Page 47 of The Unweaver

“Pity. Well, I use my gifts different now, anyway. I can sober a bloke up or bring him to his knees. I can make a lady’s courses stop. Or start again.” She gave Cora a meaningful wink.

“Jesus— still bleeding here.”

Anita shot Cora a look of female camaraderie over his head. Together they removed his long coat and suit jacket and cut away his bloodstained shirt to reveal the gory pit in his shoulder. Metal shards glinted like teeth amidst flaps of ragged flesh.

“Did the bullet go through?” Bane’s jaw clenched as Anita prodded the wound with a pair of tweezers.

“Parts of it.”

Bane spewed profanities—Irish, English, and invented—while Anita extracted a metal shard. Matte silver with hooked edges, burrowed into the meat of his shoulder. Cora had seen Bane dodge bullets with ease; yet instead of traversing away, he’d wasted a critical moment putting her behind him. He’d taken a bullet rather than leave her in the cemetery.

He was only securing his investment. Besides, if he’d known the bullet would dothisto him, he would’ve left her without hesitation, Binding Agreement notwithstanding.

“I ain’t seen nothing like this before.” Anita held a piece of the bullet that had taken down the Realmwalker aloft in the lamplight. Its curved teeth were trimmed with his torn flesh. “It’s like it’s absorbing my magic.”

“Some kind of magically inert alloy?” Bane said.

Cora took the shard and pondered it in her hand. The metal felt irritating, like the moment before realizing an itch was a mosquito bite. She guarded her reaction. “If it drains magic,” she ventured, “it couldn’t have been made by a mage, could it?”

The unspoken implication reverberated in the silence. Magic-draining bullets of human manufacture. Fired by humans at mages they shouldn’t even know existed.

“Jesus.” Bane gestured to Dimitri as he returned. “Ever come across something like this?”

The shard disappeared in the mitt of the Hydromancer’s hand. “No. I take to Gallagher. Metal mage will know. We learn.”

“Whatever it is, I can’t use my magic to pull it out or block the pain.” Anita handed Bane a bottle of whiskey. “I’ll have to pull it out the old-fashioned way. And you’ll have to heal the old-fashioned way.”

“Very well.” Bane uncorked the bottle with his teeth and drank the whiskey like it was water.

Anita pried out another shard and plinked it into a bowl. Bane, features contorted in pain and sweat beading down the taut tendons of his throat, glugged whiskey.

Glug.Plink.Glug.Plink.

Uncertain what to do with herself, Cora fisted her hands to keep them from shaking. The awful energy was receding, leaving behind a jittery fatigue. She was running on the dregs of her magic.

“How escape attack?” Dimitri said.

“Cora saved us,” Bane gritted out.

Dimitri and Anita turned to her in disbelief. The giant stared down at Cora—something few could do—like she was a pest in need of squishing; something most did.

“No offense, love. But…” Anita eyed her. “How?”

“Luck,” Cora said before Bane could respond. “And his Portal Key.”

The Sanguimancer and Hydromancer exchanged a glance.

“Say, how’d you and Mal meet exactly?” Anita asked Cora.

“I thought he killed Teddy. So, I, er, tried to kill him. Then he offered me a job.”

Anita tossed her head back in a wave of shining curls and laughed, the sound a throaty, full-bodied seduction. “You are having some week, Mal.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” An alarming amount of whiskey had brought color back to his face and eased the lines of pain. “Something is afoot. Humans attacked us in the cemeteryTeddy’s body was taken to, but only a mage could’ve cursed him with the Profane Arts.”

“What about Madam Kalandra?” Anita spoke the name in an undertone, as if the Gilded Lily’s proprietress was a demon not to risk summoning. “Teddy was her biggest competition as a fellow Animancer. And there ain’t a shortage of humans going in and outta the Lily.”

“Kalandra wouldn’t risk her business like that.”

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