Page 105 of The Unweaver

Glass cut her hands into ribbons, slick with blood and nerveless, but her aim never faltered. Not when his veins drained of blood. Not when his eyes drained of life.

Overflowing with awful energy, she planted her hands on the pulpy remains of his chest and pumped his body full of it. He jerked up like a marionette on strings. His eyes emptied of life and filled again with less, dulling into a shell of himself.

Darkness, devoid of emotion, encroached her senses.

An arm clamped around her neck and dragged her back. One of the boys in the gang stared wide-eyed at the empty shell of their leader bleeding out on the ground. Eyes glazed, mouth gaping, and features slack, Felix was alive in only the most basic sense of the word.

The boy’s frightened eyes turned from the monster on the lawn to the monster plastered with Felix’s blood. Screaming, he fled.

The girl, cowering on the dirty mattress, eyed Cora like the abomination she was. She wasn’t afraid of her rapist, but his killer. A bloodcurdling scream tore out of her throat. She scrambled to her feet and ran.

Cora fell back on her haunches, looking at the blood dripping from her shredded hands to the husk of Felix Rabin. Murder. She’d committed murder. And all she felt was numb.

Felix’s blood seeped into her skin and coursed through her veins, rotting her from the inside out. No, the rot wasn’t from hisblood, but from within her. Deep in her marrow, spreading since the day she was born and contaminating everything near her. She was the disease.

A voice in a far corner of her mind told her it was only a matter of time before more witnesses or the coppers showed up. Told her to move, flee the squat, duck into the sewers until the dust settled.

But word would spread like plague. Chased by rumors of her monstrosity, Cora would be a pariah in London. Maybe all of England. She’d spend the rest of her days trying to outrun this. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

Surviving another miserable day wasn’t a reward anymore. It was a punishment.

She rose onto unsteady feet. The silhouette of a tall man in a black coat filled the broken window. His blue eyes were fastened on her with rapt attention. He reached out, saying words she didn’t hear as she stumbled away into the shadows.

Winding down alleys, she lost herself in darkness so deep not even the rats would scurry through it. When she hit a dead end, she sank to her knees and crawled across wet garbage into a rotted-out alcove in the fence. Whatever fate chased her, she wouldn’t fight it.

She had hit rock bottom and continued to sink.

So much of her life had been steeped in death, reliving and ruminating about the hell of it. Yet she hadn’t anticipated what her own death would be like. She had fantasized about themeans of death in darker hours.Swallow the pills.Slash the wrists.Hang the body from the high branch. Refrains she couldn’t always shake from her thoughts.

She had longed for the release yet feared the possibility of failure. What if she couldn’t even get that right? What if she were only to awaken again to repeat the endless loop of years? Wakingup day after day to her own mediocrity. A torture of her own creation.

A prism of light speared the gloom. A broken shard of glass had snagged onto her patched rags. She pried the shard free. It glinted in her bloody hand, beckoning her. The simple promise of its jagged edges. The inevitability of its sharp point.

Her body was a prison she could escape from. She could put an end to this sick farce once and for all. Was it really death if she’d never been alive? The glass pierced into the flesh of her wrist. With a weakening grip, she pressed deeper,deeper. A sting of pain, a stream of blood. Her life dripped into the muck.

Darkness slid over her vision, dimming her mind, slowing her heart. Enfolding her, sinking her down, down, down. She was tired of treading water while others swam laps around her. Treading water was just a slower way to drown.

She stopped struggling and surrendered. The bondages of life slipped as she sank into the inevitable embrace of death and fell through the black veil.

Death, like Hell, was only a matter of perspective.

She had experienced countless deaths and none of them had prepared her for her own. Death wasn’t teeming with her living memories, or fraught with the unexpended energies of her incomplete existence. Her death was not like dreaming an endless dream. Surrounding her was only nothingness. Silent, peaceful nothingness.

The sweet relief of no longer having tobeovercame her. An end to the suffering, at last. The final release. She felt tranquil, then nothing at all.

There was a ripple through the void. The ripple grew into a wave, lapping at her feet and tugging her like an undertow out to sea. It swelled into a riptide and wrenched her into dark waters without beginning or end. She fought against it, but it was like fighting fate. Futile.

A life for a life, the tide seemed to say as it swallowed her whole. The black tide of death, brimming with awful energy, buoyed her. The threads of life unwoven by her own hand were rewoven by the void’s formless fingers.

No, not again.

The black tide receded, and she washed up on unwanted shores. Her eyes flew open to a searing shaft of light. There were bandages over her wrists and handcuffs over the bandages. She was trapped in a hell worse than death.

“Oh, good,” said the old woman beside her hospital bed. “You’re finally awake, my pet.”

Cor-a, taunted a disembodied voice.Cor-a…

In a flurry of feathers and ugly jumpers, the old woman transformed into a magpie. A bloodred berry gleamed in its sharp beak. The magpie contorted and deformed, bones and feathers bursting into a vulture with rotten flesh hanging from its grizzled beak. With a screech, it extended its massive wings and descended upon her, pecking and tearing and gouging.

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