Background – Susan Foster's series is set in the "near" future of about 150 – 
200 years after 1997. Created in the early 21st Century the GDP gradually 
eroded the civil rights of empaths until they were little more than slaves, 
whilst indoctrination Sentinels that they were some sort of superior being. 
In the story below I focussed on areas left ambiguous (deliberately?) by 
Susan and her co-writers Maedoc, Jael Lyn, etc. I would suggest reading 
Susan's stories in the following order – GDP series, Learning Curve series, 
Mirror series (written with Maedoc) and Dark Guides series. This will help 
you to more fully understand what I have been trying to do. Finally, you will 
notice that this story peters out into a series of scene snapshots, as I 
desperately tried to get down as many different plot ideas as I could before 
I lost them…

DISCLAIMER: Sandburg, Jim, etc, all belong to Pet Fly Productions; Stargate 
SG1 to Gekko, The District to a bunch of Americans I don't know, so no 
money being made, yada, yada, yada…

CREDITS: This story is set in the GDP universe and is my 2nd ever Sentinel 
fan-fic, bringing together various of the weird things that float round my 
cranium (mainly cos they ganged up on me and wouldn't go away). Dan 
Slater, Dr Claydove, Hunter & Sarah etc, are all characters of Susan Foster, 
and it is advised to read her stories first (on Susan Foster's Sentinel Fan 
Fiction page), else this one will make no sense! It runs parallel to the 
current GDP stories and is in no way intended to infringe upon that story 
arc – I was just so impressed by the excellence of the series that the Plot 
Bunny from Hell wouldn't leave me alone! NB – In this story Dr Daniel 
Jackson of the SGC is an empathy who managed to hide his ability. THIS 
HAS NOT BEEN BETA'D ALL GAFFES ARE MINE     

MEDICAL NOTE: There are four types of malaria, 2 nasty, 2 "bearable". 
Plasmodium Vivax is one of the latter. If you're a writer like me, it's 
something useful that you give your character to make him/her vulnerable 
but not unable to function. Other favourites are migraine (Ezra Standish) 
dyslexia (Vin Tanner) plastic bones (Miles Vorkosigan) and one or both of 
the LESSER forms of fibromyalga – fibrosis and/or fibrositis (me). 

SUMMARY/RATING: PG13 for (non-graphic) sexual assault, general 
unpleasantness and language. I'm a Brit, so the spelling and grammar is 
English, but I've tried to Americanize the lingua franca. Italics in brackets 
are thoughts. Grammatical note: in English, Blessed is pronounced Blesst, 
in order to "sound" the second e, as in "Bless – ed" you add an accent to 
the "e": é. In Britain the head of a University is a Chancellor, not Dean, but 
I have used the American title. I know there are only 8 Ivy League 
universities, but for the purpose of this AU, there are nine, including 
Rainier. 
 NB to American readers  – I DO NOT agree with nor subscribe to 
"Political Correctness"….Um, that's all folks!  

BEAR NECESSITIES

Chapter I

Blair flapped his arms vigorously until he caught sight of himself in a 
medieval bevelled mirror and realised he looked like a startled chicken, but 
damn, it was cold! He would have to meet Jim on the steps of Rainier – if his 
Sentinel came near enough to "Mr Sandburg's" office (a.k.a. Storage Room 
3) to register the chill factor in here he would go into full Blessed Protector 
and Mother Hen from Hell mode, and Blair decided he really didn't want the 
hassle, so he grabbed his coat and faithful backpack and dashed out. If 
anyone had once told him that he would come to have a grain of trust, nay, 
a modicum of respect, for anyone in the GDP, he would have burnt them 
with the acid of his bitter laughter, but his innate compassion even towards 
relative strangers kicked in at the oddest times. Despite it's massive 
unpopularity and the personal risks to himself, Dr Claydove had at least 
begun to swing some major operational house-cleaning into action at the 
GDP, helped along by people like Dan Slater and of course Senior Sentinel 
Prime Detective James Ellison (say that three times fast after one too 
many…). The GDP personnel on campus now called "Pet Barnes" Mr 
Sandburg. Who'd'a thunk it?

Blair had no doubt the lack of heating to his "office" whilst the rest of the 
building toasted nicely was deliberate. Despite the removal of students like 
Ian Tipp, who had tried to hound him out of Rainier, and incidents like Jack 
Wilde, who had killed a student, poor Jerry Carver, in the mistaken belief 
he was Blair, there remained diehards both at Rainier and in the GDP who 
refused to believe that Guides weren't best kept the empathic equivalent of 
"barefoot and pregnant", such as Dr Jensen may-she-rot-in-hell for one. 
Only the knowledge that the vast majority of those at Rainier welcomed him 
made Blair feel proud. He shivered again as he moved, but if he ran to Jim, 
Simon, Dan Slater or Dr Claydove every time he suffered some minor irritant 
such as this, what kind of wussy would that make him? 

Besides, Blair had serious concerns about Dean Hammond's health. True, 
they'd never gotten on that well even before his empathy had been 
discovered, but the woman was now petrified of him. The entire Ellison clan 
– wealthy, influential people all - openly regarded Blair Sandburg as some 
sort of demi-god for bringing about the reconciliation, albeit tentative, 
between William Ellison and his eldest (legitimate, anyway) son, big bad 
Jim, and William Ellison had gone to bat for his son's Guide in a, like, major 
way. Since William Ellison was about ten times richer than that 20th Century 
computer guy Gates, was CEO/owner of around 35 different companies, 
owned, oh, about half the planet's real estate and still had several billion 
dollars in "liquid assets" – i.e., cold hard cash – he tended to be someone 
that was listened to.

