The Blood Guard (The Blood Guard series) (9 page)

We were almost past when the hubcap slipped out of Greta’s grasp. It floated toward me in the shallow water in the canoe’s base, bouncing off the sides and making little metallic clonking noises the whole way, until it came to rest against my feet.

I looked up from the hubcap into Greta’s eyes. Her face had gone white.

“Evelyn Truelove!” the woman’s voice called from the shoreline. “Is that you and your friend in that canoe?” She didn’t sound angry at all; instead, her voice was concerned, like someone’s worried mom.

I didn’t want to answer, but it wasn’t like she couldn’t see us. And I needed to buy us time to drift farther away. “Don’t call me Evelyn!” I shouted, sitting up.

We were past the rest stop bathroom now, but not moving all that fast.

“Come back to shore,” the woman said, ignoring me. Mr. Four walked stiff-legged to the riverbank and fell to his knees in the shallows. He buried his hands and face in the wate
r
—
d
rinking it? Washing up?

I heard a loud
click
across the water.

“Gun,” Greta whispered. “She just cocked the hammer of a pistol.”

“I don’t know what to call
you
,” I yelled to the woman. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

“You can call me Ms. Hand,” the woman said. “Now come back to shore and we won’t hurt you.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” I answered. “Why don’t you come to u
s
—
t
he water’s nice! Just ask Mr. Four.”

“Last warning, Evelyn.”

“I told you, I don’t like to be calle
d
—
”

A bright flare of gunfire stopped me from finishing my sentence.

I couldn’t see the bullet, of course, but I saw the muzzle flash, the upward snap of her wrist. She had aimed at Greta.

Something in my head took over, and the paddle twirled in my hand.

There was a
clang
, the deafening sound of a ricochet, and a numbing impact that I felt all the way up my arms.

Without knowing how, I’d pivoted the paddle and deflected the bullet. Like I’d seen my mom do at the park earlier today.

From beside me, Greta whispered, “When did you learn to do
that
?”

I stared at the paddle with its puckered crater. “Never,” I whispered. “I never learned to do that.” I worked my fingers to make the numbness go away.

Ms. Hand pointed to Mr. Four and said, “Mr. Four, use the sacrifice you’ve been given. I command you! Bend the water to your will!”

We couldn’t see what Mr. Four was doing, but we could hear him: He was singin
g
—
c
hanting almos
t
—
a
t the river’s edge. His voice was low and unsettling.

“Ronan,” Greta said, her voice shaky, “something’s happening.”

“But we’re almost away.” It was tru
e
—
w
e were past the entire rest stop now; there was no way they could catch us.

As Mr. Four knelt and sang, his hands in the river, the water began to churn and splash and steam, as if he were holding something red-hot under the surface. Within moments, heaving waves began rolling underneath us, shouldering past our canoe as the water level dropped.

The water was dropping upriver, to
o
—
b
oiling back away from where Mr. Four was now on his knees in the mud, his arms held wide apart, his hands burning with red light. He almost seemed to be willing the water upstream and downstream away from the riverbed, clearing a widening strip of muddy river bottom that stretched all the way from one bank to the other.

The waters parted farther and farther until, with a wet slurp, our canoe came to rest in the mud. A few yards away, a fish gasped and flopped. Thirty feet downstream, a wall of water seethed against an invisible barrier. Upstream from Mr. Four and Ms. Hand was another wall of frothing water, this one twelve feet high and rising, dammed up by whatever magic Mr. Four was working.

Kicking off her high-heeled shoes, Ms. Hand walked out into the mud. She carried what looked like a long sliver of moonligh
t
—
a
wide silver sword. Strange runes flickered on the blade, like those on the swords the guys on the train had wielded.

“I told you to come back,” Ms. Hand growled between clenched teeth. “This has gone on long enough.”

Behind her, Mr. Four stayed as he was, kneeling, singing, continuing his whole Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea trick.

I looked at my paddle. I didn’t like my odds against that sword. Meanwhile, Greta started to climb out of the canoe.

“Get back in,” I said, standing up, feeling the canoe teeter beneath me. “It’s Mr. Four who’s making this happen. We have to stop him.” My foot came down on the hubcap.

I picked it up and thought of Dawkins with the tray in the dining car.
A Blood Guard finds weapons in whatever he has at hand.
I held the metal disk and felt an echo of a long-ago summer Frisbee league seize my brain.

I clenched my fingers along the metal rim of the disk in what Ultimate players call a power grip, cocked my wrist back, and pivoted my arm behind me.

“Hold tight,” I warned Greta.

She got down and wedged her hands and feet against the aluminum ribs of the canoe.

