Page 125 of The Unweaver

The magic-absorbing chains had loosened enough to wriggle free of. Inch by painful inch, she crawled to him. Fear gripped her as she took in his ashen features clenched in agony and the blood pooling under him from the bullet wound.

“Sephrinium,” he whispered in a faint voice. “Can’t...”

His dark blue eyes closed.

Chapter 35. A World of Disappointment

“Iburied you today, Teddy.”

Her twin stiffened, his features hardening as he glanced away. Cora had expected this response. The dead didn’t take well to news from the living. Especially when that news was their funeral.

Thirteen days had passed since Malachy closed his midnight blue eyes and his gang pulled them from the ruins of Mother’s house. Thirteen days of spending more time in Death than Living, of speaking with Teddy about everything except reality.

In the ebb and flow of their easy banter, Cora walked on eggshells around the awful truth she struggled to reconcile. She wasn’t catching up with her brother after a heart-wrenching absence; she was communing with his dead spirit.

Teddy was gone. Truly gone. His light had been snuffed out, leaving behind only a void in his shape. The foundation had caved in beneath Cora, and amidst the wreckage the Teddy-shaped void sat beside her, trailing after her as she went through the motions, teeming with a misery that ate her alive.

Anytime his death was broached, however, Teddy changed the subject. So they didn’t speak of the Specter’s Scourge or theOracle Ruby or the demon Cora had made a deal with in a futile bid to save him. A deal that died with Ikelas. Hopefully.

After several heated arguments, the Realmwalker also became a forbidden topic. Teddy insisted he was a heartless monster, regardless of what she said. But Malachy was her monster, and he was far from heartless. She ached at his absence.

In the aftermath, Cora didn’t know which was worse: The world outside or the world within.

Splashed across the headlines was human and mage panic alike. Newspapers piled up on Bane’s table, though she couldn’t bring herself to do more than glance at them. The nightmare in her head was stronger than Ikelas’s had been.

Cora relived it over and over. Watching Teddy’s spirit depart. Watching his body buried by sodden earth. It had always been too late. The well of sorrow was bottomless. Just when she thought she’d reached the end, she continued to sink.

Outside, the world was in uproar.

The London Nightmare, the newspapers dubbed the collective dream localized around “an oddball orphanage,” as one neighbor described it. Speculation abounded about the nightmare’s cause. At the forefront were suspicions of hallucinogens in the water supply.

For those not killed in the London Nightmare, two fates awaited the dreamers. Either they awoke, dazed but otherwise unharmed, or they slept on in an unending fugue.

Sleeping sickness, they called it. A malady of the mind. A blight of bedrest. Those affected wasted away in their slumber. Every day reports surfaced of more sleepers who couldn’t be roused. A pattern emerged. Those who had been awake when the nightmare began awoke after. The sleepers didn’t wake. Sleepers like Malachy.

Thirteen days ago, he had closed his blue eyes. They hadn’t opened again.

When not in the Death Realm, Cora slipped inside his bedroom to reassure herself he was alive, and this day was not just a continuation of the nightmare.

She sat at his bedside and stroked his hair back from his pale face. His features were softened in sleep, yet the lines were deeper around his eyes. More silver threaded his temples. Her fingers memorized the new scar over his heart. White vines thick with thorns, nestled among coppery chest hair.

Sometimes she caught herself talking to him, about banalities and the agony swallowing her. The metronome of his heartbeat was the only reply. Each day he didn’t wake fed an insidious fear that he never would again. And if he did, what if the man she’d resurrected was only a shell of himself?

Not even Anita had been able to revive him from his unnatural slumber. She had painstakingly removed every shard of the bullet from his wound, yet some Sephrinium must remain in his system, trapping the Realmwalker in a prison of dreams. His last words replayed in Cora’s mind on an endless loop.Sephrinium.Can’t...

“Just sleeping off his injuries,” Anita said with forced cheer, but Cora didn’t miss the pity in her eyes. “He’ll be up before you know it, love. I’d bet my favorite leather whips on it.”

The gang had filtered through his house like a funeral procession. Every visit felt more like a wake than a homecoming. They avoided Cora, haunting the hallways like a ghost.

Anita filled her in on the Oneiromancer’s fallout. What the newspapers described as a surge in gang violence was a power vacuum of London mages. The status quo had been upended since the top gang bosses—Verek, Mother, and now Bane—were all off the board. Dozens of pawns had since been sacrificed in the senseless violence to reclaim it.

Rune Borges still grappled to subdue the Pyromancers and Ferromancers. Mother’s pets, not killed or asleep, were running around like headless chickens. New gangs were moving into town. A gang of Lumomancers and Umbramancers was gaining a worrisome foothold.

John O’Leary, the Memnomancer solicitor, had arrived on that first day and inquired after their boss’s condition. In an empty voice she told him what he could see for himself.

O’Leary wrote it down dutifully, readjusting his golden spectacles on his pinched face. “I see,” was his only comment.

Bane had foreseen the unforeseeable, of course, and had contingency plans in case of his incapacitation. O’Leary would operate in his stead while he was “otherwise indisposed.”

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