Dave Carver (Book 1): Thicker Than Blood

by Dudek, Andrew

  Once we were safely out of the dead neighborhood that had been claimed as the vampires’ turf, May looked at me and said, “You may be right.” Before I could argue that I was a hundred percent right, she continued: “But what if you just did exactly what somebody wanted you to do?”

  “Somebody like who?”

  “All of the Round Table’s intelligence tells us that the Elders and Flavian don’t exactly get along. They supposedly see him as this...coward and traitor. What if you just opened a gate for the Elders’ two biggest enemies to destroy each other?” I frowned and May continued. “Kim gets killed, right? Anyone who knows anything about the Round Table knows that the leaders will storm off to question Flavian. But anybody who knows you will know that you’ll probably be incredibly angry. Maybe you do something that damages the relationships between Flavian and the Table. There’s a chance the confrontation goes violent and—abra kadabra—the two biggest threats to the Elders are at each others’ throats.”

  I grunted. She was right. It was possible that someone had used my anger, my hatred of vampires, against me. I gritted my teeth. Everything seemed to slow down and my head felt heavy. Well, there was nothing to be done for it now. All that was left was to prepare for battle.

  I stared at the black metal phone. The rotary holes stared back, dark and empty as vampire eyes. I’d been entrusted with this monumentally important job, and I’d stumbled out of the gate. You had to admire the incompetence. In one day I’d gotten one of my people killed and possibly committed the Table to another war. It usually took a concentrated effort to screw up that badly.

  I needed to call Bill.

  William Foster Pendragon wasn’t just the leader of the Round Table. He wasn’t just my mentor. He was the closest thing I had to a father. I’d met Bill at a time when I thought I wanted to die. It’s a long story, but everyone I’d ever loved had been killed by vampires, and I was preparing to launch myself on a suicide mission for vengeance. I was seventeen. Bill had saved my life and in a very real way, he was my oldest living friend. I hated the idea that I’d disappointed him. He’d trusted me with this massive job. He was counting on me to find the parties responsible for McCreary’s death and stop them. To stop the vampires’ plans in New York. Maybe even to finish the war and save the world.

  And I’d failed.

  Surely I could handle this myself. I was one of two people to ever walk alive out of a vampire prison camp. I didn’t have to roll over and call my teacher when the going got tough. With a pair of dedicated, tough knights under my command and one of the most powerful witches at my back I could handle anything Flavian and the other vampires could throw at me.

  Right?

  I was kidding myself if I thought I could get through this without Bill finding out about my incompetence. This way he’d at least hear it from me. I owed him that much. I picked up the phone and dialed the number for the London headquarters.

  It rang four times—long enough to let me know that whoever was on the other end of the line was busy and my calling was an imposition—and a shaky, elderly voice with a posh London accent said, “How may I help you?”

  “My name’s Captain Dave Carver,” I said. “I need to speak with the Pendragon.”

  “Captain?” the woman gasped, like the title was some horrible slur. I guess she wasn’t used to directing calls from someone as comparatively low-ranked as the head of a field office. Bill was in the big leagues now.

  “Just tell him my name. He’ll want to talk to me.”

  “Hold please.”

  The line went dead for long enough that I began to suspect that Bill’s secretary had hung up on me. I was about to follow suit and was composing what I was going to say when I got back on the phone with the uptight crank when the line clicked and a rough, Virginian voice said, “Dave? That you?”

  “Pendragon, sir,” I said, my voice dripping with formality. “This is Captain Carver.”

  Bill waited a beat. “Uh-huh. I know who you are, kid, and if you don’t shove that formal-talk shit down your throat, I’m gonna shove it up your ass.”

  I laughed and threw him a mock salute, even though I knew he couldn’t see me. “Yes, sir.”

  “I gotta tell ya, kid, it’s good to hear your voice again. I was startin’ to think you were in the wind for good and all.”

