The Blood Guard (The Blood Guard series)

by Carter Roy

  She scowled at me, then turned and jumped like it was no big deal, like leaping from a speeding motor home onto a trailer was the sort of thing she did all the time. She landed between the two motorbikes, crouched down, and kicked at the trailer’s metal tailgate until, with a bang, it fell backward into the dirt.

  “What are you waiting for?” she shouted.

  She made it look so easy.

  I clutched the ladder and carefully stretched until my foot was firmly on a rung, then swung out the window. “That wasn’t so hard!” I shouted.

  Greta just shook her head and said, “Come on!” Behind her, the tailgate dragged on the dirt road, creating a giant plume of dust that filled the air and obscured the coming headlights. If we couldn’t see the people in the SUV, maybe they couldn’t see us.

  But apparently, Henry could, simply by looking in his rearview cameras.

  The RV swerved left, and my feet slipped. I clung to the ladder, my sneakers dangling over nothing. A moment later, Henry swerved back the other way, jerking the trailer around behind him.

  The two motorbikes tumbled sideways, sandwiching Greta. She heaved one up, and it slid down the tailgate and vanished. The other lay on its side beneath her.

  “He’s trying to throw us off!” I shouted, getting my feet on the ladder again as Henry quickly jerked the RV left and right.

  Greta clung to the trailer’s metal grill and waved me toward her. “Stop wasting time!” she shouted.

  “I can’t!” I was afraid. If Henry yanked the wheel when I jumped, I’d miss the trailer and go down on the road. But there was no reason Greta couldn’t unhook the trailer and get away. “Go,” I said, pointing. “The hitch!”

  “Okay!” Greta shouted. She pulled something from Dawkins’ satchel and aimed its square nose at the hitch.

  The Tesla gun.

  “Wait!” I cried, scrambling up the ladder. It connected to a big metal luggage rack on the roof of the motor home. I pulled myself across it and held tight just as a bright-purple sheet of light crackled up from where I’d been a moment before.

  Once the afterimage cleared, and I could see again, I slid to the back edge of the motor home and looked down.

  “Missed!” Greta said. Still crouched on the trailer, she took aim again.

  At that moment, Henry cranked the wheel so sharply that the trailer bounced and Greta fell over, her finger on the trigger.

  The shot from the Tesla gun went wild, tracing a jagged arc up the back end of the motor home.

  Right toward my face.

  I ducked and felt the bolt sear the air over my head.

  Then it swept downward again. “Stop!” I shouted. “Turn it off!”

  The light disappeared as Greta released the trigger.

  I peered over the edge of the RV and gasped.

  Greta had cut a five-foot-wide smoking hole in the back of the motor home, big enough for a person to climb through. Izzy screamed somewhere inside, and then a moment later, the cardboard cutouts of the family came sailing out. Greta ducked as they blew over her head and were gone.

  “You put that thing down!” Izzy shouted.

  Greta aimed the gun again. This time, the purple bolt found its mark, and with a giant burst of sparks, the hitch separated from the motor home.

  The trailer spun sideways and away. I clutched the rack and stared helplessly into Greta’s eyes as we left her behind.

  I was glad she got away—I wanted Greta to escape—but at the same time…now I was truly alone. One by one, everyone had been taken from me. My dad, my mom, then Dawkins, and now even Greta. No one was going to rescue me or tell me what to do. If I was going to be saved, I was going to have to save myself.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to be like my mom. “Bring it on!”

  Suddenly the roof of the RV split apart beneath me like a bursting seam as a sword blade thrust up between my knees.

  “Hey!” I cried, flinging myself back.

  The foot of shining steel wrenched downward, only to reappear two inches in front of my face.

  I scooted over to the top of the ladder, but there’d be no going down it now: Greta’s wild shot with the Tesla gun had cut it almost loose except for a single bolt at the top. With every jolt of the road, it flopped and twisted in the air like a skeletal metal wing.

  The noise of a car horn made me look up.

