Secrets at the Door by Inka York

Author:Inka York [York, Inka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781915708045
Publisher: Inklore Books

Atherbourn House was vast, one dark wood-panelled room pouring into the next, each one smoke-hazy grey with little puddles of golden light high on the walls.

Faded flowers and glossy fruit bloomed on every beeswax-scented surface. Lotus hoped it wasn’t for her benefit. She could smell beneath the layers of camouflage to the dust-warm glass and hot-metal filament of the lightbulbs. To the woodworm and dried sap in the floorboards, and the crumbs of earth and skin buried in the rugs.

She stopped at a photograph on a sideboard, turning it to Betsy with a smirk. “This is you. Goodness, you were surly.”

“I simply dislike being photographed.”

“And this… this is Rika?”

“Yes,” she said, her quiet voice husky. “I was the first.”

“The favourite?”

Betsy shrugged, then took the photo from her with a soft smile. “Perhaps.”

Lotus’ gaze drifted upwards to the large portrait on the wall. “That is… not Rika. She is… familiar.”

“That is Edith.” Betsy leant down to whisper in her ear, the warmth of her breath chasing goose bumps across Lotus’ skin. “She was there that night.”

“Is her hair really like that?”

“Like what?”

“Glossy. Like a puddle of ink?”

“It was.”

Edith was beautiful, if one were attracted to haughty, disdainful women who looked very much like they could murder you in your sleep.

Lotus reached for Betsy’s hand but stopped herself at the last moment, instead letting her fingers trail across the contents of the nearest vase. Papery roses, leeched of colour—barely lilac, barely orange—stuffed into a squat round vase with juiceless berries and lavender stalks were a poor substitute for the velvet skin of Betsy’s hand.

In the next moment, her hand was in Betsy’s anyway, and she was dragged from the room with a broad smile on her face despite the mission ahead.

“Why is her room down here?” she asked.

“It is traditional for the leader of a coven to take a room on the ground floor. Eyes on the door and all that. Unless there is a vaewolf in the coven. In that case, the wolf takes the door. Samuel sleeps down here too. The rest of us are on the first floor, except for Edwin, who haunts the attic.”

“This is it?” she asked, when Betsy stopped in front of a deep blue door with an amber crystal doorknob.

Betsy nodded. “I should warn you. She looks quite a fright.”

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