The moment she was secure, I snapped my wrist forward.

The hubcap flew straight and true, a long glimmering streak. Ms. Hand swung as it passed, but missed, and then the hubcap connected with Mr. Four’s head. There was a sound like a big bell dropping to the ground, and he crumpled face forward into the mud.

With a roar Ms. Hand charged toward us, lifting the sword over her shoulder for a mighty chop, trying to reach us befor
e—

The river came back.

It hit with a huge
whomp
, water rushing in all around us.

Ms. Hand was swallowed up completely.

At the same moment, the river flung our canoe into the air. The water flipped the canoe’s back end straight up, right against me. Wedged tightly into the prow, Greta watched, her mouth wide in a soundless scream, as another wall of water smashed into us, straightening the canoe and slamming it back down so hard that it bounced.

I bounced with it, banging into the benches and struts, desperately clinging to the sides so that I wouldn’t fall out.

Greta struggled to her knees while the canoe bucked and tossed, and then, a minute later, it was over. The river was back to normal, rolling along serenely like nothing had happened.

We huddled in the bottom of the canoe, staring at each other in disbelief, both of us soaking wet and panting. Greta swiped her dripping hair out of her eyes.

I raised my head and peeked over the canoe’s aluminum edge. The dammed-up water had rocketed us far downstream, and now the rest stop was just a dark spot on the horizon. There wasn’t a single sign of Ms. Hand or Mr. Four. Had they drowned? I stared for a while toward the place where they’d gone under, but I didn’t see anyone surface.

We’d lost the paddle. For a moment I worried we’d lost the satchel, too, but then I saw the strap over Greta’s shoulder.

“Ronan?” Greta said. “Ronan, are you okay?”

“I think so?” I said. I watched until the rest stop disappeared completely.

“What that guy was doing,” Greta began, “that was…
magic
, wasn’t it? And the way you blocked that bullet with the paddle? And threw that hubcap? This isn’t just a bunch of scary people with guns, right? This is something else.”

I remembered my mom, her legs a blur as she ran faster and leaped farther than any human should be able to do. The men who’d been pursuing u
s
—
f
irst at the train station, and then at the truck sto
p
—
h
ad done the same trick. And Mr. Four, the partne
r
—
o
r the servant
?
—
o
f Ms. Hand, had parted the river, holding back a wall of water with just a song.

I turned to Greta and shivered in the darkness. “You’re right. This is definitely something else.”

C
H
A
PT
E
R
11
:

WE GET TAKEN FOR A RIDE

W
e’d been drifting quietly for a half hour or s
o
—
l
ong enough for the shadows to swallow up the road and the river and us with it. Back in the city, streetlamps and car headlights and all the buildings can make you forget about how dark the night can get, but out here, the darkness was so heavy that I could barely see Greta sitting in the prow of the canoe, her body a shadow against the stars that were coming out across the sky.

I heard what sounded like a sob.

“Are you crying?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Just shut your stupid mouth, Ronan Truelove.” But her voice had that giveaway full-of-snot-and-phlegm sound. “I’ve got allergies.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, we got away, right? So what’s to cry over?”

“Nothing I can think of,” I said.

The river ran beside the road for a while, but then it turned east across the fields. I couldn’t even see the traffic anymore, could only hear a faint roaring noise that I figured was the highway.

Greta sniffed. “It’s just…my parents split up and my mom is depressed, and I don’t even get to see my dad anymore unless I take the train to DC. It’s like I don’t even have a home anymore, Ronan.” Greta gestured as she talked, rocking the canoe, and the water in the bottom sloshed around our feet. Now that the hubcap was gone, the boat was filling up, slow but sure. “No offense, but I really wish I wasn’t stuck in this canoe with you.”

“No offense,” I replied, “but I wish I wasn’t stuck with you, either.” I wondered how my own parents were doing. Had Mom managed to escape Ms. Hand’s pals near the train station? “Actually, I’m sorry I got you mixed up in this.”

“It’s my own fault. If I hadn’t been so high and mighty on the train, I wouldn’t be involved.”

“No,” I said, “Dawkins had swiped that man’s wallet, and you were just trying to do the right thing.”

I heard a rustling, and then a scratching noise, and suddenly I could see Greta clearly: she’d struck a flame with the Zippo lighter. It cast a warm glow over her face. “Dawkins’ satchel is waterproof,” she said.

“Great,” I said and pictured Dawkins under the truck’s tires. I wished he were still with us. “What good is a lighter?”

“We could build a fire, maybe.”

“In a canoe? On a river?”

“Once we get out of the canoe, dummy.”

And then maybe the flame of the Zippo reminded her of something, because she asked, “So what happened to your family back in Brooklyn, anyway?”

