Page 44 of The Unweaver

The earth shifted. Ancient bones clawed out of the snow. The entombed remains convened aboveground, reassembling as her skeletal marionettes, pulled by the strings of their death.

Cora unleashed the horror of her undead protectors. The tide of death surged upon the living under the luminous orb of the full moon.

Masked men fought skeletons in an eerily quiet skirmish. The crumble of bone. The crunch of snow. The grunt of impact as the men were dragged down under a pile of writhing bones.

The living’s weapons were useless against the dead. Even with femurs and skulls lopped off, the skeletons were undeterred.

Their dismembered pieces thrashed and came back together, but incorrectly. Cora lacked the finesse for weaving even in the best circumstances. Now, she was overtaxed, her concentration spread too thin for such intricacies. She wove together whatever threads were closest. Speed over accuracy.

Ribs reattached to femurs. Mandibles to clavicles. Finger bones to vertebrae like crooked fins.

The result was an ambulatory atrocity of tangled, mismatched limbs. A tottering army of human bones in inhuman configurations. Mountains of shambling skeletons swallowed up the fallen masked men.

Splintered bones pierced flesh. Blood and moonlight spilled on the snow while the dead plodded onward.

Cora gorged herself on the energy released from the men’s deaths, replenishing her drained reserves. She shivered at the unsavory delight. Channeling the awful energy pumping through her necrotic veins, she wove the dead’s frayed threads like a cat’s cradle, reassembling skeletons and summoning more to rise.

Cor-a…

Something knocked her back. Concentration broken, the skeletons crashed to the ground. All but the murdered woman. Anger kept her alive. She flung herself at Cora’s attacker and together they collapsed, pulverized bone mixing with snow flurries.

The bones not yet turned to dust reformed into a misshapen monstrosity. Hip bone reattached to skull. Shoulder blades to kneecaps. Tibia to sternum.

Cora looked down at her fallen attacker. His white mask was cracked, revealing a haggard face and closed eyes, moving rapidly from side to side.

On a groan, the man’s glassy eyes slitted open. He staggered onto his elbows and looked down at the partial skeleton pinning him. Horror dawned on his features. Flailing, he screamed like he’d awoken from a nightmare to find himself in a worse one.

Another man dropped at her feet. Now unmasked, his features were slack and his eyelids fluttering. A skeleton impaled him with the jagged edge of a broken humerus. His eyes widened, darting between the weapon in his hand and the bone in his belly. Whimpering, he slumped over in a puddle of his own innards.

The skeletons lurched and bowled the masked men down, clearing a path for Bane. Hunched over his wounded shoulder, he trudged through the bloodied snow to the sepulcher. Groans and cries pierced the night.

The last masked man fell.

Riding a wave of rancid euphoria, Cora relaxed her stranglehold on the dead. They crawled, in bits and pieces, back to their graves. She looked around in mortification. The cemetery had been desecrated with the remains of the long and freshly dead.

On shaking legs, she followed the trail of Bane’s blood to the sepulcher. Breathing hard and fast, she staggered the final steps to where he leaned against the grimy tomb, grimacing in pain.

A metal grate blocked Cora from where her brother’s body might not lie. After feasting on death, she rusted the grate into flecks with a brief touch. The heavy stone door she struggled to pry open, feeling Bane’s gaze on her profile.

“You are— a fearsome thing to behold, Cora.”

Ignoring his morbid awe and the flip of her stomach, she shoved the stone aside and tumbled in. The stench of decay, though familiar, was a test of her fortitude. Bile rose. She covered her mouth.

Oh god, am I too late again?

Death had never felt so permanent as she took in Teddy’s decomposing body on the stone slab.

Winter had not prevented the onset of putrefaction. Rot bloomed on blue-tinged flesh. The hole in his chest had sunken into a festering cavern where his beautiful heart had once beaten. Indisputably, Teddy had perished.

Her twin, her only hope, rotting alone in a cold tomb.

Bane hoisted Teddy’s body off the slab. “The key!” came his voice from far away, strained and urgent. “The key— take us to the club.”

Cora unfroze. The nearest lock was a gate around the neighboring tomb. She jammed the Portal Key into it and turned right.

Chapter 12. Blood Charmer

Together, they dragged Teddy’s dead weight, flesh slippery and limbs stiff, across the threshold into the Emerald Club office. Cora felt herself decay from the inside out as she carried her brother. Four days and a lifetime since she’d last held him.

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