The Blood Guard (The Blood Guard series)

by Carter Roy

  “I don’t understand. If there are supposed to be Guards on Greta, why weren’t they with her on the train?”

  “That’s why I was there,” Dawkins said, slapping his chest. “When Greta goes back and forth between her parents, I—or Ogabe, or another Overseer—tag along, make sure of the handoff from the two Guards in Brooklyn.”

  “You weren’t there because of me?” I said.

  “That’s why I had your mother put you on that particular train. It was a two-birds-with-one-stone sort of thing. Had I known there were going to be so many Bend agents after you, I would have called for reinforcements.” He exhaled sharply. “It turned into such a mess. She was never supposed to cross paths with us.”

  “And that’s why you grabbed Greta instead of me.”

  “Of course. I would have felt terrible if that bus had taken you out, Ronan, but I had no choice in the matter: I had to save Greta. Because she’s not supposed to die.”

  “Is that why the Bend Sinister are chasing us? Because she’s a Pure?”

  “Afraid not. If they had any idea of what Greta is, your Ms. Hand would never have let her escape.” He poked me in the shoulder. “No, they’re pursuing us because of you. But I don’t yet know why.”

  “Two guards in Brooklyn, you said. Two here in Washington, DC.” Something became clear to me. “And you knew where Greta’s father lives. Is Greta’s father one of the Guard?”

  Dawkins ran his fingers through his hair and said, “Yes, her father is one of the Blood Guard. We recruited him shortly after Greta was born. He was already a lawman, so he was a prime candidate. That’s also why her father has always been so—adamant, shall we say?—about making sure she knows how to take care of herself. It’s not just that he’s with the FBI, as Greta keeps prattling on about. He believes in self-reliance. Like your mum.”

  A banging on the window startled us.

  It was Greta, back from her dad’s house, and seeing the horrified expression on her face, we got out of the car in a hurry.

  “What is it?” Dawkins said, taking her by the shoulders. “Greta, what’s wrong?”

  “My dad,” she said in a low voice. “He’s not there! The—the place is trashed, and there’s blood in the hallway, and—and—and—”

  “Breathe, Greta,” Dawkins said.

  She took a deep, shaky lungful of air. “And in his downstairs office, there’s a body.”

  CHAPTER 23:

  OGABE LOSES HIS HEAD

  Greta carefully led us through the wreckage of her father’s living room. There wasn’t a book still on a shelf, a picture still on a hook. Everything had been thrown to the floor.

  “What were they looking for?” I asked.

  “Anything that could lead them to more of the Guard,” Dawkins said. “Or a Pure.”

  “I don’t understand,” Greta said. “Why would they go after my dad?” She took us down a short staircase into her father’s office. There was an enormous desk in the center of the room, covered with papers and piles of things. Its drawers had been pulled out and cast everywhere.

  “Where’s this body you mentioned?” Dawkins asked.

  “Over there, where the chair goes,” Greta said, her voice wavering. “He’s missing his head, but he’s pretty obviously not my dad.”

  “They took his head?” Dawkins said.

  “Maybe I’ll just wait over here,” I said, standing by the door.

  “Ogabe!” Dawkins cried, crouching down behind the desk. “What have they done to you!”

  He reappeared a moment later, helping an enormous headless body to stand up. Ogabe was a dark-skinned man, more than six feet tall even without his head. He was dressed in a bloodstained pin-striped blue suit, a starched white dress shirt, and a classy tie. But where his head should have been on his neck, there was just a smooth patch of dark-brown puckered skin. I don’t know what severed necks usually look like—bloody muscle and bone?—but this definitely wasn’t that. Ogabe straightened the cuffs of his jacket and smoothed down his lapels.

  “Greta, Ronan, meet Ogabe. I’m sure he’d say something like, ‘A pleasure to meet you’ if only he had a mouth to talk with and ears to hear with.”

  Dawkins placed Ogabe’s hands on his face, and the fingers carefully felt Dawkins’ features, then combed through his long greasy hair. When he had finished, Ogabe’s body embraced Dawkins in a massive hug, lifting him into the air.

