by Carter Roy
The bald man made a great show of eyeballing me. “You sure you want to keep this one? Doesn’t look too smart.”
“Aye, George,” said the woman called Jenks. “The church tells us to practice charity, and this sad-looking creature needs all the charity we can spare.” And with that, she at last unknotted the purse strings and slipped it off my wrist.
George sighed and grabbed a key ring. “I’ll fill a tub,” he said.
A little while later, George told me to strip and sit in a vat of hot, soapy water. He gave me a stiff-bristled brush. “See that you scrub away every spot of dirt. Trust me, you don’t want to have Jenks do it herself. She’s not a gentle one.” He shut the door.
I was in a small windowless timbered room that had only a fireplace, a trestle table, a looking glass, and a small bookcase full of books. There was no way out, and I was mortally afraid of Jenks, so I did as George had told me and worked at my skin with the brush. There was a cake of sweet-smelling soap. I sat with it at my nose for a minute, sniffing, and then I rubbed it all over until my body and hair both squeaked under my thumb. I hadn’t been so clean in years. When I went over to the mirror, I was surprised to see what I looked like.
George brought a pair of soft trousers and a cotton shirt that smelled nice. “Put these on, and I’ll take you to see herself.”
In the office behind the clerk’s counter, Jenks sat at a desk. She turned as I came in, then pointed to a table in the room’s center, where steam rose gently from a tin plate full of stew and potatoes. “Fill your belly while I fill your ears,” she said. “Just eat and listen.”
I threw myself into it like I’d never eaten that well before. Which, come to think of it, may have been the case.
“Now hear me, boy,” she told me, “you are young enough that I don’t for a moment believe you are a bad sort. You’re just a desperate child, driven by hunger to do things that God and society frown upon.”
“I’m sorry I tried to rob you, miss,” I said. “I won’t do it again.”
She waved my apology away. “I’m going to make you a proposition. I will feed you, clothe you, and educate you for the next six years, if you will agree not to run away or steal from me. Instead, you will work here with me and George, helping us run the inn.”
“A job?” I asked. “You’re offering me work? But I tried to rob you.”
“I’m offering you a life,” she said. “If you’d rather turn your back on this offer, so be it. I cannot make you choose the path of goodness. But if you’d like a chance to do something meaningful with your life, then you’ll find that here.”
She stood up then and walked to the exit. “Take some time finishing your dinner, and I’ll be back shortly for an answer.”
The moment the door closed, I was up off the bench and going through the desk. There were plenty of fine things in its drawers—pens and glass baubles that I could easily pawn. Sitting square in the center of the blotter was a fat leather-bound book. Was it valuable? I didn’t know, because I couldn’t read. I turned the pages and for the first time felt how very stupid I was.
I worried about Agatha and Spinks, but I worried about myself as well. I looked at my clean hands holding the book. They were pink and pristine and looked like new. I’d washed off more than dirt, I realized. I’d washed off my old life.
This Jenks woman would feed me. Give me a place to sleep. Educate me so that the squiggly marks on these pages would actually mean something.
Slowly, I returned the pens and paperweight to where I’d found them, then sat down at the table again.
The stew was delicious. I was thankful that the door was closed, so that no one would see my tears as I used the crusts to mop up every last morsel.
Jenks was as good as her word. Better, in fact: Over the years I worked for her, I became healthier, smarter, and—something I’d never dreamed possible—happy. She had me learn my letters, and within a year I was reading. “You done it, Jack,” Jenks said one Christmas, giving me an orange. “You’ve become respectable.”
I turned the orange in my hands, then I asked permission to take a leave of absence. Unfinished business, I told Jenks. I don’t know how she knew, but Jenks quietly kissed me on my cheek. “Always be coming home,” she said, and sent me off into the cold.
