Page 24 of The Unweaver

“The Tribunal coming to London would be bad for business.” The corners of his mouth lifted as he gave her a slow perusal “And I do love a challenge.”

Bane vanished. She blinked at the place where he’d been. A roar of silence filled the room.

Cora was alone in an empty flat. Alone in an empty world. Staggering back, she slid down the wall and crumpled to the floor, clutching the hollow ache in her chest, the grief-pocked remains of her heart.

Someone had snuffed out her only light and cleaved her life in two—the brightness with Teddy, and the unending darkness without him. She was left behind to wander the wreckage of an unremarkable life she’d never fully lived. Of the Animancer who yearned for life and the Necromancer who yearned for death, the wrong twin had been culled.

“You are my favorite part of us,” she whispered to no one. Cora curled into herself and wept.

Chapter 7. Devil at the Crossroads

“Tell Mother everything, pet.”

Cora stared at the tea cooling between her hands. For days, she had nursed her anguish and several bottles of hooch. But for the throbbing pressure in her skull, she was empty. A ghost haunting her own body. A specter in her own life, taking up space but without substance.

“I already told you everything in my note,” she said in a hollow voice.

Impatience flashed on Mother’s face. She leaned across the table and patted Cora’s arm twice. “Poor dear. Summoned all the way to this godforsaken part of town after what happened to darling Teddy. And on Christmas Eve, too.”

Cora glanced up. She hadn’t realized what day it was. They had blurred together since that awful night when her own heart had been ripped out along with Teddy’s.

After reporting his disappearance to Mother, Cora had retreated into despondency. Grief was a tangible thing. Her shoulders bowed beneath it.

She existed out of sheer obligation to find Teddy again. Bane had given her an irrational hope that sputtered like a candle in a storm. She wrapped her body around it, willing it to survive.

Without access to forbidden books about forbidden magic, she had made no headway in discovering which Profane curse severed his spirit. Trudging through morgues and graveyards for his body had been as much of a wasted effort as interrogating Teddy’s friends. She couldn’t ask questions about dark magic or cursing enemies without revealing herself as a mage.

Her veiled questions gleaned nothing she hadn’t already known. For months, his friends said, Teddy had been carousing more and sliding back into opium dens. No one knew where he might have disappeared to, or who might’ve wanted him disappeared.

She grimaced through their empty condolences, hope slipping through her fingers like grains of sand.

Ravi Shah’s condolences weren’t empty, though. Genuine tears flowed out of the Aeromancer’s bittersweet chocolate eyes.

With heartbreaking softness, Teddy’s former lover told her that he hadn’t seen him in ages. Teddy’s erratic behavior had concerned him, but whenever Ravi mentioned it, Teddy shut him out. The last time they’d spoken, they’d argued. Ravi was plagued with guilt over how he’d stormed away instead of answering Teddy’s silent cry for help.

Since the war, Teddy had a temper like an unpinned grenade. How many times had Cora lost her own temper when he shoved her away? Angry words she’d never be able to take back.

Regret ravaged her. All the things she’d said. All the things she hadn’t said. She should have told him every day he was the light she clambered towards.

This is your fault, was a refrain she couldn’t purge from her mind. A torrent of guilt she couldn’t stave off.

“Cora.” Ravi’s gentle voice broke on a sob. “What really happened to Teddy?”

It took all of her shattered willpower not to cry along with him. “He’s… disappeared. Do you think your boss, Bane, had anything to do with it?”

“No. Mal never liked Teddy, but he wasn’t involved. He was planning some deal with Mother.”

Cora barely heard Ravi’s litany of reasons whyMalwas innocent. Frustration dissipated into wretched hopelessness. With nowhere to go and no one to direct it at, it festered inside of her.

When she ran out of questions to ask and people to answer, she crawled into bed and cried herself raw. Despair hollowed her. She would never be complete without Teddy. Hope drained from her like water from a sieve, leaving her as empty as the grave she’d have to bury Teddy in if she never found him.

The Starlite Club fired her, of course. Mary broke the news of Cora’s unemployment while fretting at her bedside. Years, Cora had worked at the Starlite, and they’d cut her after two no-shows. They didn’t care if her brother had died. They wouldn’t care if the King of England had died. Business was business.

Cora shrugged off Mary’s consolation and pulled the covers higher. If only her suffering could be a private agony. But nothing was private in a shared flat with ten girls filtering in and out.

Getting fired, Mary’s concern, the mounting unpaid bills—Cora avoided them all and sought oblivion from bottles of cheap gin. When numbness mercifully came, she let it devour her.

She stared at the scars on her wrists. Considering.

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