by Holly Martin
The Sentinel
Book one of The Sentinel Series
Holly Martin
The Sentinel
This Kindle edition published 2013
Text copyright © Holly Martin 2013
Illustration copyright © Scarlett Rugers 2013
Formatting by Polgarus Studio
All rights reserved
No part of this ebook may be reproduced in any form other than that in which it was purchased without prior written permission from the author.
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To all the amazing people that have supported, helped and encouraged me to make this book possible. I love you all.
Contents
1. The night I should have died
2. What’s so special about me?
3. I think I’m losing my mind
4. What? How? Why? When?
5. My Personal Guard
6. It’s about to get a whole lot weirder
7. Donum
8. Zeki
9. Constant Vigilance
10. The future’s bright, mine was black
11. Deception
12. Sliding into darkness
13. A watery grave
14. The science of me
15. The fear of death
16. My life or his
17. The arrogance of The Sentinel
18. The second warning
19. Edward
20. Fight or flight
21. They all died for me
22. The welcome home
Part 1
1. The night I should have died
A horrific squealing of brakes snatched me from my dreams. As we swerved, my friend Julia smacked her head painfully against the window. With a deafening bang, the coach lurched heavily onto its side. The lights went out. Metal screeched as it buckled along the ground. Windows popped and splintered. The coach suddenly tipped forward over what could only have been the edge of a cliff and our driver smashed into the front window. Silence fell over my classmates as we watched in helpless horror, somehow knowing what was going to happen next. With a sickening cracking sound, the glass shattered. He scrabbled frantically in the air and his grass green eyes, filled with despair, found mine as he tumbled into the dark abyss below. I knew that moment would be permanently seared on the inside of my eyelids, when fifty six people sat and watched our coach driver die. And then the screaming started again. It quickly intensified as the coach wavered precariously on the knife edge between our salvation and our death.
Standing still and unmoved amongst the chaos Mr Kennedy, my English teacher, was suddenly by my side. He tore me easily from my seatbelt, as if it was only made from paper, and swung me up into his arms so fast it was just a blur. Leaping through a window into the icy black night, he landed on the road in one swift, gigantic, impossible movement. Mr Curtis, my Science teacher, was holding onto the back of the coach with one hand. A terrifying realisation engulfed me. He was the only thing that was stopping the coach from toppling over the sheer drop and killing all my friends inside.
Mr Kennedy put me down and gestured to the coach. ‘Let it go, they’ll be too many questions otherwise. Eve is the only one that matters.’
My stomach twisted violently as Mr Curtis released it.
As gravity slowly took hold of the coach, pulling it over the great precipice, I shrieked with horror. Without thinking I flung out my hands to stop it, clinging onto the bumper. The coach stopped tipping immediately, though the screaming inside did not. My eyes widened in shock as I realised that I was now singlehandedly preventing the coach from falling. I looked back at my two teachers in disbelief.
‘Help me,’ I screamed.
Mr Curtis joined me at the bumper.
‘Eve, if we do this, you will have to lie to everyone. This never happened, the coach nearly slid off the cliff but somehow stopped before it did. You were never rescued by Guardians, we never had this conversation.’
I nodded, numbly; anything to save my friends.
With the loud, screeching sound of metal grinding against the rocks, Mr Curtis started pulling the coach back, as easy as if he was pulling a sheet off a bed. He pulled it back just a few feet but it was enough that the coach wouldn’t topple over the edge.
Before I could say anything I found myself in Mr Kennedy’s arms, whooshing through the air again. I was lying back in the darkness of the coach a second later; a darkness that was filled with screaming and fear and pain.
Mr Kennedy’s voice was calm as he whispered in my ear. ‘Remember to lie Eve; it’s more important than anything that no one knows about you or the Guardians.’ He flicked open his phone and his voice changed to one of panic. ‘Hello is that the emergency services…there’s been an accident, oh please get here quick, the children, please…we’re on the mountain road between …’
As I lay numb in the darkness, waiting for the emergency services to come, I listened to the sounds of Mr Kennedy and the other teachers, trying to calm down the screaming teenagers. The sticky wet feeling of blood trickling through my hair was a sure indication that I had banged my head at some point. But I was alive and so were the other fifty five passengers. My teachers, the Guardians, had saved us.
I swallowed, uneasily as I accepted the unwanted truth. No, they hadn’t saved us, they had saved me. My head was buzzing with the thoughts crashing round it. How had I managed to hold the coach? All laws of physics dictated that what Mr Curtis had done, what I had done, was impossible. And who or what were the Guardians? Why had they saved me? What did they want from me? ‘Eve is the only one that matters’. I tried to catch my breath, but it stalled in my throat. This didn’t make any sense. What was so special about me? Why was my life so much more important than anyone else’s? My life had been pretty unremarkable. I hadn’t saved any lives, I hadn’t done anything that was special, certainly nothing that could rank my life over anyone else. A sick feeling of panic prickled my scalp as I tried to breathe normally.
To make matters worse, my struggling to breathe alerted my two Guardians again. How they had heard me above the screams of my friends was beyond me. Amongst the cries of genuine pain from my fellow students, my Guardians stood unmoving by my side.