  Dawkins patted Ogabe’s back and said, “There, there, big fellow!”

  Once he was set back down, Dawkins righted the desk chair and guided the man to it.

  “How can he even move?” Greta asked. “He doesn’t have a head.”

  “Your powers of observation are impressively keen,” Dawkins said.

  I didn’t say anything, too transfixed by the sight of the man, now sitting comfortably at the desk, feeling around with his hands on the polished wood.

  “He’s an Overseer, like me,” Dawkins explained. “So he can’t be killed—not even when you cut off his head and run away with it. Which is why the Bend Sinister did exactly that, to stop him from revealing their actions. They thought they’d silenced him, but they were wrong.”

  “You mean he can still talk?” Greta said, her voice cracking.

  “He has no mouth, Greta—how could he speak?” Dawkins rested his hand on Ogabe’s shoulder. “But wherever it is, Ogabe’s head can still communicate with his body. No matter how great the distance separating them, the two remain linked. Something we can very much take advantage of.”

  “Shouldn’t we get him to a hospital?” Greta asked, clutching my hand so hard it hurt. “Isn’t he in danger of dying or something?”

  Dawkins waved her off. “A hospital can do nothing for him. The only thing that can make things right is to reunite his head with his body. Might require a bit of duct tape or epoxy or something,” he said thoughtfully. “But we can burn that bridge when we come to it.”

  Greta gazed around the wreckage of the room, her brow furrowed. “But I don’t get it—why is a Blood Guard Overseer here, and my dad missing?”

  “A very good question,” Dawkins said, looking her in the eye. “The answer is that your dad, like Ronan’s mother, is a member of the Blood Guard. Sorry you had to find out this way.”

  “You are crazy,” Greta said, crossing her arms. “According to you, everyone is a member of this stupid Blood Guard thing.”

  “Not everyone. Just Ronan’s mum and your dad. And me, of course.”

  “I don’t believe you. If my dad were part of something like that, I’m the one person in the world he would tell.”

  “Doubtless that’s true, Greta,” Dawkins said, “but the proof is all around us. We’re conversing over a body without a head—a body that is fully functioning and, from the looks of it, impatient.” Ogabe was drumming his fingers on the desktop. “And you saw me killed back there at that truck stop, only to come back and rescue the two of you.”

  “We were doing a fine job of rescuing ourselves,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, Ronan—you were a master with that chair. But Greta, there is no other explanation: The Blood Guard is real. And your father, a good man, is one of us.”

  “I’ll believe it when I hear it from my dad.”

  As they talked, I’d leaned in closer toward the body. “Why is his neck smooth like that?” I asked. The skin was faintly shiny, like a healed burn.

  “When an Overseer loses a limb, the wound seals over. It’s bloody at first, and painful like you would not believe, but then the enchantment takes over and the wound closes.” Dawkins found a pencil in the papers on the desk.

  He placed the pencil in the man’s hand, then positioned it over a sheet of paper.

  The hand scribbled for a moment, and Dawkins squinted down at what it was writing.

  “What’s he say?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to read,” Dawkins said, scowling. “It’s a good thing you can’t hear me, friend, because your penmanship is terrible.”
>
  I came around and looked at the paper. “I think it says, ‘You’re late, as usual.’”

  “That sounds like Ogabe.” Dawkins began rooting through the piles on the desk. “We need something he can type with. But they took your father’s computer.” There was a monitor, but the cable from its back hooked up to nothing.

  “My old laptop is upstairs in my toy box,” Greta said. “I’ll get it.” She dashed out and returned a few minutes later with a fat pink child’s laptop. She’d already turned it on, so Dawkins set it on the desk and positioned Ogabe’s hands. The fingers found the spacebar and carefully poised themselves over the keys.

  Then Ogabe daintily touch-typed Not really sure how we’re going to communicate, since I don’t have any ears, but I’ll tell you what I know.

  “It’s like his body is on remote control,” I said.

  “It’s exactly like that. Only we’ve lost the remote.” Dawkins took Ogabe’s hand, flipped it over, and using a pencil, slowly wrote out letters in his open palm. As he did, he spoke the words aloud. “What happened?”

