Bone Jack Read Online Free PDF Page A

down on the floor to balance himself. He closed his eyes tight until the giddiness subsided.
    The room was itself again. The feather just a feather.
    And yet it wasn’t just a feather. It meant something. It had some dark power. He’d felt it. He didn’t understand it, not yet, but it had been real.
    There was no way he wanted the thing in his bedroom or even in the house. He could drop it out of the window. He imagined it lying down there among the flowers and weeds, seeping evil. Still too close.
    It had to be miles away.
    He put it in his backpack.
    He’d get rid of it tomorrow, somewhere far from the house.

SEVEN
    The next night, Callie was waiting for him at the Monks Bridge, just as she’d promised. The red dress gone, replaced with combat trousers and a fleece that looked three sizes too big for her. There was no sign of Mark. A ghostly half-moon sat low above the trees. Bats flitted through the smoky blue dusk, quick blinks of shadow. Below the bridge the little river slid along, as sleek and brown as an otter.
    ‘Well, I’m here,’ said Ash. ‘Where’s Mark?’
    ‘Somewhere,’ she said. Watched him with eyes as silver as the moonlight. ‘I’ll take you to him. Come on.’
    ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘There’s something I have to do first.’
    He took the feather out of his backpack. In the half-light, it looked like nothing, just an ordinary black feather, its power over him nothing but a memory now.
    He leaned over the side of the bridge and dropped it. It was gone in an instant, borne away by the fast water below.
    ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We can go now.’
    ‘What was that?’ said Callie.
    ‘Just a feather.’
    She shot him a sideways look. ‘A feather?’
    ‘It’s not important,’ he said. ‘A bird flew into me. One of its feathers must have stuck to me.’
    ‘I saw you get it out of your backpack. You brought it all the way out here just so you could drop it in the river?’
    He shrugged as if it was no big deal. ‘Yeah. Are you taking me to see Mark or what?’
    ‘This way,’ she said, and set off.
    They were half a mile out of the village on a lane that bucked and twisted along the mountainside, linking farmhouses. ‘We’ll have to go cross-country part of the way,’ said Callie.
    ‘Where to?’
    ‘It doesn’t have a name.’
    ‘It must have. Everywhere has a name.’
    ‘If it does, I don’t know it. It’s just a wood.’ She pointed away into the darkening twilight. ‘Over there.’
    ‘How far is it?’
    ‘Not far.’
    They trudged along in silence. Again he felt her disapproval of him, the cold force of her rage.
    ‘It must have been hard for you when your dad died,’ he said. Immediately he cringed inside at his own words. Lately almost everything that came out of his mouth sounded idiotic.
    ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to talk about that stuff. I’m taking you to Mark, that’s all, because he wants to talk to you. And you used to be his best friend so maybe you can help him, but probably you can’t. Anyway, he wants to see you and that’s the only reason I’m here with you.’
    ‘Fine,’ he muttered, annoyed with her again.
    They left the lane, climbed over a stile in thickening gloom. As Ash’s eyes adapted to the darkness, he could make out a faint path around the edge of the field. An untidy hedge to his left. Long grass spiked with thistles to his right.
    Beyond the field, woodland stretched like a dark wound around the foot of the mountain.
    They paused just before the tree line. A twig snapped close by. A low bough jerked and shook its leaves. Ash stared into the gloom, his heart jumping. ‘What was that?’
    ‘Just the wild.’
    He looked at Callie. She seemed like a wild creature herself, as silent and secret as a fox slipping through the night.
    He smelled wood smoke and now, as the path took them on through the trees, he saw firelight flicker deep in the clotted shadows.
    Callie stopped. ‘That’s Mark’s campfire over there,’ she said.