Page 8 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

N ausea punched through Cora when she hit the ground. White and blue blurred under her face. A porcelain vase. Folding in half, she gripped the vase and retched. Cheap gin, she realized, burned even more coming back up.

“You get used to it,” Bane said.

I sincerely doubt that . Knees wobbling, she dropped into a wingback chair before the crackling fireplace and clamped her eyes shut at the dizziness. The rancid taste of vomit coated her tongue.

“—if it’s a war they want, O’Leary, it’s a war they’ll fuckin’ get,” Bane was saying into the phone receiver, his voice like ice-tempered steel. “Do as we planned. Call Dimitri and Gallagher. They’re in place with the rest of the gang. They know what to do. Meet at the rendezvous in an hour.” He slammed the receiver down.

The ground shook like an earthquake, startling her eyes wide. They were in the Victorian library the Portal Key had shown her. A spiral staircase ascended the two-story tower, the soaring shelves crammed with an overwhelming collection of leather-bound tomes and relics humming with ominous energy. With the many potted plants, fronded palms, and drooping curls of ivy, the room looked more like an eclectic scholar’s cluttered greenhouse than a library.

The room shook again. Books dropped from ceiling-high shelves and gas lamps flickered. Overhead, a door slammed.

Unconcerned by the quaking, Bane prowled to a bar cart, his charred, bloodstained coat flapping. He poured a full glass of whiskey, tossed it back, and poured another. Even covered in the sooty gore of the men she’d seen him eviscerate, he still managed to look elegant. A gentleman reposing in his charming library, enjoying a glass of spirits after liberating other men of theirs.

“Er, why is the room shaking?” Cora asked with a death grip on the armchair.

“The house is temperamental.”

“Wh-whose sentient house?”

“Mine. And it’s only approaching sentience.”

She sat up and immediately regretted it as the library somersaulted. “You have to take me back.”

“Back to what?” He faced her, black eyes flashing. “Back to your shite flat? Your shite job? Your shite life?”

Anger, then alarm, shivered through her. The Realmwalker had done his research on her. How many skeletons deep had he dug in her closet?

She fisted her trembling hands in her lap and held his cold stare. In this, and likely only this, she had the upper hand. Bane couldn’t bend what was already broken. “Don’t forget my shite wages.”

He arched a brow. “Why do you want to go back? They’ve nothing but contempt for you. Especially your so-called Mother who left you to die.”

No answer was forthcoming. Without Teddy, she was unmoored. Unilluminated. What was there to go back to? “She’s... the only family I’ve got left.”

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?” he said. “You’re not like her other fawning pets. Why has the Unweaver chosen to work for Edwina all this time instead of rotting her feathers off?”

She evaded his shrewd gaze and looked at her boots. A disconcerting piece of flesh clung to the patched leather. She wondered whose as she tried to shake it off.

“She’s blackmailing you,” the perceptive bastard said. “Over what?”

Cora huffed a laugh. “Like I’ll let you weaponize that against me, too.”

Even now, Mother’s blade, forged from that single threat, was poised over her jugular. I have only to make one call, my pet.

Like most things, it was only a matter of time. Bane could only offer so much protection from the consequences of her own actions. Unless she scrambled back before Mother noticed she’d left the nest.

“Perhaps I should go back to my shite life,” she mused.

“There is no going back.”

Her head snapped up. The gravity of her predicament hit her like an avalanche. In an unthinking moment, she had altered the entire course of her life. Malachy Bane had vaulted into her world and become its center. For better or worse, she was trapped in his orbit. There’d be no crawling back to Mother, no sliding back into that comfortably uncomfortable existence.

What happens when Teddy’s gone? Cora had a creeping suspicion Mother was more involved in Teddy’s death than she claimed. She’d never trusted Mother, yet a part of her still couldn’t believe the old bird capable of that level of treachery. Blackmailing and backstabbing, sure. Murder by proxy, of course. But the Profane Arts? Against her favorite pet?

Mother had made an artform of deception, though. If Teddy’s demise had been her doing, she hadn’t done it herself. Cora had enough blood on her hands to know Mother never sullied her own.

The web of conspiracy glinted anew. Mother and Verek’s underhandedness had tipped the precarious balance of power in London. Together, they might break Bane’s monopoly on transportation. They’d sink their own ship just to pick through the spoils. And Bane didn’t seem the least bit surprised about it. He was scheming, not panicking.

“There’ll be another war,” she said. “Won’t there?”

“It’s already begun.”

A great spasm shook the house. Books and potted plants crashed to the floor. She barely ducked in time to dodge a plummeting glass orb. Bane braced his hands on the fireplace mantle and watched the flames. He was close enough she could reach out and touch the taut muscles of his back.