“Our house burned down,” I said. “I’m pretty sure you know that.”

“Yeah, sorry about the arsonist comment earlier. I don’t really think you set your own house on fire.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Though you have to admit it was pretty freakish how the place caught fire with you at home.” She let the flame go out. “Do you think the fire had anything to do with why those people are after you?”

I stared at her in surprise. Was she right? Was the fire because of the Blood Guard? Had my mom moved us to keep the family safe? Was the person my mother had been assigned to watch ove
r
—
o
ne of the thirty-six Pure Dawkins had talked abou
t
—
o
ne of our neighbors in Brooklyn?

“I’ll ask my mom. If I ever see her again.” I reached down and splashed my fingers in the dirty water in the bottom of the canoe. “We’ve taken on a lot of water. We should probably get to shore before we sink.”

“Good idea.” Greta craned her head around, looking at the dark banks rolling past. “Let’s beach the canoe on the left up there,” she said, “where i
t
—
w
ait! Ronan, look.”

A shallow wall stretched across the entire width of the river up ahead. “What is it?”

“A dam,” Greta said. She pointed to a patch of shoreline that was a smidge lighter than the surrounding night. “And I think that’s a boat ramp over there.”

“How do we get there?” I asked. It looked impossibly far away.

“We swim for it,” Greta said. “It’s not like we can get any wetter.” She zipped up the pouches on Dawkins’ bag. “On three?”

She counted out loud, and together we flipped ourselves into the freezing river. We swam to shore and climbed out onto a concrete apron that dipped down into the shallows.

The concrete was still warm from the afternoon sun. We stretched out on it and lay there panting, letting our bodies soak up the heat.

“So if Mr. Four and Ms. Hand got out of the river okay…” I said.

“Then they’ll be really peeved.”

We both laughed. But I was forcing it a little, worried again about how they’d parted the waters like that. Did any of us have a chance against people who could bend nature to their will?

“Seriously, though,” Greta said. “If they did, they’d follow the river and check out every place we might stop.”

“But the river stopped following the highway, like, an hour ago,” I said, and got up. “They’d have to off-road it.”

The dam wasn’t much as dams go, just a long thick concrete wall about twelve feet high that curved gently from one shore to the other. On the other side of it was a large reservoir that shone silver in the moonlight, and on its far edge, an empty parking lot. We had to climb a rusty chain-link fence to get to the top, and when we did, there wasn’t a sign of life anywhere.

“Why’s a lake need a parking lot?” I asked, pointing.

Greta looked at me like I was stupid and said, “Don’t you ever go camping?”

“In a parking lot? No. In a tent, in the woods? Totally.”

“If you’re in an RV, you don’t camp in the woods. You go to places like this. See? There are trailer hookups and a shower block over there.”

“That’s not camping,” I said. “That’s…
parking
.”

Two bright beams cut through the darkness.

“Car,” Greta whispered.

There was a big green metal utility box at the edge of the dam, and we crouched behind it, watching as the headlights roamed around the lot before pulling to a halt right in the center.

I peeked over the utility box. It wasn’t the red SUV or the woman’s car from the rest stop. It was just a long tan RV, towing a small trailer that held a couple of motorcycles. As soon as it was parked, its running lights and headlamps went off, and the curtained windows along its length brightened with a warm yellow glow. “It’s just a stupid motor home,” I said.

Greta stood up. “Come on. Maybe whoever’s in it has a phone.”

We were thirty feet away when the side door of the RV banged open. We flattened ourselves in the shadows and watched as a set of metal stairs extended from the side of the vehicle, and an overweight gray-haired man in neon bright shorts and flip-flops staggered out, two folded lawn chairs in his arms. “Won’t take but a minute to set up,” he called to someone inside.

He set the chairs out and then stared at the distant line of the dam for a long minute, hands on his hips. “It’s a nice night!” he said.

A woman came down the steps, holding two cans of soda. She looked almost exactly like the ma
n
—
o
lder, overweight, with neon shorts and sandals, even what looked like the same haircut. “I brought you a pop, Henry,” she said.

“Thank you kindly, Izzy,” he said, taking it from her, cracking the top, and settling his bulk into a lawn chair. She took the other chair, and the two of them quietly sipped their drinks and stared out at the reservoir.

Beside me, Greta whispered, “They’re just a couple of grandparents.”

The man named Henry called out, “Sammy? Come on out, sit a spell!”

A lanky kid with light-brown skin and an afro appeared in the doorway. He looked like he was ten or so, dressed in jeans and a yellow T-shirt. “There are only two chairs,” he said. “Where am I supposed to sit?”

