The White Fox (10 page)

Blinking away the tears of searing pain, Alex saw, to his horror, the man dangling it in front of his face.

“Just out of interest, how did you come into possession of this?”

Alex didn’t answer. He tried frantically to twist his arms out of the invisible lock. He still could not move them and was left wriggling helplessly in midair like a wounded animal.

The man laughed coldly. “I wouldn’t bother. You’ll only tire yourself out.” And he flung the pendant over the pit.

It spun meticulously three times, the pointed end glimmering brightly on each revolution. As it reached the center, it froze, as if caught magnetically. It hung perfectly still for a single, inextricably long second directly over the slot in the stone. Then it plunged, daggerlike, down.

With a high-pitched shriek, silver light rocketed upwards, shooting a column of energy into the darkened sky. It struck clouds and penetrated through them, lost, like a bright searchlight, in the deep purple shadows. The low growl of swift wind swept over the hilltop. Clouds, whipped up by a sudden gale, swept over the bald peak, swirling together to consume the stars and moon. The windstorm descended, blasting over the barren hilltop in a freezing frenzy, crunching the trees in a cacophony of searing whistling. Thunder rumbled from above, and over the surrounding hilltops talons of bright white lightning clawed at the landscape, pulverizing their points of impact in superheated oblivion.

A deep grinding sounded, and Alex looked back down at the pit. The layers of stone were rotating slowly in alternate directions, as if pulled into a predetermined position. They halted with a heavy crunching noise, and with a crack the topmost level sunk into the second, the second into the third, and so on, seven times until they became level. The dull glow around the now connected pipes intensified, and the same vaporous light surged from the external chute through the newly aligned ones. It completed its circuit and fizzled, grinding to a halt. The silver light flickered and faded. The thunder, wind, and lightning remained.

Now, twenty feet below them, a single circular slab lay, a shimmering, complex rune highlighted in indigo across its even surface.

The man turned back to Alex, smirking coolly. “Lastly …” The man strode over to one of the black cloaks, who was holding an antiquated Latin-style scroll. He inspected the miniscule engravings for a moment, evidently translating word by word. “We need … blood …” He reached into his robe and pulled out a curved dagger. Still reading the inscription, he raised his arm and plunged it into the neck of another nearby black cloak.

The figure gave a low gurgle as scarlet blood spurted around the silver insertion. The corpse sagged to the wet ground.

Lucy screamed, and Jack gagged and vomited a little into the grass. Even the other black cloaks looked apprehensive at their leader’s impulsive murder.

“… blood … of an innocent,” the man finished. “Ah, well.” He kicked the body, and it rolled over the edge into the pit. “He can be the appetizer.”

There was a dull clunk as the corpse hit the bottom. Thin ribbons of corrosive steam, putrid blackness, snaked upwards from the chasm, accompanied by the sound of sizzling meat.

He rounded on Jack and Lucy, marching over to where they were held. He leered at them both—held as they were above the ground they were the same height as him. “I’m a generous sort of chap, so I’m going to leave it up to your would-be protector to decide. Who gets sacrificed?” He looked at Alex.

Alex tried again to wriggle out of his confine but to no avail. “If you dare touch
either
of them—”

“You’ll what? Wriggle at me? It’s either one dies, or they both die. You can choose to save a life or choose not to. It’s up to you. I may be wrong, but you’re one of those people who
doesn’t
want to see others die, yes?”

Alex snarled at him.

“So who’s it going to be? Netball player, complete with authentic scream action, or the gaunt teenager, malnourishment-related accessories not included?”

Alex didn’t answer.

The man drew his dagger out again and began swinging it between Jack and Lucy like a pendulum, getting closer each time. Both tried to move, but all they managed was to lean their heads back slightly.

Jack looked from Lucy to the dagger. She was past the point of screaming; now she was stunned into silence at the mesmerizing veer of the blade. He tried to speak. “Pick me—” He felt something invisible clamp over his mouth, muffling his voice.

