Page 4 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

S moke drifted from her lips into the cloudy night. With one last puff, Cora flicked the cigarette she’d bummed from the drummer into a dirty puddle.

Fifteen minutes was never a long enough break from the Starlite Club’s perfume of unwashed bodies packed shoulder-to-shoulder in an unventilated basement. It wasn’t even midnight and the crowd was so boisterous she’d barely heard the music she was playing. She had retreated into the grimy back alley with the uproar still ringing in her ears.

Through the club’s muffled din, she heard the band starting up again, and beneath that, her now constant companion, the rattle of an approaching death. The sensation plaguing her since the Silvertown docks had grown overpowering. A certainty that festered at the back of her mind, lingering like the stench of rot.

Death was near and Cora was not particularly concerned. Death was the only cure for the human condition, after all, and it had been the sweetest relief before. The sooner her futile race against death’s hourglass ended, the better.

Stuffing her hands in her pockets, she wondered how death would claim her this time. A specter stalking the darkness? The eyeshine watching her from the shadows? Or the Realmwalker himself?

She studied the Chronomancer’s key, warm from its hiding place beside her heart. That key’s the only way to get to the Realmwalker , Horace had said.

Portal Keys, specialized for traversing between linked doors, were often ornate. This key, however, seemed like an ordinary skeleton key. Things were seldom as they seemed.

With a pang of unease, she tried the key in the club’s back door. Horrifyingly, it slid into the lock without resistance. Tumblers clicked when she turned it left. She braced herself for—

Nothing. Nothing happened. She was still in a freezing alley, staring at a closed door like a bloody moron. Her tense shoulders fell.

Unless her fate awaited beyond the door.

She reached for the handle. At best, the Starlite’s raucous interior would greet her. At worst, Malachy Bane would stroll through, and he’d break more than her ribs this time.

Holding her breath, she cracked open the door and peered inside.

The room that greeted her was from a century back in time. A library, in the charmingly chaotic Victorian style. Ceiling-high shelves ascended the two-story tower, overflowing with leather-bound books. Mahogany furniture, paisley wallpaper, and thick drapes clashed in vibrant patterns. A fire crackled in the hearth.

Cora slammed the door shut, heart galloping and breath fogging. Far from ordinary, indeed. Instead of traversing between linked doors, this Portal Key allowed for near infinite entries into Bane’s presumed inner sanctum.

In the wrong hands, the key was dangerous. In hers, it felt like power.

Where else could it take her?

Curiosity eventually overcame trepidation. She slid the key back into the lock, turned right, and opened the door on a sharp inhale.

Inside was a spacious, walnut-paneled office that was tastefully appointed and mercifully unoccupied. With dark leather furniture and a sedate refinement that oozed wealth, the office was dominated by a massive desk, covered with meticulous stacks of ledgers. Not a single pen or paper was out of place.

Sounds of a tuning trumpet, clinking glasses, and muted conversation reached her ears. Her head swiveled, but the sounds didn’t grow closer. There was only the cold alley at her back and the inviting warmth of the office before her. She took a timid step inside. On the far wall was an emblem that halted her. The gilded shamrock of the Emerald Club.

Footsteps were approaching.

“—hell,” came a deep, lilting voice. “Verek burned down the fuckin’ rum warehouse—”

Jumping back into the alley, she banged the door shut and pried the key from the lock. She’d gone nowhere yet felt like she’d sprinted for miles. Breathing hard, she half-expected the Realmwalker to appear and finish what he’d started in those tunnels.

Tense moments she waited with only her thundering heart for company. Her mind raced through the possibilities. Turn right to Bane’s office at the Emerald Club. Turn left to some Victorian library.

Why had the late Chronomancer given her direct access to his boss? The newly dead were often irrational. Perhaps it had just been a reflex, an echo of the life he’d ended with a bullet.

He will love you to death.

The door swung open. Panic lodged in her throat.

