Chapter 14 The Three Horsewomen
The Three Horsewomen
The sky purpled like a bruise as Anita Tambo drove—or swerved, rather—Cora and Sloane to the cemetery where Lt. Potts’s copper had been buried. The Unweaver was back to steal secrets from the dead.
Anita took a corner at breakneck speed, and Cora’s nails dug into the front seat's buttery leather.
The Sanguimancer drove like a madwoman, but Cora tried to comfort herself that Anita never actually hit anything.
Well, not that badly, at least. Just passing scrapes, the occasional maimed mailbox and traumatized mailman.
Sloane, whose nerves were still frayed from the passion demon disaster the other night, was feeling less than equanimous. “Could you slow it the fuck down, Anita?” she snapped like a shrew from the backseat.
Anita glanced at the surly Irishwoman in the rearview mirror. The motor car slowed to an almost moderate pace. “Sure thing, love. How you holding up back there?”
“How do you bloody think? Things are so daft I didn’t have time to properly case the cemetery.
Who knows what we’re walking into with this dead copper business.
Could be swarmed by Potts’s dogs, for all we know, because of me.
Because of this shite.” Sloane held out her arm, covered in angry welts and bruises where Ari’s shadows had attacked her.
“Ari was like a whole different person that night,” she whispered.
“I’ve seen his temper before, but he’s never lost control like that. I-I never thought he’d…”
“I’ll kill him,” Cora offered. She could count her friends in the past thirty years on one hand and would not suffer the loss of another. Bullies like Ari Razaq had it coming, anyway.
“No!” Sloane swiped the tears pricking her eyes. “Ari’s still a good person. Right? It’s just whatever was happening at the club got to him, and he…”
“You should take the room above the club again,” Cora said. “Get space from Ari until your head clears. Mal offered to let me stay with him.”
Two heads turned to her in unison.
“Oh?” Anita inquired with a salacious smirk. “Come on, you can tell us. It’s just the three horsewomen here—blood, death, and shadows. Let the gossip flow freely.”
Cora had learned her lesson on that front. Anita had pried a secret out of her about a certain magnificent part of their boss’s anatomy, and the blood charmer had found a way to slip it into nearly every conversation since.
“It’s not a big deal. I stayed at Mal’s place when he was locked up in Rome too.”
She had not seen Malachy since that mad night at the club, but he had dominated her thoughts.
Her memories had returned in a flood before Ishtar robbed her of self-control.
She remembered Malachy curled around her in a soft bed, before and after his arrest. She remembered the three excruciating months of silence crafted by demons, unseen but sensed through the looking glass.
Months of tortured doubt, of bleak despair, believing that Mal had left her, as Teddy had.
Yet Malachy had pierced through the fog of her ransacked mind like sunlight.
Despite the efforts of demons and Masters, they had not forgotten each other.
He had missed her, had kissed her goodnight and held her until morning.
His heart had bled from the ragged edges of him, soaking her in warmth, staining her cheeks crimson.
Nothing could pry the seed of hope from rooting inside her and seeking any light.
As for the things she had said and done under the passion demon’s influence, and how badly she’d like to do them again…
The spiraling dance of their tongues and hands.
The exquisite tension tightening her innermost muscles.
The decadent filth he whispered in her ear.
A twist low in her belly, of shame and pleasure.
Stripped of inhibitions, she had freely taken everything Mal had given without remembering the hands that had touched her there before, leaving behind the bruises of cruelty.
“I noticed those matching rings you two wear.” The Sanguimancer’s grin rose along with Cora’s incriminating heartbeat. “Malachite, right?”
“It’s not like that.” Cora slipped her ringed hand into her pocket.
The first week of Mal’s prolonged absence, she had twisted the ring, frantic, desperate.
He had never appeared. She’d wrenched the ring from her finger and flung it, stone clinking on wallpaper.
Then a moment later she was scrambling to retrieve it from the floorboards, tucking it away like a shared secret.
She stroked the metal band now. She felt him on the other side, paired like links in an invisible chain.
Was Malachy hunched over his ledgers with an emptying bottle of whiskey, consumed by numbers and schemes as he had been for days?
She had not sought him out for fear that he’d changed his mind about her, worried that the fondness that had grown in her absence now withered in her presence.
“The villain gets the girl,” Sloane said from the backseat. Sadness tinged her feeble smile. “I used to think Ari was like Mal—only bad on the outside. Guess I was wrong. Still, I’m glad Mal finally pulled his head out of his arse.”