The hidey-hole on Petticoat Lane was through a narrow space under an abandoned building’s stoop, but no one had been there in a long while. The wind whistled through the gaps in the stones, and it was impossible to get warm. How had I survived here? I wondered. I thought to leave Spinks and Agatha a note, but then I remembered that they wouldn’t know what it said. Like the old me, neither of them could read. I believed I’d never see either of them again, but like so much I believed back then, I was wrong.
Unwinding my scarf from around my neck, I placed it on the ground, then nestled the fruit on top. I’d finally brought Agatha her orange.
It was well after midnight when I got home, and the downstairs of the inn was dark but for the gas lamp on the front desk.
The night clerk, Ruben, bade me a merry Christmas and let me know Jenks had taken the refuse out back for the raker to cart away. That was my job, but I hadn’t been there, so she had taken it upon herself.
I grabbed a lantern and rushed out back, apologies ready.
It was dark behind the inn, and I nearly tripped over our sledge. The waste barrels were still upon it, and Jenks was nowhere to be seen.
That was when I heard the sounds of fighting. Raising my lantern, I opened its blinders. The light revealed a strange scene.
Jenks was fighting three men. They’d circled her, but they couldn’t get in close—she was whirling between them so fast that she blurred. The men were dressed in ill-fitting dark suits and wore bowlers, and each held a flickering sword. Jenks, meantime, had only a ladle and a stewpot lid.
At the light from my lantern, one man turned. Jenks seized the moment to smack the back of his head with the metal lid. He slumped forward.
She caught the point of the second man’s sword with the head of the ladle, then twirled it so that the man lost his grip, and his weapon spun away into the dark. She struck him with the stewpot lid as well, and then turned to the third man. “Are you going to attack me or no?” she said.
The man, seeing he faced her alone, backed warily away, then turned and fled.
“Perfect timing,” Jenks said, staring at the two unconscious men on the ground in front of her, “Come on, lad, help me dispose of this rubbish.”
We put the unconscious men into two of the empty refuse barrels, and when the raker came by with his wagon to haul away our garbage, we loaded them into the back. “Mind you take this waste far, far away from here,” Jenks told the raker, handing him a heavy coin purse.
“You’re probably wondering what it was you just saw here,” Jenks said to me as we headed back inside. “Those men came here tonight to torture me.”
“Why would they want to hurt you?” I asked, shocked and confused.
“Because of who I am, Jack, and what I’ve sworn to do. I am something called a Blood Guard.”
A few years later, I myself joined the Guard. And a few years after that, I did what no one else could do for Jenks: I killed her.
CHAPTER 20:
MY WAY ON THE HIGHWAY
“You killed Jenks?” I said.
My voice must have been a little ragged, because Dawkins caught my eye. “You okay there, Ronan?”
Maybe it was because Jenks had been like a mother to Dawkins. Maybe because like my mom, she turned out to have a secret life, one in which she served in an age-old company of guardians. Or maybe it was because Dawkins said Jenks had died.
It’s not that I thought my mom was invincible—I knew she wasn’t an Overseer like Dawkins—but…She’d deflected bullets using a sword! She’d leaped forty feet through the air! She’d saved my life.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t die.
“It was an act of charity.” Dawkins d
rove in silence for a few moments, the only sound the hum of the engine. “Jenks was an Overseer, as I am now. It is a potentially eternal servitude and a lonely one. Your friends and family all pass away, while you carry on. It lasts until another of the Guard volunteers to take your place. Only then is an Overseer allowed to die. By the time Jenks plucked me off the streets, she’d been alive several hundred years. And she was tired. So I helped her.”
“By killing her?” I asked.
“Not literally. I simply took her place. Then the clock that had stopped for her began ticking again, and within a decade she was gone.”
“That’s crazy tragic!” Greta said, her fist clutched tight against her chest.
“That was a hundred and seventy-five years ago, but not a day goes by that I don’t miss the old girl,” Dawkins replied. He cleared his throat and tapped the clock on the dash. “It won’t be all that long before we reach Greta’s dad’s house, but there are still a few hours. Time enough for you two to get some proper rest.”
