Cadence of truth, p.1
Cadence of Truth, page 1
Cadence of Truth
Not the Same River
Book Six
Inka York
Book Six: Cadence of Truth
Not the Same River series
by Inka York
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Paperback edition ISBN: 978-1-915708-17-5
E-book edition ISBN: 978-1-915708-16-8
Published by Inklore Books
v.20240211
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Copyright ©2024 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. Perspective
2. Silas & Silence
3. Of Blood & Oil
4. Beautiful But Dangerous
5. Sketches
6. Splintered Furniture & Hitchcock Movies
7. To Those Who Wait
8. Silver & Circuits
9. Zorbing in the Himalayas
10. Trapdoors & Wedding Caves
11. Cascade
12. Lions & Violets
13. The Bazaar
14. Cedar
15. Comings. Goings. Unravellings
16. Seeing Double
17. There is a Time
18. Hate Spikes, Hazards & Yucktails
19. Sweet Revenge
20. A Time to Breathe
21. A Time to Sing
22. The Other Library
23. The Bloodborn Archive
24. Breached
25. The Devil’s Handcuffs
26. Relations & Accusations
27. Facing the Music
28. The Fuzz & the Ferret
29. Bum Bags & Blackmail
30. The Right Tools
31. Veritas
32. Knife Collector
33. Forevers
34. Serpent Girl
35. Underground Ghosts
36. Château & Shit Heap
37. Truth & Transfusions
38. Is He a Vet?
39. An Unexpected Uncle
40. Not the Same River
41. Petra Rosa
42. Corrupted
43. Ghosts
44. Jett’s Underwear
45. The Wedding
46. Fair Warning: I Summoned Astaroth
47. The Celestial Council
48. Astaroth
49. The Ugly Truth
50. Roots & Wings
51. Waiting
52. At a Warehouse in Swindon
53. Muted & Invisible
54. I’d Prefer a Gummy Bear
55. Fired Feathers & Fury
56. Just a Bloody Flesh Wound
57. How Not to Make a Necklace
58. Gods & Egos
59. Lucifer’s Translation
60. A Time to Breathe
61. A Time for Truth
62. Revelation
63. Traitors
64. A Time to Heal
Epilogue
A Message from Violet
A Message from the Author
Also by Inka York
About the Author
Acknowledgments
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 doughnut 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.
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Finally, since this is a thing we’re doing now, I want to assure you that no AI was used during the writing of this series. These words belong entirely to me and the people in my head, who are very chatty, especially at night when I’m trying to sleep. It is a fact that Violet has not stopped talking for close to a decade, which is, like Leia said, the real reason she only has speech mark dimples on her left cheek. It is also a fact that I’ll be inconsolable the day she stops talking to me.
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Happy reading, my friend xo
For the Hearties,
For the cheerleading sprint hosts,
For Sarra, who leads with courage and empathy,
For Dawn, my writing wife, whose humour and honesty make me grateful every day.
It’s thanks to your unwavering faith and encouragement that this series made it out into the world.
Your heart is my heart.
“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”
—George Eliot
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“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”
—Heraclitus
Prologue
While the priory sleeps on in darkness, I enact the first part of my secret morning ritual. I creep beneath the house to the secret storeroom in the library, sweep aside the dust sheet, and watch Albert bleed.
I was ready when they came for the conduit. I poured my soul into its creation, and it shows in every brushstroke—in the loving curve of Albert’s lips, in the intense light in his eyes, and the softness of his powdered hair. They’ll never know they’ve got a forgery. It won’t bleed, but none of them know it should.
I know it’s not healthy, staring at him every day, imagining his eyes flashing the way they used to just before he kissed me, or convincing myself he’s smiling just as I turn away, or worse, that I can smell him here with me, all warmth and citrus.
Four months have trickled by. Four months of knowing nothing.
Knowing nothing weighs too much.
I scratch at the tattoo on my wrist, unable to resist the thoughts that sometimes find me. The ones where Oskar breaks Albert’s mind apart piece by piece. I sit in silence, straining for Albert’s voice. The pain of not remembering its exact sound slices through me, chasing memories through my blood, failing to catch them.
