Free The Witching Hour (The Witches Pendragon Mystery Series Book 1) by Julie Sarff

sleek cabinets. I make my way to the range, grab the kettle from the cabinet, fill it with water, place it on the stove to boil and proceed to rummage about through all of Hatha’s stuff, searching for the black tin. Outside, the sun has set and a fine, misty rain begins to fall.
    I am just pouring the tea into a yellow-chintz tea cup and adding two drops of liquid from Hatha’s silver flask when the kitchen light flickers. Everyone knows what a flickering light means. Well, at our chateau, it means faulty wiring on behalf of yours truly, but everywhere else, it means ghosts.
    Hastily, I begin to arrange several more cups on a silver serving tray. Sugar? Where is the sugar? I begin searching thoroughly through the cupboards with great celerity.
    In the span of ten seconds, the kitchen turns from warm to slightly cold, to downright frigid. Dropping temperatures are, of course, another sign of a ghost. I am now flying through the drawers of a large wooden hutch, searching for the sugar bin when I hear the clanking of pots above the stove.
    I turn around and a tingle runs down my spine.
    Hatha says that she read in Deterring the Demonic that the presence of a witch can antagonize certain ghosts. For some reason, knowing that we can sense them makes them, in her words, mad as spitfire.
    “ Quærite lux,” I shout in the language of the Roman invaders.
    In response to my words, the rustling of the pans grows louder.
    “Sod the sugar! Sod the tea!” I shout, preparing to race across the kitchen to the door on the other side with tea tray in hand. That’s when I see it. A shadow appears in a tiny corner of the kitchen, faint at first, it grows and stretches spreading greedily across the ceiling.
    I drop the tray, stand up and run for it, making it to the door on the other side in nothing flat. Yet five minutes later, I find myself returning down the hallway towards the kitchen with Hatha fearlessly in the lead. Hendra’s right behind her and a twittering Camille is holding my hand, telling me it’ll be all right.
    “Chin up, that’s the ticket,” she cheers me on. “We’ll put Charlotte on the right path. Send the ole girl into the light. It’ll be alright.”
    Hatha swings open the kitchen door bold as you please. She’s ready for whatever the ghost may have in store. But the kitchen looks perfectly normal, no clanking pots, no creepy shadow and no freezing cold temperatures.
    “But, I don’t understand. It…the presence, the ghost, whatever you want to call it…it was here. The shadow was spreading over the ceiling.” I try to illustrate this with sweeping gestures of my hands.
    Hatha says nothing, instead she gathers up the tea tray while Camille and Hendra search for the sugar. Together we make our way back to the red room where an exhausted Claire-Elaine asks us if everything is okay.
    “My dear,” Hatha replies, “there are two things I know quite extensively: how to bring a child into this world and how to deal with the occasional spook. Don’t you worry about it. Make sure to drink your tea, there you go.”
    I figure this last part about “how to deal with the occasional spook” is a bit of an embellishment on Hatha’s part. It’s true she’s helped dozens of woman give birth, but as for ghosts, we really only know Francine and Lizelle. There were bad things in the Forest Fosse but they were generally magical creatures, or agents of the Dark Queen. I only recall the occasional passing ghost back in our old world of 546 A.D., and I personally never confronted one before Lizelle and Francine. Noelle, however, has met more than her fair share of spirits. Once, she ran into an entire dead contingent of Anglian soldiers. Sounds hideous, but Noelle said they were all extremely polite and bowed and doffed their hats as they marched silently past her in the forest.
    Given Hatha’s encouraging words, Claire-Elaine takes a small sip of her tea. A moment later the finely dressed woman slumps motionless in