  The red SUV had closed the distance, and now I could make out the driver—one of Ms. Hand’s flunkies, probably Mr. Four. Beside him was Ms. Hand herself. She grinned at me and then pointed at the upper right corner of the windshield.

  Signaling Izzy.

  I scrambled the other way just as the blade poked up through the roof again.

  Over the roar of the wind, I could hear Izzy’s bellow—and then something else: the high-pitched whine of another engine.

  A single headlight bounced toward us out of the dark, and then pulled alongside the motor home. It was Greta, astride the motorbike, her hair whipping in the wind.

  She’d come back for me.

  Henry must have seen her, because the motor home lurched sideways.

  Greta braked and dropped back, weaving from side to side to avoid the flopping ladder.

  Behind her, the SUV’s headlights flicked into high and it gunned forward.

  They were going to ram her. I had to get off this roof now.

  What would a Blood Guard do? I wondered. I flashed on a parkour class I’d taken. The teacher had us sliding down bannisters all over town—until I sprained an ankle and mom declared, “That’s enough of that.”

  “Get closer!” I shouted.

  I pressed my feet against the sides of the ladder as Greta pulled up alongside. then used one leg to kick the ladder away from the RV. As the ladder swung up and out, I loosened my grip and slipped down its length like a fireman sliding down a pole. When I ran out of ladder, I shot out into the air.

  And landed hard on the back of Greta’s motorbike, a leg on either side of the saddle. The impact knocked the breath out of me. “Ow,” I moaned.

  “You’re insane!” Greta yelled. She rolled her wrist on the throttle, and the bike shot forward.

  The tires bounced against the dirt as we left the motor home and SUV behind us. “We can go cross-country,” she shouted. “They can’t. So we’ll just make a big loop back to the road, and then we’ll follow it out of here.”

  But we hadn’t gone all that far when we came to a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence, topped with shiny curls of razor wire. It extended from the darkness on our right and disappeared on our left.

  Greta brought the bike to a halt, letting the engine idle. “I wonder if this is the lockdown Sammy mentioned,” she said.

  “Just cut a hole in the fence,” I said. “The Tesla gun should be able to do that, no problem.”

  “I dropped it when the trailer came loose.”

  Glancing back, we could see the faraway lights of the RV, but no sign of the SUV.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We can just follow the fence until we find the exit.”

  “Good idea,” she said, popping the clutch. And just like that, we were off.

  Ten minutes later, we reached the gate at the main road. It had been pulled closed, an enormous chain tightly wound through its two halves. “Can you pick that?” I asked.

  Greta put down the bike’s kickstand, and we both slid off and walked over to examine the padlock. “Maybe.” she said. “I don’t know this type of lock. It might take me a while.”

  Suddenly we were bathed in a bright light: the red SUV snapping on its headlights. It had been sitting silently in the dark a hundred feet away.

  The doors on either side opened and I saw Mr. Four aiming some kind of rifle at us. Over the other door, Ms. Hand’s face appeared.

  Greta and I looked at one another. “We can run for—” she started to whisper before Ms. Hand cut her off.

  “Please,” Ms. Hand said. “You’ve caused us more than enough trouble already. I’d really rat
her not have to shoot you. But trust me, if I must, I will.”

  CHAPTER 14:

  A HAND FOR A HAND

  Mr. Four pulled in right behind the motor home. I could see clearly through the big hole in the back that it was dark and empty.

  The single-story building in front of us was all ugly cinder block and smoked-glass windows and looked like the sort of suburban office mall where I went to the dentist every six months, only this one was plopped down in the center of an empty scrubby field. The glass doors opened automatically when we approached, revealing a gray-carpeted lobby that was also a lot like my dentist’s office. Cheap red couches sat against the walls and a flat-screen television on one wall silently played the news to the empty room.

  “Come along, children,” Ms. Hand indicated, leading us through a door and down a hallway, flipping on light switches as she went.

  The hallway was long. Lining both sides were big metal doors that were locked by simple metal bars dropped in brackets—not the sort of thing that could be opened by a girl with a lock pick.

  “Here you are,” Ms. Hand said, dragging open the second door on her right. She ushered us inside, then slammed it shut behind us.