The news that Blair Sandburg was the only person, besides his sons, that 
William Ellison had an "open house" policy for had gone along that invisible 
grapevine called gossip with the speed of greased lightning. Over in the 
other courtyard construction workers hammered on the first of the two new 
William Ellison endowed faculty buildings. Ellison was a master manipulator 
– he knew when to use the velvet glove or the iron fist, and he knew how 
important funding was to universities. Rainier would continue to have a very 
rich, very powerful ally – as long Blair Sandburg was happy. 

Blair's acceptance had been rocky at first, since Guides were not usually 
accepted by a Sentinel's family, but William's younger brother, George 
Ellison, a stocky, reserved man, had shocked everyone by firmly slapping 
down his snobbish wife, Alison and his spoiled son, Stanley Ellison, in a 
manner worthy of William himself. William gained a new respect for the 
brother he always thought of as hen-pecked and George privately admitted 
to Blair how happy he was that finally, after so long, William was releasing 
the guilt he felt over the death of their mutual brother, William's twin, the 
original Jimmy, a Sentinel who had died of a zone out aged ten.

The New Improved "mellower" William Ellison had also been much 
appreciated by the wider "Ellison" clan, and the young anthropologist found 
himself treated with courtesy by such powerful and wealthy luminaries as 
Senator Eleanor Ellison-Strasbourg, William's sister, Professor Emeritus 
Tiberias Ellison, his paternal first cousin, and other members of the families 
comprising the clan, all of whom were showing a level of interest in Rainier 
University that was rapidly turning the Dean into a nervous wreck. She went 
white every time she saw Blair and even though he was no Sentinel, the 
young man swore he could hear her heartbeat triple. The woman was going 
to go down with a stress-induced coronary or aneurysm if she kept it up; 
just the sight of Jim Ellison's grim (okay, savagely scowling) face was 
enough to have her hyperventilating.              

"Ooomph!!" Came simultaneously from two mouths as Blair's precipitous 
descent down the stairs had him colliding into someone much larger, with 
more padding. 

Staggering back, his stomach twisted as he took in the two GDP security 
guards for this particular campus building – Oates and McNeil. Ross McNeil, 
mid-twenties like Sandburg and fairly new to the GDP, had accepted Dr. 
Claydove's "New World Order: Guides Are Human Too" directive with little 
difficulty, since he was already friendly with Guards Gibb and Knight and 
GDP Lt Harris, who were among the small but growing band of "New GDP" 
personnel known as the "Good Guards". Oates, on the other hand, big, run 
to fat and near retirement age, was a lot less open-minded, akin to Gross, 
Mason and the loathsome Dr Amy Jenson. 

Since Blair's Karma was running true to form, it was Oates prodigious belly 
that he'd collided with. Blair felt his own heart-rate shoot up and his knees 
twitch in the involuntary kneeling reflex, both of which he ferociously 
clamped down on as he felt the Dark Guide surge suddenly to the fore. The 
Dark Guide: sarcastic, sardonic, biting, and oh, so homicidal, was just the 
sort of propaganda needed to feed the excitable imaginations of idiots like 
Oates, who believed Guides were an inherently dangerous sub-species that 
needed to be controlled like animals, rather than humans who, just like the 
"revered" Sentinels, were born with genetic advantages. The only 
difference between Guides and Sentinels were the form of their genetic 
abilities, like "the difference between yellow Labradors and chocolate 
coloured ones" as one GLA – Guide Liberation Army - leaflet had put it.

"Is your ass on fire, Sandburg?" Oates growled threateningly, bracing his 
shoulders and puffing his chest in an intimidating stance that might have 
worked had it not also pushed out his overhanging belly, making him look 
like one of those frogs in biology class when the kids held it up so it's 
spindly legs dangled below the protruding stomach.

Battering his smirk into po-faced submission, Blair said politely, "No sir, I 
didn't see you Guard Oates. I have to meet Jim."

Oates eyes' narrowed piggily at the familiar pronoun rather than the more 
formal, "my Sentinel". "Your Sentinel can't find his way up two floors to 
your little den, Sandburg?" He sneered.

"The heating in my office doesn't work." 

It was quietly said, but McNeil and, surprisingly, Oates, proved very quick on 
the uptake. Paling, both stepped aside to let the young man pass. It didn't 
take rocket science to realise what would have happened if Senior Dark 
Sentinel Prime Ellison had strolled through several toasty-warm corridors 
only to find his Guide in the icebox that was Storage Room 3. Major Sentinel 
Hissy Fit, followed by a psychotic determination to get hold of those 
responsible for the malicious prank on the Anthropology Teaching Fellow 
who sped away from them like a chemically-enhanced hare towards the 
main foyer.

McNeil promptly decided to locate the culprits himself and deliver some 
firm chastisement. After the murder of football student Jerry Carver by ex-
GDP campus security guard Jack Wilde who was trying to kill Blair, 
Sandburg's popularity had gone through the roof, making the GDP hugely 
unpopular apart from those few, like Gibbs and Dan Slater, who were 
recognised as pro-Blair. Shortly after that, two more GDP guards killed Dr 
Welland and attempted to murder Ellison, Sandburg and several other 
archaeology students because Sandburg discovered the Temple of Guides at 
Croxley Meadows, just East of Seattle.

