Forged by angel and hell.., p.1
Forged by Angel & Hellfire, page 1
Forged by Angel & Hellfire
Not the Same River
Book Four
Inka York
Book Four: Forged by Angel & Hellfire
Not the Same River series
by Inka York
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Paperback edition ISBN: 978-1-915708-15-1
E-book edition ISBN: 978-1-915708-08-3
Published by Inklore Books
v.20240202
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Copyright ©2023 Inka York
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any format whatsoever without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical reviews and other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Inka York asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously or satirically. Any resemblance to actual events, organisations, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Products/brands referred to in this work own their trademarks, and inclusion does not imply endorsement.
Cover design by Jacqueline Sweet Designs
Editing services by Esther Rae
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
1. The Dampener
2. The Shape of Albert
3. The Black Bull Apostles
4. The General
5. Demons & Déjà Vu
6. Blood & Barter
7. Escape
8. Three-Minute Head Start
9. Ghost in the Mirror
10. Full Moons & Mausoleums
11. Hunted
12. Best Friend Disapproves of Wardrobe Choices
13. So, My Boyfriend’s Older Than I Thought
14. The Badger
15. The Sixteenth Bloodborn
16. Torture
17. Men in Black & Bloodlines
18. Cosplay Shouldn’t Be This Hard
19. The Blackmore Party
20. The God-Wolf
21. Gorillas & Ghosts
22. B.O.S.S
23. A Terrible Bargain
24. Grumpy Vaenix
25. Basic Bitches
26. Estranged Angel
27. Elijah’s Treasure
28. Love Bites
29. Love Bites Back
30. Touchy Pete & Hellfire
31. Haunted
32. Inner Demons
33. The First Gift
34. A Link Forged
35. The Missing Portrait of Radnor Harding
36. Confession
37. Things That Rise From the Dead
38. Lilith’s Children
39. Tabby’s Truth
40. The Stone Warrior
41. The Devikappa
42. To Bloom in the Dark
43. Not Even Close
44. A Time to Die
45. Forever Yours
Epilogue
A Message from Violet
Legacies Unmasked
A Message from the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Also by Inka York
Content Warning
Author’s Note
Please be aware this series is set in England and is written in British English by a British author. That word you want to flag as a typo? That’s just how we spell apologise here.
If you do spot a genuine typo though, please report it through the error report form on my website, where the reporting actually works.
For readers aged 15+
The content warning is at the back of the book and is indexed on the Contents page.
For Syd,
To not believe in magic is to not believe in you,
And I will always believe in you.
“Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.”—N.K. Jemisin (The Fifth Season)
* * *
“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”—Tolkien
Prologue
Gravity is a weighty concept for an eight-year-old whose mind is bewitched by the fanciful. I didn’t know anything about magic until I met Leia, but lying on our bellies in her garden while she told me story after story, I began to believe in the impossible.
So, when she picked a daisy and said, “Do you think if we dig a daisy out and leave its roots on, it will float away into the sky?” I said, “Yes.”
I didn’t even think about it. What else could tether a flower to the earth but its roots? A picked flower couldn’t float away because it wasn’t whole without its roots. That seemed obvious.
We dug the tiny flower out, sharing secret smiles, determined to grant the daisy its freedom.
But there was no freedom in death, not for the flower lying next to the hole we dug to preserve its roots, and not for those left behind whose secret smiles turned to churning guts and guilty hearts.
There was no messing with gravity. Not then.
Leia laughed when I told her I’d stopped believing in impossible things. She said, “If you didn’t believe, there wouldn’t be any magic in your paintings.”
We were older then—eleven going on twelve. It was the summer before we started secondary school. A week after I told her magic wasn’t real, she gave me a flower and a book. We’d read the book together before, but this copy was all mine.
No hands had flicked through its pages before mine. No other fingers had traced Alice’s dress, or the red queen’s crown, or the lion, or the unicorn. No name had been scratched onto the fly sheet. It was clean and new: no scars, no bent corners, no torn pages.
I wonder if she ever knew what it meant to me to be given something so us, something so mine.
I didn’t talk about the book then, because my throat itched when I thought about it, so I asked about the flower instead. “What is it?”
“It’s a violet.”
It was small in my palm, stalk so thin it defied gravity, petals so delicate it defied the wind, purple so vibrant it defied the sun. “Like me.”
“Exactly like you.”