  For a moment, Greta and I stood still in the pitch-black darkness.

  Then the overhead lights flickered on.

  Our cell was a six-foot-by-eight-foot windowless room. Fluorescent lights caged in wire mesh were fixed to the concrete ceiling, and the featureless steel door closed off any hope of escape. The only things in the room were two cots with thin bare yellow mattresses, and an empty bucket that I was determined not to use.

  Greta sat down on one of the cots and stared at her feet. She looked completely deflated.

  I sat on the other cot and dug the disk of glass out of my pocket. “Look,” I said. “I’ve still got that purple monocle.”

  “Great,” Greta said, scooting back against the wall so that her legs stuck straight out in front of her. “Maybe if you wear it, they won’t recognize you when they come back.”

  I sighed and stuffed it back into my jeans.

  “Did you get an eyeful of this place?” Greta said, her head snapping up. She wasn’t depressed, I realized; she was angry. “It’s where bad guys take people to kill them and dispose of the bodies so that no one ever finds any evidence.”

  “If they were going to kill us, don’t you think they would have gotten around to it by now?” I said. If this was a place where prisoners were held, then maybe my dad was here, too, in another windowless cell like this one. Maybe I could find him and rescue him myself.

  “Who knows? Maybe they have to set up their evil apparatus before doing us in. Maybe they know there is no way I am going to use that bucket while you’re in the room, and they’re just waiting for our bladders to burst.”

  “You have to pee? I could look the other way.”

  “You’d hear.”

  “I can put my hands over my ears”—I demonstrated—“and sing La la la la la la.”

  The bolt must have clicked while I had my ears covered, because the door swung open. Ms. Hand and Mr. Four stood in the hallway staring. If they thought it was weird to see me with my hands over my ears, they didn’t show it.

  Ms. Hand said, “Evelyn Truelove?”

  “That’s my name,” I said with a sigh.

  “Actually, he prefers to be called Ronan,” Greta said. She gave me a tight little smile.

  “Come with us.” We both stood, but Ms. Hand gestured at Greta. “You will wait here.”

  Out in the hall, Mr. Four dropped the crossbar back into place, and then Ms. Hand walked away, saying “Follow me.”

  At the end of the passage was a right turn and a set of double doors that Ms. Hand opened by punching some numbers on a keypad. On the other side, she hit a switch and a single bar of fluorescents flickered to life.

  We were in a huge dark room like the one where I’d taken shop class in seventh grade. The place was packed with drill presses, table saws, lathes, and other giant metal machines that stood in a shadowy row in front of a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. In the center of the room were two deeply scarred wooden tables, each as big as my bed at home. And sitting by itself in front of those was a simple metal folding chair.

  “You guys do arts and crafts here?” I asked.

  On the closer table was Dawkins’ satchel, which had been cut open and was now just a mess of nylon shreds. Beside it was the Zippo lighter, Dawkins’ notebook, and the wad of bills. In the corner of the table sat a plastic intercom with a blinking row of lights in its base. The other table was farther away, stained and dirty and empty.

  “Take a seat, Evelyn.” Ms. Hand gestured to the chair. She looked terrible. Which made sense, I guess. She’d been hit by all that river water, tumbled around like a pair of sneakers in a washing machine. Her hair was uncombed and matted to her head on one side, her clothes a wrinkly mess.

  I could see the welt on Mr. Four’s temple from that hubcap I’d hit him with. I hoped he wasn’t the kind of guy who held a grudge.

  “First,” Ms. Hand said after I sat, “you can save your life and that of your friend by telling us where you have hidden our property—the case in the back of our vehicle.”

  I thought of those evil-looking Tesla rifles in their watery grave at the bottom of that river. Could they be dried out? Or were they ruined? “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “You’re lying,” Ms. Hand said. “But we shall see what you know soon enough.” She picked up Dawkins’ notebook, holding it between two fingers like it was diseased. “Now we are going to discuss the Blood Guard,” she said.

  “Great,” I said, “I’m dying to know more about them.”

  “When did your mother recruit you into service?”