Greta grabbed the duvet from the back bedroom and stretched out on the other padded bench at the dining table, but I stayed put.
I was tired, too—my eyes were gritty with fatigue and my body ached, but I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep. It was just me and Dawkins now. I’d only met him yesterday—less than twelve hours ago—but it felt like I’d known him my whole life.
I slid the Verity Glass out of my pocket and held it to my eye. The world took on a purple hue, but that was about all.
“Why is the glass this color?”
“A complex interaction to do with an element called manganese,” he answered.
I turned to Dawkins, still holding up the lens—and sucked in my breath.
“It’s not that exciting,” he said. “Though maybe if you’re interested in optics or—”
“Your head! You’ve got a—” Unlike Izzy and Henry, Dawkins seen through the lens was wholly there. His body was shadowy in the dark of the cab, his outline completely filled in. But a tiny bundle of flames on his forehead seemed to flicker, rippling and distorting like the reflection of light on water. “It’s a—”
“Oh, that,” he said. “And here I thought you were interested in chemistry.”
“What is it?” I asked, mesmerized by the miniature tongues of light that curled up and wound around each other.
“A flame sigil.”
“A sigil,” I repeated. “What’s that?”
“It’s the Guard’s mark,” Dawkins said. “It reveals to anyone with the means to see it that I have accepted the commission.” He covered his forehead with his hand, but I could still see the flames. “A Guard’s purity of purpose burns bright. Though it’s invisible to the naked eye, I am marked. Just as your mother is marked.”
I flipped down the visor mirror on the passenger side. But when I looked at myself through the lens, all I saw was my usual stupid face. I wasn’t special, after all. “Why is the Bend Sinister after me?”
He thought for a moment. “I don’t rightly know, Ronan. My first guess was that they wanted to use you as leverage, to get your mother to deliver a Pure to them.”
“They have my dad,” I protested. “Isn’t he leverage enough?”
Dawkins patted my shoulder. “You would think so. The Bend Sinister have bigger plans afoot, and somehow you matter to them.” He shook his head. “Regardless, Verity Glasses are not easy to come by and the Bend have none. Please, let’s keep it that way. Should you be taken again, smash it.”
“Don’t you want it?” I asked. “My mom said I should give it to you.”
“Keep it for now,” Dawkins said. “You might find it useful at some point.”
“But I’m not one of the Guard,” I said. “I shouldn’t be trusted with—”
“Oh, tosh,” Dawkins interrupted. “You’re on your way. I can tell. See, becoming a Guard changes a person, granting strength, speed, and magical abilities. But those talents won’t take root unless the candidate has been prepared somehow.”
My mother. She had been training me all my life. That first self-defense class when I was five. The gymnastics, the martial arts, the fencing—even the dance classes, ski instruction, and Ultimate intramurals. Every program she’d enrolled me in, all those times she’d made me take this class or that sport so I’d be more well-rounded, she’d been molding me into the perfect candidate for the Blood Guard.
It was so exactly like my mom—she never checked in with me about anything. She just told me what I had to do. And I always gave in and went along with her plans. “No one ever asked me if I wanted to join,” I said, but that sounded whiny even to me.
Dawkins laughed. “Ask? Nobody gets asked to be one of the Guard, old boy.”
“So was I…born into it?” Had my Mom given me more than her black hair and dark eyes? “Is that how it works?”
“You’re not born into the Guard, either,” Dawkins said. “That fairy-tale claptrap about being the special prophesied one who will save the world?” He wiggled his fingers in the air as though performing magic. “Doesn’t happen.”
“So it’s a choice I make?” I asked.
“Sort of. You don’t just wake up one day and decide, That’s it then, I’m going to fight evil! And then boom, you’re in. It’s more about…integrity. You undergo a thousand small tests over the course of your life. And every time you do the right thing instead of the wrong thing, you become more worthy of the Blood Guard. Until one day you are faced with a final make-or-break choice—one that allows you entry into the order, should you wish to join.”