I lifted it to my face, inhaling its sweet scent, then grinned. “Purple and smelly?”
“Not exactly like you, then.” She smiled as she looked away, dropping her rosy cheeks into her palms. “There aren’t really any violets like you.”
I read my book quietly while Leia read hers. She froze at the sight of a bumble bee dancing lazily across the flower beds, breathing again when it buzzed away.
Eventually, she put her book down to tell me my favourite kind of story: the kind she carried in her head. Leia knew a lot of stories, born in all places, imagined in the darkest and brightest minds, brewed in brains, and bred on tongues.
She knew how to make magic sound like truth.
This is the story Leia told me that day:
Once upon a time, there was a girl whose love was too late to save her from a monster. The monster was jealous of the love between the girl and the boy, so he turned the girl into a flower with no scent, whose petals would close at night. From the boy she loved, the monster stole all senses during the day, except smell and hunger, so that he might trample his love by accident in his quest for food.
At night, senses restored, he spoke to the closed petals of his love, ignoring his hunger in favour of her company. During the day, he sat still, afraid to eat, while his love spoke, unheard, through the petals she opened to the sun.
As the days wore on, the boy grew weak, and his heart bled for his love. Wherever the blood landed, violets grew like clusters of bruises. The girl sucked up their scent, and turned her face to the sun, silently begging it to waft her new scent towards her love, so he would know her location and thereby safely seek food when he was hungry.
The sun listened. Inspired by their devotion to each other, the sun warmed the girl’s petals, strengthening her scent, and recruited the wind to carry it on the breeze to the boy.
The scent calmed him, healed his heart, and helped him sleep during the day, but still he did not feed.
The girl, inspired by her love’s sacrifice when he chose her comfort over his own, and grateful for the sun’s help, trained herself little by little to bloom at night.
When the boy saw his love bloom beneath the stark blue moonlight, he was so struck by her beauty, he silently begged of the moon, allow me a promise that I might sleep forever and dream of my love, while she lives on as she was before we met.
With the moon’s promise on his lips, he said, “The violet that blooms in the shade will be made glorious in the sun.”
When the sun rose the next day, the girl woke in her own body, stretching to meet the new day. Beside her, lay a boy with violet shadows beneath his sleeping eyes. All around him, a spreading carpet of purple flowers softened his dreams with their intoxicating scent.
The boy dreamed of his love.
His love stared down at him, just as she would have before they met, without any recognition. But his beauty and the scent of the violets tugged at the deepest parts of her consciousness, and she lay beside the boy, soon succumbing to the soporific effects of the sun and the violets.
The sun and the moon marvelled at their love, at their souls’ recognition of each other, and allowed them both to sleep. They took the lovers far from the wood. Far from the jealous monster who tried to steal their precious love from them.
To fool the monster, and knowing of its hatred of all sweet things, of its hatred for the scent of violets, the sun and moon left behind a human-shaped rock, crouching beside the carpet of violets.
To punish the monster, they made it bleed whenever it stumbled upon a grave, so it was trailed by violets for the rest of its days.
* * *
“So, did they ever wake up?” I asked.
Leia shook her head, frowning at the pile of grass she’d tugged from the ground and balanced on her knee. “No. They slept forever, dreaming of each other.”
“That’s a horrible story.”
She shrugged. “Nobody dies.”
“Sounds like there’s more than one way to die,” I replied. “What’s the point of being alive if all you do is dream?”
“Dreams are all some people have,” she said. “And the dead don’t dream. They don’t do anything. But you can still dream.”
I knew what she was getting at. Leia thought I should never stop dreaming about being found someday, but a girl could waste away thinking like that. Not this girl.
That’s what I thought back then. Not this girl. I’d stopped daydreaming about what my family might be like because it felt like trying to win the lottery without a ticket. Who would want me when my own parents didn’t?
Instead of saying all that, I said, “I just don’t think it’s very romantic to sleep forever. And I wish there was a better violet story than that.”
“There isn’t. The rest are horrible. My story is the best one.”
“Your story?”
She nodded. “Because you deserve a better story, and in this one, violets are a symbol of love and sacrifice. It’s why they grow by gravesides and wherever blood is spilt,” she said, “like on battlefields.”
Leia spoke magic like it was fact. From graves and blood and battle she made flowers. She was always so much better at believing than I was. So much better at hoping. I still have the flower she gave me, pressed and laminated inside the pages of the book.
