Page 16 of The Unweaver

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 streakedher 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.

Nonononono. 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.

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