The Sentinel (4 page)

‘Seth please. You’re my friend, my best friend, if I can’t trust you who can I trust?’

He was silent for a moment, as he looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Evie, you’re scaring me now.’

I felt angry tears pricking my eyes. I pushed him away and made to walk out the house. I had to be alone now. I had to have time to think. Silas was right; I really couldn’t trust anyone.

He put a hand out to stop me ‘Evie, wait!’

I turned back and he paced away, suddenly nervous.

‘I’m not a Guardian,’ he blurted out.

‘Seth…’

‘No listen. I’m not technically a Guardian although I have the strength and speed of them. I’m half human as well, which makes me mortal.’

4. What? How? Why? When?

‘What?’ I was stunned. What did he mean half human?

‘My Mum was human, my Dad is a Guardian. I was specifically made to be your friend.’

‘Made?’ I could feel my heart hammering against my chest, I was finally getting some answers but it still didn’t make it any easier to hear.

‘Oh in the traditional sense, my Mum and Dad got together, a few months later I was born, but I was conceived with you in mind.’

‘Ewww.’ I couldn’t help make a joke of the situation; I was feeling very tense all of a sudden.

‘No, idiot not like that, but sort of I guess. Once they knew you were on your way they created friends for you too. Strong, powerful friends that would be able to protect you.’ He enclosed my hand in his large strong paw and pulled me down next to him on the sofa.

‘All my friends are Guardians?’ I couldn’t believe this. My family, my friends, was any part of my upbringing normal? I thought about my sweet, lovely, quiet friend Persia. Surely she couldn’t be a part of this as well. ‘Is Persia a Guardian too?’

‘Persia isn’t a Guardian.’ He smiled, as if there was something else he wasn’t saying. ‘No not all of your friends are Guardians. I’m the only half-human Guardian. The human and Guardian DNA doesn’t mix too well. They tried to create a few of us, girls and boys, but all the babies died except me. My Mum died during childbirth, it was just too much for her human body to take, giving birth to someone of my strength and size. Some of the other children were true Guardians, as in both their parents were Guardians.’

I gasped with sudden clarity. ‘Josh and Grace?’

He nodded

Of course they were. The grass green eyes, the constant vigilance, why hadn’t I seen it before?

‘So why bother trying to mix Guardian and human DNA if it wasn’t likely to work? Why not just have true Guardians for my friends.’

‘Because Guardians don’t really have emotions. Things like love, compassion and friendship are concepts they struggle with, things they’re not really capable of experiencing. They figured you would be able to relate better to someone with emotions. And they were right; you never really clicked with the Guardian children did you?’

I remembered Josh and Grace; distant children that never really got the concept of playing. Where me, Seth and the others were playing with water, sand and experimenting with paint, the Guardians would look at the toys with confusion. I had always thought of them as socially inept, though I didn’t have a name for it at the time. I remembered them trying to play with me in the playground, but they were so cold towards the other children, and their smiles seemed fake. Seth was right; I had never really counted them as friends.

‘What happened to them?’ I remembered when we were ten years old, the Guardian children stopped coming to school and I had never seen them since.

‘They were only there to be your friend Eve, so that when you played outside of school you would have Guardians to play with, instead of human children. When it became apparent that you weren’t friends with them, it was just a waste to have them there. They took them out of school and started putting them through extensive training instead. I’m sure you’ll see Josh and Grace again at some point. And Eli, remember him?’

‘The little boy who stared at me all day?’

Seth smiled. ‘Yes, even then he took his job very seriously. They had to take him out of school when he was seven; he was already nearly six foot, not the inconspicuous classmate the Guardians were looking for. He was the one that rescued you from the fire tonight. Did you not recognise him?’

I shook my head. Though through the smoke, the fire and with my dog turning into a man, there hadn’t really been time to take in his features.

‘So the men in the silver car, Eli, they’re my Guardians?

He nodded and I groaned. ‘I thought they were trying to kill me.’

‘No, they’re sworn to protect you.’

And I had shot at them, unwittingly with some beam of lightning.