Barry stuck his head outside and squinted at her cowering against the brick wall.The Starlite’s drummer wiped the ever-present white powder that would soon kill him off his nose. His death fell like snowflakes onto the ground. “Band’s starting up again. And you owe me a ciggy.”

Letting out a held breath, she followed Barry through the press of unwashed bodies to the stage. The clamoring crowd faded and calm returned as her hands flew over the keys. At the piano was the only time the voices of the dead quieted. Her thoughts tapered off, until it was only the glide of fingers on smooth keys, the resonant thrum of strings filling her as she lost herself in the swinging rhythm.

Jazz was a living creature. The heartbeat of drums, the strides of piano and heel taps of bass, the low growl of trumpet, purr of sax, and breath of horns. After the band exhausted their meager repertoire, they improvised. Improvisation was her forte. She sank into it.

Until the stroke of midnight, when the clanging toll of a death knell reverberated against her skull and along her bones. An unseen vise clamped around her chest, like a fist boring through her flesh, cracking open her ribs and ripping out her heart.

Cora dropped to her knees. Clutching her chest, she gasped for air that wouldn’t come. A bolt of sinister energy convulsed through her. A stab of pain. An ache of anguish. And then emptiness.

The premonition of death was coming to fruition. But there was no blood on her hands as she clawed at her constricting chest. It wasn’t her heart being wrenched out. It wasn’t her death screaming in her veins.

Teddy .

When she came to, she was on the ground in a blur of too bright lights and too loud sounds. People were standing over her, their faces and voices rising and falling. Wetness streaked her face. With shaking fingers, she touched her cheek. She was crying. Great heaving sobs that racked her entire empty body.

“Cora?” A face floated into focus, forehead creased in concern as they stared down at her. Mary, one of her flatmates who worked as a barmaid. “You all right? Looked like you was having some kind of fit, shaking like that.”

Suffocating. Cora was suffocating. She pushed away from the cloying hands and staggered outside. Cold wind whipped at her, plastering her thin dress to her body and freezing her tears in mascara-stained rivulets down her face. She was too numb to feel anything but the emptiness throbbing inside her.

In a frightful daze, her feet led her, slipping on the thin crust of dirty ice, to Teddy’s flat. An awful, creeping dread followed her. Somewhere, in the last imploding fragment of her sanity, she knew the guttural cries piercing the night were her own.

No no nonono . The dirge, chanted in a wailing voice, must have escaped her lips. Even the junkies got out of her way.

She mounted the steps to Teddy’s flat like an executioner’s scaffold and fumbled the door open with her spare key. A strangeness pervaded the building. The hairs on her nape stood on end. She climbed to the third floor, each step bringing a deeper sense of foreboding.

At the end of the hallway was the door to his flat. A dead end. Flooded by dread, she stepped towards it. “T-Teddy?” Her voice was a hoarse whisper.

Inside, something rustled. Then came a chilling silence that could have meant nothing or everything.

Tears streaked down her face as she waited for an answer that never came. With a sense of inevitability, she knocked on the door. It creaked open, and she pulled away on a gasp. The door had been left slightly ajar, as if someone had come or gone in a hurry.

Inside the dark flat, the sense of wrongness was thick enough to choke on. Weak light from the streetlamps slanted across the floor, cleared of the furniture now pushed against the walls.

In the center laid Teddy.

Desecrated.

Eyes glazed, he stared at the ceiling, unseeing. His limbs were outstretched like a blasphemous Vitruvian man in a pentagram of bloodred salt, the points crowned by crystals emanating a phosphorescent vapor. Only a gaping hole remained where his heart had been carved out. White splinters of bone steepled through torn sinew and congealing blood. His body, pale and gaunt, was mottled by bruises from the Realmwalker’s attack.

Despair was a boulder dropping in the pit of her stomach. A strangled cry tore out of her throat. Stumbling, she sank to the floor beside him lying still. So terribly still.

Sobs poured from her like a river from a ruptured dam. She touched his shoulder and was at once besieged by wrongness. Whatever had been done to Teddy had been a transgression against nature.