In the process of being fully excavated, the site was now repeatedly proving 
what the would-be murderers already knew - that the GDP assertion of 
Guide-inferiority was a crock of bull excrement. Somehow the find had been 
leaked onto the Internet and national news channels like CNN, thwarting the 
GDP's attempts to bury it; also somehow leaked were more-accurate-than-
not details of how the two GDP guards had killed Welland then tried to blow 
up the entire temple site with C4 whilst Ellison and Sandburg were in it. 
McNeill thought he saw Jack Kelso's subtle manoeuvring there. Whatever, 
the websites and any news story about the Croxley site received millions of 
hits a day and even the most obtuse viewer could see the difference 
between what the archaeological excavations were revealing and the 
complete crock that was official GDP doctrine. Several high-ranking 
members of the organisation had been caught flat-footed on camera when 
reporters obviously well researched had begun to ask all manner of awkward 
questions.     

Above all that, Ross McNeil's hacking abilities had managed to get some of 
the more "sensitive" information on Sandburg, and suffering even half the 
torture and abuse the young man had whilst in the GDP's "corrections 
facility" would have left him well within his rights to let the GDP and 
anyone associated with it swing in the wind. Instead of which, Sandburg was 
making the effort to head his Sentinel off at the pass. If Ross McNeil had 
anything to do with it, these malicious, spiteful pranks that the Guide had 
still been experiencing over the past few weeks were going to stop – now.

Blair burst through the main doors of Rainier's central building, almost 
tumbling down the steps again, but (thank-you, God) Jim hadn't yet arrived. 
Fortunately Oates and McNeil hadn't needed to have it spelled out for them, 
and Sandburg had seen something almost like, admiration, in the younger 
guard's eyes…

"Hey, Teach, you okay?"

Blair turned at the concerned voice to find himself facing Alan Fraser, 
Captain of the Football Team, and several of the other players, all of whom 
were looking at him with worry. "Nah, no problem, just waiting for Jim. The 
game's at eight, right?"
As usual with Blair's obfuscation tactics, the distraction worked, and the 
players immediately surrounded him and began to chatter about how they 
were going to paste the other team. Blair was grateful, for Cascade was 
having one of those "crisp, clear autumn days" that poets waxed lyrical 
about whilst buried in some 15th Century tavern in front of a blazing fire 
with a plump barmaid and lots of ale. The wind chill factor had to be about 
–70, but the big, beefy youths surrounding him deflected most of it. 
Nevertheless, Blair hoped Jim arrived soon, else he'd still be a shivering 
wreck and that would mean Mother Hen from Hell all over again. 
Not all the dieticians in the world would ever convince Ellison (or the rest of 
Major Crime) that Sandburg was the right weight for his height, and it was 
the big cop's mission in life to feed his Guide up. Unfortunately, Ellison and 
Major Crimes had a nasty ally on their side – the malaria Blair had caught as 
a teenager whilst on a trip to Kenya to study the little-known Masai Simba-
Nyuse people, before the GDP found he was an empath. Modern medication 
kept it under control, but it meant that Blair felt the cold far more than 
usual and even a minor case of the sniffles was enough to kill his appetite 
deader than a dodo and make any weight dissolve off his body like dew 
under the morning sun. While he'd lived in that old warehouse (right next to 
a major drug lab, how could I not notice that?) he'd gotten bronchitis and 
pleurisy at the start of every winter like clockwork, to the point where the 
local vagrants and gang members had started ferreting out their thermal 
underwear and cold weather gear the instant they heard his first cough.
Not fooled by the distracting question, Alan Fraser let his buddies gather 
round Sandburg but kept a weather eye on their surroundings. The Tipp, 
Wilde, Croxley Meadows et al situations should have pounded sense into 
peoples' heads, but Alan knew that some people would always be bigots out 
of choice. He'd heard certain morons giggling about Sandburg's office 
heating, and guessed what had happened. He'd hoped that kind of crap had 
withered and died when Ian Tipp and his little coterie of students had been 
publicly shamed for bigots they were, but Rainier was one of the top 
universities in the United Americas, one of the nine Ivy League institutions, 
and there was a constant influx of new students, a minority of whom 
determined that they would show the "upstart Guide" his proper place, 
especially those from right-wing backgrounds like the Christian Purity 
League, who lacked any virtues of true Christian compassion. It was time to 
make sure certain people knew that Teach was not to be messed with, Alan 
decided, flexing hot-dog sized fingers in anticipation.
A few months before Teach had been fingered as an empath, his malaria 
had had him suffering a dramatic collapse that, fortunately, was witnessed 
only by the student he was giving extra tutelage to – Alan Fraser. Sandburg 
had brushed it off, but Alan filed it away for reference. Fraser was a very 
realistic young man, something that had been developed during his parents' 
acrimonious divorce and that fact that, though they call him their "adored" 
boy, he lived with his grandparents  - even though each parent had a 14-
room mansion that could have accommodated the entire football team. 
Somehow, his parents were always too busy working or networking or 
vacationing to visit. Alan was a jock, and his fellow players were jocks, but 
they needed the academic grades to stay at Rainier. He had been one of 
those resentful that Sandburg didn't just give out the grades but insisted on 
study and work to pass his class, even though Sandburg had rarely missed a 
game, coming to cheer to team on, and was always ready to give extra help, 
explanations and tuition.
For Alan Fraser, that resentment had ended the summer before Sandburg 
had been betrayed as an empath to the GDP (and I still intend to find the 
SOB that did that and cause them major pain) with Jackie Kitson. One of 
Rainier's star players, he had blown his knee out at 20, effectively ending 
his career, but Blair Sandburg's patient explanations and extra tuition 
sessions had allowed Kitson to remain at Rainier after swapping his athletic 
scholarship for a Latin American Studies course. Kitson was now a Teaching 
Assistant at Dartmouth College, another Ivy League university in New 
Hampshire, and had a well-paid, progressive career in front of him. Many 
Rainier jocks had been bright enough to understand that without Sandburg's 
efforts, Kitson would have been just another teenage ex-football star, his 
promise never realised, stuck in some dead end job back in his hometown 
and rotting his brain in front of daytime TV. Already Alan had suffered a 
dislocated shoulder, and he was clever enough to know that while he would 
be a multi-millionaire by the age of 25, his professional football career 
would be over by 30, even without the freak accident that had happened to 
Kitson. He'd wisely decided that taking in Sandburg's lessons on how to 
study and retain academic information would stand him in good stead for 
the career choice he would have to make when his sporting one ended.               
The esteem in which Alan and the team held Teach had only increased 
during the mess when their fellow ball player and friend Jerry Carver had 
been killed in a hit-and-run on campus. The incident had actually been the 
intended murder of Blair Sandburg, but the boy had borrowed Blair's spare 
jacket, and from a distance looked like him, which had gotten him killed. 
Blair's obviously genuine grief over the death of a boy he'd barely known 
outside class had raised him to unimpeachable heights in the estimation of 
the team.     

