Chapter 14 The Three Horsewomen #2
The casket was not only latched but welded shut. Cora pulsed death magic, coaxing the metal to rust. She pried the casket open with grim determination and a crowbar. The creaking groan of the hinge was deafening in the night.
“Hello again.” Cora grimaced down at the corpse.
Embalming only kept nature at bay for so long.
At the edges of the copper grew rot, blooming as it decayed, decaying as it bloomed.
Taking one last breath of relatively fresh air, she sank to her knees, removed her gloves, and hovered her hands over the uniform covering his heart.
Eyes rolling back and necrotic veins spreading, her spirit departed from her body and slipped through the black veil into the Death Realm.
But before she landed in the copper’s Deathscape, the corner of the Death Realm where the grave for his spirit had been dug, she was tugged back into her body, kneeling in a copper’s grave.
“Oi!” Anita’s nails bit into her shoulder. “We got company.”
The Sanguimancer had sensed their heartbeats before the thud of their approaching steps registered. Molten panic filled Cora’s chest. Over the top of the grave, she saw torches, heard voices.
“Shite,” Sloane whispered. “I’ll lure them away.” She disappeared, a wisp of shadow into darkness.
Moments later, the sound of a large object dropping reached their ears. Cora and Anita exchanged a look.
“That didn’t sound good.” Anita helped Cora out of the grave. Together, they slunk towards the shadowed outline of Sloane crouched over a prone body. “I don’t sense a heartbeat. Bloody hell, Sloane. You killed him?”
“So? I made it look like an accident.”
Cora’s gaze veered from the unsmiling Sanguimancer to the unrepentant Umbramancer, then down to the second corpse lying a few paces from the first.
“I sensed two heartbeats earlier,” Anita said. “Where’s the other bloke?”
“Dunno. He scampered off when I dropped this one.”
A glint of metal caught Cora’s eye in the darkness.
She glanced down and swore. “He’s not just a bloke.
Look at that uniform, that ridiculous hat.
He’s a damned copper. They must be keeping an eye on their dead comrade’s grave, in case his idiot murderer comes back.
Bugger, this will be difficult to explain to Mal.
Well, we can’t just leave the body here. I’ll move him.”
“How?” Anita eyed the hefty copper sprawled at their feet. “You’re a tall bird, sure, but you’re more likely to snap in half than move him an inch.”
“He’ll move himself.” Honing her concentration, Cora threaded the copper’s death through the eye of her magic. His spirit had not yet fully passed through the black veil, and his body reanimated easily. Like a macabre seamstress, she rewove spirit and body with the slightest stitch.
Anita and Sloane stared in grotesque fascination as the corpse lurched to his feet with a tug on the strings of his death.
He staggered, step by plodding step, towards the open grave.
A convenient dumping ground, hidden from prying eyes.
Cora would have him climb down into the nook of earth, settle atop the first copper’s coffin, then coax secrets from his dead lips.
A beam of light slashed through the night.
Cora froze. It was a torch, in the hand of a distant figure with glinting brass buttons on his uniform.
The torch light cut past them. Three mages dropped to the ground, but not the reanimated body. He swayed onward in a drunken gait towards the pitfall trap of the open grave.
The torch swung back and illuminated the ambulatory corpse in stark, incriminating shades.
Cora’s mind restarted with a jolt. “Slow his heartbeat,” she whispered to the Sanguimancer, then jumped to her feet. Cora clamped an arm around the dead copper’s waist, and together they stumbled among the headstones.
“You’re drunk, honey.” She made her voice carry, concealing the tremble with a high-pitched laugh. She willed the other copper to mistake them for a drunken couple shambling into the cemetery for a morbid shag.
The beam of light tracked them for a long moment, holding steady. Her heart thundered against her ribcage, lungs burning from a held breath. After a long moment, the torchlight dropped, followed by the thud of dead weight.
Anita had found her quarry, slowing the blood in his veins. Cora released a stuttering breath. She hauled the dead man into the open grave while Anita and Sloane dragged the unconscious copper into the bushes.
“Could really use a John O’Leary special right about now,” Anita grumbled. “A brain drain to remove this bloke’s inconvenient memories.”
“Do you think he saw us?” Sloane’s voice was pinched in concern. “Maybe you should slow his heart all the way.”
“Jesus, Sloane, we can’t kill another copper.”
“Why not?”
“Mal said not to.”
“You see him here now?”
Cora tuned out their bickering. She settled beside the second corpse atop the coffin of the first and deliberated.