‘So… Seth you’re my friend because you have to be?’ I asked quietly.

‘No silly. I mean yes in the beginning, as soon as I was able to walk and talk, my Dad told me what my purpose in life was, what I had been created for. I had to make friends with you and protect you no matter what. The first day, probably the first few weeks I was just fulfilling my duty, but after that I…I became attached. I’m your friend now because I want to be, because I cannot imagine my life without you, because I love you. I’m supposed to discredit you, get you to think it’s all rubbish. You’re not supposed to know yet and I’m definitely not supposed to be the one that tells you. But how can I laugh in your face when you’re my best friend? Evie I’m loyal to you, not to my duty, that’s why I’m telling you all this now. When they find out I’ve talked I’ll get in so much trouble but I don’t care, you’re my best friend, so I’ll tell you what I know.’

‘Thanks Seth, that means a lot.’ I squeezed his hand. ‘Tell me about the Guardians then, they’re not human, so what are they?’

‘They’re a species called Deus.’

I knew enough about Latin to recognise that word. ‘Gods?’

‘Yeah thousands of years ago that’s what people thought they were. They were so strong and fast and never died, it was quite obvious they weren’t human, so it was thought they were gods rather than just another species.’

‘Wait, back up, they never die, they’re immortal?’

‘No, not really. Once a Guardian reaches the age where they are the strongest, they stop aging, so they don’t die of old age, well not at the same age as humans. Because of the strength, they’re really hard to kill as well, but it’s not impossible. I think the oldest known Deus was about four hundred years old.’

‘Hang on, Guardians? Deus? What’s the difference?’

‘Deus are the species, Guardians are the Deus that have pledged allegiance to you.’

‘To me?’

He nodded.

How ridiculous.

‘So what am I? Am I a Guardian too, though that doesn’t make sense…’

He held up a hand to stop me, listening to something else. I looked around to see what he could hear.

‘Eli’s going mad. Are you ok for them to come here?’

‘What… you can communicate with them?’

‘Yes, we can talk to each other via telepathy.’

‘So tonight, you were in the woods because they called you, telepathically?’

‘Yes, as soon as you left the house, the Guardians were all talking with each other. They called me to come and get you, they realised you were running from them so they thought you’d be more susceptible to a friendly face.’

‘How did you find me?’

He smiled wryly. ‘We can sense you as well. Your mind is like a beacon, we can pinpoint your exact location from hundreds of miles away. We can centre ourselves on you very quickly too, you’re kind of like a magnet and when the need arises you can literally pull us through the fabric of space to be at your side. It works both ways. We can pull ourselves to you too, although it’s a lot harder physically and mentally for us to do that. When your powers get stronger, you’ll be able to pull us to you as and when you need us, but for the time being we can come to you if we feel the need. It doesn’t happen very often because the Guardians are always around you. But tonight there was a need. So I got the call, I grabbed my bike and one second I’m standing outside my house, the next I’m with you in the woods.’

‘So they can come here now?’ I whirled around, expecting Eli to suddenly appear from the air as I’d seen him do already.

‘No. I didn’t know, but Cain’s house has some kind of… power. It’s blocking your signal which is making your Guardians extremely nervous. Cain came to me a few days ago and told me I would need his house but that no one could enter it apart from me and you. I thought he meant he didn’t want anyone else to go in, but now I’m guessing there’s some kind of force field stopping the Guardians from sliding to you. They probably won’t be able to enter the house either. If they come here, they’ll be trapped outside. But when you’re ready you can talk to them. They might be able to answer more questions that I can’t.’

‘Won’t you get into trouble?’

He shrugged. ‘What’s done is done.’

My brain was whirling. But I nodded my consent.

‘We probably have about ten minutes,’ he said.

‘So apart from super strength and the ability to slide through time and space, is there anything else they can do?’ I couldn’t believe how normal this question sounded, how calmly we were discussing this.