When James Ellison shocked about everyone on the planet by allowing his 
Guide to return to Rainier to get his PhD in Anthropology Major & Psychology 
Minor, Sandburg had promptly started coming to games again and took up 
tutoring his jock students just as he had before; as Captain of the Football 
Team and therefore major Rainier trend-setter, Alan had moved rapidly to 
show his public approval of Sandburg. Coach had even taken on board some 
of the anthropologist's explanations on how to "out-psyche" their 
opponents. He had been adopted by the team as their "unofficial" mascot. 
Even the ferocious and terrifying James Joseph Ellison, who played ball in 
college, had unbent enough to come and cheer the team on.

Alan remembered that first game attended by Ellison shortly after Sandburg 
had returned to Rainier as Ellison's Guide. He'd spotted the curly-haired 
teacher lurking under the stands, clutching his backpack and wearing that 
battered raincoat of his, not daring to be seen, but cheering Rainier on. 
Ellison had suddenly appeared behind the smaller man like some stalking 
leopard and Alan's stomach had hit his boots. The guy was huge. He topped 
Sandburg's height by a clear foot and had a linebacker's physique. Slender, 
wiry Sandburg only came up to his shoulder if he stood on tip-toe, and he 
would have no chance again any brutal beatings, or worse, that the Sentinel 
decided to give out….

Alan grinned at the memory of the shock on the prissy, pasty faces of the 
University faculty when Ellison strolled out right to the Rainier team bench 
by the field side with Sandburg steered next to him by use of a large shovel-
sized hand on one slender shoulder. Ellison had plonked himself and his 
Guide down on the bench in the miraculously, suddenly available space and 
proceeded to cheer the team on whilst sharing a bowl of popcorn with 
Sandburg, whose carefully blank face was given away by the nervous glances 
he kept shooting at his Sentinel, since, of course, the "proper" Guide knelt 
on the floor next to his or her Sentinel like a well-trained dog, or was even 
leashed like one, something that Alan had always considered repugnant.

During the first time-out Alan had come right up to the bench and cried out, 
"Hey, Teach!" with a firm disregard for the Sentinel whom he should have 
addressed whilst ignoring the Guide. Ellison hadn't reacted until he realised 
that Alan was checking out Sandburg for bruises and other signs of abuse, 
then the patented Ellison Laser Death Glare had been switched on. Alan had 
quaked in his boots under the furious ferocity, but tried to glare right back 
at Ellison, until the cop had suddenly grinned at him and congratulated him 
on a good game. Alan's sincere protectiveness towards Blair had gained him 
immediate entry to "Ellisonville". Jim Ellison knew that Alan and the other 
players looked out for Sandburg at Rainier, and had showed his appreciation 
by casually mentioning that fact to William Ellison, who hadn't become one 
of the world's richest men by being slow on the uptake and who was acutely 
aware of how much he owed Blair for his and Stephen's reconciliation with 
Jim. Rainier's Sports Faculty suddenly had a new gym, refurbished football 
locker room, basketball court, baseball field and brand new kit for the 
football team.

The throaty roar of a "classic", i.e. old, truck engine had their heads 
turning in time to see Jim Ellison's blue and white pull up to the steps with 
zero regard for the university regulations about absolutely no parking in 
front of the main entrance. As the large Sentinel slid from the driver's side 
with casual, yet definitely predatory grace, it was unlikely anyone would 
take him to task for it. After Ellison had notched up one too many crashes 
during high-speed cop chases, his insurance agent had laid all sorts of 
conditions on that basically would mean getting a second mortgage, ergo 
the old truck he was currently driving as opposed to his sleeker previous 
models. Ellison greeted the players cordially, making them all beam by 
stating that he would be at the game, and off they drifted, their protection 
no longer necessary. "See ya, Teach." Alan saluted Sandburg and led his 
own pack off in search of food at the campus diner.

