Bone Jack by Sara Crowe

fungus, across ground ankle deep with ivy, past clumps of bracken and green licks of hart’s tongue.
    Smoke from a small fire drifted under the leaf canopy. The hounds stopped, gazed into its bright heart. One of them tossed a handful of something into the flames. Smell of burning leaves. Ash’s eyes, nose, throat filled with bitter smoke.
    They seized him, pushed him down onto the ground. Held down his arms and legs so he couldn’t move.
    ‘Be still,’ hissed one. ‘Be still for the stag god.’
    Then the god came.
    At first he was a silhouette, a shadow. The afternoon sunlight slanted through the trees behind him, hazy beams, dust motes drifting and sparkling. The god was taller than any of the hound boys. A cloak of black feathers swung about him. Instead of a man’s head, a stag’s head sat upon his shoulders, crowned with spreading antlers.
    The hounds drew back to let him through.
    Ash stared up into two dull, dead eyes. The stag’s nose and half-open mouth tarry with congealed blood.
    The stag god crouched over him. Stench of blood, rotten meat, death.
    And the cloak. It was made of bird skins, feathered and bloody, eyeless heads still attached. Steely beaks.
    Rooks, like the dead rooks Ash had seen hanging from a branch the last time he’d come here.
    The god took a thin, vicious knife from under his cloak. The hand that held it was caked with cracked clay, the colour of rust or dried blood. Black dirt under his fingernails.
    ‘Earth and stone,’ whispered the god, ‘fire and ash, blood and bone.’
    ‘Mark,’ said Ash. His voice shaking. ‘I know it’s you. I know your voice.’
    ‘Me, and not me. Be still. It will hurt less if you’re still.’
    Ash tensed, tried to wrench away from the hounds pressing down on him. But there were too many of them, too strong, too heavy. ‘What will hurt less?’ He couldn’t catch his breath. Maybe Mark wasn’t going to wait for the Stag Chase. Maybe this was it, the kill, the blood sacrifice that he had threatened. ‘Killing me won’t bring back your dad,’ he said. His voice thin and shaky.
    ‘Hush. Be still.’
    The knife descended tip first. Ash felt its cold bite as it broke the skin just below his collarbone. He flinched, bit back a cry. The hounds whooped and hollered and bayed. Then the cold became a white-hot thread of pain that moved this way and that across his chest.
    The stag’s dead eyes watched without seeing. Ash gazed back through a haze of pain and smoke and blood and terror. A cloud of flies buzzed around the rotting head. Then the knife lifted, vanished back under the cloak of bird skins. Mark straightened and stood. He raised his head and bellowed. Then he turned his back on Ash, walked away through the hound boys, vanished back into the gloom.
    Ash sucked in air. A knot of darkness unravelled inside him. The world around him spun away, dimmed and disappeared.
    When he opened his eyes again, he was alone.
    He sat up. Pain clawed across his chest. Wincing, he got to his feet. His stomach heaved. Bile flooded his mouth. He gagged and spat.
    The wood was silent except for the shrill staccato jabber of a startled blackbird.
    The fishing rods and the rucksack were on the ground where the hounds had dropped them. He rummaged in the rucksack, found the water bottle, rinsed his mouth, spat, then drank deeply.
    A tiny sound, the pop of a twig cracking underfoot.
    He looked up.
    In the darkness among the trees a shard of sunlight lit up a face. Someone watching him. Then the breeze scattered leaf shadows and the sunlight and the face were gone.
    But not before he’d recognised the watcher.
    The wild man who’d taken the wolf-dog.
    Bone Jack.

SIXTEEN
    Ash stood among the trees at the bottom of the drive. He stared up at the house. Most likely Mum was in the back garden but he couldn’t count on it. He couldn’t let her see him, not pale with ash, his shirt slashed open and his chest all cut up and a mess of blood. She’d freak.
    Hidden in