She clenched her hands in her lap. “Mother and Verek are teaming up against you.”

He slanted a wry look over his shoulder. “You think?”

“Well, since you seem to know everything already, why don’t you fill me in? Do you honestly think you’ll win, two against one? Against the Tribunal?”

“I already own this city and they’re fuckin’ idiots to believe otherwise. After the Great War distraction ended, the natives were bound to get restless again. I’ve had plans in motion for years, and dispensing with that truce gobshite will liberate opportunities. Now they’ve made the first move, I can claim self-defense should the Tribunal interrupt again. But first.” He half-turned towards her, his profile imbued with firelight. “Have we a deal?”

Her world had been tilted on its axis; she didn’t know where she stood anymore. With the upheaval of her loyalties, she was no longer Mother’s pet. But she was still on a leash.

An array of bleak futures unfolded in her mind. Mother making that one call and bringing Cora to heel like a disobedient dog, shredding her life with her sharp beak and Verek incinerating the pieces. Or willfully misleading herself with Bane, delaying the inevitable with his proffered illusion of sanctuary.

During parley, though, Bane had woven a fragile thread of trust. He hadn’t revealed her identity even when he stood to benefit. Maybe there was a vein of morality in his ruthlessness. He also hadn’t treated her with the revulsion she’d come to expect. Not yet at least.

The devil still waited at the crossroads. What strings were attached to his deal? Would they come to strangle her?

Cora slumped forward, head in hands. Perhaps life was a slow descent into the lower levels of hell, only to realize there was no bottom. From the nuns to Felix to Mother and now Malachy Bane, the reigning king of hell himself. Arrogance sheathed in burning ice.

After a long silence with only the crackle of flames, her gaze crept between her fingers to find him looking down at her with fierce intent. Her hands dropped. She couldn’t balk from the truth blazing in his eyes. The bridge to her past had burned and the only way was forward. With him .

Cora realized, with cold clarity, there were few things she wouldn’t do to get Teddy back. Time would tell just how Bane would use that against her. “What do you want from me?” she asked carefully.

He contemplated her from her old boots to her singed hair. “I want you to trust me.”

“Trust?” she scoffed. “Definitely not.”

“What do you want, Cora?”

The sound of her name rolling on his tongue made something flutter in her stomach. Something she quickly squashed.

She let out a ragged breath. “I want to get Teddy back and leave this wretched city. If that means partnering with you, then... so be it. Find my brother and I’ll work for you.” The words came easier than she’d expected. Defection was simple, now she was on the other side. Shearing off that festering umbilical cord at last was a near physical relief. “With some conditions.”

He crossed his arms, the fine fabric of his suit pulling tight over his broad shoulders and chest. “Go on.”

She straightened. “I have the right of refusal on jobs. I don’t have to kill or hurt anyone. And you pay me forty—a hundred—quid. Per job.”

“Is that all?”

The sum hadn’t made him flinch. A hundred pounds, Cora realized belatedly, was a pittance to him. She regretted not asking for more. Pushing her luck now was bound to backfire, though. “If we seal it with a Binding Agreement, yes. That’s the only way I’d trust you.”

She measured his reaction. Proposing a lifelong contract written in their blood, whose conditions and the painful consequences for violating them could only be severed through death, was a long shot. Binding Agreements were reserved for matters of vital importance—securing the succession of magical dynasties, not employment contracts.

Floating a lifetime commitment to the Realmwalker was also easy. If they didn’t get Teddy back, her lifetime wouldn’t be that long, anyways. But there was no way in hell Bane would agree to it.

“All right.”

Cora blinked, relieved and worried by his ready acceptance. “Really?”

He helped her to her feet and pulled out a knife. Polished metal reflected the hearth glow. “I have conditions of my own. You’ll divulge everything you know about Edwina, Verek, and their dealings. You won’t under any circumstances undermine me, my gang, or my businesses. You won’t defy my orders.”

She snorted. “If you want a doormat, find yourself a wife. We’re talking business.”

At his unamused expression, she glanced at his left hand to see if she’d just insulted Mrs. Bane. No ring. A memory stirred, of her flatmates gossiping over tabloids featuring a certain Irish gangster, photographed with a different gorgeous woman on his arm each time.

Oh god , her flatmates. Her flat and everything in it were lost to her now.

Negotiation ensued as she made her deal with the devil. Bane would help her find Teddy and give Cora his full protection and resources, within reason. In return, she would cooperate with his orders to the fullest extent possible and work for Malachy Bane until her dying breath. No hidden clause could be more fearful than that fact.