  Gaspar was worried about his daughter, Ogabe typed.

  “Gaspar is my dad,” Greta whispered, her voice quavering.

  Dawkins quickly wrote something else in Ogabe’s palm.

  After a moment, the typing resumed. Here?

  “I’m letting him know we brought you here,” Dawkins said. “You and Ronan.” He wrote on Ogabe’s hand for a while, probably reminding him not to discuss Greta’s true nature while she was in the room. After that, the man put his hands back on the keyboard and began typing fast, piling up sentence after sentence.

  The Bend must have been watching this place. The doorbell rang, and when Gaspar answered, it was flung open, and a team of Bend Sinister agents burst in.

  Dawkins wrote something more on Ogabe’s hand with the pencil.

  In response, Ogabe’s fingers typed out: They had the element of surprise. We fought them but there were too many, and we were unarmed. They knocked Gaspar unconscious, and then chased me into his office and piled on me. Took five of them to hold me down. He paused for a moment. Their Hand almost seemed to enjoy being the one to lop off my— He stopped abruptly, and his hands closed into fists.

  “I’m sorry, friend,” Dawkins said, writing on Ogabe’s palm.

  I recovered from the shock a while ago and have been quietly observing my surroundings ever since. I can still see and hear and, if they get close enough, bite—not that they’ve been that foolish. Mostly they’ve kept my head in a pillowcase. But it doesn’t matter. I think I know where they’ve taken me. Is Bree with you?

  Dawkins shook his head and wrote.

  That’s too bad.

  Dawkins wrote and said, “So where are you? We’re all ears here.”

  Could you be any more insensitive? I’m trying to help you, and you make little jokes.

  “That wasn’t—oh, never mind.” Dawkins wrote something more. “Go on.”

  We’re underground. We arrived by boat—I could smell the river and hear the water slapping the hull, and when they finally took my head out of the bag, I caught a glimpse of a small dock at the entrance of a cave. We’re at Mourner’s Mouth, I’m certain of it. They threw me onto a cot in a tiny office, one of several they’ve turned into jail cells.

  Dawkins looked up at us. “We’d intercepted a Bend Sinister communication that mentioned a place with that name,” he said, “but we were never able to find out what it meant. Only that Mourner’s Mouth was a key location for the Bend Sinister.”

  Mourner’s Mouth is a cave system on the Potomac River that later became home to the East Potomac Park Substation, a small hydroelectric power plant that was closed up back in the 1970s. You’ll find all of our research—including a map of the place—in a file Gaspar has on his computer.

  “They took his computer,” Dawkins said as he wrote. “But I believe I have a map.” He reached into his jacket and drew out the blueprint he’d taken from the Bend Sinister safe house. He unfolded it on the desk, ran his finger along one edge, and then went back to writing on Ogabe’s hand. “It’s a two-story underground complex. Here is the row of offices where they’re probably holding you, and here is the dock entrance. This must be the place.”

  Whatever the Bend Sinister is doing, it requires a lot of energy. More than they can pull off a city’s power grid. They reopened an old substation, modernized its equipment, and got it up and running again. Gaspar figured out that much, but he never learned why they need so much power.

  “We have that part figured out,” Dawkins wrote.

  I don’t know why they took Gaspar, but it can’t be good. One of them mentioned “test subjects” during the drive to Mourner’s Mouth.

  “They’d better not do anything to my dad,” Greta said, her voice low.

  “We’ll find him,” I said. I wanted to reassure her, but I wasn’t really sure how to do that, so I just gave her an awkward one-armed shoulder hug. “We’re going to get him—and my parents—back, and we’ll stop these Bend Sinister people. That’s what friends do, help each other, right?” I’d never in a million years have called Greta a friend before we’d met on the train yesterday, but I felt different about her now.

  She snorted. “You don’t sound so sure.”

  “I haven’t had all that many friends,” I said. “I’m kind of new at this.”

  Dawkins had been slowly writing a series of questions to Ogabe, and after each one, the man’s fingers danced across the keyboard.

