Sentinel (13 page)

Nicholas watched her unhurried approach, his mouth half open. She was mesmerising. He forgot everything. The pain. The bus. The world. It all fell away around her until there was only the woman; stark and red and impossible.

“I do not fear you, hag,” Sam sputtered.

“Lies!” she bellowed. Glass crunched under her feet as she loomed toward them. “All men fear me. You’re all worms, writhing in pitiful worship.”

“I bow to none but the Trinity themselves! Nicholas, stay away from her. Don’t look at her.”

The woman’s eyes slid from the old man to the boy.

“Nicholas,” she whispered. “Such a noble name. I wonder if you will die with the nobility it suggests?”

“You’ll not touch him, witch,” Sam’s voice barked. Nicholas could barely hear it.

“We have searched too long and hard to give up now,” the woman purred. “How interesting that he was so easily discovered, even after all your efforts.” She winked at Sam. “You’re losing your touch.”

Now she was standing over Nicholas, and he was lost in the depths of her cat-like eyes. Enraptured. Unable to move. She stooped down and cupped his chin in her hand. Her skin was ice cold and he melted into it.

“Just a child,” she murmured quietly, searching his young face. “All this time we have feared you, sought you, and you’re nothing more than a human child.”

“Get away from him!”

Nicholas was unaware of the sound of crunching glass and stomping footsteps behind him. All that existed in his world now was this enchanting creature. He could happily lie here for the rest of his life.

Before he knew what was happening, a dark shape hurtled over him and barrelled into the woman.

Sam and the woman tumbled across the hard metal of the bus ceiling.

Nicholas blinked sluggishly and shook his head.
What was going on?
He turned towards the scuffle and saw two bodies crash together at the front of the bus. The woman in red landed on top of Sam. One of her hands went to his neck and squeezed while the other pressed down on his chest.

“Fool,” she spat. “Nothing will come between me and the boy. Especially not a decrepit old corpse like you.” She turned her nails inward against his chest and the sharp tips sliced through his clothing.

Sam gasped and swung upward with his left hand. There came a bone-crunching thwack as he struck the woman over the head with a heavy object, and she crashed backward. She hit the side of the vehicle, a previously intact window shattering under her weight.

“Nicholas,” Sam called, “here, lad.”

He fumbled with the object that he’d used against his attacker – it was his old-fashioned suitcase. The old man’s hands shook as he struggled with the catches on the side.

Nicholas heaved himself to his feet, but even as he did so the entire vehicle creaked. There was the sound of complaining metal as the battered bus roof weakened under the weight pressing down from above.

“Hurry!” Sam yelled. He flipped open the lid of the case.

Nicholas took a step, but before he could advance any further his path was blocked. The woman stood coiled, as if she were about to pounce. The tussle with Sam had left her breathless and glowing – she had enjoyed it.

“Nicholasss,” she hissed. “You won’t get away. I can smell it on you; in your veins, your skin, your hair. You’re different.”

Nicholas stopped still, bewitched by the murky spirals of her eyes. “Different,” he murmured.

“You feel it,” she hummed. “I see it in you. It’s printed in every fibre of your being.”

“Leave him, she-devil!” Sam’s voice roared.

She ignored the old man. “You’re dangerous,” she whispered. “You’re a threat to the world, Nicholas.”

Nicholas suddenly felt only four years old. A child in an adult’s world.
She knew.
She knew everything that he’d been feeling, all of the strange things that had been happening to him.

BLAM!

A flash of orange lit the inside of the bus and shocked Nicholas out of the woman’s grip. And then he saw her face. It had gone blank, one eyebrow arched upwards in angry surprise. His eyes travelled down her body to where dark crimson flowered on her gown.

“What–?” she murmured.

There was another fiery explosion and the woman’s body convulsed before collapsing in a heap at Nicholas’s feet. Revealed at the front of the bus, blue smoke curling about him, was Sam. He lowered the rifle in his grasp and gave Nicholas a half smile.

“Thought that might shut her up,” he said.

Nicholas simply stared back at him.

“We have to move quickly,” the old man added urgently. “It won’t keep her down for long.”

“It won’t… what?” Nicholas said.

“Find your things, hurry,” Sam urged, already dismantling the rifle and slipping it back into the suitcase.

“O–okay,” Nicholas mumbled.

He tried to forget about the body that lay at his feet, pooling black liquid across the ceiling of the bus. He scraped through the shards of glass and quickly found his backpack. Shouldering it, he hurried to the front of the bus, where he found Sam already had his suitcase.

Sam was bent over the crumpled body of the bus driver.

“S–Sam,” the driver gurgled, his face covered in blood. “I’m… I’m s–sorry…”

A final breath sighed from the gash in his throat and he was gone.

“Malcolm,” Sam said in a hushed tone. “You’re in a better place now.” He pulled the driver’s coat from the wreckage and draped it over the dead man’s form. “May the Trinity bless you.”

He straightened.

“Follow me,” the old man said without looking at Nicholas. “Be careful.”

Nicholas watched as Sam stepped through one of the shattered bus windows and out onto the grassy bank of the ditch. He cast a glance back at the shape of the woman, lying motionless in the darkness, wondering what she had known about him. Then he followed Sam.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Footprints

N
ICHOLAS HAD NEVER BEEN SO COLD
in his life. Or scared. If it hadn’t been for Sam urging him tirelessly on, Nicholas suspected he might have succumbed to the lure of sleep hours ago, despite the hostile climate. His eyelids drooped and every step made his frozen toes ache inside his boots.

Apart from the occasional bursts of encouragement, Sam was quiet again. The older man frowned against the grey weather. The fedora perched on his brow gathered snow and submerged his features in shadow.

