The Sentry

by Lyssa Morasey

  I mumbled a quick prayer—“Please, Nixa, don’t let me die”—and then Asreil blew his whistle, transforming the quiet stretch of desert into a bloodbath with one little puff of air.

  Danger came at me from all sides. A shifter girl lunged past me, brandishing her blade, in pursuit of her target, almost taking my nose off along the way. Someone else, running past me from behind, slammed hard into my leg, and it was all I could do to keep my balance and not face-plant in the middle of a wild stampede. Some desperate idiot decided to throw his dagger at someone on the other side of me; I ducked out of the way to keep it from implanting itself in my skull. Three near-deaths, one after the other.

  A blade slashed at my arm, tearing through my skin like butter. Red-hot pain shot up my body—I would have keeled over from the strength of it if not for Cass’s pendant, which checked the pain almost instantly.

  I whipped around to face my attacker, my own blade at the ready. She was blonde, with emerald-green eyes and a mole on her neck and a thin cut framing her cheekbone. Her mouth was curled into a semi-feral snarl.

  It was my girl.

  She swiped at me again; I blocked the blow with my dagger, hearing the ringing clang of metal as the blades scraped together. The girl staggered back from the force, and I leapt at her and yanked her forward with her shirt balled up in my hand. Another shifter running by knocked into my shoulder, hard, but I barely felt it. All I felt was the drumming of my heart and the heat of Cass’s pendant searing my skin.

  The girl grit her teeth, struggling to free herself from my grip with grunts and curses. I held her still and slammed my dagger’s hilt into the side of her head as hard as I could. She fell forward into my arms, knocked instantly unconscious.

  I adjusted my grip on the dagger, ready for its blade now. Shifters streamed past us like minnows headed downstream, giving us only the thinnest of berths. Looking around, I saw several daggers already thrust into the air, and several of the observation towers vacated as coaches flew down to check out the kills. Vultures, some of them in the literal sense.

  I snuck my blade under the girl’s shirt and sliced through the skin between her ribs, thrusting up towards her heart. Her eyes were still open—I hadn’t ever seen eyes as green as hers before, even on a shifter.

  Her body began to convulse, thrashing wildly in my arms so that I could barely hold onto her. Blood spilled over my fingers, warm and thick. I pulled out the dagger, and blood gushed from the wound, seeping out from under her shirt and covering my entire lower arm.

  I put the blade to her throat and slit it, digging into the vital arteries there. Even more blood oozed from between her lips, and her eyes went dull entirely. The spasms stopped, and the body went still.

  I couldn’t stand to look at her for more than a moment. I let the body fall from my arms, landing at my feet to be kicked and stepped on by the shifters fighting for their lives all around us.

  I raised my dagger above my head, and the nearest coach swooped down from his tower to land bent over the girl’s body. He checked for pulse and breath, then stood with a clipboard in hand and congratulated me on becoming a Sentry. “In which sector would you like to serve?”

  Even though I’d known the answer to that question for years, it was a full minute before I had the voice to respond.

  ❄❄

  The five hundred and twelve of us left were marched back inside the Sonoran building to be cleaned up. A Sentry massaged antiseptic cream into my blade wound, which had begun to hurt again as soon as Cass’s pendant had cooled, assuring me that it would heal fine. Most of the shifters around me were in worse condition; several were limping, and one had a gaping leg wound that would probably need to be treated by Nixan healers.

  After all our collective blood had been washed off, we were taken into a long hall in the building’s left wing where Sentries waited at tables with tattoo guns. We were divided into lines, and the Sentries immediately got to work etching Sentry marks into everyone’s right forearm.

  I scanned the hall for Delphi, but his almost-faedra eyes and elvish grin were nowhere to be found. I tried not to worry; I couldn’t see most of the remaining shifters from my place in line.

  Cass’s pendant had gone entirely cold by this point, which made getting my tattoo much more painful than the dagger wound. It was all I could do to keep my arm still while the gun needle tore at it, driving its signature blue ink deep into my skin. The pain allowed me to forget about Delphi, at least for a moment.