Some days, I want to forget more than I want to remember. And every day, my mind conjures an image of a morning to come—the day the conduit fails to bleed. The day it no longer needs to.
Panic spins through me at the thought of it, building so fast I can’t breathe. Like that moment just before waking, when you know the nightmare isn’t real, that it’s just a dream. But you’re waking now and an awareness comes over you, like skipping a stair, that being awake won’t be any better. Because being awake is like missing one stair after another, thudding helplessly and painfully to the floor over and over.
So, I end up here, standing alone in the north field, performing the second part of my ritual as the dawn paints the river gold. I conduct my orchestra—my dormant flock—its movements in harmony with mine as it rises above the river. Every swoop, loop and swirl seduces me into calm, my own brand of hypnosis.
I let my hands fall, and the flock falls with them, scattering to the ground like a fistful of dirt on a coffin.
I tilt my face up to the sun, eyes closed to absorb its promise, but I’m still wearing a mask. The truth wears it thin. Gathering pace, waking secrets, tumbling towards me like a river cascades over rocks, the truth chants one message: war is coming, war is coming.
Today, the sun tries harder to reach me. I almost feel it.
The displaced starlings sing their disapproval downstream. The river rushes endlessly onwards. Footsteps, soft and steady, brush through the dewy grass.
“You shouldn’t be this close to the river,” I say, eyes still closed to the sun.
“I can’t get any closer, angel. Iron circle, remember?”
I turn to see Caleb tossing his jacket to the ground beneath the ancient, sprawling oak.
The apple core bench is gone. The bicycle horn is gone. The grave is gone.
Noah is back. And he bites.
Caleb sits down, back against the tree, eyes on the glistening river.
“I didn’t know you were acquainted with six a.m.” I say.
“I wanted to watch you chase the sun up.” He squints into the light. “I’m surprised there was so little nagging.”
I laugh. “Unlike some I could mention, the sun knows how to do as it’s told.”
Uriel’s words come back to me. He thinks you nag the sun into existence every morning. I feel the hum of the iron circle as I cross it.
Caleb smiles, the sun spinning his black hair into copper, and a dim memory of Sean takes me somewhere else for a moment, somewhere before Albert. Caleb’s gentle blue eyes fill with warmth and understanding and countless other emotions I have no right to. I lean against him, sighing out every clawing scrap of tension as his arm comes around me.
“How did you know it was me?” he asks.
His huff of amusement ruffles my hair. “What will you do with your new friends?”
“My flock?” They’re too beautiful to be a plague. “Mr Harvey said they’ll be dormant until I call them to action.”
He also said they’d take the form of anything that flies. They used to be an actual plague of locusts, but that’s too literal, too biblical, and too conspicuous for twenty-first century England.
Along with the bequest, Harvey left me a manual rivalling Sean’s diaries in weight. Call and they will come. So, that’s what I did. One morning, while I watched the starlings form a cloud above the river, I broke beneath their dance of freedom, screaming at the sky, and they rose around me.
My beautiful black mass.
My flock.
My plague.
1
Perspective
Why the hell am I running down the side of a building with a vampire on my tail? I ask myself for the tenth time.
I’d like to say I didn’t sign up for this, but that would be a big fat lie. I remember now why I stopped running when I was twelve; my boobs are literally slapping my chin.
My thighs burn as I try to stay parallel to the ground that’s rising fast to meet my face.
I can’t do it.
I’m seconds from hitting the dirt when War’s voice worms its way into my head.
Visualise.
I bend my knees and push away from the wall, bouncing on my conjured pinball, veering left just as the vampire makes an airborne grab for me and misses.
Never fly in a straight line; it makes you predictable.
Before the vampire can right herself, I somersault backwards over her head, landing behind her, and tap her on the shoulder.
She laughs as she turns around. “That was great, Vi. I had no idea what you were doing.”
“That’ll be my leaks.”
Hazy Lin utilises what War calls perspective shift, which basically means she flattens surfaces in her mind, making everything two dimensional. Running up a building for her is like running on the flat for everyone else. She’s trying to teach me. It kills me that I’m not very good at it yet. I can do the physical part because I can already fly and manipulate the air around me, but War is convinced I have the right sort of quiet mind to become great at this. Problem is, my mind is a cave right now, its only inhabitant the echoing fear that Albert will never come back.
