Free Guardians Of The Haunted Moor by Harper Fox

our kid. She can expect to feel
the edge of our temper.” Gideon kissed him, let his eyes close in
the sunlight streaming through the window. “And quite a temper it
is—get you, all sexy and assertive, putting your foot down. I think
Zeke thinks you’re oppressing me.”
    “ Ugh. There was nothing sexy about that. I just miss Tamsyn,
Gid. I miss her.”
    “ I know. It feels like a hook in the gut. Is there no way you’d
let Zeke and Ma try out their crazy plan?”
    “ I can’t. It’s a wrong thing to do, and not because I’m
frightened of upsetting my bloody sister. I can’t explain it—not to
them, not to you.”
    One hook
at a time was enough. Gideon let him off this one in silence,
rocking him. When his death-grip eased and his breathing quieted,
he said, “All right. Look, are you okay? I really do have to go
back to work.”
    “ I know. I have to go with you.”
    Gideon
sat back. “Oh, no. Not this time, sunbeam. This is a bad one. And
all I’m gonna do is go back up to the field to see if they need me
for anything more there, and then I think I’d better call a meeting
at the village hall, see if I can talk everyone out of whatever
panic Darren Prowse is trying to start.”
    “ The thing is, I’ve been invited.”
    “ What? Please don’t tell me John Bowe’s disembodied soul is summoning you
to—”
    “ No, no. I just had a phone call this morning, even earlier
than our early-bird visitors. It was your HQ at Truro. They want me
to go and have a look at the scene once it’s been cleared up, see
if I can get any read on what’s happened.”
    “ Wow. Don’t they usually wait until I’m bewildered and
desperate before they call in the psychic?”
    “ Nothing to do with you, Robocop.” Lee brushed a kiss to
Gideon’s mouth, just a moth-wing touch but enough to make him want
to sling Zeke and Ma out of the house and slam the door.
“Apparently they’ve hired an officer whose special remit is to look
into cases with any kind of... well, I forget what they called it,
but anything out of the usual run of things. Folklore connections,
Pagan, paranormal, that kind of thing.”
    “ Ah. The weird shit.”
    “ That’s it. And this weird-shit sergeant reckons a ritual
slaying in a cornfield on the eve of harvest festival might just be
the making of his career, so I’ve been drafted.”
    “ Wait up. Who said anything about a ritual?”
    “ He did. So you can see what kind of kook we’ve got on our
hands. Looks like I’ll be putting out fires, too... All of which is
far less important than the fact that I upset Ma Frayne. Better let
go of me, gorgeous—I’ve got to go make things right.”
    “ No, Lee, dear.” Ma Frayne came tentatively through the nursery
door. “It’s for me to make this right. I wonder if you can
understand—I was married for fifty years to a man who would have
said that something like this was God’s will. But now he’s gone,
and I’ve come to know what a load of...” She hesitated, and Gideon
held his breath: not bollocks , surely, not from the
cashmere and pearls. “What an error that is, I feel obliged to try and fix things,
whether God likes it or not. With the result that I’ve become a
most interfering old woman.”
    Lee held
out a hand to her. She wobbled over and took it, subsiding onto the
edge of the cot. “You’re not,” Lee said. “You’re a perfectly normal
grandma. Look, Gid and I are just shell-shocked. Can you give us a
couple of days to think about what we should do?”
    “ Yes. Yes, of course.”
    “ Is Zeke all right?”
    “ I’ve tired him out. He’s gone into the garden with
Isolde.”
    Gideon
glanced through the window. He’d made serious efforts with the
little moorland garden so that Tamsyn would have flowers to marvel
at, a pond, a swing. Zeke had taken up an unlikely perch on the
wooden board hanging from the hawthorn tree. Isolde was sitting on
his feet, her big mournful head laid in his lap. “Jeez, what a
screw-up,”