Cora plummeted into the Death Realm crying his name. But no Deathscape greeted her. No death throes churned in her mind. No Teddy. There was only the static of nothingness. A deafening quiet.

Even with his body as an anchor, she couldn’t find his spirit in the Death Realm. Anywhere. She shouted his name, searching and searching but seeing nothing, running as fast as she could but going nowhere, until her cries turned to whimpers and her magic was drained. She fell to her knees in the aching abyss.

Teddy wasn’t there. Not even a remnant of a shadow of his spirit existed in the Death Realm.

Where could his spirit have gone, if not Death? Spirits didn’t linger in the Living Realm, as ghosts or otherwise. And bodies couldn’t be reanimated without their spirits.

His spirit had flown from its mortal cage to a place beyond Death. A place she couldn’t follow him.

Teddy was gone. Truly gone.

A sinkhole opened inside her. She teetered on the brink of its precipice, the foundation crumbling beneath her feet. An endless expanse of emptiness stretched before her. Staggeringly vast and never to be filled.

Magical exhaustion and a profound, marrow-deep sense of loss drove her back to her body in the dark flat. She felt as though years had been drained from her spirit. It didn’t matter. Her other half, her reason for living, was a heartless carcass on the living room floor. With her only light extinguished, she was alone in darkness.

Tears overflowed as she looked down at the only person she had ever loved. The organ clenching in her chest—hopelessly, helplessly—began to wither.

It should’ve been me. If only it had been me.

A spine-chilling realization wrapped around her ribs and strangled her. The rattle of death hadn’t been hers, but her twin’s. She had sensed death coming and done nothing to stop it.

Guilt settled over her like a leaden shroud. She should have done something, anything . She should’ve stopped him from going into those tunnels. Should’ve held onto him and told him she loved him while she had the chance. Her last chance. Now, there would be only his memory to love.

The last time she’d seen him—the last time she would ever see him alive—he had shut his flat’s door in her face with the muted thud of a coffin lid closing.

She brushed a lock of hair from his face, a mirror image of her own, frozen in the agony of death. The sense of wrongness crawled up her arm like spiders and she jerked back.

Over his lifeless body shimmered a phosphorescence so faint she hadn’t noticed it. An uncanny sheen she had seen before, on victims of the Profane Arts.

Dark, forbidden magic—the embodiment of wrongness—hummed in the room. This wasn’t just death. This was a curse .

Impotent rage gripped her. Someone had robbed Teddy of his life and cursed his spirit. Their insidious presence hovered around her.

The timing of Teddy’s injuries couldn’t be coincidental. The bruises on his body and the yawning cavity in his chest had to have been inflicted by the same man. For if Teddy’s spirit wasn’t in the Death Realm, it had to have been cursed into another Realm, and only one portal mage in London could accomplish that.

It was no secret the Realmwalker used the dark magic forbidden by the Covenant. The only secret was how he avoided the Profane Art’s lethal cost. Speculation abounded.

All magic had a cost. The spirit was the conduit for magic, but also paid its price. The magic wielded was equal to the spirit expended. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. Dark magic granted immense power but drained tenfold the wielder’s spirit, leaving them husks of their former selves. If they were lucky.

Anger sharpened the edge of her grief to a point and filled her purpose. Her brother’s murderer would pay. A life for a life. She rose, shaking, to her feet. On a table, Teddy’s revolver glinted, and with it a reckless inspiration. He’d fired that revolver in the tunnels.

Recklessness was a building momentum, spurring her to load the gun with trembling hands. She had lost everything. There was nothing more to lose. She clicked the cylinder shut. This time, she wouldn’t miss.

It was late, but the jazz clubs were just getting started. Teddy’s murderer was probably sitting in his posh club right now, sipping champagne while her life fell apart at his hand.

Before her mind could catch up to her body, Cora fitted the Portal Key in the lock, turned right, and stepped through the door.