‘Is she hurt?’ Mr Curtis asked quietly.
Mr Kennedy bent down to touch my head, a surge of electricity shot through me and he stood back up again. ‘She’s had a bang to the head, but it’s just a lot for her to take in. She’s beginning to understand how important she is and she doesn’t want to believe it.’
I looked up at them, at their grass green eyes that glinted in the moonlight; the exact same eyes as the driver who had fallen to his death. The same eyes as my parents.
‘This was no accident,’ Mr Curtis said. ‘There were small explosives rigged to the tyres. They were deliberately trying to kill her.’
‘The Putarians?’
‘Probably or someone after the bounty. We will have to intensify the guard.’
‘There are already hundreds in her servitude; Eve’s teachers, doctors, neighbours. She’s never alone now without a Guardian. There are four that live in her house…’
Four Guardians that lived in my house? My parents, aunt Jada and uncle Silas, they were Guardians too? My throat was dry.
Flashes of my life suddenly filled my mind, like a film played too quickly to make any sense of it. The flashes were of tall, powerful people with grass green eyes. They had followed me throughout my life; they had seemingly watched me as if nothing else existed. My family? My teachers, next door neighbours, doctors, dentists, shop keepers, flower se
llers? I had never been alone. Even in seemingly innocuous situations the Guardians had never left me. All of them shared one thing in common, that intense look in their eyes, that single minded ferocity that I had to be kept alive, that it was their job to protect me at all costs.
Lying there surrounded by broken glass in the debris of the coach crash, the realisation of what the Guardians were came crashing down on me. My heart was racing, my skin humming with horror.
‘She wasn’t supposed to find out this young. She’s only seventeen. She’s not ready for it yet. She certainly shouldn’t have found out like this. But still, the secret cannot remain at the cost of her life.’
‘No, we had to save her,’ agreed Mr Kennedy.
‘Maybe we can modify her memory.’
I felt a fresh wave of panic surge through me. Finding out about the Guardians had horrified me. The possibility of this knowledge now being taken away from me and the bubble of unawareness being refastened over my eyes and my mind was even more terrifying. I had to find out answers not have what little I knew removed from me. I shivered violently.
‘I can try.’ Mr Kennedy was doubtful as he bent down again to touch my head, then leapt back as if he had been burnt. He looked at Mr Curtis and shook his head. ‘She’s becoming more aware of her powers, maybe subconsciously now, but she is defending her mind against me.’
My powers!? My heart was roaring in my ears.
‘I must say, I was very surprised to see her holding the coach earlier. The strength isn’t supposed to kick in for a good few years yet. Isn’t she supposed to be around twenty before she can do that?’ Mr Curtis muttered, as he shrugged out of his jacket and placed it over me.
‘We always hoped she would be physiologically advanced, but no one could have foreseen this.’
And suddenly, as if all this wasn’t enough to deal with, a tall man with a scar down his left cheek and golden eyes appeared between them, as if the air had just spat him out. The two Guardians didn’t even flinch, as if people appearing from the thin air was the norm. He glared at them as if he blamed them entirely. He knelt by my side and put a hand to my head. With a surge of energy from him the welcome dark of unconsciousness consumed me.
2. What’s so special about me?
I lay in bed, in my home, thinking of the night of the crash and what it all meant. Five days I had been back in England now. Five nights of restless dreams, filled with super strength beings following my every move. Five days where I couldn’t talk to anyone and no one in the know would talk to me.
When I had woken in hospital from the relief of the empty unconsciousness, my Dad had been impossibly by my side. How he had got to the French hospital in such a short time was a mystery. I tried to talk to him about the Guardians, about what it all meant, but he had denied all knowledge of such things. He tried to convince me that it was the bang to the head that had caused these hallucinations.
Even Mr Curtis and Mr Kennedy denied what had happened that night. And there was no one else I could talk to about it, because who would believe it. What would any of my friends say if I started talking about Guardians and how supposedly important I was. I can imagine the reaction actually; I’d imagine it would end with me sitting in a padded cell. I couldn’t even tell Seth, my best friend, which hurt me the most, as I told him everything. But it just sounded so unbelievable; I was having a hard time believing any of it myself. Why would anyone else believe me? Every time I started forming the words to tell him, my mouth would go dry with embarrassment.
The annoying thing was Seth should have been there on the coach with me. Seth had come on the school skiing holiday with us, but had seemingly broken his ankle a few days before the end of the trip and was flown home. Though once back home he’d text me to say it was nothing more than a bad sprain. I was so grateful in one way that he wasn’t there, so he didn’t get hurt in the crash. But if he had been with me, he might have seen what had happened with Mr Curtis and Mr Kennedy and I wouldn’t be doubting my own sanity right now.
I got up and felt Quinn, my golden retriever, stir next to me on the bed. My throat was dry and the air was thick with heat. The last few days had been warm despite the lateness of the year but the top of the house was always hot at night.
