Page 8 of The Unweaver

His death throes played, and it was as if both their hands were prying the gun from the Ferromancer’s holster. Swallowing the cold metal barrel. Pulling the trigger with sweat-slickened fingers. The bullet kissed his brain and splattered it across the tunnel walls

His death throes reversed, like a film played backwards in slow motion. The bullet arced back into the gun, pouring the fleshy shrapnel into his reforming skull. Tissues stitched back together, his face reassembled. Deep lines recorded every scowl and laugh in his long life.

Then, Moriarty lunged for the gun, shooting and un-shooting himself. Forward and back, again and again, as if he was reviewing the footage of his own death, searching for a fate that could have led him anywhere but here, in his childhood cottage, blowing his face off.

While the newly dead were often stuck in their death throes, they were also eager to talk, craving any connection to their recently severed life. Which was fortunate for Cora, as time in the Death Realm drained equal time from her life, already limited given that ominous clanging in the tunnels.

“What is Malachy Bane’s weakness?” she asked Mother’s first question.

His death throes replayed, taking his face with him. The open wound of his face spasmed in what might have been words, if he had lips to shape them. Torn flesh flapped. Blood gurgled.

A memory washed over her, of looking into a man’s black eyes, the retinas and pupils inseparable. The Realmwalker. Moriarty’s feelings of brotherhood flooded her.

Cora had glimpsed Bane once last New Year’s Eve, before she was thrown out of the Emerald Club by that irate Irishman—Moriarty, she now realized. The Chronomancer seemed to recognize her at that moment as well. Their memories of the night intermingled.

“Walcott!” Moriarty shouted over the jazz and laughter, elbowing through the dancing crowd. Two faces, mirror images, turned to him in unison. He grabbed the haughty Animancer. “Boss says fuck off, gatecrasher.” He leered at the tall woman beside Teddy. “But your sister can stay.”

Feeling the weight of someone’s attention on her, Cora looked across the sea of churning bodies. Her gaze locked with a pair of obsidian eyes. The devil in a three-piece suit. He winked at her.

More of the Chronomancer’s memories flashed like shards of a broken mirror, a kaleidoscope of disjunct glimpses from across time. Powerful Chronomancers, like Moriarty had been, could leapfrog through time, albeit inaccurately, or worse, incompletely. The shards shifted in an endless permutation of shapes and possibilities. Foreknowledge without memories. Memories without experience. None of which she had time for.

“What is Malachy Bane’s weakness?” she demanded.

Still locked in the replaying loop of his death throes, the gun fired again, tearing open his skull and interrupting the stream of memories. Brains splattered up, then flowed back down. Thesinews and cartilage reclasped, and from his reforming lips came a low groan.

“You will be,” the Chronomancer answered in a rough brogue. “He will love you to death.”

Cora stared at him in perplexed silence. The dead never lied, but… Was this the raving of an unsound mind, or a time mage’s prophecy?

Chronomancers glimpsed into whatmight be. The future could always change. Stepping foot in another time might create a paradox that undid it. Observing the past could alter the present. Scrying a possible future could nullify it.

There was a thin line between prophecy and prophetic gibberish. Given the trauma of his recent death, Moriarty’s ominous words were likely the latter. While he had recognized Cora before, now he must have mistaken her for someone else.

The faceless Chronomancer pulled a skeleton key from his pocket and pressed it into her palm. The key compounded her disbelief. All was incorporeal in the Death Realm. Nothing could pass through the black veil except spirits and their remembered lives. A physical key should fall through her palm like vapor. Yet there it was, a solid weight.

“What is this?” Brow furrowed, she looked from the impossible key to his restitching features. “Why have you given this to me?”

Guttural noises came from his tongueless mouth, air passing through ragged flesh. She was running out of time.

“What is Bane’s weakness right now?”

Out of the pulpy ruins of his throat came what sounded likeCoshoy’s Egg.

She didn’t have the chance to ask again. A vice clamped down on her, pulling her back sharply from a great distance and flinging her back into her body.

Cora gasped at the shock of returning from death. Necrotic veins crawled like black vines from where her hands had rotted over Moriarty’s heart.

Hands bit into her shoulders, yanking her up and hurling her across the crypt as if she weighed nothing. She hit the wall, bones snapping, and crumpled in a heap of blinding pain. Broken ribs threatened to puncture her lungs with each shallow, agonizing breath.

In the candlelit gloom, she grappled to make sense of what was happening. Shouts and deafening gunshots reverberated off the earthen walls.

“We didn’t kill him!” Teddy fired his gun at empty air. “It wasn’t us!”

From the darkness emerged a phantom.

Backlit by the flickering candles, the tall figure’s silhouette was cloaked in shadow. In a blur of motion too fast to register, the phantom was there one moment and gone the next.

Terror turned her blood to ice. Each panicked breath felt like broken glass in her lungs. Curled in the fetal position across the crypt, Cora could only watch as the phantom blinked impossibly back into existence several feet away, his long black coat flapping like raven's wings.

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