  I looked for him again in our next location: the big gym we were brought into on our first night in the Sonoran building. The chairs and screen were gone, but Caphian had returned, along with a handcuffed girl he held by the elbow. Her dark hair reached all the way down to her waist, and her slender figure was wrapped in a sun-patterned turquoise drape. She was one of the jnani telepaths, taken from India years ago to maintain the Sentry mind-link.

  I still couldn’t find Delphi. I craned my neck and stood on tiptoe, wishing I were taller than five-three, but I couldn’t pick him out from amongst the sea of shifter heads.

  “Spread out some more,” Caphian directed, gesturing with his free hand. “You’ll need space to lie down.” The crowd thinned as shifters retreated into the open corners of the gym; I continued my search fruitlessly. Delphi, where the hell are you?

  “Hey.” Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to find the girl who’d slept next to me in the dorm—Mira, she was called. She had a nasty cut running across her forehead, but other than that she looked okay.

  “Congratulations,” I said, not knowing what she wanted from me. “We made it.”

  “Yeah.” She glanced down at her feet. “You killed Soraia.”

  “Oh.” My thoughts flashed back to the girl, her bright green eyes and lifeless body. It was worse with a name attached. “Were you friends?” I asked quietly.

  She shook her head, blushing. “No, no—not really. I just…knew her. We grew up together.”

  What does she want me to say? “I had to. It wasn’t really a choice, I mean. She would’ve killed me.”

  “To complete your initiation as Nixan Sentries,” Caphian said from up front, “you will need to pledge your allegiance and be joined to our mind-link. Laena will put you to sleep, and when you wake your minds will be connected to those of every Sentry in the Western Province.”

  “No, I know,” Mira said. She fingered her hair, her eyes flitting across the gym nervously. “I, um…I was paired with your friend.”

  The blood froze in my veins. “Who?”

  “You know, the one you always hung out with at night. The one I kept having to tell to shut up because he was laughing too loud.”

  “Repeat these words after me,” Caphian directed. “I pledge my life, loyalty, and honor to King Aknes, the Loraveires, and the Nixans of the Western Province. I give my soul to the goddess Nixa and swear to uphold the laws of her Trinity. I swear to defend her from all who might deny or defile her, and to aid in the Nixans’ holy mission to share her teachings with every Novan.”

  His pledge was echoed around the room, but I couldn’t bring myself to join in. Delphi. My knees gave out underneath me, and I collapsed onto the gym floor.

  “Are you okay?” Mira knelt down beside me. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have told you like that.”

  “Now lie back,” Caphian said. “Unless you want to fall asleep on your feet.”

  “He came at me first,” Mira said. “Went right for my throat. I was just defending myself.”

  I could barely hear her. My ears were ringing, and everything was spinning like it was after he kissed me. Oh, Nixa, no. Please no.

  I saw him then, right in front of me. Strutting over with his hands in his pockets, leaning over me smugly. “Guess I won’t be coming to New Fauske after all,” he said.

  My eyes closed against their will, and I fell back against the floor, asleep before my head hit the ground.

  3 October: Westrey

  I raise my eye
brows, leaning back until I’m a safe distance away from Keira’s face. “You want to know more about me?”

  “Yeah.” Keira gives me a lopsided smile. “I want to know what your life was like before you had a shifter stuck to your arm. You know—pretty girls, the sister we’re running off to save, the reason your Warden buddies call you Doorstop….”

  “Doorstep, actually,” I correct her. “And it’s a really stupid reason.”

  “What’s the really stupid reason?”

  I lower my shoulders, deciding to go ahead and humor her. “Well,” I say, “like I said, me and Freya don’t know who our parents are, which means they must’ve been Wardens who didn’t take their Warden’s vows. Deserters.”

  “That’s allowed?”

  “Sort of.” I sigh. “It’s very rare, but you’re allowed to refuse the vows and go off into the Sen world instead. The only condition is that if you ever have kids, you have to bring them back to the Wardens to be raised. And deserters usually don’t want to be seen again by the Wardens they left, so they leave their kids outside a bunker in a basket or something.”