Hazy is much shorter than me, with cropped black hair, and the same dark, curious eyes as her grandmother. Thankfully, her smiles never end with inappropriate lip-licking when she encounters my brothers.
Her team rescued Elijah from Fane’s clutches at the convent last year. He stayed with us for a week, looking like he was sitting on needles the whole time, then he moved on. According to Michael, Elijah thinks he doesn’t deserve a family, that we deserve better than an angel who was fooled by a demon. He’s been punishing himself for fathering Lilith’s child for almost two thousand years, which is why he happily took the penance Michael gave him, but he’s not done self-flagellating yet. All his work defending vulnerable mothers and children was undone by Paul as fast as he completed it, so he’s off again, scorching the earth with Lilith’s names like he did before, so she can’t rise again through the earth. And scratching them into the backs of mirrors, so she can’t possess people through their reflections. Lilith has quite the skill set.
Hazy only moved in with Maggie to help her recuperate after her kidnapping, but she’s still there. I’ve seen a lot of her for two reasons.
One, she’s training with War. She’s got balance issues from too much intercontinental teleporting, which is not a good thing for someone whose powers rely on subverting the laws of physics.
Two, Noah needs a bit of guidance about becoming a bloodborn, and Maggie is helping him. He has questions and fears, and though I was initially concerned that Maggie’s brusqueness might be too much, the opposite is true. Noah adores her. I introduced them a few weeks after Noah’s rebirth, so now we spend a lot of time at Maggie’s garishly yellow house.
“You coming to see Maggie today?” Hazy asks, a hopeful look sprouting on her face.
“That depends if you need a buffer more than I need a new sports bra.”
She laughs, but it doesn’t last. “She’s a tyrant. Nothing is good enough. I can’t so much as heat soup without spoiling it, and I burnt her toast this morning.”
“You burnt her toast? You must die,” I say in Maggie’s Fane voice.
“That’s what she said.”
“She’s channelling Fane.”
“I spend so much time rinsing out food bags, my hands are going weird.” She holds up her non-weird hands. “The only thing she’ll make is red bean dessert, and I’d rather die than eat that shit. She keeps forcing it on me like I’m five again, and I haven’t been five for a hundred and forty years.”
“I had no idea you were such an old lady.”
She gives me a scary look. “Honestly, the shouting I can tune out—though I’d rather she didn’t scream about the electricity bill every time I turn the hairdryer on—but I don’t want to be glared to death.”
I don’t tell her she’s inherited Maggie’s glare. That would just be rude. “Tell her to behave or you’ll leave.”
“She’ll call my bluff, and I don’t really want to leave her, but the petty conflict’s doing my head in. It’s one of the reasons I left… Never mind, you don’t want to hear about this.”
“You think she’s testing you? To see if you’ll stick around?”
Hazy shrugs. “Who knows?”
“I know she looks frail, but she’s not actually an old lady,” I tell her. “She’s an ox. And she’s completely recovered now. She can make her own toast.”
“Uriel says the same thing. I know she’s strong, but I look at her, and she’s so small.”
I arch an eyebrow. “She’s no smaller than you are.”
She laughs and pats my arm. “Now that’s perspective.”
When I get home from training, Uriel’s waiting for me in the drawing room, drinking coffee from a bucket-sized cup. I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks. According to War, he’s been sunbathing on a volcano, but he’s as pale and beautiful as ever. Green tweed never looked so good.
And here’s me, looking like I barely survived a woodchipper. My hair is French-braided, but that never stops the frizzy halo from circling my sweaty face.
I throw myself onto the sofa, too exhausted to care how soggy and gross I’m making it. “Hot date?”
He looks down at himself and raises his eyebrows. “Seriously? You think I’d wear this on a date?”
“Uriel, you could wear a binbag on a date, and they wouldn’t care.”
He shudders. “But I would.”
“I thought you were on holiday.”
His eyes widen beneath two perfect arches. “Did you?”
“War said.”
He huffs. “Trust me, it wasn’t a holiday.”
