The Witch Of Stonecliff. Dawn Brown

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      Chapter Three

      He’d started for The Devil’s Eye, but changed his mind five minutes in. Instead, Kyle turned and walked the opposite way, seemingly without direction, but the farther away from The Devil’s Eye he went, the clearer it became that he was retracing his escape route.

      A phantom ache gripped his throat, and Kyle swallowed hard. Memories played in his head, turned his skin clammy and chilled him to his soul.

      His terrifying run through the trees, naked and bleeding. There’d been no pain, then. Not yet. Adrenaline had been pounding inside him. There’d been a vague sort of heat where his throat had been slashed. A sticky stream down his neck and chest. He had no idea how much damage had been done—not as much as there could have been had he not managed to free his hands and jerk forward as the blade pierced his skin. Later, he’d learn how much damage he’d done to his feet. Running barefoot through a forest had shredded them.

      Now the trees fell away and a field of tangled, yellow grass stretched out before him. Kyle spotted a stone cottage in the distance. It looked smaller in the day than it had that night—even as he drew closer—but his memories were blurred. The drugs pumping through his system then had distorted the world around him.

      At the time, he’d barely been able to make out more than a yellow glow from the window. For the first time since he’d regained consciousness next to The Devil’s Eye, Kyle had actually believed he could survive.

      He stopped walking, closed his eyes against the anxiety swelling inside him. The line between past and present was becoming more difficult to maintain.

      That night had changed everything. He thought of the man who only hours before had been drinking and doing his best to charm some tourist girl into going back to his room with him.

      Kyle might have survived that night, but that man had died, and only a few fleeting memories remained.

      “Good Christ, is that you?”

      Kyle opened his eyes. The squat farmer who had found him that night stood a few feet away, eyes rounded, face pale as though he’d just seen a ghost. But in a way, Mel Barber had.

      Kyle forced a smile. “In the flesh.”

      Barber didn’t return the smile. “What in God’s name could you be thinking coming back here? They’ll kill you this time. Mark my words. You got away once. They won’t let you escape twice.”

      Kyle held his grin in place, pretending the man’s predictions didn’t turn his insides to ice. “I’m counting on it, as a matter of fact.”

      Barber lifted his worn gray cap from his scalp and scratched what little hair remained on his round head. “You’re out of your bloody mind, you are. D’ya remember nothing of what I said to you that night?”

      He remembered only too well the man’s furious instructions. The story he’d concocted and insisted Kyle memorize while driving him to the nearest hospital. Kyle had been leaning against the passenger seat of Barber’s truck, holding an old towel the man had given 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. СКАЧАТЬ