Pure Dead Frozen Read Online Free Page B

thorny stems in what appeared to be miles of horticultural fleece.
    Damp’s new bedroom looked down on her mother’s shrouded rose garden, its wrapped roses ghostly against the deep and velvety darkness. A pale light shone through a gap in the bedroom’s distressed silk curtains, their linings tattered beyond repair. Like so many battered relics at StregaSchloss, these curtains were kept solely for their sentimental value: a long-dead relative had embroidered every silken inch with pale pink rosebuds, thus ensuring the fabric’s immortality. Possibly this was the same relative who had hand-painted the wallpaper in this room with her eccentric version of
toile de
Jouy
: hundreds of perfectly rendered nymphs and satyrs, some gamboling round Damp’s walls, others pausing above Damp’s fireplace to wind daisies around the horns of a singularly depressed-looking Minotaur, the whole originally painted in a particularly aggressive shade of pink, which thankfully had faded with each passing summer. Snug in her first proper bed, Damp slept on her back with her arms above her head, the slow rise and fall of her chest barely visible beneath the pillowy cloud of her goosedown quilt.
    Minty watched her sleep, sure now that the cry she had heard earlier could not have come from this child. Slightly puzzled, she stroked Damp’s forehead, dropped a kiss into one little hand that lay unfurled on the pillow, and then, remembering that she’d put bread into the oven to bake, checked her watch. The loaves would be ready in a few minutes, and then there was that recipe she’d just found for pear-and-marzipan cake, which had looked so intriguing that she’d decided to bake it right away…. Head full of matters culinary, the young nanny failed to notice that she was being secretly observed by three pairs of eyes, all six of which followed her progress around the room as she pulled curtains tightly shut, picked up discarded clothes, turned Russian dolls till they all faced out, and at last left the door to the corridor ajar and disappeared downstairs.
    â€œFeee-yooo,” said a small bat, unfolding his wings and drifting down from the ornate plaster rose in the center of the bedroom ceiling. “I thought our cover had been blown for sure,” he added, landing with a thump on Damp’s pillow.
    â€œIt hath to be thed that Mith Minty ithn’t very obthervant,” remarked a baby salamander, uncoiling himself from inside an empty candleholder on Damp’s bedside table. Damp wriggled round onto her tummy and ducked down to drag a heavy book out from under her bed. With a grunt of effort, she hauled it onto her pillow and opened it at random.
    â€œOh, come
on,
Orynx,” complained the bat. “Couldya hurry it up with the ill-yoomin asians? I can’t see my wings in fronta my face.”
    Orynx slitted his turquoise eyes at the bat and gave a dismissive sniff. “You, thir, are a complete petht,” he stated. “You’re never thatithfied. You’re a
bat,
thilly. You don’t need a thalamander to provide you with illuminationth. You’re thuppothed to be able to
thee
in the dark.”
    Vesper, the bat, clapped one wing dramatically against his forehead and sighed. “Lordy, lordy,” he said. “If you aren’t the most ornery crittur I have ever had the misfortune to bunk down with—”
    â€œYou two, shoosh,” Damp said, looking up from her book with a faintly harassed expression. “I’m trying to contrinsate. What d’you think? ‘Three Bears’ or back to ‘Snoke Ween’? I’ve got my Wellies on, so I’m all ready.”
    As they all bent over Damp’s picture book, trying to decide where her magic might take them to, a gust of wind rattled the windowpanes, and downstairs they heard a door slam shut. This was followed by Nestor’s wail echoing up from the dungeons—“Want