“How will I know when that moment comes?” I asked, looking through the hole in the back of the RV. Was it when Ms. Hand had told me to sit by while she maimed my friend, and I’d obeyed as I always had when people told me what to do? “Maybe it already happened. Maybe I failed.”
“Don’t worry, Ronan. You’ve failed nothing and no one. When the time comes, if you’re ready, you become something more. And if you’re not ready, you don’t. Some people—most people—are never ready.” He turned and gave me his full smile.
I couldn’t help myself; I smiled back.
He eased the motor home into the fast lane. The highway had gotten wider, adding lanes, until now there were six on each side. There were cars all around us now, and they were a comfort, each one a little bubble of normalcy.
“So how did the Bend Sinister figure out my mother is one of the Guard?” I asked.
“That is one of the great mysteries.” Dawkins’ smile disappeared. “Your mother isn’t even active in the Blood Guard. She took herself off assignment a year ago. These days, aside from her museum job, she just spends her time being your mum.”
I closed my eyes and saw her then, as she’d been since we moved to Stanhope. Relaxed, happier, and usually around. As my dad got more and more swallowed up by his work, it was as if she’d expanded, filling the empty space he used to occupy.
“You’re skipping school today,” she’d announced one morning last winter. “Dress warmly.”
It had been dark outside and bitter cold, and she’d made us thermoses of hot cider and sandwiches. We’d driven for hours, all the way to Vermont, until the sun was high in the sky, the snow making everything almost too bright to look at.
We hiked up a hill at an orchard until we found the perfect Christmas tree. And then she and I cut it down.
“When did you learn to use an axe?” I asked her while we were wrapping the tree in a canvas tarp and tying it to the top of our car.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “You just pick up skills in life, Ronan.”
It was a lot of fun, that Christmas tree expedition with my mom. We were just cold and tired enough afterward that I could almost forget how much fun we all used to have—me, Mom, and Dad—when we’d buy our tree in Brooklyn and have to drag it home through the snowbound city streets, the two of them arguing over how best to carry it, me laughing at them.
“She’s good at it,” I said to Dawkin
s now. “She’s good at being my mom.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” he said. “She’s always been the best at whatever she does. We were sorry to see her take some time off, but she felt she had a duty to you.”
And suddenly I knew why. “The fire at our house! Was the Bend Sinister behind it?”
“It was,” Dawkins said, looking thoughtfully at me. “Or we think it was, anyway. We never found any definitive evidence.”
“But why would they burn down our house?” I asked. I vividly remembered standing ankle-deep in snow, watching from across the street as the fireman sifted through the blackened bricks and timber that used to be my home.
He threw up his hands. “We don’t know. To kill your mom? To rattle her so profoundly that she’d lead them to other members of the Guard—or even to the Pure she was protecting? Whatever their goal, they didn’t achieve it—your mother would never compromise her mission.”
I aimed the Verity Glass around, but saw nothing new except the first hints of dawn through the windshield.
“So what’s the plan now?” I asked.
“I wish I knew. I’m making this up as I go. My best option right now is to take Greta home to her father, leave the three of you safely there, and pray Mr. Sustermann can help me in—”
“Oh, man,” I said, remembering. “The RV has a phone. We can call Greta’s dad.”
“Tossed it out the window ages ago,” he said. “But Mr. Sustermann will have a phone, and I shall use that to summon help. Then my associate Ogabe and I will locate your mother and find this Eye of the Needle device. And destroy it.”
“Why is Mount Rushmore important?” I asked, thinking of Ms. Hand’s questions. “It was in your notebook.”
Dawkins laughed. “That’s just an anagram of something I came across in my research. Rather than writing it down straightforward for any old twit to read, I anagrammed it.”
“So it was in disguise,” I said.
“It’s a place called Mourner’s Mouth,” Dawkins said. “Which I at last have a notion about, thanks to the map we found back there.”
