The Baskerville Tales (Short Stories) Read Online Free PDF

current styles. If her grandmother had gone to that much trouble, surely that meant she cared for her? When would she allow herself to let go of her doubts?
    A letter. There had to be a letter. Evelina’s hands dove into the box, searching for notepaper between the layers and layers of gleaming satin. She found no paper, but her fingers closed on something moist. She jerked them out, clutching a fistful of frost-blighted plants with dirt still clinging to their roots. It was the wrong season for blooms, but she knew at once what they were.
    Violets.
    Panic thudded against her chest. With a wheezing gasp, she ripped the dress from thebox. The sound that came next was between a snarl and a cry of pain.
    The bodice was intact, but the magnificent skirt of her dead mother’s gown had been slashed to ribbons. Nothing wider than a handbreadth of fabric remained.
    Violet Asterley-Henderson had got to the box first.
    * * *
    Violet was about to pay dearly—and in ways that would astound even the most lurid writers of Gothic novels. Pain. Shame. Remorse. Pleading. The show would have it all. Evelina would milk the moment. Spectacle was something a girl from Ploughman’s Paramount Circus understood and relished. Unfortunately, it would have to wait until she stopped sniveling like a girl of five.
    Stomach cramped with stifled sobbing, she sat curled on the roof in the freezing cold, her knees under her chin. She was leaving the school in days, a grown woman, but right then it felt as if she had been thrust backward to childhood. The only good thing was that the rain had stopped.
    Once, she had come to this perch often. The first year at the academy had been perfect hell, and Violet its chief devil. The rooftop had been the one place where safety from her taunts was guaranteed. Despite the cold and slippery wet, the climb from the window and up the drainpipes was easy for Evelina, who was raised to the tightrope and the trapeze. The circus belonged to the air.
    Violets belonged in dirt. Fine. Evelina was going to pound her into said dirt.
    She looked up at the sky, which had cleared with the dusk. The first icy stars were pricking through the gloom. She wiped her face, the skin stiff with the dried salt of tears. Shewas freezing cold.
    Her stomach was easing, the hard knot of sadness and anger loosening as the first wave of shock wore off. Reason was inching its way into the tumult of her thoughts. What, exactly, was she going to do?
    The dress had been beautiful—the most luxurious thing Evelina had ever almost owned. And it had been a link to her mother as well as to her grandmother, a strict woman who rarely made a kind gesture. Violet had destroyed far more than she realized. And there was still the question of whether there had been a letter in the box. Evelina hadn’t found one, so had Violet taken it?
    And why? Was it just because she’d stood up to her that afternoon?
    Evelina shifted. The roof tiles were not the most comfortable surface. A sudden breeze swirled around her, cold and frosty fresh.
    What is the matter, girl on the roof?
    The voice sounded inside her thoughts, breathy as the wind through leaves. Evelina sat a little straighter, searching the dusk. A smudge of light hovered at the edge of the roof, its slight iridescence barely visible. It was a deva, an elemental nature spirit. For the most part, devas seemed to fall into four types—air, water, fire, and earth. They lived in plants or streams or trees, and anyone who loved the wilds could feel their presence. However, only those of the Blood, like the Coopers, could see and hear them.
    The deva hovered closer, just outside of Evelina’s reach. Although it had no scent or substance in the conventional way, she could smell and feel cool, clean wind in her mind. That marked it as an air deva. She’d talked to it before; this deva seemed more curious about humans than most.
    “I’ve had a very unpleasant day,” she said.
    So have I, roof-girl
. The light