Page 43 of The Unweaver

Shaking his head, he scanned the moonlit cemetery. A dead woman’s scream, then.

While the newly dead clambered for any connection to life, the centuries-dead were reticent. Coaxing a word out of a desiccated corpse could take hours. Some might quietly pine for life, craving its remembered sensations, but this corpse demanded it. From her unmarked grave beneath the snow, she screamed her death’s injustice. Murdered at the hands of her lover, vengeance kept her tethered to the Living Realm by a single, furious thread.

A booming caw startled Cora. The crow flew overhead, a black streak across the full moon, and landed on a skeletal branch. Cocking its head, the crow watched her with a lambent eyeshine that made her pulse race. One of Mother’s pets, come to peck at their entrails.

“Owens,” she whispered. “Mother’s second.”

They exchanged a look. Bane bent down and hurled a snowball. The crow flew away with an affronted squawk. Definitely Owens.

Cor-a, came a voice like liquid darkness.Cor-a…

Fear clawed at her. Had someone spoken, or had the voice insinuated itself into her mind? Whipping around, she searched for the voice’s source amidst the graves, but the moon’s glaring reflection on the snow blinded her. She stumbled into a buried headstone and fell on her arse in a puff of snow.

Grumbling, Bane reached down to help her. She went to take his hand when her gaze honed on movement over his shoulder. She gasped.

He spun, putting her behind him. “It’s a tr—”

The gunshot sent him flying backwards. He hit a crypt with a brutal thud and sprawled at an unnatural angle. Grimacing, he rolled onto his side and clasped his bleeding shoulder.

She dashed over and took his arm. Warm blood gushed through her fingers, dripping onto snow and melting small crimson craters in the white. “Traverse away!Now.”

“I can’t,” he said between clenched teeth, his face pale and drawn. “Something’s wrong— The bullet is— draining me.”

On the periphery of her vision, she saw something that skidded her heart to a stop. Emerging like ghosts from the crypts were half a dozen men. Their clothes ranged from fine suits to worker’s rough-spun, but their masks were identical. Smooth, bone white ovals with slitted eye holes and the lipless suggestion of a mouth.

Cora was outnumbered and Bane was incapacitated, brought down by a horrifying bullet. She reached for the knives she’d recovered from Bane’s office, her frantic eyes searching for a lock for the Portal Key.

More masked men poured out of sepulchers. Insidious and insectile, they staggered and lurched like two-legged praying mantises. Cora flung a knife into the nearest man’s chest. Even with the metal buried hilt-deep between his ribs, he kept coming, as if in a trance.

Cor-a, came the voice from nowhere and everywhere.Cor-a…

“Reanimate.” Bane gnashed his teeth as he struggled to unholster his gun. “I’ll— get Teddy.Do it.”

“I can’t!”

Reanimation was tricky even with a fresh corpse. The dead had to be obliging and the threads of their life intact enough to reweave their body and spirit. Willingness and intactness plummeted after centuries in the ground. The long dead couldn’t be bothered from, if not their eternal slumber, then their eternity of non-existence. The threads of their lives had been unwoven long ago. The long dead stayed dead.

The masked men were closing in. They were surrounded.

Over her drumming heart and their plodding footfalls, Cora heard the murdered woman’s scream. Instinct kicked in. Eyes rolling back and necrotic veins webbing, she called out to the dead in their nameless graves.

The earth pulsed with their bones, faint and distant. Cora beckoned the murdered woman. The rage infused into her bones stirred in reply. With immense concentration, Cora’s death magic grasped that single, furious thread.

Unweaving came naturally to her—sometimes too naturally—but reanimation required the precision of weaving, like threading the eye of a needle with her non-dominant hand while hanging upside down. It was so much easier to tug than tie.

Gunshots burst. Fists thwacked. Footsteps approached.

She was out of time.

One by one, her magic pulled the unraveled threads of the woman’s life tight. But the threads, in deep states of decay, unwove as quickly as she wove them.

An arm grabbed Cora and she pitched sideways. The threads unraveled. She tapped into her magic reserves and drained them, frantically weaving the threads of the woman’s life back together, knitting decrepit body with its betrayed spirit.

The woman’s withered remains crawled out of the earth. Yellowed bones on white snow stacked into a crumbling, shambling skeleton. Cora tugged the woman’s skeleton by her threads and launched her at the man who’d grabbed her. The skeleton tackled him and without a sound they fell, old bones snapping and falling apart on top of him.

The other dead remained taciturn in their nameless graves at Cora’s desperate summoning. They’d spent far longer dead than alive; their bones were no longer eager vessels to pour their spirits back into. Accustomed to the darkness, they were reluctant to return to the light.

Cora didn’t give a damn. Her summons was a command, not a question. She forced her will upon them like an unmoving boulder. Blood thudded in her ears and the awful energy of death coursed in her veins. Grave by grave, she overpowered their resistance.

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