Page 127 of The Unweaver

“Teddy bear,” she sobbed, clinging to him, unable to let go. “Please. I love you. Don’t leave me again. Oh, Teddy, why did you leave me?”

He slapped her hands away. “Why is it always how I feel about you and never how I feel about myself?”

“Please.” Her plea was scarcely more than a whisper as he pushed her farther away. “Please don’t leave me again—”

Teddy foisted her through the black veil of death. Cora fell back into the prison of her body. The last piece of her heart shattered.

Alone, she was forced to confront the bitter truth.Unlovable.Failure.Abomination.

She couldn’t save Teddy from himself, or Bane from the sleeping sickness, or London from the escaped demons. But she could save the world from herself. Cora was poison. The only way to stop its spread was to cut it off at the source.

All she felt was numb exhaustion as she staggered to her feet. She was tired of trying to survive as an ugly thing in an ugly world. Her mind detached from her body. She watched as a woman wearing her face walked to the midnight blue bathroom and pulled out her sharpest knife. Metal glinted in the candlelight. Inevitable.

The woman’s empty eyes met her gaze in the mirror.

How long can you live without hope?

Turning on the faucet, the woman climbed into the golden tub, fully clothed. She contemplated the knife as the bath filled with cold water. Thirty years she had haunted the Living Realm as a person-shaped emptiness. She had never lived. She’d died before she was born. The purposeless tragedy of this non-life ended today.

With hands not her own, she pushed up her sleeves. Pale flesh webbed with black veins and white vines. To drain the poison, the cut needed to be deep.

Metal bit into tender flesh. The wound opened like a sigh. On the left wrist. The right. Sensation dripped out. Eyes drifted shut. Grip loosening, the knife slid into waters that ran crimson.

Distantly, the woman felt her body shaking. Water splashed onto the mosaic tiles. Doors slammed. Glass jars broke into pieces that would never be whole again.

Deeper she sank below the surface into blissful darkness. It felt like going home.

Unconsciousness enveloped her and she slipped through a gossamer veil. Falling, floating, she saw a sea of dreamers in a cocoon of night. A man rushed forward as the black veil neared.

“Cora.” His blue eyes brimmed with relief. “The Sephrinium— I’m trapped here.”

Malachy reached for her, and with the last shred of her fading life’s energy, she reached back. Their hands almost touched as she sank further away.

Horrified understanding dawned on his face. “Cora, no! NO—"

But it was too late.

Chapter 36. The Death of Dreams

Death beckoned Cora into its gentle embrace. An embrace that rocked her. Then shook her. Violently.

A shouting voice pierced through the darkness. Hands were lifting her out of the water and running over her. She tried to get away, but her limbs were too weak to move, her consciousness waning.

“Let me… die,” she thought she said. “I’m… already… dead…”

* * *

Cora dreamed of death and the death of dreams. Time passed with only dim glimpses of lights and voices in the darkness. The meaning of their words slipped through her hands like water. Darkness reclaimed her.

* * *

She awoke, disoriented, in a four-poster bed. Silken sheets caressed her sleep-warmed skin. Dawn’s lavender light reachedthrough the windows in the tender silence of early morning. Memories lapped at the shoreline of her foggy mind. Memories of Teddy and sharp knives and sinking into oblivion.

Her eyes flew open. She sat up and was overcome with a wave of dizziness. There were bandages over her wrists. And a man beside her in the bed.

Malachy’s face, relaxed in slumber, came into focus slowly. Dark hair swept his brow, and his chest rose and fell with even breaths. Through his white undershirt, scars and tattoos peeked.

Was this a dream? Was this death?

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