C?” Bittenbinder tossed his well-fondled rulebook down like a gauntlet.

O’Leary, his traitorous solicitor, nodded eagerly, not bothering to hide his admiration for the fellow memory mage.

“You don’t need to quote the rules to me,” Malachy said, wishing the reins on his temper were as tight as they’d been for several decades. Political grandstanding and tedious proprieties tested his already limited patience.

“Absurd notion,” Bittenbinder bristled. “We must all abide by the rules. The Tribunal demands answers, Mr. Bane. I know how your usual handler, Master Lyter, dotes upon you.” He shuddered, as if feelings were contagious. “Which is why the Tribunal, in its vast wisdom, has sent me to oversee this disaster. And what a disaster it is.”

Bittenbinder threw newspaper after newspaper onto the table, reading the headlines in a tight voice. “Bizarre hallucination shared across London. No cure in sight for sleeping sickness. Sleepers number over a hundred. Suspicions of psychoactive toxins in the water. And now this slander on the front page of the London Times: Germans! Poisoning Brits!”

Displeasure deepened the lines on the Berliner’s face. Malachy opted not to inform Bittenbinder that he’d personally planted that story, and was pleased it was catching on. Replacing one boogeyman with another would buy them all time.

Bittenbinder tossed down more newspapers. “Lt. Randolph Potts of the London Police claims, ‘These inexplicable events are tied to gang activity.’ Lord Crispin Fairchild demands answers for the sleeping sickness, stating he will ‘find whoever is responsible for Lady Fairchild’s unnatural slumber and bring the full weight of the law down upon them.’”

Malachy shifted in his seat. Potts was still a persistent pain in his arse. An overzealous Lord didn’t help matters. “There were mitigating circumstances, Bittenbinder, which O’Leary explained to the Tribunal while I was indisposed. Ikelas—”

“Do not be preposterous.” Bittenbinder shot a sharp look at their attentive audience. “There was no official paperwork submitted to reclassify that Oneiromancer as… living.”

Their gazes clashed. Arguing with Bittenbinder about the impossibility of a dead demon possessing a living vessel was moot. Officially, the Tribunal insisted demons were relegated to history—admitting otherwise would advertise their incompetence at enforcing their own Covenant. Unofficially, they’d shackled Malachy with retaining that illusion.

The Tribunal had learned about Koschei’s Egg after an unfortunate incident while Queen Victoria still sat on the throne. Rather than executing him for using the Profane Arts, they’d made the Realmwalker their private demon hunter. Not even the Master Choromancer, Nastassja, could traverse to the Demon Realm, let alone ferry corrupted mages across its veil.

Taking a deep breath, Malachy checked his temper once more. “Dream bitch and her co-conspirators have been dispatched. I will smooth things over in London and elsewhere. Line the right pockets. Plant the right stories. I’ll handle it,” he lied.

Some loose ends were too far gone to tie up again. At least he’d avoided the elephant in the room. They were fucked. And much worse than the Tribunal suspected. Ghose and an untold number of demons had escaped through the rift in the veil. The veil the Tribunal had tasked him with ensuring remained intact.

Malachy knew his former Master was out there, biding his time.

He was spread too thin to have sunk so many resources into following dead ends. Chasing demons had been a wasted effort. They remained hidden, and the origin of the Sephrinium bullets, likely derived from the Tribunal’s long lost Ruination Stone, also eluded him.

If his suspicions were right, the Tribunal was the last he’d inform of the full catastrophe. Ikelas had been the Master Oneiromancer, and she hadn’t been reborn as a body-snatching dream demon without help. Master Ghose hadn’t slipped through the veil as a sewn-up bastardization of his former self without a network of accomplices.

“In my humble opinion,” Rune Borges said in a gruff voice, readjusting his paunch in a tunic festooned with jeweled weapons. “The London Nightmare is a blessing in disguise. Mages have always been superior to humans and it’s high time they learned.”

Bittenbinder’s nostrils flared. Malachy regretted backing the former Ferromancer mercenary every time he opened his mouth. Which, unfortunately, was often. Rune’s bark was worse than his bite, but Bittenbinder didn’t know that yet.