With automatic, unconscious thought, Jim extended his senses over his 
Guide even as he and Sandburg got into the truck, Blair already in 
"Energizer Bunny" mode, talking with the speed of a machine gun and 
waving one hand like an orchestra conductor while using the other to hold 
the backpack on his knees. Everything was okay, but….

"You're cold!" Jim chided, immediately turning on the heater. "You should 
have stayed in your office!" 

The coerced bonding of Guide and Sentinel had been barely a month old 
when Blair had had his first malaria caused "do" in the middle of one night. 
Waking suddenly in the knowledge that his Guide was not laying beside him 
where he should be, Ellison had cast out his enhanced senses to hear the 
rapid heartbeat behind the closed bathroom door. What had unnerved Jim, 
and still did, was Blair's total silence in the case of pain. He had opened the 
bathroom door to see Blair apparently trying to bring back everything he'd 
ever eaten  - in silence so complete it had taken Sentinel hearing to pick it 
up. Vomiting was many things, all unpleasant, but politely silent wasn't one 
of them, and the kid had managed it with a soaring temperature, a bad case 
of the shakes, and severe joint pain.

As an Army Ranger, Jim could recognise malaria bouts blindfolded, his 
enhanced senses picking up the disease in Sandburg's blood – Plasmodium 
Vivax, fortunately one of the two mildest forms. Blair had cowered, 
apologising, whispering that he would clean it up right away, despite being 
barely able to move. If Alex Barnes, Dr Jensen, Wilson and all the others 
who had tortured and brutalised the young man had been in the room at 
that moment, Jim would have ripped them limb from limb. Even now, well 
into their partnership, Blair had a tendency to simply ignore or treat himself 
those injuries and illnesses that even a normal person, never mind a 
vociferously over-protective Dark Sentinel, would have decreed merited a 
trip to the ER. Despite Jim's exasperation, however, there was a part of him 
that surged with pride in his Guide's emotional security as, now, Sandburg 
just rolled his eyes at the scolding and snuggled down, basking in the 
warmth blasting out of the heaters. The mechanic who Jim used to service 
the old truck had shaken his head when the big guy had quibbled over the 
cost of repairing the rust spots but instantly forked over many dead 
presidents in order to have an expensive heating system installed in the 
driver's cab.

So intent was Ellison on monitoring his Guide's vital signs and increased 
body warmth that not even his "spider-sense" tingled in warning of the eyes 
that followed the truck's departure too avidly for coincidence.

* * *

Turning on his heel, Shan quickly entered the university campus, silently 
thanking his late, alabaster-skinned grandmother for the fact that he could 
still pass for a college student despite being 30 years old. The mirror on one 
corridor wall reflected a medium height youth with the black hair, dark eyes 
but pale skin of a Celt, so slender as to verge on skinny, dressed in the 
"fashionable" university student manner – denim jeans (faded) were the in 
thing again, along with white T-shirts under patterned/coloured too-large 
over-shirts and black sneakers. Shan blended into the students like a 
chameleon, walking just outside the personal range of this group here or 
that duo there, so it seemed he was with them when he wasn't. Several GDP 
guards passed him without a flicker, and if anyone had suddenly started 
yelling that he was a good six years older that most of the students here, 
they'd have been laughed at. Mamar's Celtic complexion that helped her 
look sixty at seventy-eight was working wonders for her black-eyed boy. 
There was now a proper plastic name plate: Blair Sandburg, Anthropology 
Teaching Fellow on Storage Room 3, but the lock wouldn't have fazed a 
toddler and Shan was in, carefully locking the door behind him. A grin 
creased his face as he looked around. Typical Blair, the place was crammed 
with papers and artefacts on every available surface. Cocooned in the chaos 
was a large desk (covered in stuff) with a state-of-the-art computer 
(covered in stuff) comfortable chair (ditto) and even a coffee maker (ditto). 
Coffee was definitely needed.

Not wanting to disturb the alarmingly listing piles of books and junk, Shan 
sat on the floor and pondered. Blair had been his first thought, his first (last 
and only too!) hope, but he'd been out of the loop, not daring to even 
mention Blair Sandburg lest someone should guess……the big Sentinel – Shan 
could have recognised what he was from ten miles away - had been an 
unpleasant shock, even if the way Blair acted towards him showed that he 
practically worshipped the ground the guy…"Jim?"….walked on. Blair was a 
savvy kid…(he figured me out in about ten seconds flat and had the sense to 
not so much as twitch about it)… but he had an inbuilt sense of morality, an 
ability, even after all that he'd suffered, to understand and, amazingly, 
forgive. (Please, the one thing I really, really want is two minutes alone in 
a room with Mason, Dr Jensen and those bastards at the GDP corrections 
facility who tortured and raped the kindest, gentlest, truest friend a guy 
could have…you weren't fit to be the dirt Sandburg walked on Wilson, and 
one day I'll find whoever managed to get into your cell and rip you apart 
and shake their hand.….)

