The Sentinel Read Online Free PDF Page B

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