“My esteemed colleague Mr. Borges makes a compelling argument,” chimed in Julian Morro, the boss of the Lumomancer and Umbramancer gang that had moved into London while Malachy slept. His two-toned eyes—one blue, one brown—flashed. “Mages should stop cowering in the shadows and come into the light.”

Julian reached into his arsenal of charm for a disarming smile. Without a filter between his platinum blonde head and silver-tongued mouth, the young Lumomancer would be a useful distraction. Malachy already had several ideas in mind.

“The Covenant,” Bittenbinder ground out, “states that mage secrecy is to be upheld in all circumstances.”

“The Covenant was written in the Middle Ages,” Julian Morro drawled. “It’s time for a change, darling.”

“Now, see here, young man—”

Over their arguing and the club’s chatter beyond the door, Malachy heard her sultry voice singing. The architect of his undoing was playing a mournful piano tune. Cora must have at least a liter of gin in her bloodstream to croon before a full audience. But to hear her sing again was a balm to his spirit. He drank her in by the heartful.

Reminders of her inhabited everything. He caught himself looking at the door, hoping she’d appear. The same door she’d burst through on the Winter Solstice like a harbinger of fate. A vaguely familiar woman, tear-stained and near hysterics, with vengeance in her eyes and a revolver in her hand. Impeccable aim, too. He glanced at the holes she’d left in the wall behind his desk. Without his Choromancy, she would’ve shot him through the last shriveled piece of his heart.

Instead, she had brought him back to life. He wished he deserved it. The full realization of every heartless thing he’d done haunted him. All the blood on his hands that would never wash clean. Sins he could never atone for.

Regret hadn’t been a word in Malachy Bane’s vocabulary since the early 19th century. Now, a planet of regret sat upon his shoulders, growing heavier by the day. Before he dealt with the Tribunal and hunted down Ghose, he had a century’s worth of his own demons to banish.

The man he’d been before the Specter’s Scourge had been buried under decades of numbness. That gap between what he felt and what he should feel had grown wider, deeper. Guilt had become as distant as satisfaction, pleasures mechanical, sex perfunctory.

Without a whole spirit, he grew colder. His blue eyes blackened as he watched the Industrial Revolution spread like cancer. Concrete where there once was earth. Steel where there once was woodland. Railways and highways extended like paved arteries, metastasizing gas-powered monstrosities that coughed black soot across the choked warrens of people multiplying like contagion.

Now, Malachy had come back to life, yet he wasn’t entirely what he once remembered being. In spite of everything, he hoped that one day he might deserve Cora. But by the Doomsday Watch, it was already too late.

That didn’t stop him from seeking her out wherever he was. Poised to see her willowy figure, to hear her throaty laugh. The woman who still held his heart in her claws.

Her hazel and turquoise eyes, heating as they raked over him when she thought he wasn’t looking. Her sly smile, rife with secrets he wanted to drink deep from. The way she played piano with her whole body, sinking into bliss. The soft caress of her lips and suppleness of her body. How many times he had wanted to peel away her defenses to that dark part of herself she let no one see.

Cora had returned his heart, only to break it. Awaking to find her in a bathtub full of her blood, fading away in his arms… The afterimage was burned onto his retinas. For days, he had sat at her bedside, eaten alive by fear, before her beautiful eyes opened again. How close he’d come to losing her. A lifelong regret in the making.

After hiding every sharp object in the house and installing more portraits to observe her through, he’d dug the enchanted rings out of Durbec’s impressive, repurposed collection. While away, he set Sloane upon Cora as her literal shadow. A necessity Cora wouldn’t appreciate if she found out. Luckily, his Umbramancer was careful.

His feelings for Cora were more primal than practical. A fact that didn’t dislodge her hold on him. Even before his full spirit had been returned, that single sliver had yearned for her.

At night, Cora shredded what remained of his once formidable self-control. He was attuned to her every breath and movement as she slept. Arching into him as he gathered her into his arms. Nestling her arse against his aching cock as he held her close.

Malachy shifted. They were discussing the certain doom of mages everywhere, and he was getting a hard on.

I am in trouble .

Marshaling his thoughts, he tried to follow the threads of conversation. Rune Borges was waxing poetic about mage supremacy to the young Lumomancer—preaching to the converted, it seemed. The Memnomancers were in a heated debate about which specific sub-clause of some bylaw Malachy had violated in solving the Tribunal’s problem for them. Cora was no longer singing.