Consciously unclenching his fingers from the coffee mug, Shan ruefully 
decided that Blair's compassion was what stopped him from being an ice-
hearted, ego-driven amoral bastard (like me). The decision now was how to 
proceed. Normally he wouldn't have thought once, never mind twice, about 
whacking the Sentinel, but Blair obviously adored the guy so that was not an 
option. The hypnotic barriers he'd placed on Alexei had begun to fail, as 
spectacularly demonstrated last week….Shan took a deep breath and slowly 
unclenched his jaws as the memories came back, swamping him with shame, 
guilt and humiliation…. in the end, the barriers had held, but by now the 
Secret Service shrinks had to have made Alexei aware of them, and the 
Winter King would be fighting the blocks with all his mental strength, 
meaning their total collapse was as inevitable as an Eastern sunrise. It was 
time to put a healthy distance between Alexei and Shan, preferably a 
couple of continents worth.

Blair would help him, of that there was no question, even though Shan was 
aware Blair might not have kept up his contacts with the Underground 
Railroad. Total loyalty for anyone he chose to love was yet another 
Sandburg trait. His absolute devotion to his mother, Naomi Sandburg, had 
been the most effective chain that Alex Barnes had used to keep Blair with 
her, never once had Blair tried to escape the torture, brutality and sexual 
abuse the psychopathic, megalomaniac "sentinel" woman had inflicted on 
him. There was also the danger of Grokk, who made Alex Barnes look like a 
sweet little teddy bear. No, Sandburg was his only option, but he was going 
to have to use all the skills Uncle Sam had taught him to pull this one of – it 
was a good thing he was about the only person in the world who could 
obfuscate better than Blair Sandburg….

Chapter II    

"We have to control the media cycle for the mid-terms…" The suddenly 
intrusive voice made Jed frown and instantly a Secret Service agent closed 
the door to the Oval Office. The power of the presidency, to incite 
obedience by twitching a few facial muscles. (Yeah, right, grand 
opportunity to get some major ulcers more like). Turning his attention back 
to his papers, Jed kept a weather eye on his Sentinel Prime, Race Keegan, 
who was at the secure computer at side desk. Jed had specifically asked for 
the information the man was pulling off.

Sitting quietly in a chair, head down, hands folded in his lap, sat Keegan's 
Guide, Gage Butler, the epitome of the good little guide. Except, thanks to 
two men by the name of Blair Sandburg and James Ellison, "times they are 
a'changin'". Jed Monteith was old blue-chip stock back to his last known 
ancestor, the Marquess Monteith who'd come over to Britain with William 
the Conqueror in 1066, and while one set of early United States immigrant 
ancestors had had the pedigree, the others had had the cash, which they'd 
kept and expanded with generations of savvy businessmen and women in the 
family. Jed Monteith, President of the United Americas, big title, big job, 
despite him being raised to eat, breathe and sleep politics since birth. 

But Jedidiah Monteith was his own man, a fact he had shown with regard to 
his Sentinels. The President's Sentinels were all CIA clones, anonymous 
types in sober suits with invisible, meek guides. Jed had insisted on 
personally reviewing every Sentinel in the country and picking his own 
choices, which was why Race Keegan sat here. The First Lady's Sentinels, all 
female at Jed's insistence, were also unconventionally "non-company". The 
Secret Service had had apoplexy, but Jed was adamant – he didn't want yes-
men, stuffed shirts or po-faced clones, he wanted fast thinkers, innovative 
thinkers, men who could move their asses and think on their feet when the 
going got tough. Men who could think the unthinkable and who weren't 
over-awed by the office that they served. 

Once again, Jed considered Gage Butler. It was a secret that Jed had kept 
all his life, but he found the GDP way of treating guides abhorrent. His 
beloved Gran, actually great-grandmother, a feisty lady of razor wit, had 
been the guiding light of his childhood, instilling in him all the important 
values. Elyssa Monteith had been born before the GDP was formed, before 
being a Guide meant you were no longer a citizen with any rights but the 
possession of your Sentinel, property like a house or dog. Jed had always 
been aware of her mild empathic ability, but she had never discussed it. 
Elyssa had loathed the GDP from their founding with an abhorrent fury that 
actually scared him; only after her death had Jed come across the 
photograph of a beautiful young woman – Elyssa's adored sister, Ellana, who 
had died of Hodgkin's Lymphoma at 28 years of age. Had Ellana lived, she 
would have been taken by the newly formed GDP, bonded with a Sentinel: 
property not a person. Jed had always respected Gran's wisdom, and if she 
had detested the GDP from it's outset, maybe she had a point.

A point harshly proved by the two men who were shaking American society 
as if it were a blancmange in an earthquake – Ellison and Sandburg. 
Everyone knew, thanks to the GDP, that Guides had neither the ability or 
nor desire to go beyond eleventh grade in high school. Everyone knew, 
thanks to the GDP, that Guides had no problems with losing their identities 
and simply being Guides. Nice spiel, except that Blair Sandburg had been a 
BA and MA working towards his PhD when he'd been betrayed to the GDP. 
Blair Sandburg had been credited with the discovery of the Temple of 
Guides at Croxley Meadows in Eastern Washington State, and not three days 
ago had caused a frantic influx of archaeologists to the site when he'd oh-
so-casually mentioned on a Cascade regional news TV interview that a 
Temple of Sentinels was usually built within ten miles proximity to the 
Temple of Guides.       

Many more anomalies didn't fit the portrait of harmony the GDP were 
selling. The United Americas, apart from various self-governing Reservation 
territories within them, operated by the Native American Indians and South 
American indigenous tribes, was the only country in the world to operate 
the GDP-style of servitude with Guides. Everywhere else, including the 
Reservations, the GDP was ignored or openly vilified; a Guide was treated 
with equal and sometimes greater respect than their Sentinel, some Guides 
were also Shamans, or priests, revered spiritual advisers.

