The Blood Guard (The Blood Guard series) Read online

  We’d found Dawkins.

  CHAPTER 9:

  GRAND THEFT AUTO

  I don’t know how long we stood there, staring. Long enough that the big rig driver, a portly man with muttonchop whiskers, swung down out of his cab and came to stand beside us. “They were in the road!” he kept saying.

  “We have to get out of here,” Greta said, dragging me backward by the hood of my sweatshirt. “He’s gone, Ronan. We can’t help him.”

  “But.…” I couldn’t stop staring at Dawkins’ empty hand. I felt sickened knowing that he was under those wheels, sure, but that was only part of it. Mostly, what I felt was alone. The only connection I’d had to my parents had been this crazy kid with the weird accent, and now he was gone.

  “I’m going to be sick,” I said.

  “No, Ronan, you’re not,” Greta said, yanking my arm again. “You are going to come with me.”

  She pulled me past a bunch of senior citizens in fanny packs and sun visors who were piling out of a turquoise tour bus and joining a thick ring of onlookers. In the commotion, everyone seemed to have forgotten about the Cadillac.

  “Keep edging back,” Greta said quietly beside me. “We’ll disappear in the crowd.”

  “There they are!” someone said. “Take them, Mr. Four.”

  A hand caught my right arm and twisted it back so hard that I yelped. I found myself face-to-face with Slicked-Back Hair.

  Mr. Four, I guessed.

  He was clean-shaven, his face weirdly slack-jawed and waxy looking. I couldn’t tell how old he was. Definitely past thirty.

  He stared at me, unblinking, his eyes full of nothing—not hatred, not satisfaction at having caught me, just emptiness. I felt cold metal as he snapped handcuffs onto my wrists.

  Next to him was Blondie. Her slow smile made my mouth go dry. “Children, we’re going to have to take you in for questioning.” She held up her badge again, and the people around us cleared a space. “There’s nothing to see here,” she announced. “Just two officers of the law apprehending a couple of young criminals.”

  “Let go of me,” Greta snapped, twisting and trying to break the woman’s grip.

  The woman smacked the back of Greta’s head with her open palm, then plucked the Tesla gun out from under her shirt, saying, “Aha!”

  Around us, the crowd murmured.

  Spinning Greta around, Blondie cuffed her, too, and pushed her toward the SUV. Mr. Four followed suit, planting his hand between my shoulder blades and shoving so hard that I thought I was going to fall flat on my face.

  Then I heard something strange: applause. The crowd around us was clapping. Just a few people at first, but then everyone joined in. And why? Because they believed what the blonde woman had told them: that we were criminals. For some reason, I felt ashamed. I dropped my head as we crossed the parking lot.

  But Greta wasn’t so easily embarrassed. “Are you people kidding me? We’re being kidnapped, you idiots—ow!” The woman smacked Greta again, and she fell to her knees on the hot pavement. Without another word, Greta used her cuffed hands to shove herself back up. She kept her head held high.

  Greta was right: We weren’t criminals. The people around us had no idea what was going on. “We’ve done nothing wrong!” I said—and got a sharp jab at the back of my head from Mr. Four.

  And then we’d reached the SUV. Mr. Four and the woman pushed Greta in first, me right after. They opened our cuffs and then locked them around the armrests in the backseat.

  “While we see to a few things,” the woman told us, “you will be silent and will draw no attention to yourselves. Or there will be consequences.”

  Mr. Four went to the rear of the SUV and dug out a couple of long black zippered plastic bags, like the sort people carry suits in. He followed the woman back across the broad parking lot to the truck.

  After a minute, the big rig slowly moved backward. Several minutes after that, Mr. Four returned, hunched beneath the weight of those two long black bags, one slung over each shoulder. They looked…full. Of something.

  With a grunt, he heaved the bags into the SUV. Then he closed the back door. We were next. He rattled the chains on our cuffs to see if we were still locked up tight.

  Without a word, he turned and headed back into the crowd.

  “Was that what I think it was?” I asked, picturing the bags in the back and feeling queasy.