“—quite right, Master Bittenbinder. The language in this clause is open to interpretation.” O’Leary’s small smile was full of glee. “A hearing in Rome would bring a swift conclusion to this fascinating discussion.”

“I see we are comrades in logic, Mr. O’Leary. Given the nature and severity of the alleged violations, the Tribunal has requested I return posthaste with Mr. Bane. Consider this an official summons to a hearing before the Tribunal. We shall depart for Rome immediately.”

Malachy pictured agate gemstone eyes, not shining with an inner radiance, but weeping as he left her again. Even without Cora, abandoning his operations amidst the London turmoil would be bad for business. Not to mention the untraceable demons running loose.

He lit a cigarette and deliberated informing them of the horrors unleashed upon this Realm. Telling them was less likely to get him killed now, as the Realmwalker was the obvious solution to the demonic problem, but less guaranteed for long-term survival. And if he was getting dragged before the Tribunal on some gobshite technicality, he’d hold onto any advantage.

The full catastrophe would inevitably be revealed, but not until it benefitted him more.

“I can’t go to fuckin’ Rome now.”

“Master Bittenbinder is correct, Mal. According to the Tribunal’s proceedings, detailed in sub-clause—”

“Curse your infernal devotion to logic, O’Leary. No.”

O’Leary readjusted his spectacles with an affronted sniff. “As you wish.”

“Requesting is not asking, Mr. Bane,” the Lethe said in a firm voice.

Malachy could read between the lines. The Tribunal wouldn’t execute him while he was useful, but that courtesy ended when his usefulness did.

“For how long?”

“However long it takes, Mr. Bane. The law is thorough.”

“Clearly,” he muttered. “Very well. O’Leary, you’re in charge while I’m away. Start on the paperwork we discussed, would you?”

“I’ll be filing paperwork for weeks,” the solicitor said with a contented sigh.

Malachy’s sigh was full of discontent. How was he going to explain this sudden, prolonged absence to Cora? He’d only just convinced her to play at the club again. What would he be returning home to when the Tribunal released him? If the Tribunal released him.

Traversing back and forth to Rome would drain him. Since his heart had been uncaged, he had less power for traversing himself, let alone others, across large distances. One of the many adjustments he struggled with. The loss of those powers ached like a phantom limb. Despite his returned spirit, he felt stunted, a fragment of himself.

Bittenbinder rose to his full Napoleonic height. “Let us not waste more time—”

There was a knock on the door. Every head whipped around. Malachy’s gang knew better than to disturb him in a meeting. Guy’s finger never had quite grown back.

“What?” he clipped out. The door cracked open, and a welcome apparition ducked her head inside.

A very welcome apparition, he thought as his eyes raked over her hesitating in the doorway, resplendent in a turquoise beaded gown that matched her eyes. The weightless feeling she gave him returned to his stomach.

I am in deep fucking trouble .

He attempted an impassive expression. Cora knowing what she did to him was one thing. Everyone else in the room knowing, too, was another.

“Is this a matter of life or death, Cora?”

Her wary gaze, flicking over the men, locked with his. She nodded. His hackles rose.

Conversation died as she crossed to him, every pair of eyes tracking her slender figure. She bent to whisper in his ear, offering him the best view in the club down her dress. Thus distracted, he scarcely heard the words she rasped against his ear. His gaze lifted to her parted lips. Soft and stubborn. He had only to angle his chin to—

“— here , Malachy. He’s in the bloody club.” Their gazes connected. “He’s not a mage. Or a human.”

The fear in her eyes registered before her words sank in. “Fuck. One moment.”

Her gaze flickered behind him, her breath hitching. She didn’t move. Or blink. Or breathe. She was frozen. Everyone in the room was frozen. Mouths opened midsentence; hands poised mid-gesture. Only Malachy could move. He scrambled to his feet, breathing hard.

In his waistcoat pocket, the Doomsday Watch ticked its last.

The countdown was complete. He knew what was coming before the door swung open.