  “You have May to thank,” I said. “She told me about this pathetic, weak, old man that needed my help. Wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  Bill growled into the phone. “I’ll show you an old man, you ungrateful little whelp.”

  “I was gonna say a ‘doddering old fool,’ but I thought that might have been disrespectful to the office.”

  He laughed. “You know, it just might have been, at that. Well whatever she had to do, it was worth it to get you out o’ that dumpy ol’ safe house and back where you belong.” His voice sobered. “So what can I do for ya, Dave? You enjoyin’ the new job?”

  I filled him in on everything that had happened since I had crawled out of the safe house, including the ambush on the way to the office, Kim’s murder, and my twin meetings with Flavian. After a moment’s hesitation I decided to leave out my suspicions about Avalon. That could wait.

  “Well, that’s quite a mess you got goin’ there, kid. I’ll send Gwen back your way with some more backup as soon as I can.”

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Thank you.”

  “For what, doin’ my job? Take good care of yourself, Dave. I’ll see you soon.”

  I was heading back downstairs to update the troops on everything that had happened in the last couple of hours. My head was spinning, but I felt like a burden had been lifted from my shoulders. For the first time that day I felt pretty good about events. Help was on the way.

  “What the hell is this?”

  May’s voice, angry and...afraid, drifted out of the bullpen to greet me on the stairs. I sprinted down the stairs, leaping the last three to land in the foyer. May stood with her back to the door, near the desk that Krissy had been using, and madly waving a piece of paper. Krissy stood eye-to-eye with the older woman—to her credit, she didn’t back down. Earl James kept shoving his arms in between the two of them, trying to calm the situation down. Rob and Madison stood off to one side, warily watching the proceedings.

  “Where did you get this?” May demanded. The air in the room heated up. A coffee pot in the kitchenette rattled dangerously. A (long-healed) broken bone in my leg tingled.

  I took a deep breath and roared, “Enough!” I wasn’t sure I had the lung capacity for the drill sergeant thing, but I’d seen Bill shout like that in similar situations. It usually seemed to get everything under control.

  The cat-fight, if that’s what this was, came to an abrupt, weirdly funny halt. Everyone turned to look at me.

  “May,” I said quietly. “What’s going on?”

  “I want to know who drew this.” She shoved the paper into my hands. It was the drawing that Dallas had shown us. The one of the image that he said accompanied the dreams of fire and destruction.

  I shrugged. “It’s just some drawing a wizard did. It’s got something to do with a prophecy. I was gonna deal with it after we figured out what the vamps are up to.”

  May shook her head. “What was the dream?”

  “You know, the usual: Death, destruction, fire. Why?”

  She looked at me, and there was something utterly terrified in her eyes. “Because I’ve been having dreams like that, too. And this....thing was in all of them.”

  Chapter 17

  I blinked. “Um. What?”

  May’s gray eyes seemed a shade or two darker in the florescent lighting of the office, and they were heavy with concern. “For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing this thing in my dreams.”

  “What kind of dreams?” I asked.

  “Fire,” said May. “Every time, it starts with my parents’ house in San Diego. It’s on fire. The Pacific Ocean is on fire. Castle A
rthur in ruins. Guinevere run up on rocks and broken.” She pointed at the drawing in my hand. “And that thing is always the last image I get before I wake up in a cold sweat.”

  I wasn’t an expert in oneirology, but I was betting when two powerful magicians had the same recurring dream over the same time period, it meant something. This wasn’t just bad. It was apocalyptic.

  “Do you know what it is?” I said.

  “Never seen anything like it before.”

  Madison Coburn raised her hand like a diner asking for the check. “Uh...I think I have.”

  May and I spun around to stare at the young woman. She swallowed heavily, looking like she wanted to phase through the nearest wall like Kitty Pryde, but she held her ground.

  “I mean, I don’t know what it is, but I think I recognize those symbols.” She pointed at the little gold characters that Dallas had drawn on the scarlet bands. “It’s not like I can translate it or anything, but I think they’re a type of goblin script.”

