Sentinel (12 page)

“That she did,” Sam nodded. He took the pendant and stared down at it in silence. He held it almost reverently, Nicholas noticed.

“Do you know what they’re about?” Nicholas asked. “You probably knew them better than me, and I think they were hiding something.”

Sam sat very still for what felt to Nicholas like an eternity, his downturned gaze fixed on the pendant. Finally, the man heaved a great sigh and murmured: “I really couldn’t say, lad.”

His tone was measured and kind.

“Please, Mr Wilkins… Sam,” Nicholas pleaded. “If they were going to give me these things when I turned sixteen they were obviously going to tell me what they had been hiding. If you know anything, I want to know. I need to. They were my parents.”

He could hear the desperation in his voice and it sounded childish, but he didn’t care. Things were happening that he couldn’t understand and Sam was his last hope. If Sam couldn’t help, nobody could.

The old man peered down at the necklace for a moment longer, then passed it back to Nicholas. “It’s a mystery,” he said. “If I could help you, Nicholas, I would. You know that.”

Nicholas’s eyes were suddenly bright with tears. If he could just see what Sam was thinking – he obviously knew something, and he was keeping it from him just as his parents had.

“You know something, I know you do,” he said through gritted teeth.

“I know lots of things, that is true.” Sam inclined a nod. “But alas, nothing that might shed light on those trinkets of yours.”

“I remember you telling me stories when I was younger,” Nicholas continued, though despair was quickly flooding through him. “About monsters and heroes, and how the world used to be before–”

“Fiction, lad. Stories,” Sam said gently. “Fascinating, yes. Joyous escapes from the drudgery of the real world, certainly. But not real, my boy. You can’t put faith in such things.”

“No, they were real.”

“You’re tired, lad. Try to get some sleep,” Sam said. He was resigned now – the energy seemed to have left him once more. “We’ll be there soon.”

Nicholas thrust the objects back into his bag. He wiped hastily at his cheeks and sank down in his seat. Anger and annoyance hammered in his chest. He knew Sam was keeping something from him, and he didn’t understand why. It was too much. His parents had lived a whole life separate from him; that much he understood. It hurt that they’d kept it from him. It hurt that they’d never had the chance to talk to him about it, and now even Sam was refusing to tell him anything. Nicholas hated them all.

Outside, the sky hurled snow to the ground.

Nicholas closed his eyes, but he could still feel Sam’s presence across the table. For the first time, he wondered why Sam was accompanying him on the trip at all. Why had anybody assumed Nicholas required a chaperone to begin with? Surely a fifteen-year-old boy could manage a coach trip alone. Nicholas’s mind probed for an answer, and like the realisation that somebody was following them, an answer suddenly rang through as clear as a bell.

They’re protecting me.

Like so many other recent discoveries, the realisation felt heavy with truth. His parents had been protecting him from whatever other life they were leading; his mother had looked sad and scared when she had left him that final morning; Sam knew his godmother, but wouldn’t reveal anything about her, just as he knew what the raven pendant meant. All of them –
all of them
– were keeping things from him, and it was all to protect him. But why? And from what?

With these thoughts occupying his mind, Nicholas slithered into a fitful slumber.

*

There were three of them and they were whispering.

About him.

He strained to hear, but the whispers were like the wind. They rose and fell. He couldn’t grasp their meaning. He didn’t know them. But they were murmuring about him. And they knew everything about him. They knew where he was going. What he meant. What he was.

They knew his purpose.

Nicholas awoke with a start. He gripped the back of the bus seat, the fog of the dream lingering. Then everything came back into focus.

Relaxing, he collapsed back into the seat.

“Bad dream?”

Nicholas looked across at Sam and nodded. “It felt so real. They were whispering about me.”

Sam moved in his seat, making the worn leather creak under his weight – it was almost as if he had gone to sit suddenly upright but caught himself at the last moment. In his confused state, Nicholas didn’t notice.

“Who? Who was whispering about you?” Sam asked. He looked worried, but for once Nicholas didn’t pick up on the tightness in his chaperone’s tone.

“The trees,” Nicholas said. “Three trees, all huddled together like... women. And they were talking about me. They knew me.”

A rumour of a smile crept onto Sam’s lips, and the leather seat creaked again as he relaxed back into it. “How unusual,” he remarked. “That head of yours is quite the mystery.”

Nicholas looked out of the window and was surprised to find that snow was flurrying heavily now. A pallid mantle had settled upon the world, making it appear strange in the gloomy afternoon half-light. Time seemed to linger confused between night and day.

“Snow,” the boy murmured. “Again.”

“Indeed,” Sam commented. “It seems we’re to be denied yet another summer.”

“Two weeks ago it was thirty degrees,” Nicholas said. “We all went to the park for a picnic… I got sunburnt.”

Sam chuckled, then grew serious. “The road is beginning to ice over,” he said. “I would have advised the driver to stop, but we don’t have much further to go.”

Nicholas nodded. Then, inexplicably, that dull, prickling pain returned in his stomach.

“Are you alright, lad? You’ve gone dreadful pale again.”

“I– I don’t feel right,” Nicholas said. A swell of nausea coursed through him. His vision darkened and he put a hand to his forehead. His skin was clammy and cold. He saw red. The hot red of the bus’s taillights on the road. And another red. Darker and glittering.

Something’s wrong.

“You don’t look right, do you want water?” Sam offered.

“I– I think we need to stop the bus,” Nicholas said, his vision swimming alarmingly. “There’s something–”

BAM!

Before Nicholas could finish the thought, a horrendous explosion rent the air. The bus lurched on the icy road.