“The rings are just for communication,” Cora said.
“Mm-hm.” Anita smacked her siren red lips. “Say, did you guys hear about Guy?”
Cora was almost grateful for the change of subject, until she remembered the sound of the bullying Electromancer’s neck snapping.
Malachy had killed a man, without hesitation, because of her.
She should have felt revulsion. Instead, she felt…
safe. Protected. Perhaps a little turned on, if she was being honest.
“I heard the poor bloke was left for dead in an alley.” Anita’s riot of dark curls swayed with the sad shake of her head. “Someone mentioned seeing Guy arguing with you, Cora. Before it happened.”
Cora willed her traitorous heart not to betray her to the Sanguimancer. “Oh? I can’t quite remember that night. Insanity, everywhere.”
Anita’s gaze remained focused on her carefully averted profile, and not on the road. The scrape of metal on metal shrieked as they grazed a parked lorry, which jolted Anita’s attention, thankfully, back to driving.
“Bollocks.” Anita overcorrected the car’s course and nearly plowed through shrubbery. “You know, Mal gave Guy a black eye not too long ago. Think the boss had anything to do with it?”
Every muscle in Cora’s body went taut. “Why would Mal kill his Electromancer?”
The non-answer seemed to satisfy Anita.
They continued towards the cemetery gates, elaborate wrought-iron arches that stretched into the deepening gloom.
Anita parked behind a privet hedge off the road.
The three mages climbed out of the sleek motor car, hefted gear over their shoulders, and slunk through the cemetery gates, cloaked in the Umbramancer’s shadows.
Amongst dead things at last, Cora felt the dark caress of death, along with a stab of grief.
This was the cemetery she had buried Teddy in.
Beneath the stone and soil, she sensed her twin’s presence, parting the black veil between Realms to stroke her cheek.
Not even death could sever the interwoven threads of their spirits, painful as they were.
Memories of Teddy coated her like dust, growing thicker the more she tried to avoid them. When she felt like she’d suffocate from loss, she would sweep up the memories and pile them at the back of her mind, safe from any wind to disturb them.
The hollow in her heart carved in Teddy’s shape deepened with each step closer to his grave.
Time had not made it easier to commune with her dead brother.
It only reminded her of how much she had lost, her missing half.
Death had not quelled her love for him, and so she killed herself piece by piece to commune with him.
The price was worth embracing Teddy, incorporeal spirits though they were, and gazing into his achingly familiar face, the elegant mirror image of her own, and hearing the echo of his laugh.
Sometimes, she understood why the tortured Animancer had chosen death over suffering with her. Sometimes, she almost forgave him.
Tonight, she was not here to commune with Teddy.
Cora pulled Anita and Sloane behind a mausoleum, its grimy marble edifice blocking them from view. Night was falling fast.
“Here’s the plan. We need info on Lt. Potts, and it’s too risky to kill another copper.
We’ll just nip over to the already-dead copper’s grave for a little exhume-and-commune.
Anita, darling, you’ll sense and slow any nearby heartbeats—until they’re unconscious, not dead.
Mal was quite emphatic on that point. Sloane, you’ll cloak us in shadows and serve as lookout while I chat with the dead bloke. ”
“I lifted the burial plot map,” Sloane said. “Poor sod is buried in the northeast corner.”
In a shifting spill of inky shadows, they followed the Umbramancer through a maze of graves. The unquiet dead whispered at the back of Cora’s mind. They were rounding the mercifully empty path to the copper’s grave when they reached an unfortunate realization.
“You only brought two bloody shovels?” Sloane said.
“Keep your voice down,” Cora hissed, glancing around for shapes in the darkness. “We can take turns digging. Here.” She offered the second shovel to Anita.
The Sanguimancer waggled her blood red manicure. “But I just had them done.”
With a string of Irish curses, Sloane grabbed the shovel and started digging. The freshly tilled earth was soft beneath the bite of their shovels. It would draw little notice when they buried the copper a second time.
Cora fell into the familiar rhythm of grave digging. Within minutes, their shovels clanked against the casket.
“Wow.” Sloane wiped a hand over her sweating brow. “That was fast.”
“I’ve done this before.” Cora tossed the shovel onto the grassy earth. “Anita, darling, keep your senses peeled for any heartbeats.”