“Hush,” the man whispered, raising a finger to where his mouth would be, “it’s not your turn. You get your question next round … providing you still have a tongue. Or a head.”

There was silence. Jack looked at Alex. He was staring at the dagger, his face a mask of indecision.

The dagger swung before Jack, so close that he felt the air ripple around his collar, then by Lucy and grazed her neck. It came back a second time, aimed deep at Jack’s jugular—

“No,” Alex shouted.

“We have a winner,” whooped the man. He lowered the dagger. “Girl, how many people have you murdered, tortured, stabbed, shot, psychologically damaged, or otherwise maimed?”

“None,” Lucy whimpered.

“How good of you.” He grabbed her by the throat and lifted her into the air. He raised the dagger in his right arm and switched his grip so the blade was pointing downwards.

Jack tried to cry out, but he couldn’t even whisper.

The man swung the blade in an arc, ready to strike—

“Wait,” Alex yelled.

The man paused and turned his head to look at him, the dagger halted in midswing.

Alex looked from Lucy’s terrified expression to the darkness of the hood. Jack could tell he was thinking fast. “Show us your face.”

The figure smiled again. “I suppose you’re thinking by looking me in the eye and appealing to my better nature you can stop this madness and bring me over to the side of goodness and justice, and then all evil in the world will vanish forever, and we’ll all go and have a tea party in a flowery forest grove with talking animals with names like Bertrand and Alice. Well, it won’t. The world’s cruel, Mr. Steele, and the sooner you understand that fact, the sooner you’ll see true reason. But then, why not try? Why not try and prove me wrong?”

The man reached down with his dagger hand and pulled the hood off his face. Sleek, shoulder-length hair framed a darkly handsome face with fierce blue eyes and a sadistically curved jawline. He looked only about forty, but in his eyes there burnt a light Jack immediately associated with madness—simultaneously old so as to have seen all the evils of the world in their worst form, but at the same time young, daring, and vicious.

“No?” the man said. He leaned closer to Alex. “Has it sunk in yet that you’re on your own? No grown-ups here to make it all better. This isn’t smoke and mirrors, boy. You aren’t about to wake up safe and sound. This is real. Nowhere is sacred, not even your hometown. Does it hurt, knowing what kind of place this world really is?”

Alex stared at him for a moment. He thought he had seen something in that face before, though he could not recall where or even if it was on this man. “What’s your name?”

“Icarus. And before you say anything, I appreciate the poetic significance. I chose it, after all—the second great overreacher after Prometheus in classical mythology, the one who aspired to the sun, the symbol of light and life in the ancient world, but ended tumbling down, scorched by the sublime nature of his own ambition, down into bottomless perdition, there to dwell in chains wrought by his daring grasp at the glory of immorality. Now, if we’re done with theatricality …”

He raised the dagger above his head, its vicious, entwined blade glinting in the red light of the eye above, its shimmering surface mirrored in his own pupils.

Lucy screamed again, louder this time. The thunder and wind still blasted over the hilltop. The cloaks of all the figures around rippled, wraithlike. The crescent moon now shone with purple light: from one angle, a hungry grin.

Alex writhed against the force that kept him bound, but again nothing happened. There was the sound of movement in the background, but Jack did not hear it. He was frozen with fear.

Then a bolt of blue light burst out of the darkness like an enraged beast. It struck one of the black cloaks squarely in the chest, sending him tumbling into the shadows.

Icarus lowered the dagger and dropped Lucy, whirling around. All the black cloaks turned, searching for the source of the blast.

A moment later, a second shot exploded out of the gloom, narrowly missing another figure. The shock wave blasted her hood off—a dark-haired woman with sagging skin. Then another, which knocked the legs out from under a man to her right. The group abandoned their positions at the pit and drew closer around their leader. The purple light had faded from the moon.