  “Ah.” Keira nods understandingly. “So you were a doorstep baby.”

  “Basically,” I say. “That’s just what they call all deserters’ kids. It’s not exactly a compliment.”

  “I’d imagine not,” Keira says, giving me a somewhat rueful smirk. She leans forward again. “So, is there anything else interesting that’s happened in your life? Embarrassing Sen school stories, maybe?”

  “No.”

  She narrows her eyes interrogatively. “You have to have embarrassing Sen school stories,” she insists.

  “Not any that I want to share with you, I don’t.” I lift my chin to her. “It’s your turn now. Tell me about yourself.” I am curious about how she grew up, at least a little.

  Keira sighs, tilting her head to the side. “Well, I was born in Skalten, the capital of Sector Three—it’s near Minneapolis, sort of. I never went to school, but my foster parents taught me to read and write and everything. I lived with them until I was seven, when my eyes turned.”

  “Any siblings?”

  She shrugs. “No idea. Shifters are supposed to have as few links as possible to other shifters, so foster parents aren’t allowed to raise more than one kid at a time. If I had a twin like you, we would’ve been raised apart.”

  “Shit,” I say.

  “Anyway, once my eyes turned, I was shipped off to New Fauske to work in Fenris’s castle. I’ve never seen my foster parents since. End of story.”

  “What, so you lived in the castle until the Sentry trials?”

  “Yeah.” She gives a small, almost imperceptible shudder.

  “What were they like?” I prompt her. “The trials, I mean.” The Wardens know next to nothing about the Sentries’ centuries-old initiation process.

  “Hard,” she says tersely. “Less than half of us made it to become Sentries.”

  “All the other shifters were…what, killed?”

  “Yep.” She looks away. “Each of us had to kill another shifter on the last day of the trials, to prove that we could if we had to.” She picks at her nails. “I had a friend there who was killed that day. I knew the girl that killed him, too.”

  “That’s rough,” I say. “Really rough.” She nods, clearly not wanting to elaborate.

  But I’m not finished with her yet. “Have you had to kill anyone since then?”

  She closes her eyes. “This isn’t exactly my favorite thing to talk about, you know.”

  “So you have, then.”

  “Only once.” Keira opens her eyes again, but keeps them averted from mine. “It was right after the Massacre. There was a big Shade camp revolt, and Caphian took a bunch of the new Sentries with him to help put it down. I—well, I shot at a bunch of people. There wasn’t really another option; the Nixans don’t have much use for a Sentry who won’t kill anyone.” Her voice goes low. “We were always told that we were fighting to save Novans from eternal damnation, but I never really understood how putting a bullet through someone’s head was supposed to save them from anything.”

  I frown at Keira, sizing her up. I’ve always thought of the Sentries as Nixan henchmen, loyally executing the will of the dukes and king. But hearing Keira hash out her life like that—taken from her parents when she was seven, locked away and made to work in a castle, then fight for her life at the Sentry trials and beyond, and be forced into killing—makes me wonder if the Sentries are really Nixan lackeys or Nixan slaves.

  Freya is the only family I’ve ever had, and the shifters took her away from me. I’ve always blamed them as much as the Nixans for what happened to her. But maybe I haven’t been seeing the whole picture.

  “What are you looking at me like that for?” Keira demands.

  “I think I’m starting to see why you’d want Fenris dead,” I tell her. “The Nixans have screwed over the Sentries as much as they’ve screwed over the Wardens.”

  Keira opens her mouth to reply, but she falters, her eyes flitting suddenly to something over my shoulder. I turn around to find that a trio of people has slunk into the room behind us, silent as snakes.

  “A shifter and a Warden shacked up in the mountains, discussing the death of Duke Fenris?” one of them says. “That sure isn’t something you see every day. Mind if we join in?”