I took a long sip of water, opened the window and climbed out onto the roof. My Dad hated me sitting on the roof and he’d nearly beat me once when he caught me out here. But Uncle Silas had thrown him against a wall when he raised his hand to hit me.
Uncle Silas had been weird towards me since I came back from France. Whenever we had been alone he would mutter things like, ‘trust no one’, or ‘just because they have green eyes it doesn’t make them safe’.
The ‘secret passage’ was the strangest thing at the back of the garden. He had showed me this hidden gate, with some special release button two days before. The alley, that must have cut across the backs of many of our neighbours’ gardens, led to a small side road. Parked immediately outside the second gate was a black Range Rover, the keys to which were hanging on the back of the gate. It was all very cloak and dagger. I wouldn’t be surprised if the car had some kind of laser gun attached to it like something from James Bond. It was almost laughable.
‘If you need to run, you run. No one knows about this, no one. Don’t look back, don’t take anyone with you, just run if you have to.’ That’s all he said and despite me badgering him for more information, he never said anything else. Had Silas gone delusional? What would I need to run from? But then Mr Curtis had said that someone had tried to kill me by rigging explosives to the coach tyres. But who would want to kill me and why were hundreds of Guardians in charge of my protection? Was any of that even real? The doctors at the hospital, the ones with the grass green eyes, had said a bang on the head could cause hallucinations. It was easier to believe in hallucinations than super strength beings and murderers.
Quinn stirring inside caught my attention through the window but he slept on. I sighed as my eyes shifted to my reflection in the glass.
I was quite unremarkable in many ways. My hair was a rather boring shade of brown, my nose, I always felt, was a bit too big for my face. I was thin, but not in a willowy and graceful way, in fact I was quite short. I had a strange birthmark on the inside of my left elbow; it looked like a small pair of wings. I always wore long sleeved tops to cover it up as much as I could. The only part of my body I liked was my eyes. They were big but what I liked best about them was I could never put a colour to them. Where other people would say they had blue eyes or brown, I could never decide. Some days they looked grey, some they definitely looked blue, some days I’d say with absolute conviction they were green, but the next I was leaning towards hazel, or maybe a bluey green. I loved the uniqueness of my eyes, but that was definitely the only unique thing about me. Which just made what happened that night of the crash even more unbelievable.
Although certainly not unique, I’ve always thought of myself as a bit of a freak, a bit of an outcast. I have never been one of the really cool kids, or really clever or really sporty. I am distinctly average. I think my friends, well my classmates, will look at our class photo, years from now, when they find it covered in dust at the back of the cupboard, and after laughing at their younger selves, they might pick out their friends and laugh at them too. And then their eyes might drift to me, standing second from the left on the third row and they’d say, ‘who was that, what was her name, was it Eve something, Eve Jones that was it.’ Then their eyes would slide away from mine to find a much more interesting memory. As far as my class mates are concerned, I’m just Eve, nice, plain old Eve. But that’s what I want them to think. I would hate them to know any different.
It had become glaringly obvious to me very early on that I was different to the other children. I hated it. I had stopped talking to my friends about my weekends many years ago, when my experiences stood stark apart from theirs. Now I have to pretend that my weekends are normal. I make up tales of shopping, going to the ci
nema, going to London to the theatre. How I long for those tales to be true.
I go to school, get good grades, run for the school cross country team, and read my books and play on my computer whenever I have any spare time. But that is where the similarities end. Where my friends spend the warmer weekends and school holidays, camping with family and riding their bikes through the woods, I have spent most of my spare time learning to shoot a multitude of frightening weapons, to fence with swords so sharp that the slightest slip would be fatal for me or my opponent. I can speak three different languages, fluently. Where my friends are learning how to play the flute or piano after school, I have learnt hand to hand combat and have become a black belt in three different martial art disciplines. Where my friends have just started to learn to drive, I had already accomplished this by the time I was thirteen. Now looking back, it kind of feels to me that I was perhaps in training for something, though I’ve never figured out what.
The only saving grace in my training was Seth was present for all of it, his Dad apparently as keen for him to learn how to kill someone as much as my Dad was for me to learn it. Seth took to the training like a duck to water, like he had been born to fight. The bruises on my body and the way I spent most of my younger years aching, were a clear indication, at least to me, that I wasn’t really built for such brutality.
As I looked out into the dark garden, my heart started pounding angrily. With the coach crash, the training, in trying to make sense of my life, ‘freak’ didn’t even come close to describing me. The Guardians had made me an outcast. With the training they had forced me apart from my friends. But what was worse was I’ve never been told what it was all for. Knowing I was different was one thing, but not knowing why was the ultimate insult.
In the last few days I had seen the Guardians everywhere, parked outside my house, following me to the shops, over the park when I walked Quinn and so many of them at school, all silently watching me, or watching over me. Their very presence was a painful reminder of this other world that I wasn’t allowed to know about, but somehow integral to. It annoyed me so much that they think I’m stupid enough not to notice them. Though I was more annoyed with myself that for the last seventeen years I hadn’t. It struck me now that the grass green eyes was the marker of these Guardians, but there had been so many of them surrounding me, that it had long since become the norm, though clearly not just for me, for everyone.