Page 6 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)
F irst came a sharp tug behind her navel. Then, vertigo.
The Emerald Club office swam. Walls warped and dematerialized. Space distorted and disintegrated. Up became down and then sideways in a sickening disorientation, an onslaught to the senses.
Hands joined, they careened into the deforming void. She tried to scream but there was no air. She was suspended in freefall, as if startled awake while falling out of bed and bracing to hit the ground that never came.
But come it did. Cora crashed into something very solid. Her knees buckled, and a steadying arm fastened around her waist. The world spun in a nauseating blur. Doubling over, she proceeded to empty the contents of her stomach. The arm hastily withdrew.
“Everyone bokes the first time.” Bane gave her a handkerchief.
“Thanks for the warning,” she muttered. Stomach and dignity emptied, Cora cleaned off her face. The handkerchief was only fit to be burned when she finished. Lungfuls of cold air eased the next wave of nausea. She blinked through tears and the world came into focus. They stood on a dark street, in front of Teddy’s flat. “Wha— How?”
“Not a very bright one, are you?” he said with a casual callousness that grated on her shredded nerves. Her blistering look was lost on him as his gaze swept the empty street. “Come on, then. Haven’t got all night.”
Hands in the pockets of his long black coat, Bane trailed after her like a shadow across the desolate street, inside the building, and up three flights of stairs. Dread mounted with each step. The sour taste of vomit rose in her throat.
Domestic sounds filtered through the doors lining the dark hallway. A baby crying. A radio crackling. A couple bickering. Garish reminders of normalcy.
Cora wondered if they had traversed not into Hackney but into an alternate Realm. One surreal like a dream, where Bane helped his enemy’s Necromancer. Where Teddy was on the other side of that door, sleeping off a night of revelry.
On the outside, Teddy’s flat was like all the others. But through the door cracks seeped wrongness . The nightmare that would haunt her remaining nights awaited beyond that door. She couldn’t face it. Not again. The last fragile pillar of her sanity was crumbling. Screwing her eyes shut, she fell back a step.
“What are you waiting for? A fuckin’ written invitation?” Undaunted, Bane strode inside.
She hesitated on the threshold. Instinct screamed at her to flee. She was turning away when Bane tugged her stumbling inside. She halted in the dark flat with an icy rush of shock.
Missing. Teddy’s body was missing. Along with any sign of the pentagram and its crystalline corner crowns. The furniture was still pushed along the walls, but the center was empty. Save for a crimson stain.
A chilling silence engulfed them.
“But—” Her head whipped around. “This can’t be. There was a pentagram, and his— his body. Someone must have taken him! And cleaned up the whole ritual. All except the— blood. How? Why ? Everything was here earlier, I swear to god it was. I know what I saw.”
“Aye, this reeks of the Profane.”
Bane cut a strange figure, striding about to inspect the shadowed corners in a suit that cost more than the flat itself. An overflowing rubbish bin was kicked aside in the darkness. Bottles rolled across the floor. He turned on a lamp and illuminated the devastation.
With a sinking sensation, Cora realized they were empty liquor bottles. Dozens of them. And empty pill bottles, plundered from Teddy’s medicine cabinet that was stocked like a one-man pharmacy.
Teddy’s obsession over appearances had never extended to his personal abode. But this was worse than normal. Much worse. The entire flat sagged with the dinginess of neglect. Strewn about in haphazard piles was the fortune of clothing Teddy wore like armor. Draped over one pile was the cashmere scarf she’d stolen for him last Christmas. The last gift she’d ever give him.
There’d be no Walcott family holiday this year or any year after. The Walcott family had died along with him.
On the tangled bed sheets laid the long-stemmed cigarette holder Teddy was never without. Tears welled but she wouldn’t let them spill. Not yet. She pocketed it.
Bane turned over a bronze pipe packed with sickly sweet opium. She yanked it away and stuffed it in a drawer, avoiding his gaze.
Her gut told her no one had rifled through Teddy’s things except him. This was the legacy of a man in the throes of addiction. What had once been home to so many good memories was now a junkie’s rundown flat. Reminders of him clung to the air like mildew.