  “I don’t even want to know,” Greta said. Suddenly her cuff was swinging loose on her arm. “But why don’t we get away from here before they come back and show us.”

  “Wha—hey, how’d you do that?” I asked, but then answered myself, “Oh, let me guess: Your dad’s—”

  “Right. He taught me how to pick locks. These are standard-issue Peerless cuffs, an old-school brand that’s a total cakewalk if you know what you’re doing. Which I do.” Clenched in her fingers was a crooked bit of wire that looked like one of the pins that kept her mess of red hair in place.

  “Unlock me, too!”

  “No time.” She climbed forward between the front seats and slid behind the wheel like she did this sort of thing every day. “We have to get out of here. Those dumb jerks are so sure of themselves that they left the keys.” She snapped the seat belt, adjusted the mirror, and gently cranked the ignition. “Pull that door shut.”

  I slid the side door closed with my free hand as the engine came to life with a quiet rumble. In a moment, Greta had the SUV moving.

  “Your dad taught you how to drive, too?” I asked in disbelief, but she didn’t answer. She nudged the gas and soon the SUV was rolling away like we had just stopped to fuel up and now were getting back on the road.

  I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until I gasped for air.

  “You all right back there?” Greta asked, her eyes on the road.

  “I can’t believe this,” I said. “Are we really getting away?”

  “I hope so,” Greta said, glancing into the rearview mirror and biting her lip. “Unless they have…wow.”

  I twisted and looked over my shoulder. Through the smoky back window of the SUV, I could see the truck stop dwindling, getting smaller behind us. And I could see something else: the blonde woman and Mr. Four running after us, keeping pace with the SUV.

  “They’re chasing us!” I shouted. “You have to go faster!”

  When we reached the on-ramp, the blonde woman stopped. She stared after us, her hands on her hips.

  Mr. Four didn’t slow down at all.

  He ran with long loping strides. There were cars leaving the truck stop that he passed in a blur, dodging them like they weren’t moving. When he came upon two cars driving side by side, he just hurdled them, sailing through the air and landing in stride. He kept coming.

  “How can he move like that?” Greta asked. “What are these people?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How fast can you push this thing?”

  “I just hit thirty miles an hour,” she said. “That’s the speed limit for the on-ramp.”

  “Forget the speed limit,” I said. “We need to lose this guy!”

  He was moving faster than the traffic, bouncing from foot to foot, never slowing.

  Greta punched the gas.

  The SUV seemed to gather itself for a split second before surging forward. Through the rear window, I could see Mr. Four get smaller and smaller, until he was just a dot at the edge of the on-ramp.

  We drove in silence for a minute.

  “Who are those people?” Greta asked. “And why are they so hot to get you?” Her eyes caught mine in the rearview mirror. “I mean, nothing personal, Ronan, but you’re kind of an idiot.”

  “Thanks for that,” I said, smirking. “Dawkins never got a chance to explain them to me. And neither did my mom.” I knuckled my eyes with my free hand and hoped that the people who took my dad weren’t anything like this woman and her crew. “I don’t know anything more than you do.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “My dad will help us.
Once we find a phone.”

  “Didn’t you already call him?” I asked. “Back at the truck stop?”

  “He didn’t answer. I left a message, but…” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Let’s just concentrate on getting as far away from those people as possible. In a couple of hours we’ll be at my dad’s place and this nightmare will be over.” She smiled anxiously at me in the rearview.

  I watched as a pair of ambulances roared past in the opposite lane, their sirens blaring.

  They were too late, I knew. I thought of poor Dawkins squished under a semi like a bug under a boot and shuddered.

  “We got away, Ronan,” Greta said, her voice full of forced brightness. “We’re safe now.”

  “Sure.” I said, clanking my handcuffs. “We’re safe.”

  I didn’t believe it for a minute.

  CHAPTER 10:

  UP THE CREEK

  An hour and a half later, with the sun sitting on the horizon, Greta steered us into the parking lot of an empty rest area.

