Free Tyack & Frayne Mysteries 01 - Once Upon A Haunted Moor by Harper Fox Page B

Ibiza. Lee Tyack, jade eyes shadowed, was probably putting his feet up on his sofa at home and wondering what on earth had possessed him the night before.
    No. Gideon knew that last part wasn’t true, with as much conviction as had ever seized Lee during one of his visions. Gideon had never had a psychic flash in his life. He just knew men, and Lee would have left him a note. No matter what his regrets, he’d have found an honest way of saying goodbye.
    Gideon had never got out to Joe’s pastures earlier on that day. He’d gone rushing back to the station, and the tracker dogs had taken him and the search crew off in another direction. He should at the very least go up there and check on the sheep. The gap in the hillside meant nothing to him. He’d never even be able to find it again, in the mist-shrouded giant’s playground of rocks. “Isolde!” he called, and nobody called back Tristan , but to his surprise his dog emerged right away from the gorse and sat at his feet. She looked up him. For the first time, her presence was a comfort.
    The climb around the side of the crag to the pastures was one of the loneliest of Gideon’s life. For a while he could follow the hawthorn-edged track, the ceremonial way with its odd feel of safety, as if it led over shark-filled water. Leaving it, he had a sense of leaving human territory behind, of entering into the realm of...
    Of what? He forced himself to analyse his fears. They were gut reactions, instincts, just the endocrinal surge of a primate cut off from his group and all alone in the dark. No entity, no Beast held sway here. If a human of Gideon’s village had begun to commit bestial acts, that was bad enough, more than enough for him to concern himself about.
    It was just that no human presence could account for the crawling dread hampering his every breath and step. He held the torch steady before him and scrambled over the rocks that lay strewn across the hillside. The thick mist reflected and scattered the beam of his torch so that he moved in a globe of light. Maybe the batteries were dying. For every few yards of ground he covered, it seemed that the globe grew smaller, the weight of the night pressing in.
    He wasn’t wanted here. Emerging onto the field of rough turf where Joe’s sheep grazed, Gideon came to a halt. He didn’t believe in God. He had no cross around his neck to clutch. What did he have, to ward off whatever the hell was haunting this moor? He closed his eyes. That was an act of faith in itself, and in his own darkness – not the dead black of the night – he could see. He was back in his kitchen in the world below. Lee Tyack straddled his lap: smiled at him, kissed him. I can’t believe you thought this might have been only for one night.
    That moment – even more than the sex they’d shared – was sacred to Gideon. He held on fast to it. The air was shaking. You feel the sound before you hear it, a low vibration in your bones... Gideon had absorbed his folklore and fairytales as a child, no matter how Pastor Frayne disapproved them. He knew the magical power of three. Three bears, three Cinderella sisters, three billygoats Gruff and the troll that lived under the bridge...
    The third howl on the moor. Gideon straightened up. Too far to run for home now. He opened his eyes, and when the hellish sound arose from the subsonic and began to spiral around him, he let it. He stood still. The cry died away. Its echoes broke like waves against the crags. A wet scald on his cold upper lip made him lift a hand: his nose was bleeding, his blood lurid crimson in the torchlight.
    There was something on the turf in front of him – a kind of black heap. “Isolde?” he said uncertainly. A head lifted from the lump of fur. Yes, it was his dog. She was crouched down so low that she looked legless. Her eyes were white-rimmed with fear, and her face was contorted into a hideous mask of a snarl, but she was there, for all the world as if she’d been