Jack twisted his head and squinted into the dark. Out of the shadows, more figures appeared to be advancing up the hill from all sides. With no moonlight, they were semi-spectral, but a momentary flash of lightning silhouetted several against the obsidian sky. They were not swathed in ethereal cloaks, but one had some kind of rifle or heavy gun hoisted over its shoulder. In that moment, another threw out their arm, and a flash of crimson light burst out of it, spinning through the air like a throwing dagger and striking a heavily built black cloak in the shoulder. He shrieked and reeled off sideways.

Another burst of light, this time green, shot from the outstretched arm of one of the newcomers, swiftly dodged by one of the cloaks. A newcomer flicked her arms outwards and let loose the orb of golden fire that had been hovering between her palms.

However, Icarus was ready. He raised his arm in a lightning quick motion, and the air rippled around him as the fire was deflected to smoulder in the grass to his left.

Now, the black cloaks began to counterattack. The unhooded woman raised her hand and contorted it. Shiny black tendrils leapt from her fingertips to coil around the nearest figure like writhing serpents. A man, his face still hidden, made a motion like a karate chop through the air, and a wave of indigo energy panned out across the ground, tripping up two approaching newcomers. The hilltop dissolved into chaos—bursts of light being fired, absorbed, and deflected everywhere, augmented by the furious crackling of bullets.

The force suspending Jack released, and he collapsed to the grass, face-first. He moved his arm experimentally, and it worked. He searched around for his captor and saw him flinging crackling black bolts at one of the newcomers—a blonde girl in what looked like a Special Forces uniform of dark Kevlar and body armor. Icarus was nowhere to be seen, but Lucy was a few feet away, spluttering and choking.

He tried to stand, but a blast of red light shot directly over his head. Half-crouching, half-crawling, he made his way over to Lucy. “You okay?” he panted.

“No,” she gasped, grasping her throat. She had pink marks around her neck and cheeks where Icarus had held her up.

“What the hell’s going on? Who are these people?”

“I don’t know.” She looked more scared than he had ever seen her, but he saw in her face the same thing that was keeping him from denouncing this all as a hallucination: the impulse to stay alive.

If they survived this, Jack knew he would question whether what he was seeing here was actually real, but this was not the immediate issue. These lights, whatever they were, seemed to be hitting and hurting, and that was good enough for his adrenaline-induced brain.

“If they’re half as bad as this lot, we shouldn’t be sticking around. Let’s get out of here. Where’s Alex?” Jack looked around. After a moment’s searching, he saw him. He had jumped onto the crescent moon stone and was sparring with a tall and skeletally thin black cloak. He seemed to have abandoned the gun; it took Jack a second to register that what was rotating in his palms were shruriken-like discs of silver energy, which he was hurling at his opponent.

The black cloak deflected three in succession, but one caught him in the stomach, and he doubled over sharply, crumpling to the ground and rasping for breath.

Alex scanned the chaos and caught sight of Jack and Lucy. He smiled.

He’s actually enjoying himself
, Jack thought, ducking a whistling wheel of violet flames. It was at that moment that he knew for certain that Alex hadn’t been anywhere near a mental hospital. He couldn’t help smiling himself. The last eighteen months melted away, and there they were again, the three of them in the orchard, sharing pizza and drinks that Alex had bought from the off-license down the road. Lucy had just said something funny, and they were all laughing. And there was Icarus, laughing along with them, cackling behind Alex, raising his knife …

Smoothly, almost artistically, Icarus slid his dagger into Alex’s back. The vision melted away as time turned to sludge, everything seemingly slowed to half rhythm. Jack saw Alex’s eyes widen, his mouth sag as he fell forward onto the hard stone.

Jack didn’t know what was going on. He did not see the blasts of energy shoot past him nor the duelling figures staggering in his wake. He did not feel himself running or the pain in his thighs as he dropped into the pit. He only knew that he wanted to cause Icarus as much pain as possible, and he didn’t care how he did it.