Interrogating a reanimated corpse, no matter how fresh, was often an exercise in frustration.
A spark of consciousness remained in the copper’s glazing eyes, but the onset of rigor mortis nearly clamped his pimpled jaw shut.
She realized with a pang how young the copper was.
“What’s your name?”
“Spindler.” The gruff voice was like gravel in his throat.
“Sorry, Spindler.”
Her knife slid between his ribs and pierced his heart. It beat once more, then stopped. Her magic sipped up his death like a banquet of rot. Power rushed through her veins. After living so long in fear, there was a dark, nasty part of her that enjoyed that power. She shivered in unsavory delight.
Cradling his weight, she lowered the copper to the damp earth.
She had made the decision to kill him with the same ease as she had about Ishtar.
An instinctual calculation. The demon had hurt Malachy, and so Cora had slipped behind Ishtar, wrapped her hands around her throat, and unwove her. The copper was merely a windfall.
The Unweaver could slip ruthlessness on like a second skin that fit better than Cora’s own. She was tired of being the victim.
Her hands lowered over where Spindler’s heart had once beat. Her eyes rolled back. Rot bloomed like death’s bouquet. Her spirit departed her body in the Living Realm for Death.
She landed in Spindler’s Deathscape and screamed. A horn blared directly in her eardrum by the harsh ring of it. A hand tugged her to sit down in a hard chair. It was Spindler, looking even younger out of his uniform. He squinted at Cora like she had grown a second head.
“Whatcha hollering about?” he yelled over another blare of the horn. “Race is about to start.”
Cora blinked around them. They sat trackside at a horse race, two spectators among hundreds in the cheering crowd. She flinched at the deafening clomp of hooves and spray of mud as the racers thundered past in a blur of shining, steaming horseflesh.
The dead copper turned to Cora with a boyish smile. Her heart clenched at how happy he looked. Spindler had been killed too quickly for his death to register yet.
“The Epsom Derby. Can you believe it, lady? This right here is the winning bet. I put ten whole quid on Humorist. I can just feel it.”
She nodded, uncertain. The racers rounded the final turn, and Spindler leapt to his feet with whoops and hollers as his horse took the lead. After a booming voice declared Humorist the winner, Cora allowed Spindler a solid minute of tap-dancing celebration before she tugged him down to sit.
“I’m curious about your boss, Potts,” she shouted over the clamoring crowd. “What’s his obsession with Malachy Bane?”
“Obsession is the word,” Spindler chortled, still beaming at his win.
“He’s recruited a whole team of us to tail that IRA cutthroat around London.
Dozens of us, and it’s all we do, day and night.
Daft, ain’t it? There’s whispers that the upper brass is getting worried.
Apparently that Irish gangster pulls weight with some bigwigs in Parliament.
Though after tonight, hell, they’ll probably promote Potts once he arrests Bane.
They’ve got the bodies and everything. No way that Paddy is talking his way out of it this time. ”
A cold bolt of fear shot through her. “What bodies?”
“They found two of ‘em outside his ritzy jazz joint. One had his neck snapped like a twig. The other bloke was just pieces stuffed in a bag. Mate of mine on the team said the body parts looked fish-eaten and… not fully human.”
Her panicked thoughts tumbled over each other. “Where is Potts getting the money for all this surveillance?”
“Certainly ain’t coming from the Metropolitan Police.” Spindler leaned in. “I hear Potts has himself a private benefactor. Some rich toff with a personal vendetta against Bane.”
“Who?” Cora wanted to throttle Spindler when he merely lifted a shoulder. She settled for grabbing him by the shirtfront and hauling him closer. “Who?”
His eyes widened. “I-I dunno who, lady. I only glimpsed the toff once, and he was wearing a hood pulled low. Had a gravelly voice, not an English accent, I think. Too far to tell, really.”
Swearing, she released him. With no more answers to give her, she left Spindler to his derby in the Death Realm just as the horses resumed their starting positions in a looping race. She returned to her body in the grave with a shudder.
They hastily buried two dead coppers in one grave, ensuring the loose earth was packed identically to before their disturbance. The third copper, unconscious, laid hidden in the bushes. He began to stir.
“Go to the car, but don’t go back to the club tonight,” Cora said. “The coppers are about to descend on the club like locusts. Lay low until this blows over.”
Anita exchanged a worried glance with Sloane. “What about you, Cora?”
“I need to warn Mal.”
She found the closest lock—a rusted gate around a mausoleum shrouded in ivy—and shoved the Portal Key inside and turned it. Throwing open the portal door, she rushed into the Emerald Club office.