  “I don’t suppose anybody can translate old goblin languages,” I said. No one volunteered, which was not at all surprising. Even most of the mountain-dwelling supes didn’t use ancient Goblin much anymore, preferring regional dialects crossbred with local human tongues.

  I asked May, “Which side are the goblins on in the war?”

  “Most of the tribes are officially neutral,” she said, like reciting a memorized fact. “But the Himalayans are siding with the vamps.”

  I grimaced. “Of course they are.”

  The goblins of the Himalaya Mountains were the most aggressive, most human-unfriendly tribes on the planet. Their queen was an ornery old biddy that hated the Table because we dared stop her from raiding nearby Nepalese settlements for food and sexual gratification. If she saw an opportunity to hurt the Round Table, while simultaneously increasing her own standing in the world she’d take it.

  “Babyface Martin and his people have them under control, though,” said May. “They’re trapped in their caves—they shouldn’t be much of a factor.”

  I sat down at the desk and put my head in my hands. It wasn’t fair. Like the vamps weren’t enough to deal with—now I had a potentially deadly goblin weapon in the mix? Damn, but it never rains. And the worst part was that there was nothing I could do about it—this was a job, at least at first, not for a knight, but for a scholar. We needed somebody who knew something about ancient goblin mythology, and there were very few people in the world who fit that description. With the war raging, any of them with any sense would be hunkered down in their homes or libraries. There was no one who could help.

  Wait.

  Yes, there was.

  “I think I know someone who can help,” I said. “I have to go alone.”

  “You sure about that, Dave?” May said. “It’s dark outside. Could be vamps.”

  I shook my head. “This guy’s a little shy—if we come at him in force he’ll disappear—but I think he’ll talk to me. Just to me. Besides, it’s not like I’m going anywhere especially dangerous. Just Jersey.”

  I parked the Toyota in the lot of a small elementary school in northern New Jersey. Trucks roared audibly in the distance as they crawled up and down the Turnpike like overgrown mechanical beetles. Nearby, playground equipment stood like monuments to childhood. I closed the car door with a little more force than was strictly necessary—I wanted to make sure that the inhabitant of the school knew I was coming. He wasn’t the kind of guy I thought was wise to sneak up on.

  My sword wasn’t around my waist, which was bothersome. It was strange—I’d only had the thing back for a couple of days, and I was already finding myself dependent on the comforting weight at my hip. I did have the hunting knife that May had given me tucked under my jacket, though, and the switchblade was in my pocket, so that was something.

  The first four doors were locked, but I got lucky on the fifth. That’s the thing about big buildings: lots of times, someone will miss a lock and you can get in without the “breaking” part of “breaking and entering.”

  My boots clicked like hooves on the linoleum floor as I made my way through an empty office and into a long, deserted hallway. Roughly drawn children’s pictures were hanging along the walls outside of some of the classrooms. I stopped for a moment in front of one of them: a Crayola drawing of a humanoid creature with short limbs, long ears, and gray skin. The caption, in a childish scrawl, read “The man in the basement.” I smiled and kept moving. As I strode through the hall, I peeked into the classrooms. They were empty, which wasn’t surprising. To all appearances, I was alone in the school.

  But I knew I wasn’t.

  After a few more twists and turns in the hallway—I’d been in this school before, but it had been a long time ago and it was dark—I found the door I wanted. Someone had scratched an A in the wood. Signs stapled to the door announced it was “Off Limits” to any but “Authorized Personnel Only,” and that everyone should “Keep Out.”

  I felt a small smile on my lips, and I pounded on the door. “Addy!” I shouted. “Open up. It’s Dave Carver.”

  Then I stepped back and waited, facing the door and keeping my body as far away as possible. You don’t want to enter a goblin’s lair without permission and you don’t want to turn your back on one, either. Addy was relatively easygoing so I figured I wouldn’t need it, but I missed my sword.

  There was a series of steady thumps from behind the door, the sound of heavy footsteps on stairs. A lock clicked and the door opened. Squinting at me out of a darkened stairwell was the last of the Adirondack goblins.