Without breaking skin, he traced the knife over her palm, along her lifeline. His gaze captured hers. “Have we a deal?”

She wasn’t certain if it was madness or inevitability that led her to be standing here. Their gazes held in a moment that was its own eternity.

“We have a deal.”

Knife poised, he repeated the conditions of their Binding Agreement and sealed it with, “To hurt me is to hurt yourself.”

“To hurt me is to hurt yourself.”

He sliced her palm, deep. She gasped. Blood oozed from the cut. He made a matching incision on his palm and clasped their hands together, wound to wound. Blood and magic and a strange current of energy coursed through their joined hands. An iridescent shimmer enfolded them.

In her mind’s eye flashed a series of impressions. Visions of Malachy Bane. Naked and bathed in cream, smiling a slow, devastating smile. Then, hunched over and grimacing in pain, blood dripping down his arm. Then, kneeling between her thighs and gazing up at her with sky blue eyes. And finally, lying on a bed of stars, his heart beating in her hand.

The shimmer burst. A torrent of energy blew them apart and knocked her back into the armchair. Her hand was no longer bleeding, but glowing . Energy sparked from her fingertips to the ends of her hair. Half-formed thoughts teemed in her mind.

This was her first Binding Agreement, but it felt… unusual. What ramifications might come of this, she could only imagine.

Bane was mired in his own tumultuous thoughts. Transfixed by his glowing hand, he moved his fingers as if they belonged to someone else. “I have made a grave mistake,” he muttered.

He’d voiced her own concern, and it brought her no comfort. Seconds into their agreement, and he already regretted it. Perhaps it was the lasting static shock that perturbed him, or his own troubling visions he’d seen of her.

Their blood and magic had intermingled, yet she couldn’t bring herself to ask him why he thought it a mistake. Binding Agreements couldn’t be rescinded regardless of mutual regret. This mistake lived as long as they did.

“There’s no going back.” She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “You can’t tell anyone who or what I am. Anyone . I’ll work for you, but in secret. No one can know. Understood?”

His eyes, glittering like coals, found hers. “It will take a lifetime to plumb the depths of your irrationality.”

“And a lifetime we’re bound to. I suppose the Binding Agreement has agreed for you. You won’t have a choice without hurting yourself.” She rubbed her tingling hand. The wound was healed, but the strange energy remained. “Now will you fill me in?”

He slid his hand into his pocket. “Very well. I’d planned on them instigating another war. Breaking the truce under the guise of a business dispute. Attacking me during parley, two against one. Threatening the Tribunal. I knew they’d take out at least one of my gang. Shame it had to be Moriarty.” Sighing, he raked back his hair. “Whole thing was predictable.”

He offered her a cigarette, and she placed it between her lips with a trembling hand. When he leaned down to light it for her, their gazes locked across the flickering flame.

“This business about your brother, though, intrigues me. Why frame me for Teddy’s death and get rid of all the evidence? It’s a blunder I’d expect from Verek, but Edwina is clever. She wouldn’t sacrifice her precious Animancer for nothing, or risk the Pyromancer’s incompetence on the job. This doesn’t fit with the other gangs either. They’re too afraid of the Tribunal to use Profane curses. Something more than this war is afoot.”

Cora forgot all about the cigarette. “You think someone else cursed Teddy?”

“The simplest explanation is often the correct one. Teddy was always unstable, but was he running with darker circles of late?”

She opened her mouth, closed it again. Unspoken between them was the sea of empty bottles in Teddy’s flat. “Drunker and less clothed circles, certainly. But nothing like the Profane Arts. Do you know any dark mages in town?”

“Not yet. But whoever they are, they have my undivided attention.”

“Your attention isn’t divided on, say, a war?”

He dismissed the bloodshed to come with a wave of his hand. His lack of concern was concerning. “The pieces are in place. Plans are running their course. Though Edwina will need closer handling after losing so many of her pets.”

“I doubt Mother considers losing me a loss.”

“With all the damning information you’re about to hand over to me? She will be feeling your loss most keenly.”

The Realmwalker’s capacity for scheming was much less disturbing when it benefitted her. Blackmailing the blackmailer. Delicious . “Happy to oblige. But what about Verek? What do you think about him?”

“I don’t. I’ll be running his gang within a year. I’d planned on a compromise with Edwina, but after this parley stunt, she’s in need of some killing. Would you like the pleasure?”

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” she said, and disappointment crossed his features. “Unless they deserve it. I’d love to pluck that old bird’s feathers off.”

His mouth curved. “Good girl.”