“I’ve seen enough,” Greta whispered. “They are completely harmless.”

We stood and walked side by side out of the darkness.

“Hello!” Greta called, waving and smiling broadly. I copied her. We probably looked like a couple of crazies, grinning and sweeping our hands back and forth through the air like we were trying to flag down a taxicab.

Henry and Izzy squinted at us. Their faces were wrinkled and tanned, and I guessed they were in their late sixties. “Now what have we here?” Henry said.

“We’re lost,” I said.

“We were with a school group,” Greta explained, “and we kind of wandered off. And then they left without us! Anyway, could we use your phone? I need to call my dad and let him know I’m safe.”

As we talked, the kid named Sammy shook his head. He looked disappointed for some reason.

A smile burst out across Izzy’s face, and it was clear where her wrinkles had come from: She probably grinned a lot. “I’ll go and dig out our cellular telephone.” She heaved herself up the stairs into the RV.

Henry rubbed his chin and stared between us. “Did you two
fall in
the river? Because you look like a couple of drowned rats.” He chuckled.

“We swam across the river,” I said. I noticed the RV was super shiny and new. There wasn’t a scratch or a smudge on it. Not even the mud flaps were dirty.

The man stuck out his hand. “I’m Henry, my wife is Izzy, and that beanpole you see there is our nephew, Sammy. He’s taken pity on a couple of old geezers and decided to spend some of his summer vacation with us.”

“Hi,” Sammy mumbled. And then, seeming embarrassed, he looked down at something in his lap: a handheld GameZMaster IV.

“I’m Ronan,” I told them all, “and my friend’s name is Greta.” I didn’t think it was polite to point out that summer vacation hadn’t begun ye
t
—
m
aybe Sammy had a different setup where he went to school.

Izzy reappeared with a smartphone. “There you go, honey,” she told Greta. “You feel free to call whoever you want. We have a good plan, so it shouldn’t cost us nothing.”

Greta stared at the phone, smiled tightly, and said, “We’re not getting a signal.”

“Tell you what,” Izzy said, “we only just got here, and there’s not so much to see that we’d be missing anything if we gave you two a lift somewheres. What say we pack up and head toward Baltimore? Once we find a signal, you can call your dad.”

“We couldn’t trouble yo
u
—
”
Greta began, but Henry cut her off.

“It’s no trouble at all to help two souls in need. Besides, we want to set a good example for Sammy here.” The boy rolled his eyes. “Let me put up the chairs, and we’ll be on the road before you can say Benedict Arnold.”

Ten minutes later, we were packed into the RV and rolling out of the lot. Henry had wedged himself into a huge caramel-colored leather swivel chair behind the steering wheel and kept chattering nonstop about the motor home’s HD video monitors that acted like rearview and side-view mirrors. Behind him in the kitchen, Izzy was tying on an apron, and farther back, toward the middle of the motor home, Greta and I were sitting with Sammy in a fake leather dining booth. He ignored us, jabbing away at the buttons on his GameZMaster IV.

The clock above the fridge said it was nearly 10 p.m. “What a crazy day,” I said to Greta. I felt relaxed for the first time since my mom had come to get me at school.

Greta slouched back against the bench. “Seriously. But we’re safe now.”

Beside us, Sammy clucked his tongue.

Weird kid
, I thought.

The RV was kind of nice. It had everythin
g
—
o
ven, fake fireplace, even a stacked washer/dryer, and through a door at the back was a bedroom with a full-size bed. It was like a house on wheels, if you wanted to live in the sort of place that had wall-to-wall carpeting and carpet on the walls, too. Everything looked spotless and brand-new. “You guys really keep this thing clean,” I said.

“It even smells new,” Greta said. “Did you all just buy it?”

“Sort of.” Izzy smiled and turned to us, a loaf of bread in her hands. “Have you had dinner yet? Why don’t I make you kids some sandwiches?” She pulled open one drawer after another until she finally found a butter knife.

“Thanks,” Greta said. “A sandwich would be great.” And then she launched into some story about a magnet school in Baltimore: “We’re both students there. I’m in the sciences but Ronan’s more of a drama geek.”

I tucked my hands in my jeans and shrugged like I was shy, because I didn’t have any idea what to sa
y
—
I
didn’t know the first thing about the drama club. I felt something hard and round in my pocket.

The purple glass disk. I’d totally forgotten to give it to Dawkins. I fished it out and turned it over a few times. It was pretty, just a few inches around and collared with a twisted strand of tarnished silver. My mom had written that it was valuabl
e
—
w
hy? Sammy watched me while his fingers moved over his GameZMaster IV. I held it to my eye and looked at him.