If the GDP was right, why was the suicide rate amongst newly identified 
empaths five times higher in this country than anywhere else on the planet? 
Why if the GDP was all sweetness and light, was there a thriving 
"underground railroad" that got empaths to the safety either of a 
Reservation, or out of the country entirely, usually to Australia or Europe, 
as Dr Claydove, new Director of the GDP, had admitted in this office only 
two days ago? Why did empaths go to extraordinary lengths to hide what 
they were if being a GDP Guide was so wonderful? Why did they risk death, 
accept death, to escape the GDP?

In a situation that would never reach the public, just one week ago Dr 
Juliana Mendez, a highly respected paediatrician at Mercy Point Hospital, 
had been identified as a Guide-strength empath. An hour before the GDP 
had arrived to take her for Guide training, she, her husband and daughter 
had fled. Chased by the GDP, Juliana had pulled a gun at a bank, causing 
the guard to shoot her, but her husband and daughter were nowhere to be 
found. As she lay dying, Mendez had asked for her cell-phone, which had 
suddenly rung. Taped by the GDP, the wavering female child's voice, 
"We're safe, mommy? Mommy? Mommee…!" had become engraved on Jed's 
brain like acid. Juliana had led the GDP away so her daughter could get to a 
Reservation. Mr Mendez had been a businessman of some repute, and he had 
made certain phone calls the GDP had been unable to halt.

Juliana Mendez' funeral had been attended, bar her husband and child on 
the safe reservation, by her remaining family, the hospital staff, various 
friends and the families of the children Juliana Mendez had healed. From 
them all had come the one message: keep the GDP away from us or else. 
The hospital administration had quietly but icily informed the local GDP 
office that it would be "inadvisable" for GDP personnel, Sentinels or Guides 
to attempt to receive treatment there. Sentinels and the GDP were being 
perceived as some sort of evil cult of sadists and torturers. 

Even more horrific had been the Lucienne incident three weeks ago, again 
carefully kept from the news media. A rickety, rusting freight ship, the 
grandiloquently named Lucienne had set out from Port Rainier just down the 
coast despite stormy weather conditions, alerting the GDP to the fact that it 
was probably an Underground Railroad boat getting empaths out of the 
country to the safety of Australia or Europe. Pursuing the Lucienne, the 
Coast Guard Search & Rescue ship Valiant had had to battle increasingly 
violent seas until it became apparent that the Lucienne wasn't going to 
make it. The new improved rescue boats meant that the Coast Guard could 
get close enough to the ship to rescue the escapees and the crew, but then 
it had all gone horribly wrong, as the full report, still on Jed's desk, had 
shown.

The Coast Guard boat had unbonded and Bonded Sentinels aboard, who had 
indeed confirmed that unbonded Guide-strength empaths were on the 
freight ship, but the empaths then realised they were there. To the horror 
of those aboard the Valiant who could only watch in shock, the 43 empaths, 
including 7 pre-adolescent children, had committed suicide by either 
jumping overboard or remaining on the deck of the collapsing Lucienne. The 
Sentinels aboard the Valiant had in turn gone berserk, witnessing the deaths 
of the empaths, and those that had been unbonded were still receiving 
psychiatric care, their self-image and cosy GDP-indoctrinated worldview 
irrevocably shattered when faced with the brutal reality that even child 
empaths considered death preferable to Sentinels.          

The statistics even now debated over by the President's advisers were 
harsh, unforgiving: every year for the past decade, the number of people 
voluntarily coming forward for empathy testing had dropped like a stone, 
whilst the number of people protecting their families or trying to hide their 
own empathic abilities had quadrupled. The "Underground Railroad" – so 
named in honour of the secret organisation back in the 1850s that had 
helped Negro slaves of the southern United States escape to the free 
Northern States – that helped "rogue empaths" flee the United Americas 
was purportedly stretched to capacity by the sheer number of empaths 
seeking their help.

For the first time since the GDP was founded nearly a century and a half 
ago, more "rogue empaths" were being "caught out" than were willingly 
entering the GDP training programs. Even those previously more pro-GDP, 
conservative-minded Sentinels were becoming more and more upset, 
resentful of being demonised and paranoid about their Guides being 
snatched by do-gooders like the Guide Liberation Army or their families, as 
had recently happened with Captain Vincent Hunter of Cascade PD's 
Internal Affairs department, though he'd got his Guide, Sarah Freeman, 
back. Hunter was also James Ellison's older, illegitimate paternal half-
brother and a powerful Sentinel, which must make life in the Cascade Police 
Department very interesting.   

Jed brought his attention back to Gage Butler, who was a case in point, Jed 
mused as he signed one document and reached for the next. A highly 
regarded palaeontologist by the age of 27, Butler had gone all over the 
globe, having a "knack" of finding rare or new species of dinosaur fossils. 
His Guide-strength empathy had been discovered when he was 28, during a 
brain scan in hospital after he was back ended by a drunk driver and 
knocked unconscious. Gage had entered GDP Guide training without demur, 
although "positive" his empathy was of minor and almost useless ability, 
and had had the perfect excuse for the GDP. His mother's family suffered 
chronic migraines, and he had simply assumed that his headaches were 
migraines, rather than overloads from the emotions of those around him, it 
had simply never occurred to him….