The words did something odd to her insides. A tightening, low in her belly. Not unpleasant, but very unwelcome. She pushed the sensation away. “Have you looked for Teddy in other Realms yet?”

“Aye, without any sign of him, body or spirit. You didn’t find him in the only Realm I have a one-way ticket to. His spirit might be trapped between Realms in a place I’ve never risked going to.”

Her gaze veered to him. “Where?”

“Purgatory.”

A spark of hope flared. The Death Realm’s waiting room. Of course . The spark was doused as his words sank in. “Why have you never risked going there? Is Purgatory hard to find?”

“It’s not finding it that’s the challenge. It’s returning. There’s too much that can go wrong.”

“Such as?”

“Such as your spirit being trapped in between, wandering aimless and alone in the nothingness for all eternity.”

“Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

He sent her a flat look, then turned to the towering bookshelves. “A Choromancer and Necromancer might be able to safely traverse in and out of Purgatory.”

He began rummaging through the bookshelves, disconcertingly, without moving from where he stood. There was a faint wrinkle in space where his vanishing hand reappeared a story overhead, pulling down a book. He thumbed through the pages before his hand disappeared for another book.

Restless, she stood and ran her fingers along the book spines. If Teddy wasn’t quite dead, and not quite alive… If they could find his spirit in Purgatory and his missing body, and somehow reunite them…

If, if, if . Doubts swarmed her.

She turned her attention to the books. The library’s sheer size was overwhelming. Generations of knowledge were crammed onto the overflowing shelves and piled haphazardly on the furniture. The contradiction of this ruthless man in this cluttered house struck her.

To her surprise, the books were not only alphabetized but enchanted to be so. When she re-shelved a book in the wrong place, it floated back to its proper home within moments. His control issues exceeded even her sketch of him. Then again, Bane seemed nothing if not efficient.

From a high shelf he took down what appeared to be a grimoire bound in human flesh. After feeding it drops of blood from a pricked finger and murmuring an incantation, the grimoire opened with a low groan. He turned the pages reverently, scanning them for excruciating minutes.

“There could be a way,” he said at last.

Her head whipped to him. “How?”

He considered her over the grimoire. “How powerful of a Necromancer are you?”

“Shouldn’t you have asked that before we made a Binding Agreement?” she said. “I dunno. I’ve never met another Necromancer.”

Feelings of unworthiness crept in. There was no other death mage to compare herself to, yet she still found herself lacking. She’d never trained or studied to strengthen her abomination. She might not be able to find Teddy’s spirit in Purgatory or return safely, thrice damning him.

Bane laid the grimoire, likely more ancient than some civilizations, before her. Written on the goldleaf pages were Latin enchantments she was too out of practice to translate. She grew more aware of her deficiencies.

“We might make it to Purgatory and back alive if we traversed corporeally. It’ll be tricky. Here’s a ritual to combine our magic. Even then, we’ll have scant minutes to search. Locating his spirit is the key. Spirit and body are tethered across Realms. Find his spirit—”

“Find his body.” A crazed smile spread across her face. “Reunite them and bring Teddy back to life.”

Bane held up a cautionary hand. “If the curse can be broken, you could reunite them. But he will never come back the exact same. Your brother as you knew him is truly gone.”

Memories came unbidden of the spirits she had returned from death. A young man growing paler and more vacant each time she damned him to death and back, until he was only the husk of a monster.

Teddy’s body—wherever it might be—was irrefutably dead, but not his spirit. Reanimation could bring back more than a shade of him. The fractured pieces of her heart were strung together by that slender thread of hope.

“I know. I’ve reanimated before.”

His brows lifted, impressed. “Reanimation takes skill. But if I’m risking my life, I’ll make damn sure first. You’ve had training?”

“If by training you mean disastrous trial and error, then yes.”

His brows knitted. “You’re self-taught? Edwina didn’t train you?”

“She trained me in manners and that’s about it.”

“I see how well that worked,” he said. “I’ve wondered, what is the Death Realm like?”

Cora blinked. No one had ever asked her about it. Not even Teddy. “Like a necropolis with private suites. Everyone’s perception of death is different. Moriarty’s Deathscape looked like the Irish countryside.”

“He’s gone home to County Cork.” Sorrow flickered across his features like a sparrow, there and gone. “What’s the oldest spirit you’ve communed with?”

“Hmm. A knight from the First Crusade.” That had been an odd favor. The knight had been little more than a ghost of a whisper. A man-shaped vapor fading to nothingness. She must have drained away a year of her own life trying to cajole a peep from him.

“Almost a thousand years. Jesus. That’s incredible.”

She glanced away, embarrassed by how his praise affected her, even if he was complimenting her abomination. “How many other Realms are there? What are they like?”