Nicholas and Sam were thrown against their seats.

“What’s going on?” Nicholas cried.

“It sounds like one of the tyres has blown,” Sam said.

The bus careered across the road like an enraged bull. The driver pumped the pedals and spun the steering wheel, but the vehicle skated precariously over the road and he could do nothing to bring it under control.

As the bus pitched over a bump, Nicholas was thrown against the window so hard that the breath was knocked from him.

“He... he can’t stop it,” Nicholas gasped, clutching at the back of the seat. The jerky motions tossed him about, and the seat’s metal frame jabbed him painfully as he was thrown repeatedly against it. The vehicle hit another bump and Nicholas’s bags tumbled into the aisle.

“Hold on!” Sam yelled.

Nicholas watched the driver frantically playing with the bus’s gears, but still they sped across the frozen road.

“Come on, you clapped out thing,” the driver bellowed.

He stopped and squinted, as if he’d spotted something on the road.
What is it?
Nicholas thought uneasily. He saw the driver pumping at the brakes again, but the bus ploughed onwards. The driver said something under his breath, then jerked the steering wheel to the right. The bus’s wheels turned on the road but the vehicle failed to change direction, merely skating across the ice.

“What’s going on?” Nicholas exclaimed.

“I don’t know,” Sam replied. “Just hold on!”

Nicholas craned over the seats, attempting to see whatever it was that the driver had seen.

Something was caught in the headlights. Somebody standing in the middle of the road.

It was a woman and she was smiling.

At the last possible moment, she stepped out of the bus’s path, her crimson gown billowing behind her. And there, ahead, was a sharp bend in the road.

Sam squinted through the windscreen and his face hardened.

“Get down, boy!” he yelled. “Down!”

Nicholas didn’t waste time asking questions. He threw himself down. Under the table he saw Sam do the same.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

The bus pummelled into the bend in the road, hitting the embankment at the roadside and bucking alarmingly upwards. The front of the vehicle ricocheted up into the air, its back wheels still sliding on the icy road. Then with a THUMP the back wheels struck the grassy bank and the bus catapulted forwards.

There was a moment of stillness as the vehicle fell through the air.

Then- CRUNCH. The bus crashed down into the ditch at the roadside. It crumpled on impact, rocking onto its side and rolling over in the wide, muddy ditch. Finally it came to a standstill.

There was blackness. And throbbing pain.

Nicholas lay still. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t see. All he knew was that his whole body was suddenly heavy. Aching. His clothes pinned him down.

There came a rasping breath nearby, followed quickly by a cough.

Nicholas opened his eyes. It took him a moment to realise where he was, his surroundings had changed so much. Up on the ceiling were rows of crumpled bus seats and tables, and all around him were splinters of glass. Except it wasn’t the ceiling of the bus above him; it was the floor. The bus had landed upside down and he was lying on the hard metal of the roof.

The cough came again and Nicholas turned his head. Sam lay a few feet away. The old man looked as beaten up as Nicholas felt – his eyes were closed and there was an angry red slash on his cheek. But he was alive.

“Sam,” Nicholas managed to rasp.

He could practically see the old man’s mind willing himself to move. Finally, Sam’s eyelids trembled open and he struggled to focus groggily on him.

“Nicholas,” Sam said, and coughed again. “You... you alright?”

“Been better,” Nicholas replied. He tried to move, but his muscles screamed at him to stop. He lay there motionless.

“Agreed. Just try–” Sam’s head twitched to one side. “Shhh.”

Nicholas held his breath. Then he heard it too – very softly, but with growing clarity. The patter of soft footfalls.

Then a new sound tore into the silence – that of ripping, screeching metal. It made Nicholas’s teeth knock against one another.

The bus shuddered and a blast of cold air hit him in the face. The boy squinted down to the front of the bus where the noise seemed to have originated. He frowned. The door had been ripped from its frame. There was another whisper of hushed movement and a silhouette appeared in the doorway.

Somebody’s here to help us!

The stranger swept into the crumpled bus.

It was the outline of a woman. Mountainous curls of soft hair framed the silhouetted head, snake-like in the dim light. Nicholas watched the newcomer as she peered at the bus driver’s seat above. He could just make out the obscure form of a slumped body, held in place upside down by the seatbelt.

A voice hissed.

“Sentinel pig.”

A shiver ran through him, as if icy fingers had caressed his spine. That wasn’t the voice of a rescuer. Not any rescuer he’d choose to come to his aid, anyhow. He watched as the woman reached for the slumped body in the driving seat and pulled it by the throat into the aisle.

“Please,” a choked voice cried. It was the bus driver. “Please... Help me.”

“Help you?” a voice spat in reply, and the curls were tossed back to release a scathing laugh. “Help you?”

“Please... please...”

The face of the silhouetted woman moved closer to that of the man in her grasp so that they were almost touching. Nicholas saw her raise another hand to the man’s face and caress his cheek.

Then she tore his throat out.

“NO!” Nicholas cried.

The woman spun and dropped the lifeless body.

Sunlight finally broke through the clouds, illuminating her face.

Nicholas gasped. He couldn’t help it. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Pearly skin shimmered in the light, her proud countenance framed by ruby curls. Her eyes sparkled like the diamonds in her crimson dress.

Nicholas felt like he’d been punched in the gut. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.

“There,” the woman purred, taking measured steps into the bus. “There you are.”

“Stay back!” Sam warned, though his voice contained none of the authority he had surely intended it to.

The woman smiled and her loveliness increased tenfold. “Do you fear me?” she teased, peering down her nose at him. “Am I feared by those who seek my demise?”