The Blood Guard (The Blood Guard series) (15 page)

“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.

C
H
A
PT
E
R
20
:

MY WAY ON THE HIGHWAY

“Y
ou
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 invincibl
e
—
I
knew she wasn’t an Overseer like Dawkin
s
—
b
ut…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 drove 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, to
o
—
m
y 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 yesterda
y
—
l
ess than twelve hours ag
o
—
b
ut 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 len
s
—
a
nd sucked in my breath.

“It’s not
that
exciting,” he said. “Though maybe if you’re interested in optics o
r
—
”

“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 wit
h
—
”

“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 fencin
g
—
e
ven 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 mo
m
—
s
he 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 choic
e
—
o
ne 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 peopl
e
—
m
ost
peopl
e
—
a
re 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 hav
e
—
m
e, Mom, and Da
d
—
w
hen 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 Dawkins 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 Guar
d
—
o
r even to the Pure she was protecting? Whatever their goal, they didn’t achieve i
t
—
y
our 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 i
n
—
”

“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.”

I thought again about the notebook. “And those dog drawings?” I asked Dawkins. “What do those mean?”

Dawkins shot me a look. “They mean I like dogs, obviously. Who doesn’t?”

I don’t remember falling asleep, only waking up, groggy, the sun huge and orange through the windshield and throwing a warm gold light over the hundreds of cars around us. None of the cars were moving. We were stuck in a traffic jam.

I found a jar of instant coffee and microwaved two cups. Dawkins put the motor home into park and took a cup in each hand. “Ah, the stuff of bad breath and nervous jitter
s
—
h
ow I love it!” He downed one immediately.

“Do I smell coffee?” Greta asked, sitting up. The seat cushion seam had left a line across her face.

“I’ll make you a cup. You want one, too?” I asked Sammy as he yawned himself awake.

“No thanks,” he said. “I’m
eleven
.” He wouldn’t meet my eye, just picked up his GameZMaster IV and started stabbing at the buttons as if it were some kind of enemy.

Greta sniffed at her green top. “I need a shower. And my clothes stink.”

“Welcome to my world,” Dawkins called over his shoulder. “But don’t you worr
y
—
w
e are just north of Washington, DC. We should have you at your dad’s house in a jiffy, provided these cars get a move on before the world ends.”