‘We can’t travel through time, only space and we can’t go anywhere in the world, we can only pull ourselves to you, but other skills…, clearly the super strength thing is not impressive enough for you, you want more.’ He nudged me and I rolled my eyes. ‘Well we’re super-fast too, they could have easily caught up with you in the woods tonight, but they understood that you were scared of them. They can’t let you out of their sight, that’s why they called me. What else? As I said, they can communicate telepathically with each other, and with you, but they only hear what you want them to, however, some can read minds, read what a person is thinking, without their permission.

I remembered Mr Kennedy in the coach, touching my head and then telling Mr Curtis what I was feeling. And what he tried to do afterwards. ‘And modify memories?’ I asked, with annoyance.

He smiled. ‘Henry can, Mr Kennedy. There’s not many that can. How did you do that by the way, keep him out?’

‘I don’t know. When he said he was going to modify my memory, I just knew I didn’t want that, when he touched me he seemed to get burnt.’

He shook his head. ‘You scared us all that night. When you shut your mind to him, just for those few seconds, it was like the beacon went out, we couldn’t feel you anymore. If you learn to control your powers and learn to do that properly, we won’t be able to sense you, to follow you, to protect you anymore.’

‘Really?’ I beamed. ‘If I can control it, I might get a few minutes of peace, wow that’s the first thing I want to control then.’

‘Evie, no, you can’t do that.’ His hands balled into fists, I had never seen him angry before. ‘There are those out there that want to kill you or worse. They can’t get close enough to you because of the Guardians but that doesn’t stop them trying. Not all the Deus are good.’

‘Who wants to kill me? What have I done? What do you mean worse than being killed?’ My voice was unnaturally high. This was getting too much.

He shook his head. ‘I swore to myself I wouldn’t tell you this, not yet, it’s too much for you to take in.’

‘Seth, you’ve just told me that there are people out there that want to kill me, we’ve just gone beyond too much to take in.’

‘Exactly, that’s why I’m not going to tell you.’

‘The Guardians are pledging their allegiance to me, there are those that want to kill me, I need to know, why me, what’s so special about me?’

He sighed heavily as he took my hand again. ‘They call you the Sentinel. It has been foreseen that… You’re going to save the world.’

‘What?’ My heart leapt.

‘The Oraculum are a council of nine, they have the ability to see the future. They have foreseen that you will be the saviour of all mankind.’

‘What? How? When?’ This was so much worse than I ever imagined. I had envisaged that I was being trained up to enter this strange world of Guardians; I had no idea that I was the saviour of it.

He smiled at my startled expression. ‘That I don’t know, but the Oraculum are never wrong. They make predictions all the time. Some are hazy with not all the details, some are crystal clear with almost the time and date of the event predicted. But they are never wrong.’

‘I’m just a girl, how can I save the world?’

‘You’re special Evie, you know that. You’ve already started realising your powers and your strength. When you are full grown, you will have strength greater than the Guardians and the powers of the strongest, most powerful Donum…’

‘Donum?’

He shook his head. ‘Another time I think, I’m worried your server is going to fry from too much information.’

I knew he was right; my heart was pounding so fast I thought it might explode right out of my chest. I stood up, nodding, taking a deep breath and started pacing up and down in front of him. ‘Ok, ok, say this Oraculum are right and I’m going to save the world…’

‘They are and you are.’

‘Ok, so why would anyone want to stop that, why does anyone want to kill me?’

He sighed. ‘There are the Putarians who believe that the world needs to be purged of all things evil, that includes the sinners, the thieves, murderers and other criminals of course, but mostly anyone that is not pure human, so the shape shifters, the Donum, the Zeki,…

‘The Zeki?’

‘Later Evie, the Zeki, the Oraculum, anyone with powers, they are all on the hit list. The Putarians are already covering the earth trying to slaughter any humans that are not pure, but now the end of the world has been foreseen and the Putarians welcome this. They believe that their God, Putus, will use this ‘end of the world’ to cleanse the earth of all the evil, it will only leave the pure and they’re not too happy about someone putting an end to this purge.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you saving the world kind of puts a dampener on their plans. So they would be very happy to kill you and there are Deus who have pledged their allegiance to the Putarians instead of to you. Super strength beings that want to kill you, Eve you wouldn’t stand a chance.’