  3 October: Keira

  Three flawless-looking men and women stand against the cabin wall, brows raised and eyes twinkling. I hadn’t even heard them come in. Their hair is raven-black, their skin a few shades darker than Wes’s: using the Novan version of racial profiling, I determine that they must be vamps, dusties, or Shades with dyed hair. When one of the girls smiles, revealing a pair of razor-sharp upper canines, I quickly decide that my first guess was correct.

  My pendant grows warm; I can feel adrenaline pulsing through my body. Vamps are bad news—they’re stronger and faster than anything I can shift into, and their bites are more venomous than any snake’s. They drink your blood, like vampires in Sen stories, but only after they’ve stopped your heart. They’re the Wardens’ allies, but the conversations I overheard in the Boston bunker made it clear that vamp-Warden relations are about as sunshine and rainbows as Shade-Nixan relations. So, basically, we’re screwed.

  I stand, the form chain clanking against the floor. The smiling vamp girl laughs. “The Warden chained his shifter to a table,” she says. “It doesn’t look like we’re dealing with Einstein here.”

  “The chain keeps her from shifting,” Wes growls. “What are you doing here? This is way past the guard stations.”

  “We live out here,” the vamp says, creeping closer. Her companions follow, a short step behind. “Not everybody likes to play by your rules, you know. Your people are assholes; they try to tell us what to do, and they give us no say in it at all.” She lifts a shoulder. “Last I heard, this country was a democracy.”

  “Funny,” Wes mutters.

  “Not really,” the one boy vamp says. He’s tall and dark, with guyliner and bulging arms.

  “Anyway,” the first vamp says, “we just stopped by for a chat, and maybe a little bite to eat. It’s not often we find Wardens or Sentries creeping around the no-fly zone. Finding both at the same time’s even rarer.” She licks her lips, her eyes flitting between the two of us excitedly. “We’re not supposed to touch Wardens, of course, but I figure you’re fair game if you’re all the way out here.”

  “They’ll make a nice treat,” the other girl says behind her, sweeping back her bangs. “I haven’t fed on a Novan in years.”

  Wes’s arms burst into flame, all the way up to his shoulders. He pulls his fire-gun from his belt. “You can’t touch me,” he says. “You’re not immune to fire, are you? Or bullets?” He fires the gun into the midst of the vamps; a millisecond later and they’ve all leapt aside, allowing the bullet to fly between them and through a window instead.

  “Smart,” I say to Wes.

  The vamps share
a look, amused. “That was cute,” the girl in front says. “I think I’ll start with your pet shifter, though.” Of course. She steps up to me and grabs me by the shoulders. Her hands, complete with sharpened fake nails, look dainty and fragile, but I feel their strength firmly holding me in place. I don’t even try to resist. She winks at me, almost seductively. I bite back the urge to spit in her face.

  She grabs my arm and runs a nail down its underside, slicing open the skin all the way down to my Sentry mark. I bite my tongue to keep from crying out until Cass’s pendant eases the pain. The vamp lifts my arm to her nose and sniffs at the blood, her eyes brightening.

  Her other hand leaves my shoulder and traces its way across my collarbone, wrapping finally around my pendant. I tense; the vamp notices, and smiles. “Pretty necklace,” she says. “Mind if I take it?” And with one firm yank, she snaps it clean off my neck.

  “Eeeeeep!” A high-pitched wail cries out from behind me, the wail of an aura detector; the vamps’ heads snap up in tandem, and Wes unleashes a wild volley of fireballs and bullets that sends the girl with bangs flying out the door. The hair of my pendant thief catches fire—she screeches and drops to the ground to smother it. In one fluid motion, I shift into a kite and shake off the form chain, fly upside-down over the table with a couple of wing beats, and land in human form beside Wes’s backpack as the chain clatters to the ground. I pull Ferignis by the hilt from the backpack and rip off its sheath.

  The remaining girl vamp, standing again, narrows her eyes; the boy, who has pinned Wes to the wall, stiffens and stares. Wes frees himself with a well-placed crotch kick and a fireball; then, realizing the cause of the vamps’ distraction, he turns to me and gapes stupidly.

  “So you can shift, Sentry,” the girl vamp says, looking wary now. Good.