“Can’t make time for your old Master?” came a distorted Scottish burr like broken glass underfoot. A man glided through the door. Or rather, two mismatched halves grafted together did. Dark pince-nez glasses glinted over his coal-black eyes as he stopped before Malachy. “If you can’t make time for me, I’ll make time stop for you.”

What remained of Alastair Ghose smiled a gruesome half-smile and plucked the silver watch from his hand. “I’ll take this back now, lad.”

Horror crept up Malachy’s throat. He remembered the last time they’d fought over the Doomsday Watch. With only half his corrupted spirit, Ghose wasn’t as powerful as he’d been back then. But with the watch returned, he’d be that much quicker at reuniting his halves to regain that power.

Malachy had known what Master Ghose was becoming before they set off on that secret campaign during the Crimean War, across the tundra and into darkness. As his unwitting apprentice—servant, more like—he’d watched his Master succumb to the Profane Art’s seduction, amassing immense powers at the cost of his humanity. Over the years, Ghose’s eyes had hollowed and blackened.

Lazlo Lyter, the Sciomancer prodigy, had been half Malachy’s age and rightfully terrified of their Master. Ghose wouldn’t listen to their growing concerns. He wanted what was beyond the control of even the most powerful Chronomancers: to stop time. With the Doomsday Watch in hand, he finally could.

Naturally, Ghose didn’t use this power for good. When not in Rome, the Master Chronomancer was little more than a cutthroat mercenary, earning funds through suspect means and using his “apprentices” to enact his own personal crusade. A crusade that brought them to a shack in the Siberian wastelands, to steal a myth from a demon.

Malachy hadn’t believed in Koschei’s Egg until he pried it out of the slain demon’s bony fingers. Such power, in the palm of his hand.

“What price would you pay for power, lad?” Master Ghose had asked him on the day his imprisonment and apprenticeship began.

“Anything,” Malachy had answered without hesitation.

When Ghose stopped time for sixty seconds with a pocket watch, Malachy didn’t hesitate. He forced himself into the time bubble where the Specter’s Scourge cleaved both their spirits. He ripped his Master in half and sent the pieces into different Realms, Death and Demon. Then, with his heart’s blood dripping in time with the ticking watch, he caged his own spirit in the egg made of needles.

Lazlo had been sworn to secrecy. Their paths had diverged, Master and crime lord, but crossed again over the years. If Malachy had a heart, it would have broken to see his oldest friend age while he remained ageless.

Over the decades, checking the Demon Realm’s veil had become a ritual. First, indulged out of paranoia. Then, out of responsibility to the Tribunal for the demon he’d helped create.

The demon now standing before him.

“Why are you here, Ghose?”

“Why are you here, Realmwalker?” The demon tilted his mismatched head. “I watched you die, lad. With a fair amount of joy, no less.”

With a quick glance at Cora, Malachy betrayed them both.

“She resurrected you.” The demon grimaced a smile. “You’re not the only one your Necromancer will be bringing back to life. How things change, eh? Your bonny blue eyes are back but you're not the carefree lad you were then. Betraying your Master and selling your soul will do that. Least you're no longer the dour bore you’d become when all your dreams of cheating death came true.” He stroked Cora’s frozen cheek. “I wonder why?”

“Leave her out of this,” he growled, knocking the demon’s arm away and sending his pince-nez glasses to the floor.

Ghose laughed, his black-on-black eyes gleaming like an oil spill. “So ‘tis true. The man without a heart has found love at last. And with her , no less. For some unfathomable reason, she must care for you in return.” He gave her a half-pitying, half-disgusted look. “But your Necromancer is my Necromancer now.”

Fear constricted his chest. “She is not beholden to you. That Binding Agreement was with Ikelas. It ended with her.”

“Agreement or no, she will join us. The Queen of Rot returned half of me. Now her abomination will finish the job.”

Malachy’s memories of the late Necromancer stirred sluggishly, as if emerging from a tar pit. The previous Master Memnomancer had siphoned his memories of her after something he couldn’t remember but had been bad enough to incarcerate him in the Tribunal’s prison for several months.

When he tried to picture the so-called Queen of Rot, for some reason he saw Cora.

Malachy met his former Master’s dark, glittering gaze. “What do you want, Ghose?”

“You owe me, Realmwalker.” The demon smiled. “I’ve come to collect.”