  “Why are we stopping?” I had no idea where we were. Somewhere near the border of Delaware and Maryland, maybe, but I hadn’t been paying close attention to the signs. “They could be right behind us.”

  “If I don’t pee soon, I’m going to explode.” She looked embarrassed as she turned off the engine. “Also? We’re basically out of gas. They were so busy kidnapping us that they forgot to fill up the tank.”

  “Great,” I said. The rest stop was nothing much—a little brick bathroom on a big slab of concrete, surrounded by a grassy area, some picnic tables, and a dozen big streetlights that would probably kick on once the sunlight was gone. The grass sloped down to a narrow, reed-choked river, and a long way downstream a bridge spanned the water. It was almost peaceful.

  I was as depressed as I have ever felt in my life. Here I was, out of gas at an abandoned highway rest stop with a girl I barely knew, handcuffed to the backseat of a car stolen from the people who’d kidnapped my dad, chased my mom, and killed the one person in the world who could explain to me what was going on. How long would it be until they caught up to me and Greta and killed us, too?

  “There’s a pay phone on the wall over there. We’ll use it to call for help. But first,” Greta said, holding up the bent pin she’d used on her cuffs, “let’s give you your freedom.”

  I checked out the pay phone while Greta used the bathroom, but it wasn’t going to be any help to us: there was no handset on the end of its cord.

  So we searched the SUV’s glove compartment to see if there might be a cell phone there, but it held only a couple of parking tickets and a manual for the car. Greta flipped through it, looked closely at the inside front cover, and coughed. She showed me a bright red sticker reading THIS VEHICLE IS EQUIPPED WITH LOJACK.

  “So what? What’s that mean?”

  “It’s a tracking device for stolen cars. Basically it sends out a GPS beacon so that the car can be found by the police.”

  Suddenly I was all too aware of how alone we were. “That means they can—”

  “Find us, yeah. They’ve probably already activated it.”

  “But that would take a while, right?”

  “It would take a phone call. And a smartphone.” She swallowed and looked around us at the deserted rest stop. “They’re probably not that far behind.”

  “What should we do? Run? Go on foot?” We were trapped. There was no place to walk, just a thin line of trees along the highway. “Hitchhike?”

  “Calm down, Ronan,” Greta said.

  “I’m calm!” I yelped, then realized she was right: I was panicking. I took a few deep, slow breaths. “Okay, sorry. I am totally calming down now.”

  “Hitchhiking is way too risky. They’d probably be the ones to pull up and offer us a ride. We need to find a way to escape them so that they can’t follow, and we need to call my dad and tell him exactly what is going on.” Greta dropped the manual on the front seat. “Let’s see what they’ve got in the back.”

  The storage compartment was packed. On the left was a long green trunk banded in steel, and snug against it were the two zippered black bags. Both were about as long as a person and lumpy. “Body bags,” Greta whispered, stepping back. “They really are body bags. I didn’t want to believe it.” She leaned over, her hands on her knees, and breathed loudly. “Oh, man, I think I’m going to be ill.”

  “I don’t get it: Why would they pick up the bodies?”

  “There’s nothing to get, Ronan. These people are sick. Sick, sick, sick.”

  I didn’t want to think about that. “At least now we have some money,” I said. Sitting on top of the green trunk was the satchel Dawkins had given me. Inside was the Tesla gun (the woman must have put it there after she took it from Greta), the wad of cash, and the Zippo lighter.

  “What’s this?” Greta pulled out something I’d forgotten: Dawkins’ cheap spiral-bound notebook.

  We flipped through the tattered pages. His scribbles were tough to decipher. Some pages we just gave up on entirely. Toward the back, there was a note describing me—“black hair, short for his age, dark blue hoodie, yellow backpack; looks like Bree”—that made a lump form in my throat. Bree is my mom’s first name. And on the facing page: “3:41 southbound out of Stanhope.”

  “There’s the proof that he did come because of my mom,” I said, tapping the page.

  “So he was telling the truth,” Greta said. “Sorry I didn’t believe you.”

  “It’s okay. I wouldn’t have believed us, either.”