“Infinite. And infinite.” He pulled out his silver pocket watch. On its face were a half dozen hands pointing at archaic symbols rather than numbers. “Does your death sense include objects?”

She eyed the watch warily. “Sometimes.” Communing with the dead through objects or places was like casting a line into dark waters and feeling a tug. The more intimate from life or saturated with death, the stronger the tug.

He held the watch out. “Tell me who they were and how they died.”

“Are you joking?”

“Does it look like I’m joking?”

It looks like you’re incapable of joking.

Her fingertips hovered over the watch. The tug was so strong she was yanked off her feet and dragged through the depths of time. Into the past, into the death infused in the silver.

Cora was at once immersed in the bizarre.

In a frozen tundra, against the blinding glare of sunlight on snow, two men grappled for their lives. A shimmering veil surrounded them. Inside, they raged. Outside, the world stood still. Snowflakes hung suspended in the breathless air.

The man with a coppery beard pinned the older man. Eclipsing the sun overhead, he glared down at him with blue eyes colder than the ice. Betrayal was etched on the older man’s face, and his eyes, impossibly black on black, widened in disbelief.

“ Ad infernos , Ghose,” said the bearded man with a grin of vicious satisfaction

Like invisible hands, a force tore the older man in two. Flesh and bones were wrenched apart, splitting him down the middle with a resounding rip. In the tumult, his guts and spirit spilled out. He thrashed in vain, struggling to hold on as one half of himself was yanked away and banished to unseen hinterlands. His other half collapsed in —

Cora was on the library floor, screaming. She couldn’t breathe. Her narrow throat couldn’t recapture the air that had gusted out. Bloody hell, was she still in one piece? She patted herself down her middle to make sure. Feeling that man getting inter-Realm drawn and quartered had been beyond disturbing.

A figure stood over her, eclipsing the fireplace. Her head snapped back and for a moment she saw the bearded killer. He held out his hand. She blinked and the library refocused.

Bane, beardless and eyes blackened, helped her to her feet. “You experienced it,” he said with morbid fascination. “No wonder Edwina’s kept you to herself all these years. Your connection to death is immersive.”

“That’s one word for it,” she said. “What did you… do to that man?”

“Nothing that cunt didn’t deserve.” Scowling at the watch, he was silent for so long she didn’t think he’d elaborate. “A Chronomancer once used this watch to stop time. Sixty seconds and a pocket watch,” he mused darkly, sliding it into his waistcoat that clung to the tapering plane of his torso.

The questions on the tip of her tongue she left unasked. Some questions she didn’t want to know the answer to.

“You’re powerful, Cora.” His gaze captured hers. “The most powerful Necromancer I’ve met.”

She balked. Her only concerns with power had been her lack of it, though his declaration was a dubious honor. She was more likely to be killed for, rather than kill with, powerful death magic.

In spite of herself, she was curious. The yardstick she measured herself by came from rumors and third-hand accounts of other Necromancers ranging from the fanciful to the macabre. “Have you met many Necromancers?”

“Not many to meet. I once traversed to a village in Brazil after hearing of a so-called demon possession. A lad had reanimated his dead mutt and gained some notoriety. The creature decayed quickly in the tropics, and the lad kept patching it with pieces of other animals. With the flesh peeling off its bloated, mismatched body, it’s hard to say whether the sight or the smell was more horrific.”

“What happened to the lad?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

“They found him hanging from a rope outside the village.”

The statistics of Necromancy were damning. Cora had been doomed the moment she was born from a dead womb. Necromancers not killed when their affinities manifested unerringly killed themselves. For her, the wounds with the greatest risk of fatality were self-inflicted. Her greatest fear was herself.

Only a matter of time before she joined the statistics. Hopeless inevitability led to one fate, after all. Just nature culling an aberration

“Necromancers don’t live long.” She tugged her sleeves down. “Who’d want to? We’re abominations.”

“Cora.” He lifted her chin to meet his eyes, as vast as a moonless night. “Fuck that. You’re not an abomination. People have projected their fear of death onto you, and you’ve internalized it as shame. But you have power. They fear that power. Let them fear you.”

She stepped away from his light touch and heavy gaze. Was he attempting to secure her compliancy through flattery? Rather unnecessary, as she’d already signed her life away to him. “What do we need to go to Purgatory?”

His eyes sought hers, but she couldn’t meet them. He returned to the grimoire. “We need an anchor for Teddy to the Living Realm. You, his twin. The Damnation Elixir to ease the passage into Purgatory. A gold crucible. And a medium to meld our magic so we can traverse corporeally… Goat milk. A lot of goat milk.”