Read Online The White Fox by James Bartholomeusz - Free Book Online Page A

palm. “Keep it safe. Put it around your neck and don’t let anyone see.”
    Jack got a longer look at Alex’s crystal. It was, as he’d thought before, slightly different to his. The symbol on Alex’s was carved in silver, not gold, and the inscription wasn’t the same. “What do these things do?”
    “No time to explain,” replied Alex distractedly as they hurried off.
    “That’s just what the fox said.”
    “What?”
    “Nothing, nothing …”
    They jogged off down the street. Jack noticed Alex kept the gun out—and ready—all the way. He considered what Alex had said. Under any other circumstances, he would have dismissed “working for an organization” as something like drug dealing, but now he wasn’t so sure. And that wasn’t something Alex would do, anyway.
    What about the demon? He had been convinced such things didn’t exist—everyone had—except maybe the extremely religious. But Jack had seen that thing with his own eyes, and somehow he knew that it wasn’t from this world. When it had looked at him, it seemed to emanate some kind of psychic stench, which was enough to make him feel physically sick. And then there was the fox. He was still having trouble accepting that an animal could talk, but again, that had been no normal fox. And Alex had another one of those pendants. What did it all mean?
    After an endless series of twists and turns down side streets and alleys, they came onto the main road coming down from the school. They were at the orchard. Across the tarmac and out into the sea of mist, treetops could be seen. Rising above it, silhouetted against the deep purple sky, was Sirona Beacon. Trees clustered up its sides, and right on top individual trunks were picked out against the stricken horizon.
    Alex slowed, and Jack came to his pace, breathing a little harder than usual. The freezing air seared his lungs, and he had just realized how cold he was, only in a school blazer. His bag was long gone, abandoned in some alley to keep up the pace.
    They crossed onto the grass and followed the path.
    Jack looked at Alex, then at the gun in his hand. They hadn’t said a word since the alleyway. “So one of those can kill a demon?”
    “Sort of. It’ll delay it long enough for us to get away. It’s only because the bullets are laced with a special chemical. Super corrosive.”
    “And those black cloaks?”
    “They’re called the Cult of Dionysus, by the way. And it depends.”
    “On what?”
    “Who surprises who.”
    Gradually, light became evident before them. Alex gestured for Jack to stay quiet, and they both crept towards the source. As they got closer, they could see it was being projected in blocks from floodlights, placed in a circle around something. Closer still, and Jack could see the orange tape of the excavation site fluttering in the wind. It had been severed.
    Alex moved ahead on soft footfalls, the gun outstretched. He made a circuit of the area and returned to Jack’s side. They moved forward to the remnants of the orange tape.
    There definitely had been an excavation here. In a circle of about fifteen feet across and six feet down, the earth had been uprooted and piled next to the hole. The floodlights had been positioned to afford maximum vision into it. They both peered over the edge.
    Whatever Jack had been expecting, this was not it. His first thought was the inside of an industrial revolution–era machine—layers and layers of cogs and gears, all piled on top of each other on multiple axes, interlocking and turning slowly. They seemed to have been cast out of some rough, dark metal, and by the soil still clinging in the grooves, the whole construction could not have been exposed to the air for many hundreds of years. That, though, wasn’t the strangest part. A silvery purple glow, more vapor than light, wafted up through the gaps in the intermeshing structure. Under the thick layers of metal crisscrossing each other as far down as Jack could see, there was