The Witching Hour (The Witches Pendragon Mystery Series Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

She says the first thing she notices is that the air in the room turns glacial. Then she reports this…this…depraved ghost is pulling off her covers while she sleeps.  She wakes up in the room, with her covers off even though it’s freezing.”
    “Although, to be truthful, this castle is drafty,” the Count replies sternly. “All the rooms are cold at night. And my daughter tosses and turns, she might be kicking her own covers off.”
    “So you are saying you don’t believe our daughter?” Claire-Elaine challenges the Count, her knuckles white as she grips her teacup. On the sofa we witches bustle in our seats.
    “I absolutely do believe little Mathilde. She is my child too,” the Count replies. Claire-Elaine gives him a withering look before returning to the subject of the ghost.
    “Things have gotten so bad, that our eldest daughter reports having her feet grabbed at night.”
    “Oh!” I sit up as if pricked by a pin. “How horrid!”
    In my limited experience, ghosts are typically pranksters, but Hatha has been reading up on awful spirits in the local library. She read to me part of a book called Deterring the Demonic, a book she found rotting away on some shelf in the library’s basement. The few pages she read about ghosts haunting humans until they became gravely ill or committed suicide kept me awake all night. Back in our tree-hugging, earth-worshipping days, I never even imagined such horribleness. The worst things we had to deal with in Anglia were the Dark Queen to the south and the peffer-footed battle cracs that roamed the forest looking to snack on a wayward witch.
    “We absolutely cannot allow that kind of thing. We cannot accept ghosts harassing children. Ordior arma, ” Monique pontificates and rattles off of the first few lines of the poem the Punica .
    Claire-Elaine absolutely beams at this, as though this is exactly what she needs in the house. I hate to tell her that Monique speaks mostly in Latin and is simply recounting the battle between Carthage and Rome; she’s not uttering some anti-ghost religious gibberish. The truth is in Anglia of 546, the well-do-to all spoke the language of the Romans. By the time I was born, the Romans had left the island and I learned enough Latin to get by; but, like most of the witches, I speak in the vernacular known as Anglian. Of course, nowadays I also speak a smattering of modern French. I have Francine and Lizelle to thank for that, they correct my French all the time.
    “If I may interject,” the Count says after Monique finishes the fourteenth stanza of the Punica . “Our daughter has never liked sleeping alone in her room. Most nights she snuggles in our bed. It is only in the last few days, since we’ve put our foot down and insisted on her sleeping in her own bed that she claims to be haunted by the Lady in Blue.”
    Monique mumbles more Latin. This time, she’s not reciting the Punica . I understand enough Latin to know what she said: “ The husband clearly doesn’t believe the child is being tormented by the ghost while the wife is most convinced.”
    Monique is right. Claire-Elaine stares at us beseechingly, as if she has reached wit’s end.
    “It is quite a scary thing,” Hatha states, “when ghosts become physical. It’s not something to be taken lightly. Dear Count, dear Claire-Elaine, do you suppose we might have a look around?”
    “Oh, you don’t know what a relief it is to hear you say these things.” Claire-Elaine puts down her teacup and jumps to her feet. “We called a second priest who came highly recommended from Tours, but he said that since we, ourselves, are not Catholic, he wouldn’t help us. Then we called a protestant priest…Church of England I believe. He was in Paris. But, like our local priest, he said he doesn’t do exorcisms. He too claims they are witchcraft.”
    There’s that word again. Witchcraft. Heh. Honestly, these people haven’t the faintest idea what witchcraft is about.
    Hatha has