The Witch Of Stonecliff. Dawn Brown

him to staunch the bleeding at his throat. A rough horse blanket wrapped around his lower half to shield his nudity.

      “If you say anything about where this happened, they’ll find you,” Barber had said, his words clipped. “If you’re a threat, they’ll finish what they started. But say you don’t remember anything from me finding you out here in the ditch, they might leave you be.”

      By then, Kyle’s throat had been white fire, he’d hovered on the brink of unconsciousness, but every word the gnome-like farmer had spoken stayed with him. Haunted him.

      He’d had questions, of course, despite the haze of agony spiking every time the truck, with its piss-poor shocks, hit a bump in the road. He’d wondered if this man had known who they were—these faceless monsters he feared still. But he couldn’t speak to ask; even breathing had turned into an alarming gurgle, the tinny taste of his own blood thick on his tongue.

      Looking back, Kyle still wasn’t certain how he’d survived. Only that he wouldn’t have if not for the scowling man facing him. “I remember everything.”

      “You’ll get us both killed.” Barber waddled closer, waving a chubby hand. “You need to go. Now!”

      “I owe you a thank you. I wouldn’t have survived that night, had it not been for you.”

      “If you want to thank me, leave and never come back.”

      Kyle snorted. “Believe me, I wish I could. You did a brilliant job, by the way. Moving my car from the pub so no one would think I was anywhere near Cragera Bay, and I suppose that’s why you took me to a hospital on the other side of the island.”

      The man’s careful attention to detail had been instrumental in the police not believing Kyle’s version of events.

      “I did that for you. The further away, the safer you were.”

      “I never doubted it. Was it her, Eleri, you were keeping me safe from?”

      The man’s round face paled so his sagging cheeks looked disturbingly like cottage cheese, and he took a step back. “Who else?”

      “That’s the question I’ve been asking myself. You said ‘them’ in the car that night, and again just now.” Kyle held himself rigid, watching the man’s expression morph from surprise to irritation in a nearly single fluid motion.

      “I don’t know what you mean.”

      “While you were driving me to the hospital, you told me if I kept my mouth shut with the police, I might be safe from them—not her, them.”

      “Bah!” Barber waved a hand and stalked off toward a small barn, its brown planks weathered and sloped. The rickety structure looked ready to collapse at any moment. “You nearly bled to death in the cab of my truck. You can’t remember anything clearly.”

      Kyle fell into step behind him. “I doubt I’ll ever be able to close my eyes and not see that night in my head. You said them, and there was more than one. If you—like the rest of this village—believed I’d fallen prey to one small woman, why them?”

      “I’ve work to do,” Barber said, hauling open one rough weathered door. “I don’t know what happened to you before I found you. I saved your life, isn’t that enough?”

      “It should be.” Kyle wished it were. But he’d spent the better part of two years haunted by memories of that night, fear building to a crippling paranoia until he wondered if he wasn’t slowly going mad. “Who are they?”

      Barber took a pitchfork from the corner of the barn and started mucking out the nearest stall. “You know as much as I do, I’m afraid. They say it’s that woman, that she’s wicked.”

      “That may be, but she’s not alone.” There were at least three—two holding him down, a third binding his hands while his consciousness ebbed in and out. A shudder rippled over him. “Who are the others?”

      Barber tossed the pitchfork aside and stomped over until he was inches away. The top of the man’s head barely reached Kyle’s chin, and the farmer had to tip his head back to meet Kyle’s gaze. “If I knew for certain what in the hell went on at that place, I’d be as dead as you’re sure to be if you stay here. Maybe Eleri James acts alone, maybe she has a coven of minions carrying out her evil tasks, but I tell you this: death follows that girl like a shadow. Get away while you still can.”

      * * *

      Eleri dragged the scrub brush across the fading lettering. The stringent cleanser’s acrid fumes wafted to her nose and churned her stomach. Her shoulders ached with the repetitive motion and her knees cramped from kneeling on the damp ground.

      She leaned back to look at her work. The brilliant red lettering had faded to dull grayish pink, but the words were still visible.

       Witch.

       Murderer.

      If she found the bastard who did this, she might just live up to the epitaphs, after all. The last one, at least. With a gloved hand, she opened the tin and poured more cleanser on the stain before returning to the monotonous task.

      As uncomfortable as her job was, at least she was out of the house, her mind busy. Though, her thoughts did have a habit of wandering, and usually down the same track. Her gaze, almost involuntarily, darted to the trees in the direction of the lodge.

      She still hadn’t seen Kyle today, and she wished she’d catch sight of his car on the road behind her or the man himself walking through the woods on the opposite side of wall where she worked. Anything to let her know he was alive and well so her knotted insides would finally loosen. Though, the sensation would be short-lived. Every time the man was out of sight, all she could think was that it would be the last time she saw him.

      Eleri had even gone to her father that morning; a last desperate attempt to override Warlow. She hated visiting her father, hated the stink of illness in the stale air, hated the way he looked at her like she was some foreign object he couldn’t quite understand. Like she was all the things people said. For all the good it had done her, anyway. Her father had merely stared at her with dark eyes, a scowl etched into his skeletal face. He was little more than taut skin over bone these days, the outline of his limbs beneath his bed covers barely discernible from the wrinkles. When she’d finished speaking, silence had stretched between them in the dimly lit room except for the steady hiss of the oxygen tank. Finally he had said, “Hugh has given you my decision. Stop wasting my time.”

      A rumble from a car engine cut through the quiet and pulled her from her thoughts. She dropped the scrub brush, stood and turned as a white van passed. Her stomach sank like a brick.

      “Shit,” she whispered. She didn’t have it in her to deal with that man.

      Her pulse fluttered in her throat. She bent her head and started for the Land Rover parked between the posts at the end of the drive, peeling off her rubber gloves as she hurried.

      Tires crunched gravel as the van swung over the soft shoulder and onto the grass between her and her car. She jerked to a stop, her feet nearly slipping out from under her.

      Heart slamming against her chest, she backed away from the van. Could she make the drive for the lodge by doubling back on the path through the woods? Unlikely—she couldn’t outrun his truck.

      The driver’s door opened and Stephen Paskin’s enormous frame unfolded from behind the wheel. The man’s small eyes narrowed, his mouth twisted into a ferocious caricature of a smile beneath his flat, crooked nose. His square head set on a short neck gave him a hunched appearance as his long strides ate up the space between them.

      “Advertising, Eleri?”Paskin asked, nodding at the faded lettering on the wall.

      She couldn’t reply. Fear had cut the receptors connecting her brain to her mouth. She was alone with Stephen bloody Paskin.

      Now that he was out of the van, she might be able to outrun him.