  From a distance you could almost mistake Addy for somebody’s grandfather. He had two arms and two legs, and they were more or less in human proportions. The top of his head only came to the middle of my chest, and he hunched as he walked, making him seem even smaller. The top of his head was ringed with wiry white hair like Friar Tuck. He wore a tattered old janitor’s jumpsuit that had been repaired so many times that it was impossible to tell where the original material ended and the patches began.

  But that was where the similarities to a human grandfather ended. The skin on his face and hands—which were also on human scale, except for the grotesquely long fingers—was cracked and leathery like an elephant’s, and it was colored in a complex patterns of greens and browns. His eyes were tiny, perfectly round, and coppery, like new pennies. Half a dozen gold rings pierced his ears, which were long and elfishly pointed. His cracked lips split into a facsimile of a smile when he saw me, revealing rows of short, pointed teeth.

  “Hey, Addy,” I said. “Good to see you, man.”

  “Carver.” Goblins can learn human languages, but their vocal systems aren’t designed for them. Addy sounded like boulders being scraped together. “How can I help you?”

  “Right to business, huh?” I said. “That’s why I always liked you.”

  Addy stared at me, unblinking. Goblins aren’t really big on humor. Or maybe I’m just not as funny as I think I am. Although it wasn’t like Addy didn’t have a reason to be dour. He was the sole survivor of a proud people. “Addy” wasn’t even his real name, which was an unpronounceable series of guttural syllables. It was an abbreviation for the name of his tribe: Adirondack.

  For centuries his people had lived in the mountains of upstate New York. Unlike a lot of goblin tribes, they weren’t interested in bothering humans. They left humans alone, so the Round Table left them alone. That is until one day forty years ago, when a bunch of stoned hippies wandered into the goblin territory.

  What happened next was the subject of great controversy in the Table. The goblins claimed that the humans had attacked them, so they were forced to defend themselves. None of the hippies survived, so we only had the goblin side of the story, but it didn’t much matter. The Round Table’s job was to protect humanity from dangerous supes, and when the Adirondack goblins killed those kids they became dangerous supes.

  That war had been brief, but fierce. When the smoke cleared, most of the
Adirondack goblins were dead and their caves were full of blood. A few survived, but they were all males. Goblins don’t believe in interracial marriages, so they couldn’t just breed with females from other tribes. After the Adirondack War it was only a matter of time before the whole tribe was gone.

  Within thirty-five years all but three were dead. They were too old, too weak to continue living in their ancestral family homes, so the Table had stepped in to “help.” I’d been part of the team that had hiked into the mountains, picked up Addy and his brothers, and brought them down to this elementary school. (The school was built on a convergence of low-powered ley lines which allowed the Table’s magician allies to create a powerful concealment spell over the basement.) Over the last five years I’d heard through various grapevines that Addy’s two older brothers had passed on, leaving him alone.

  “How’s the basement?” I asked. “Anyone ever bother you?”

  “No. No one comes down.”

  “That’s good. And you raid the cafeteria at night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, school food...I guess it’s better than nothing.” I forced a chuckle. “Listen, Addy, the Round Table needs your help.” The goblin’s eyes narrowed and his lips curled away from his needle teeth in a scowl. Duh, Carver, I thought, of course he doesn’t want to help the organization that wiped out his family. I hurried to add, “I need your help.”

  He nodded, but he still seemed hesitant. “What can I do?”

  I took Dallas’s sketch from my pocket and showed it to the goblin. “These symbols are ancient Goblin letters, right? Can you translate it?”

  He studied the paper for a moment before muttering, “Gragihigt.”

  “Uh,” I said, “what?”

  “It is...a legend of my people. Sometimes it is called the ‘Death-Bringer.’”

  I frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “It is called the Gauntlet of Greckhite, my people’s god of war. It is said that whoever wears the gauntlet can wield the power of Greckhite.”