Why hadn’t she checked on Teddy since the tunnels? Had he been suffering, crying out to her all this time? She had seen the resurrecting demons of his addiction and left him to be eaten alive by them, too consumed with the trivialities of her own life. Now his life was forfeit.
Bane passed a strange object from his pocket over the blood stain. A faint, phosphorescent outline of Teddy’s body glowed. Cora found herself reaching towards it when it dissolved.
“Tell me what you saw.”
“Teddy was—” She jumped at a flash of light from the window. Headlights. It was only the headlights of a passing car. She released a shuddering breath.
In a voice soaked with anguish, she whispered, “He was… splayed out in a pentagram. With red salt and crystals at the points. His heart was c-carved out. Someone mutilated him. My brother, my only— First they took his spirit, and now his body. All that remains of him is a blood stain. Why would someone do this? I—”
“What kinds of crystals?”
His brusqueness took her aback. Bane had remained expressionless while he observed the remnants of the atrocities committed here. To her, this was the worst day of her life. To him, this was just business.
“I-I didn’t notice,” she said.
“Was anyone else near the flat or inside when you came in?”
Cora silently berated herself for not checking for a shadow-cloaked Umbramancer or the glimmering outline of an illusion-casting Lumomancer. The grim implications of his question sent a shiver through her. Had the causes of her grief also borne witness to it? Had she interrupted the culprits before they could clean up the evidence of their wrongdoings?
And she had just left Teddy here, defiled and unprotected, for an ill-fated confrontation with the man now coldly judging both of them. It was her fault Teddy was gone, in body and in spirit. Her shoulders stooped. “I didn’t notice anyone.”
“Did you notice anything useful?”
Her head snapped to him on a pulse of anger. “I was a bit preoccupied.”
Frowning, Bane circled the blood stain. “Yet they still made an effort to clean it up after you left. That worries me the most.”
“Seriously? That’s what worries you most?”
His eyes slashed to hers. “Did Teddy practice the Profane Arts?”
“No,” she said, too quickly.
The Profane Arts corroded the body and spirit; had more than dope aged Teddy beyond his years?
Grief was a knife between her ribs when she remembered how ill Teddy had looked the last time she saw him. The deep lines on his face and dark circles beneath his eyes. The gauntness of his frame. And she had abandoned him to his demons. The knife twisted deeper.
“No,” she said with more conviction. “Teddy is—” Her throat constricted. “ Was reckless, but not suicidal. Someone cursed his spirit elsewhere. But… Why? Who would want to make him suffer like this?”
“A shorter list would be who wouldn’t want to make him suffer like this.”
Cora cut him a sharp look. The Realmwalker deserved the vilification he received. Hell, he vilified himself just by opening his mouth. His unapologetic bluntness stretched the restraints on her self-control thinner and thinner.
Hands fisting at her sides, she rounded on him. “I don’t need your bloody help making this any worse. My brother is gone —”
“Clearly.” He gestured at the room.
“Are you going out of your way to be a fucking arsehole or are you always like this?”
The words burst out before she could stop herself. She winced into the ringing silence. She had communed with enough of his victims to know people didn’t speak to the Realmwalker like that and survive. Divested of all her weapons and flirting with hysteria, she was in no position to defend herself. She tensed, awaiting what form his displeasure would take. Would he rip her apart with his words or his hands?
Instead, he nearly smiled. It was far from comforting.
“Getting shot at by Teddy’s vinegary spinster of a sister has depleted my limited patience for the Walcotts. Not even you can deny what an infernal shit Teddy was. He made a lot of enemies.”
Grief solidified into anger. A burning anger that slithered into her belly and around her empty heart.
“I know!” she spat. “I know what Teddy’s like. I know him better than anyone. He can be vapid and impulsive, I won’t deny that. He’s a flawed man. I know all of his flaws and I love him just the same. And he knows all of my flaws and loves me just the same. Two billion people in this world, and Teddy is— was —all I’ve got. He’s the only one who cares whether I live or die.”
She swiped away her tears. That chasm into an unbearable emptiness gaped open before her. Pulling herself back, she forced her gaze on Bane. “Could anyone say that about you?”