  “She didn’t,” I said. “Until today, I’d never even heard of the Blood Guard.”

  That smile was back on Ms. Hand’s face, the one that made her seem like a nice mom until you got a look at her flat, dead eyes. “A reliable source informs us that your mother has been training you since you were a child.”

  “I guess, maybe,” I said, “but she never told me that.”

  Abruptly, the smile disappeared, like a switch had been flicked off. “Joking with me is a very bad idea, Evelyn.”

  “I’m not joking!”

  “Tell us what your mother is doing in Washington, DC,” she said, crossing her arms.

  I couldn’t help myself: I smiled. My mom was alive! And she was causing trouble for Ms. Hand’s buddies in our nation’s capital. “Beats me. She didn’t tell me before she kicked me out of the car.”

  “And your father? What do you know about him?”

  Was this a trick? I thought they had him. Was my mom after the wrong people? Or was Ms. Hand trying to find out how much I knew? “Um…I know you guys have him,” I said and swallowed. “He’s okay, right?”

  Ms. Hand ignored my question. She dropped the notebook back onto the scarred wooden table, then calmly said, “Tell me about Mount Rushmore.”

  “It’s a mountain with the faces of four presidents carved into it,” I said. “George Washington, Abe Linc—”

  I had never been slapped before. I had no idea it would hurt so much. It stung like my face was burning, and made my ears ring and my eyes water. I couldn’t even say, “Ow.” I just breathed through my open mouth and tried not to sob.

  “I warned you not to make jokes,” Ms. Hand said. “Look at me, Evelyn.”

  I did as I was told. The whole left side of my face was numb.

  “What does the Guard know about the Eye of the Needle?”

  “You mean like the story about the camel?” I gingerly touched my cheek. It was warm. “I’ve never heard about anything like that.”

  She clucked her tongue at me. “And I suppose you know nothing about the Bend Sinister?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t even know what that means. Something evil?”

  Ms. Hand raised her open palm to hi
t me again, but paused when I flinched. “I almost believe you, poor thing. Raised by your mother and told nothing, forced to train for something you don’t understand at all. You should be angry with her!” She lowered her arm. “We are the Bend Sinister. The sinister in our name comes from the Latin for left. Not for evil. It is because of our foes—people like your mother—that the name of the Bend Sinister has been demonized over the centuries.”

  I didn’t know about that. They sure seemed evil to me. “If you say so,” I said.

  Ms. Hand barked out a laugh, like she’d never laughed before in her life and was trying it out. Over in the corner, Mr. Four stood at attention—or boredom—he was so expressionless it was hard to tell.

  “The Bend Sinister is a rational society, rooted in scholarship and science,” Ms. Hand continued. “We count among our members some of the greatest scientific and alchemical talents of the ages. And what binds us together? What drives us to devote our lives to the Bend Sinister? A long-ago promise to make the world a better place.”

  Her words were impassioned, but she delivered them like she was reading from the world’s dullest textbook. Maybe that’s why I opened my big mouth. “Is that why you kill people?” I asked. “The thirty-six or whatever Dawkins called them?”

  Ms. Hand stopped talking and stared down at me for a long minute. Then she went over to the plastic intercom and pressed a switch. “Mr. Five, Mr. Two, collect the girl.”

  “What?” I said. “No—look, Greta’s got nothing to do with any of this, honest. She’s just some stupid girl from school I bumped into on the train.”

  “You have been lying to me since the moment you entered this room,” Ms. Hand said. “And because of that, your friend is going to suffer.”

  “But I’ve told you everything I know,” I pleaded. “I never heard of the Blood Guard before my mom told me about it this afternoon, and that Dawkins guy barely had time to tell me his name before he got run over.”

  “Only someone who has given himself to service in the Blood Guard can do the sorts of things you’ve done today.”

  “I haven’t given myself to anything! I just do as I’m told. I take a lot of extracurricular activities. I’m not even the best in my class!” I started to stand, but both Ms. Hand and Mr. Four tensed up, so I eased myself back down. “What is it you want from me?”