Nicholas didn’t know what time it was, but an odd half-light was ebbing into the frosty countryside, picking out the highs and lows of the snow-cloaked landscape. Great expanses of bare terrain huddled under the icy air for what seemed like miles, and the hills resembled the shoulders of great giants who had buried their heads ostrich-like in the ground.

“Can we slow down?” Nicholas asked breathlessly. “I can’t feel my feet anymore.”

“We can’t stop,” Sam replied resolutely. “Our only hope is to place as much land between us and that bus as we can. We need to reach safe ground as soon as possible.”

“Do you think we’ll be attacked again?”

Sam’s unwavering stare betrayed nothing and he was moving mechanically, as if a switch in his brain had been flicked to ‘auto-pilot’. He’d set a brisk, urgent pace that Nicholas, weighed down by his suitcase and backpack, struggled to keep up with.

“We’re not safe out here in the open,” the elderly man mumbled.

“Do you think we’ll get into trouble because of what happened with the bus? Would they arrest us?” Nicholas asked.

“The police!” Sam’s mechanical demeanour stalled momentarily and he uttered a good-natured laugh. “No lad, nothing like that.”

“Then what? What are you afraid of?” Nicholas skipped along as fast as he could. Sam may be in his seventies, but if his stride was anything to go by, he was fitter than anybody Nicholas knew.

Sam didn’t answer. He pushed on through the snow.

“What is it?” Nicholas persisted.

Sam glowered from beneath the brim of his hat and Nicholas could tell that he’d struck a nerve.

“Can we please slow down?”

“No!” Sam answered gruffly, before adding quietly to himself: “We can’t slow down for anything. If that woman reaches us before we get to safe ground we’re done for. At least the snow will cover our tracks.”

“Woman? What woman?”

No reply came. Nicholas detected in the older man the same inner struggle that he’d observed earlier when he’d confronted him about his parents.

“You can’t mean the woman from the bus; you shot her twice, I saw her go down,” Nicholas pressed. Grimly, the boy added: “There was blood everywhere.”

“You have to trust me,” Sam murmured, not looking at him. He scanned the horizon, and the old man reminded Nicholas of a nervous deer who had picked up a dangerous scent, but not yet discovered the whereabouts of the hungry lion.

“Course I trust you,” Nicholas said. “You’ve always been there. I think that woman back there was going to kill me – you stopped her.”

“I merely slowed her down,” Sam grumbled, again in that quiet tone, as if he hoped that Nicholas wouldn’t hear him.

“She was strange,” Nicholas commented. “When I looked into her eyes it felt like the whole world didn’t exist anymore, and I didn’t care.” He looked up at Sam, ignoring the set stoniness of his jaw. “She was... different, wasn’t she? Not normal?”

“Yes,” Sam relented. “You remember I said there are things in this world that are secret. She was one of them.”

“Why did she kill the bus driver?” Nicholas probed. The encounter in the upturned bus had left him with more questions than ever before. He’d seen somebody die right in front of him – he was a witness to a murder. He shivered, and for once it wasn’t because of the weather.

“I don’t know,” Sam said flatly.

“You do. You know things, and you won’t tell me,” Nicholas persisted. “You know things about my parents; about where we’re going; about that woman back there in the bus. And I don’t understand why you won’t tell me anything. You want me to trust you, but–”

“Enough!”

Sam whirled on the boy.

Taken aback by the outburst, Nicholas stared up at the old man. The expression on Sam’s face startled him – his eyes were wide with desperation.

“Please, boy,” Sam appealed softly, “that
thing
back there in the bus is hunting us, and we need to get as far away from it as possible.”

“But... you killed her.”

Sam shook his head. “She won’t stay down,” he said. “I’ve come across things like her before and they never stay down.”

“Was she a...” Now that he had to say the word, Nicholas felt foolish, but there was no other way of putting it. He thought about what he’d gleaned from the
Sentinel Chronicles
, those journal entries that hinted there was something more to this world than he had ever imagined. Sam had always told him stories about monsters. What if they hadn’t been stories?

“Was she a demon?” Nicholas asked.

“Near enough,” Sam said.

“So all that stuff you said on the bus about monsters not being real was just for my benefit, then.”

Nicholas could feel his tenuous grip on reality slipping. Perhaps it was the cold, or the fact that his life had already been turned upside down by his parents, but it felt good to finally have something resembling an answer, no matter how outlandish it was.

“I’m sorry, lad,” Sam said, and his apology sounded genuine. “I really think–”

“What’s a Sentinel?” Nicholas continued. “Do you kill things like that? Stop them?”

Sam didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to.

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

Slowly, Sam nodded. Rather than feeling vindicated, Nicholas suddenly felt ill. There were evil things out there. A whole world he knew nothing about. He’d lived alongside it his entire life and he’d never even noticed it.

“And my parents?”

“No more questions,” Sam said. “Your parents kept these things from you for a reason. The less you know at the moment the better. Trust me, you’re safer that way. You’ll get your answers soon enough. First we need to get to safety.”

Nicholas held the other man’s desperate stare. Sam had kept things from him so far, what made this any different? His shoulders slumped when he realised he really didn’t have a choice in the matter. Finally Nicholas nodded and they started trudging through the snow once more.

When a few moments had passed, Nicholas said: “I never knew you owned a rifle.”

Sam coughed. “Yes, well... The less said about that the better, eh?”

Nicholas grinned and hurried after him.

*

From the outside, the church looked almost pleasant. Soft scatterings of snow had settled snugly in all the right places, affording the hallowed edifice a festive, Christmas card quality.

Inside, however, was a different matter. Many years had slipped by since those with faith enough had worshipped here. If possible it was even colder inside the building than out – the very stones of the church held a chilly charge that had accumulated through the long lonely years. The wind groaned through the empty window frames, humming between the crumpled pages of the hymnbooks.