Page 17 of The Unweaver

Even with his body as an anchor, she couldn’t find his spirit in the Death Realm. Anywhere. She shouted his name, searching and searching but seeing nothing, running as fast as she could but going nowhere, until her cries turned to whimpers and her magic was drained. She fell to her knees in the aching abyss.

Teddy wasn’t there. Not even a remnant of a shadow of his spirit existed in the Death Realm.

Where could his spirit have gone, if not Death? Spirits didn’t linger in the Living Realm, as ghosts or otherwise. And bodies couldn’t be reanimated without their spirits.

His spirit had flown from its mortal cage to a place beyond Death. A place she couldn’t follow him.

Teddy was gone. Truly gone.

A sinkhole opened inside her. She teetered on the brink of its precipice, the foundation crumbling beneath her feet. An endless expanse of emptiness stretched before her. Staggeringly vast and never to be filled.

Magical exhaustion and a profound, marrow-deep sense of loss drove her back to her body in the dark flat. She felt as though years had been drained from her spirit. It didn’t matter. Her other half, her reason for living, was a heartless carcass on the living room floor. With her only light extinguished, she was alone in darkness.

Tears overflowed as she looked down at the only person she had ever loved. The organ clenching in her chest—hopelessly, helplessly—began to wither.

It should’ve been me. If only it had been me.

A spine-chilling realization wrapped around her ribs and strangled her. The rattle of death hadn’t been hers, but her twin’s. She had sensed death coming and done nothing to stop it.

Guilt settled over her like a leaden shroud. She should have done something,anything. She should’ve stopped him from going into those tunnels. Should’ve held onto him and told him she loved him while she had the chance. Her last chance. Now, there would be only his memory to love.

The last time she’d seen him—the last time she would ever see him alive—he had shut his flat’s door in her face with the muted thud of a coffin lid closing.

She brushed a lock of hair from his face, a mirror image of her own, frozen in the agony of death. The sense of wrongness crawled up her arm like spiders and she jerked back.

Over his lifeless body shimmered a phosphorescence so faint she hadn’t noticed it. An uncanny sheen she had seen before, on victims of the Profane Arts.

Dark, forbidden magic—the embodiment of wrongness—hummed in the room. This wasn’t just death. This was acurse.

Impotent rage gripped her. Someone had robbed Teddy of his life and cursed his spirit. Their insidious presence hovered around her.

The timing of Teddy’s injuries couldn’t be coincidental. The bruises on his body and the yawning cavity in his chest had to have been inflicted by the same man. For if Teddy’s spirit wasn’t in the Death Realm, it had to have been cursed into another Realm, and only one portal mage in London could accomplish that.

It was no secret the Realmwalker used the dark magic forbidden by the Covenant. The only secret was how he avoided the Profane Art’s lethal cost. Speculation abounded.

All magic had a cost. The spirit was the conduit for magic, but also paid its price. The magic wielded was equal to the spirit expended. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. Dark magic granted immense power but drained tenfold the wielder’s spirit, leaving them husks of their former selves. If they were lucky.

Anger sharpened the edge of her grief to a point and filled her purpose. Her brother’s murderer would pay. A life for a life. She rose, shaking, to her feet. On a table, Teddy’s revolver glinted, and with it a reckless inspiration. He’d fired that revolver in the tunnels.

Recklessness was a building momentum, spurring her to load the gun with trembling hands. She had lost everything. There was nothing more to lose. She clicked the cylinder shut. This time, she wouldn’t miss.

It was late, but the jazz clubs were just getting started. Teddy’s murderer was probably sitting in his posh club right now, sipping champagne while her life fell apart at his hand.

Before her mind could catch up to her body, Cora fitted the Portal Key in the lock, turned right, and stepped through the door.

Chapter 5. To Fate

The Emerald Club’s walnut-paneled office was aglow with warm light. And occupied.

Behind the desk, surrounded by neat stacks of paper and a half-empty bottle of whiskey, sat the devil in an impeccably tailored three-piece suit. Lamplight cast his face into deep shadows. The hollows beneath his sharp cheekbones. The hard line of his jaw. The cruel curve of his lips. Dark hair, slicked back from an implacable brow, gleamed like burnished copper.

His eyes cut to the doorway. Their gazes collided. The intensity of his obsidian eyes pinned Cora. Cold, calculating eyes. Shark’s eyes.

His features flickered with surprise, then cooled into cynical resignation when he saw the revolver trembling in her grip. He took her measure in the time she managed a shallow breath. All her inadequacies laid bare in a sweep of his shrewd gaze.

With a graceful wave of his hand, the door slammed shut behind her, as final as a gunshot. Locking her inside with the Realmwalker.

Panic heated and chilled her blood in turn. Her heart rammed against her ribs in a frenzy to escape. In a moment of stark clarity, Cora realized the grievous mistake she’d made coming here. Likely the last mistake she’d make. Ensnared in the trapshe’d unwittingly set, Cora watched the disaster of her own making unfold before her.

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