Page 21 of The Unweaver

“Does your Mother know yet?” The name sounded like an insult from his lips.

“God no, she’s the last person I’d go to. I came straight here.”

This he considered for a long moment. “Did Edwina have a falling out with the prodigal son?”

“No, Teddy spent twenty years with Mother and never once doubted her adoration. This wasn’t a crime of passion. This was premeditatedslaughter.” She hated how her voice broke. “Mother couldn’t have hidden that from him. You can’t lie to an Animancer.”

“That assumption is probably what got him killed. Where’s the body?”

The body. “His flat in Hackney,” she whispered, and gave him the cross streets.

In a blink, he was no longer leaning against the desk but standing before her. He captured her hand in his. A current of energy radiated from his fingers, skittering up her arm and along her nerves until her entire body tingled with an unusual awareness.

“Show me.”

Chapter 6. Grief-Pocked Remains

First came a sharp tug behind her navel. Then, vertigo.

The Emerald Club office swam. Walls warped and dematerialized. Space distorted and disintegrated. Up became down and then sideways in a sickening disorientation, an onslaught to the senses.

Hands joined, they careened into the deforming void. She tried to scream but there was no air. She was suspended in freefall, as if startled awake while falling out of bed and bracing to hit the ground that never came.

But come it did. Cora crashed into something very solid. Her knees buckled, and a steadying arm fastened around her waist. The world spun in a nauseating blur. Doubling over, she proceeded to empty the contents of her stomach. The arm hastily withdrew.

“Everyone bokes the first time.” Bane gave her a handkerchief.

“Thanks for the warning,” she muttered. Stomach and dignity emptied, Cora cleaned off her face. The handkerchief was only fit to be burned when she finished. Lungfuls of cold air eased the next wave of nausea. She blinked through tears and the world came into focus. They stood on a dark street, in front of Teddy’s flat. “Wha— How?”

“Not a very bright one, are you?” he said with a casual callousness that grated on her shredded nerves. Her blistering look was lost on him as his gaze swept the empty street. “Come on, then. Haven’t got all night.”

Hands in the pockets of his long black coat, Bane trailed after her like a shadow across the desolate street, inside the building, and up three flights of stairs. Dread mounted with each step. The sour taste of vomit rose in her throat.

Domestic sounds filtered through the doors lining the dark hallway. A baby crying. A radio crackling. A couple bickering. Garish reminders of normalcy.

Cora wondered if they had traversed not into Hackney but into an alternate Realm. One surreal like a dream, where Bane helped his enemy’s Necromancer. Where Teddy was on the other side of that door, sleeping off a night of revelry.

On the outside, Teddy’s flat was like all the others. But through the door cracks seepedwrongness. The nightmare that would haunt her remaining nights awaited beyond that door. She couldn’t face it. Not again. The last fragile pillar of her sanity was crumbling. Screwing her eyes shut, she fell back a step.

“What are you waiting for? A fuckin’ written invitation?” Undaunted, Bane strode inside.

She hesitated on the threshold. Instinct screamed at her to flee. She was turning away when Bane tugged her stumbling inside. She halted in the dark flat with an icy rush of shock.

Missing. Teddy’s body was missing. Along with any sign of the pentagram and its crystalline corner crowns. The furniture was still pushed along the walls, but the center was empty. Save for a crimson stain.

A chilling silence engulfed them.

“But—” Her head whipped around. “This can’t be. There was a pentagram, and his— his body. Someone must have taken him! And cleaned up the whole ritual. All except the— blood. How?Why? Everything was here earlier, I swear to god it was. I know what I saw.”

“Aye, this reeks of the Profane.”

Bane cut a strange figure, striding about to inspect the shadowed corners in a suit that cost more than the flat itself. An overflowing rubbish bin was kicked aside in the darkness. Bottles rolled across the floor. He turned on a lamp and illuminated the devastation.

With a sinking sensation, Cora realized they were empty liquor bottles. Dozens of them. And empty pill bottles, plundered from Teddy’s medicine cabinet that was stocked like a one-man pharmacy.

Teddy’s obsession over appearances had never extended to his personal abode. But this was worse than normal. Much worse. The entire flat sagged with the dinginess of neglect. Strewn about in haphazard piles was the fortune of clothing Teddy wore like armor. Draped over one pile was the cashmere scarf she’d stolen for him last Christmas. The last gift she’d ever give him.

There’d be no Walcott family holiday this year or any year after. The Walcott family had died along with him.

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