Page 20 of The Unweaver

He assessed her with an inscrutable expression. “How would you know that?”

“His… death throes.” The words sounded strange to her ears. Two simple words to encompass the horror that gnawed at her waking hours, the nightmares that tormented her sleep. Two words and a gross oversimplification of the living hell that was death. “When someone dies—when I touch them—I can sense their final moments. Their memories.”

It was more than she had ever voiced aloud about her private hell and it had been too much. His gaze sharpened in calculation. She cursed herself for giving even more away to an enemy.

“What were you and your late twin doing at the docks?”

Late twin. Her heart seized, dropped, and shattered at the awful finality of the past tense. Gut-wrenching in its permanence. The image came unbidden. Teddy, lying still. So horribly still.

Fighting the wave of sorrow, she trained her watering eyes on the floor. She might have lost every shred of composure, but she wouldn’t let Bane see her cry. “Mother sent us. To question Moriarty.” She felt no loyalty to Mother. Only a perverse pulse of self-preservation.

“You fuckin’ scavengers.” He thudded his glass down, a muscle working in his jaw.

Her conscience pricked, remembering the feelings of brotherhood Moriarty had for this man, even in death. The Chronomancer hadn’t just been another favor. He’d been a person, with people left behind to mourn him.

“Did you commune with Moriarty?”

The depths of hope and despair in those few words echoed in the hollowness within her. She wasn’t the only one to have lost someone irreplaceable. Her heartless brother. His faceless friend. Had the Realmwalker wept for Moriarty as she did for Teddy? Beneath his controlled features, was he also aching with grief?

Compassion only went so far, however. “No,” she said.

His gaze raked over her. “You are a terrible liar.”

“Well, you interrupted before he could respond. You broke my ribs, by the way.”

“Good. So, you’re telling me that my dead second handed you, the Unweaver, his Portal Key. Bringing you straight to me.”

“He was a bit preoccupied with shooting his own face off to explain. It doesn’t matter how or why he gave me that key. What matters is my brother. Who’s beenmurdered.”

“This concerns me how?” He regarded her coolly. “Your first mistake is thinking I give a shit. Your second mistake is thinking that fuckin’ shooting at me is going to change that.”

“Every mage in London is going to give a great many shits when they learn how Teddy died.”

Sighing, Bane checked his silver pocket watch. “And what fate has befallen poor Teddy?”

“A fate worse than death.” She fought back the anguish, the helpless fury. Unshed tears stung her eyes, made worse by his indifference. “I can’t find his spirit in the Death Realm. His body is here but he’s…” Her gaze rose. “It was the Profane Arts. Someone cursed him with dark magic.”

Her words hung heavy in the silence between them. The Covenant forbade the Profane Arts. Any mage wielding dark magic would be executed by the Tribunal without trial.

Obsidian eyes blazed with intrigue. “You should’ve opened with that.” His brows furrowed. “Are you sure Teddy didn’t do it to himself?”

“Yes, I’m bloody sure! How could you even suggest that?”

He lifted a shoulder. “I’m always right.”

“His fucking heart was gouged out.” Gasping on a sob, she spun away. She couldn’t fall apart, not in front of his abrasive matter-of-factness.

“When did you find the body?”

Her throat bobbed on an upwelling of grief that threatened to drown her.The body. Teddy wasn’t a person anymore. Just a body.

When she glanced up, Bane was looking at her with peculiar intensity. He held her gaze for a too-long moment, and she felt herself falling into the bottomless pits of his eyes.

“I-I dunno. I sensed him and— I left the Starlite Club, around midnight. Maybe that was days ago, or only hours... I searched for his spirit, but I couldn’t find him anywhere.”

“Jesus.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “The Profane Arts at midnight on the Winter Solstice.”

Magic fluctuated in ebbs and flows corresponding with the moon cycle. The longest night of the year held portentous power. It was the most auspicious date for dark magic. The Profane curse on Teddy had been planned.

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