Something stirred in his depthless eyes. He regarded her with an indecipherable expression. Perhaps her outburst was just a miserable curiosity to him. Another variable for calibrating the human calculus he’d reduced her to the moment she barreled into his office.
Turning away, she stared at her twin’s blood on the floor. “I can’t leave Teddy to suffer like this. He should be at peace, not… I need to find him. I need to find who’s responsible and make them pay. Teddy deserves a reckoning.”
“I don’t know about that, but I do know that this MO doesn’t fit any of the London gangs. The Profane Arts are too subtle for that wanker Verek. The Pyromancer burns it down and asks questions later. You’re sure Edwina isn’t involved?”
“No, Teddy is—was—too useful. He’s the best Animancer in London. Not even you can deny that. He would’ve sensed her genuine feelings. Mother’s also too cautious. I’ve never known her to dabble in dark magic.”
“You don’t know your Mother. Edwina Morton does more than brainwash orphans.”
His words fed her growing suspicions. What happens when Teddy’s gone? All the assassinated politicians, slain children, and maimed corpses she’d made Cora pry the secrets out of like juicy worms to feed her insatiable appetite for intrigue. Had Teddy been desecrated for his secrets?
“If his spirit isn’t in the Death Realm,” Bane said, “it might be alive in another.”
Her heart turned over in her chest. His offhand comment sparked a perverse hope inside her. In spite of all she had seen and heard and knew to be true, she clung to that hope. “You mean, Teddy might not be… truly dead?”
Cora was certain she’d be truly dead in the silence that followed. She felt the heaviness of his silence like she was trapped at the bottom of an hourglass, drowning one grain of sand at a time.
“Depending on the Profane curse, his spirit could be in another Realm or trapped between Realms.”
The possibilities unspooled in her mind. Curses could be undone. Death was not always permanent. The spirit could be rewoven into the vessel of its body, regardless of its degradation. From horrendous reanimation favors, Cora knew a body would reject the wrong spirit, limbs spasming and mouth foaming until it was more lifeless than before.
But if Teddy’s spirit wasn’t truly dead, and his body could be found and healed, she might reanimate more than an empty husk of him. A shade of Teddy was better than nothing at all.
Hope was like a stowaway on a sinking ship. Barely enough to keep her afloat in a sea of misery. If it sank, so would she. She clung onto it like a life raft.
Closing the distance between them, she implored, “Can you find his spirit, Realmwalker?”
He considered her. “There are countless Realms, one stacked right atop another. I’d need to know which Profane curse to know where to begin looking.”
“The red pentagram, heart removal, and missing spirit doesn’t narrow it down?”
“You’re clearly not familiar with the Profane Arts.”
“Then how can I find out which curse?”
“Without his body or spirit or the person who split them? Not fuckin’ likely. Even if you found them, not every Profane curse can be broken.”
His curt reply dashed her fragile hopes. She gripped the cigarette holder in her pocket like a talisman. Through the crushing disappointment drifted a sullen thought: How long can you live without hope?
“Can you try searching for him?” she asked, quiet, desperate. “Please. I would do anything to get Teddy back.”
His gaze flicked over her, lingering on her lips. “I’ll look into it.”
She reached out when he made to leave. They both stared at her hand, perplexed to see it gripping his arm. Soft fabric and hard muscle under her palm. She let it fall.
“How will I know if you find him?”
“If I find him, I’ll come find you.”
Questions spun in her mind but only one came to her lips. “Why are you helping me?”
“The Tribunal coming to London would be bad for business.” The corners of his mouth lifted as he gave her a slow perusal “And I do love a challenge.”
Bane vanished. She blinked at the place where he’d been. A roar of silence filled the room.
Cora was alone in an empty flat. Alone in an empty world. Staggering back, she slid down the wall and crumpled to the floor, clutching the hollow ache in her chest, the grief-pocked remains of her heart.
Someone had snuffed out her only light and cleaved her life in two—the brightness with Teddy, and the unending darkness without him. She was left behind to wander the wreckage of an unremarkable life she’d never fully lived. Of the Animancer who yearned for life and the Necromancer who yearned for death, the wrong twin had been culled.
“You are my favorite part of us,” she whispered to no one. Cora curled into herself and wept.