  There were six who came here to Gaspar’s, a Hand and a team of five agents. But I’d be surprised if they were the only team at Mourner’s Mouth.

  “How do we surprise them?”

  Gaspar discovered another way in. The substation is connected to the DC storm drains. That way, when the hydroelectric plant overflows, the excess water floods into the storm drains and back to the river. All we have to do is work backward, following the storm drains into the substation.

  Dawkins wrote a few words in Ogabe’s palm, and the body stood up from the chair.

  Dawkins looked at me and Greta. “I am conflicted. It is far too dangerous to leave you two here unattended. And yet it is far too dangerous to take you with us.”

  “No way am I going to wait around while you and a headless body try to rescue my dad,” Greta said. “Talk about hopeless teams!”

  “Oh, Ogabe isn’t going to be doing any rescuing,” Dawkins said. “He can’t even see where he’s going. I’ll be leaving him in that car we borrowed.”

  “Dawkins,” Greta said, “you’re going to need help. We’re coming with you.”

  “You two have no training,” Dawkins said. “Yes, yes,” he added, as I began to object, “you’ve taken classes in hand-to-hand combat and fencing and who knows what else, but we’re facing a dozen of the Bend Sinister, all of them intent on killing you.”

  The sound of typing made us all turn back to Ogabe. He was hunched over the laptop again, furiously pecking at the keys.

  STOP ARGUING, JACK.

  That’s what you always do, just flap your gums while everyone waits. Lives are at stake. The clock is ticking. The risks are too high to chance losing.

  And don’t even THINK about leaving me in the car.

  “He really knows you well, doesn’t he?” I said to Dawkins, closing the laptop and putting it in Ogabe’s hands. “But he’s right. Like it or not, we’re all in this together.”

  CHAPTER 24:

  DOWN A GIANT’S THROAT

  “So this is how we get in?” Greta asked.

  “Since none of you will listen and stay in the car,” Dawkins grumbled, “I suppose so.”

  It was a little past nine in the morning, and we were standing on the grass of a deserted park, in the shadow of an enormous arm, part of an eerie metal sculpture of a giant working his way out of the ground at the very tip of East Potomac Park.

  The giant’s right arm stretched twenty feet up, the shoulder and bicep flexing, its fing
ers clawing at the air. Thirty feet from us, the left hand had only just broken through the soil, the wrist still underground. The toes of the giant’s right foot were visible some distance away, and the bent left knee arced high enough off the ground that I could walk under it if I ducked my head. The whole thing was made of a dusky silver metal that was cold to the touch.

  The giant’s face looked blindly up at the blank sky, his mouth open wide. Was he angry? Suffering? Sad to be waking up into a world that no longer believed in him?

  “Mourner’s Mouth makes sense,” I said. “He does look sad.”

  “It is a bit spooky,” Dawkins admitted.

  “Spookier than driving around with a headless man in the passenger seat of the car?” I asked.

  Dawkins glanced at Ogabe and said, “Only that one woman noticed, and who’s going to listen to her? Headless man in a sports car? That’s crazy talk!”

  “This sculpture is actually called The Awakening,” Greta said. “My dad took me here last winter. He said he wanted to show me something cool. But I guess he was just casing the site.”

  “There’s no reason he couldn’t have been doing both,” I said.

  “Stop lollygagging, you two,” Dawkins called. He led Ogabe straight to the giant’s bearded face. Its silver tongue curved back into shadow, past enormous teeth. I felt cold air wafting up out of the mouth. On the drive over, Ogabe had explained that there was a shaft directly under the giant’s mouth that connected to the storm drains.

  “Everyone got their torches?” Dawkins asked, holding a flashlight aloft. We nodded, and he placed Ogabe’s hands on the giant’s lower lip. “This better work.”

  Ogabe bellied headfirst into the giant’s mouth. After a moment of kicking his legs in the air and Dawkins pushing his feet, he slid into the dark and disappeared.

  Dawkins leaned forward into the mouth, then backed out in a hurry.

  The giant seemed to cough up a round metal disc. It flew out of the mouth and rolled in the dirt like some sort of enormous button.