Page 61 of The Unweaver

Her palms were slick as she neared her mark. It only took a moment of catching the mark unawares. The mark turned from the vendor towards the mouth of the alley. Towards Cora. Their gazes touched for a second.

Bollocks. She stepped back, preparing to bolt away empty-handed when the mark’s gaze continued to something over her shoulder. Fear swept across the mark’s lined face. Slowly, Cora turned. The shadow of a young man loomed over her.

Caged. He’d caged her in. Nowshewas the mark. Grasping the switchblade in her pocket, she backed towards the sewer for a hasty escape into London’s shit-smeared catacombs.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the man said with a taunting smile. Leaning down, he lowered his voice. “You see that hat she’s got on? That great big beak of a schnoz? Kike like that carries a gun. She’d shoot you”—he pointed a finger gun between her eyes and mock fired— “before you could kiss your skinny arse goodbye.”

She jumped back, cringing at the slurs he spoke with the casualness of a practiced antisemite. Her hand lashed out to cut him, but he was quick. He gripped her arm with biting force.

Felix Rabin, he called himself. A twenty-something from Birmingham armored in a too-small suit and middle-class indignation. He told her a story as he hauled her from the alley, about a place where there was a roof over your head and warm food in your belly. A place where fine people such as himself lived and worked together.

“Felix Rabin ain’t no pickpocket or two-bit lowlife, y’see. I came to London to make it big. My gang runs real games for real dough.”

She didn’t trust his snide smiles or charming words. Over the years, she’d met a dozen Felix Rabins. Second sons and army rejects with delusions of grandeur stuffed into shit-colored suits.

“Bugger off.” She tried using her abomination against him as he yanked her into the shadows. But it only came in spurts and never when she needed it.

Felix’s hand, clammy despite the cold, slid down her hollow stomach and rested above her pubis. She went rigid. Yelling for help would be pointless. She could scream herself hoarse and no one would step out of their own petty miseries to help her out of hers.

His hand drifted lower. “What would you do for a bit of warm food, sweetheart?”

Felix dragged her, kicking and screaming, back to his gang’s squalid squat, a condemned hotel in Limehouse warped and bowed by time, and shoved her into the sty of his bedroom.

That first time, it was as if it was happening to someone else, to another starving girl with frightened eyes, her face pushed into the dirty mattress, her skirts hiked over her waist.

“Nono no,” the girl cried.

A clammy hand silenced her scream.“Keep it quiet, love.”

There was no love in the way he pinned her down. There was no love in the way he pushed inside of her.

Here, on this tear-soaked mattress in a rundown hotel, was where the girl ended.

When it was over a minute later—a lifetime later—Felix tugged up his trousers, not meeting the bewildered accusation in her eyes.

“Wh-why?” She wiped away the tears, but they continued to pour. “I said no.I said no!”

He shrugged. “You didn’t say no enough.”

She slept in a room with several other children. The roof over her head might leak and the food was far from warm, but she survived. Another miserable day.

Felix said she had it better than she deserved, that she should be grateful. As the abomination she was, she believed him. She belonged in Hell. But when he put his clammy hands on her, night after night, the last thing she felt was gratitude.

Hell, she realized, was only a matter of perspective.

She didn’t dare use her devilry against him. The squat was the first real scrap of stability she’d had since the orphanage. She couldn’t go back to the streets. Not again.

In the moldering hotel lobby was an out-of-tune piano with missing keys. For hours and hours, she played for the other forgotten children. Felix preferred the bawdy tunes she picked up outside pubs while waiting in the shadows for her intoxicated prey to stumble past. She’d play anything if it meant one less second alone with Felix.

She kept a vigilant eye out for him, spending as little time at the squat as possible to dodge his sticky violence. Wraithlike, she was good at disappearing.

She shot up several inches that first year, and several more the next. Reed-thin and flat-chested, she towered over everyonelike a lumbering beanstalk. Felix made her slouch so she wasn’t taller than him.

Her devilry grew along with her. As a gangly teenager, it took all her concentration to hide it. If she slipped,somethingleached from her fingers. She’d glance down at the decay in her hand, wanting to drink from the rot. Dip her fingers in and absorb that awful, tingling current of energy.

She didn’t understand and there was no one to ask. She kept it a dark secret. But she couldn’t hide every accidental monstrosity from the gang’s curious eyes. She heard their whispers, as she’d heard the nun's whispers.

Screwy. Ghoul.Freak.

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