  There were sketches of various things and people, and lots of drawings of dogs. All kinds of dogs. We couldn’t quite figure out one creepy illustration of a spiky mask with three eyes, but the sketches of the blonde woman and two of her gang of thugs were instantly recognizable. On the last page Dawkins had written the words MOUNT RUSHMORE all in caps.

  He’d drawn a picture of the four sculpted president heads on the mountain, along with a fifth—his own grinning face, his long hair looking greasy even when carved in stone. Etched into the mountain below the heads were the words Nunquam mori—whatever that meant.

  The rest of the pages were blank.

  “What’s it all mean?” I asked.

  Greta threw the notebook and everything else back into the satchel. “That he’s a bad artist? That he likes dogs? That he was completely nutso? Who knows.”

  Greta tried each of the keys on the green metal trunk. The fourth slid in effortlessly, and the lid opened on well-oiled hinges. She peeled away a big piece of foam packing material, and for a few seconds, we just stared.

  “Ronan,” Greta finally whispered, “what exactly are your parents mixed up in?”

  Inside the trunk were guns—nothing like any I’d ever seen before. I counted eight big black rifles and, tucked between them, pistols in holsters and other dark metal things that looked like weapons of one sort or another.

  “They’re not mixed up in anything,” I said. “I mean, Dad’s basically a big-deal accountant, and my mom—”

  “These are modified SG 550s,” Greta said, lightly touching the thick stock of one of the rifles, “and these look sort of like M14s, but these modifications”—she tapped the bulbous plastic swellings above the trigger guards—“I don’t even know what those are.”

  “They look like that Tesla gun.” I pulled it out of Dawkins’ satchel, and we compared them. I thought about those sideways lightning bolts shearing through the Cadillac’s windshield and shuddered. “Did you see what this thing did?”

  “Yeah. Scary.” She slammed the lid down and stepped away from the truck. “That is really evil stuff, Ronan. Guns? Body bags? We need to get rid of this.”

  “We don’t have time,” I protested. “Why can’t we just leave it in the truck?”

  “Because when they catch up to us, they’ll get all that evil junk back.” She took my hands in hers. I don’t know what I was expecting—girlishly soft fingers, maybe—but her grasp was firm. “No one
should have weapons like those things, Ronan. They’re horrible.”

  I turned to look out at the deserted rest stop. It felt like we were the only two people alive, like a horde of zombies might come running out of the bathrooms at any moment.

  But here we were, stuck in the middle of nowhere, without any gas or a phone or anyone to help us. And a case full of scary-looking weapons. What would my mom tell me to do? I wondered. What would Dawkins do? The answer to that was easy: He’d help Greta.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s hurry. Grab the handle on the front end, and I’ll get the back.”

  The case was heavy, but it turned out to have wheels in the corners like a suitcase. We were able to roll it down the grassy slope to the bank of the river.

  Greta slipped off her shoes and waded backward into the water up to her knees.

  “Can’t we just throw it in here?” I asked, but from the look on her face—her brows knotted together, her jaw tensed—I knew I’d have to wade in, too. “Okay, okay!”

  On the first step, my foot sank in past my ankle. “Gross. There goes a good pair of sneakers.”

  “Should have taken them off before you got into the water, you big dope.”

  The case bobbed in the river, not floating exactly, but it didn’t totally sink, either. We just kind of steered it in the current.

  At the halfway point, where the water was up to our armpits, Greta said, “This is good. Let go!”

  The case drifted for a second before taking on water and vanishing. A fat air bubble rose up and was gone.

  Greta said, “Just a sec.” Then she took a deep breath and dove under.

  I stood and waited. The sun sat on the horizon, and it made the water glint and twist around me like molten gold. A ways upstream was a huge grassy meadow shifting in the wind, and farther away, a tiny, weather-beaten gray cottage. Nearer to the river was a ramshackle white gazebo, with what looked like an old overturned canoe beside it.

  Greta popped up with a gasp, then squeegeed her hair with her hands. “I opened the lid—wanted to make sure it stays sunk. And, you know, if those guns get ruined, all the better.”