Third Solstice CALIBRE with cover Read Online Free PDF

Isolde’s water dish. After a moment of blood-chilling silence, she released a desolate wail.
    It had been five months since Gideon had seen her really upset. She was too little for the terrible twos he’d been warned about, and the worst he’d expected of those were tantrums in the supermarket—not for every loose item in his kitchen to lift from its moorings, like small boats on an incoming Falmouth tide, and begin a mid-air dance.
    Cups, mugs, cookbooks. The toaster, tugging at the end of its cord. There was a wild humour to it, flashing Gideon back to Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia , but then the knives began to rattle in their block.
    He got to his feet. He was an adult, a policeman and a householder, and more important than any of these things, he was husband to his white-faced other half and father to his child. He stepped through the chaos—swept Tamsyn out of her high chair with one arm and caught Lee into the other. “Stop it,” he commanded. Who did he expect to obey him? Ezekiel, maybe, to quit staring at the baby as if she’d been a snake. The forces of nature, raw and incomprehensible, to let go of their hold on his home. “Stop it now.”
    The mugs dropped and shattered. The toaster crashed down on its side, several weeks of unattended crumbs spraying out across the surface. Tamsyn huddled like a woodlouse into his embrace. The static in the air cleared, leaving an ice-blade clarity, frost-bound fields round a church after the bells have stopped. Lee stepped forward into the hush. “Zeke,” he said carefully, holding out a hand. “She’s only a little girl.”
    The sugar bowl had disgorged its contents in a widespread cloud. Blindly Zeke brushed the crystals from his jersey. “What... What did I just see?”
    “We don’t know yet. She’s just started doing it. But it isn’t anything harmful, and—”
    “Not harmful ?” Zeke held out one shaking finger towards the knife block. “I have seen things—countenanced things—in your company and my brother’s, until I’ve begun to... doubt my own sanity, let alone my faith. I’ve even tried to help you. But this—this is...”
    Gideon handed the baby to Lee. He came to stand squarely in front of his brother, arms folded. “Choose your words carefully.”
    “You must know what they’re going to be.” Zeke’s voice was a ghost of itself, thin and attenuated with fear. “You know who I am. You know what I do. And this is... devil’s work, Gideon. You have a demon in your home.”
    “A demon ?”
    “Bring the child to my church. I’ll do what I can for her.”
    “An actual demon , Ezekiel?”
    “You heard me.”
    “Yes, I did. Get out.”
    Lee stepped between them. “Don’t. He’s just scared.”
    “He’s not. He thinks he’s got the right to come in here and drag off our child to whatever medieval bloody exorcism he imagines is gonna—what, Zeke? Cast out the devil from her?”
    “Not a right. My duty.”
    “Fine, Matthew Hopkins. Don’t let the door bang your arse on the way out.”
     

Chapter Four
     
    The night had made good on its promise of frost. Gideon only realised this when he stood up from the rail and found the cotton of his pyjamas sticking to the wrought iron. His motives for following Zeke outside had been complex. There had been the element of seeing him off the premises, making sure every trace of him was gone. He shivered, rubbing his arms. The village was small this morning, the moor rising silent and vast as the sky beyond the furthermost rooftops. Sunlight on the ice-daubed crests only emphasised their loneliness. When Zeke’s tail lights had disappeared around the corner—and good riddance to him—loss had struck Gideon so sharply that he’d had to sit down.
    He was freezing his butt to the rail. This was ridiculous. Carefully he detached himself and went inside. Tamsyn was crawling around in her playpen, chortling at things only she could see. The kettle was on again,