A nephilim once told me you could learn to read the history of battle through the earth’s scars. He said every strategy yet to be devised by the world’s greatest generals had already played itself out a hundred times over. There are no new moves. We just learn to fight with what we have: muscle, technology, brain, charm, furniture.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t met this nephilim yet when I was kidnapped by Mara and taken to the Bishop’s palace, but if I had met him, he would’ve said this: if you want to undermine a bishop, you have to think like a queen. But what I already knew, like every pawn who ever made it across the board, is this: there’s more than one way to become a queen.
1
The Dampener
I sit on the bed, wincing at the ache in my right ankle as I kick my boots off, still too chicken to check beneath the bandage.
Albert is leaning against the wall by the door, watching me.
The maid that ushered us back to the room took a completely different route. This place is a twisted maze.
The staircases are uniformly wide, with heavy wooden banisters and identical half landings, each with a frosted arched window set above a table with flowers on it. All the same vase, all the same flowers.
There’s no artwork on the hallway walls like there is in the bedroom and the dining room, and the hazy silver light comes from nowhere. It’s dreary, like a classroom dimmed for the whiteboard. Only this isn’t school.
Every door around here is unmarked, and thick red carpet flows through every corridor and down every staircase like a tumbling river of blood.
We were deliberately misled on the way back here. It’s like we’re trapped in an Escher woodcut of impossible architecture. I didn’t think I could hate a building more than I hated that sea fort.
The curtains have been opened in our absence, but there’s no view. Just frosty glass and the impression of sky.
“Are you gonna watch me all day?”
Albert pushes away from the wall and takes a seat at the desk. “I don’t have anywhere else to be.”
“Well, I’d like a shower, so if you could go to your own room…“ I let him fill in the blank, but it seems he’s not going to. “This is literally a palace. There must be another room you can haunt.”
He spins in the swivel chair, the leather creaking beneath him. “I’m no more a guest here than you are. I’m not permitted to roam the palace, and if you think I’m leaving you here alone while Caspar is around, you have, as you say, been reading the wrong file.”
A smile tries to break free, but I don’t let it. “You can’t sleep in here.”
His nostrils flare. “I can, and I will.”
“But…“ My fingers play over the soft duvet. “There’s only one bed.”
No way am I sharing the bed with a creepy hypnotist, not even one who looks like that.
Albert nods at the armchair in the corner. “I will sleep there.”
“You’re not watching me all night like a creeper.”
He sighs. “I shall be sleeping.”
Ugh! “Fine. I’m gonna shower.” I hobble around the bed to the bathroom, calling over my shoulder. “You better not come in.”
He laughs under his breath. “Why would I come in? Just make sure you take clean clothes in with you. I don’t want you accusing me of looking at you in a towel.”
He makes a great point. I veer back towards the wardrobe, where I try to find something comfortable. There’s new underwear here, and I wonder if Mara did this. How long has she been planning to get me here to have all this prepared? There are tracksuits and pyjamas that still have shop labels on, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t here earlier.
I try to think back to this morning, but everything’s a bit hazy. Probably Piper messing with my head. I swallow hard at the thought of someone getting into my head, and for the first time in a long time, I open that little box in my mind where I put all the uncontrollable shit. If someone wants to get inside my mind in this place, there’s nothing I can do about it.
On the plus side, the itch on my forehead has worn off.
I gather an armful of clean clothes, then trek back to the bathroom, supremely pissed off that there’s no lock. At least there’s not a camera in here like there is in the bedroom. A huge thing, it is. Blinking from the corner, right above the chair Albert will allegedly be sleeping in.
Watched by an annoying vampire and a creepy, religious bastard. Fun.
The shower is heaven, and I need it. I’m pretty sure I’ve still got mud in my hair, and after the mousy maid tried to brush it, it needs all the help it can get. The only downside is the lack of water softener—first world problems right here.
I blink the water out of my eyes to reach for the shampoo and go completely still. Mara must’ve been in here while we were talking to the Bishop because everything is the brand Amethyst uses, and I know it wasn’t here earlier because I used the bathroom to change into that abominable outfit.
I’ve probably got half a bottle of conditioner on my hair, my fingers combing through it as the bandage around my ankle gets heavier and heavier. The skin beneath it stings, but I still don’t look. I just peel the bandage away and let it plop into the corner of the shower tray. At least there’s no blood on it.