Under normal circumstances, Gage would never have gotten near the 
Presidency, but when Jed had made his final selection of his personal 
Sentinel bodyguards, he had chosen Race Keegan. Of Naval Intelligence, and 
not Secret Service, Keegan had been working with several temporary 
Guides, though he had bonded with none. Quick-witted, able to grasp 
subtleties easily, Keegan was ideal, even though he continued to use 
temporary Guides during the first six months of Jed's term in office. The 
other five Sentinels all had long-established bondings with their Guides and 
were unfazed by Keegan's constant switching, until the fateful day Jed had 
gone on a mini-tour of a GDP training school, courtesy of a heftily-
contributing Democrat businessman whose son was a GDP lecturer. 

They had toured the facility with Jed's Sentinels, including Keegan, being 
silent shadows, then it had all changed. One minute Race had been standing 
there beside Jed, as animated as a fence-post, the next the Sentinel had 
lunged along the corridor and picked up a slender man in his mid-twenties 
by the scruff of his neck, swinging him into a wall. Butler had shown some 
pretty nifty self-defence moves that his GDP "trainers" obviously didn't 
know anything about and would have escaped if the other five Sentinels 
hadn't abandoned Jed, in strict breach of procedure, and surrounded him. 
His protestations that he was too weak an empath, that he hadn't the 
training to work in the Oval Office, that he wasn't suitable for a Sentinel of 
Mr Keegan's stature, had been totally agreed with by the GDP and Secret 
Service, but made moot by the simple fact that Race Keegan had turned 
into a snarling, rage-filled killing machine the instant anyone even hinted at 
removing Butler from his presence.

But Jed had to wonder as he looked at the former palaeontologist, who 
knelt and allowed himself to be leashed at Race's whim, though the Sentinel 
was never harsh. According to the GDP, Guides were naturally placid people 
of mediocre intelligence. Juliana Mendez had been a paediatrician, Gage 
Butler a palaeontologist and Blair Sandburg was currently working towards 
his Doctorate in Anthropology, none of which were occupations for people of 
mediocre intelligence, and, Jed suspected, placid temperament, especially 
if the rumours about Blair's Sandburg being a Dark Guide were true. 

The pilot two-year Guide Emancipation programme that had just been 
introduced in the city of Cascade a few days ago by Dr Claydove, along with 
the national abolition of leashes and the Guide no longer being forced to 
kneel, were being watched by various parties with keen interest, including 
Jed. He had already personally ordered the Director of every intelligence 
and covert operations agency in the United Americas to find out who had 
the most to gain from making the emancipation programme fail and keeping 
the Guides in slavery. Jed found it a depressingly long list, but it was getting 
shorter, with help. 

Just after Dr Claydove's Emancipation announcement, Sophie Kramer, 
teenage daughter of the President of the ultra right wing Christian Purity 
League, had gone on CNN and publicly disowned the movement, calling the 
CPL members "sadly misguided in their belief that the Sentinel-Guide bond 
was one of perversion" and "that Guides sucked the souls out of people", 
which she likened to adults still believing in the "monster under the bed" 
story. She had openly credited Blair Sandburg and Jim Ellison with saving 
her virtue and her life after she was captured by a gang of sex attackers. 

Her father's response had been an enraged, wildly screaming rant on live 
CNN news, denouncing his daughter as utterly corrupted and sinfully 
revelling in base perversion. He had ended his vitriolic rhetoric with the 
thundering denunciation that, "GOD WILL JUDGE HER!!" To Jed's 
scrupulously hidden but extreme glee, that final fire & brimstone threat had 
backfired spectacularly on the ranting bigot. Just ten days later Miss 
Kramer's long-lost spinster great-aunt, disowned by the family decades 
before for calling the CPL a "bunch of crackpots scared of something they're 
too dumb to understand", had suddenly died leaving her great-niece her 
entire estate, having changed her will within hours of seeing Sophie's 
broadcast. The late Miss Cordelia Constance Morgan's legacy had totalled 
just under 25 million United American dollars, causing the journalist who 
reported it on the front page of the New York Times to sardonically finish 
her article by wondering if God was going to punish Sophie by killing her 
with kindness.
            
"Sir?"

 Race's voice almost made him jump and he looked up sharply. "The 
latest?"

"Yes, sir."

He took the printouts eagerly and began to read the latest reports intently. 
Despite his protestations, Detective Dark Sentinel James Ellison of Cascade 
PD, Washington State, Major Crimes Unit had needed a Guide or he would 
die. Thus there had been a forced bonding with one Blair Sandburg, then in 
the GDP corrections facility. There the situation would have continued into 
nothing other than obscurity, had it not been for the unique natures of the 
two men.

James Ellison had always refused a Guide since he believed that no human 
had the right to "own" another, and so he had done the unique: he had 
treated Blair Sandburg as a person, and allowed him to return to his studies 
at Rainier University, actions which were having national repercussions. 
Even contemptuous Dr Jensen, who viewed Guides as bipedal lab-rats, was 
vocally insisting that Sandburg & Ellison were not a "normal" bonded pair 
and was devoting more time and money trying to study the duo – no easy 
feat. Sandburg, it seemed, was a Dark Guide, just as rare as a Dark Sentinel, 
and unprecedented in the annals of GDP history.

Thankful for his almost perfect recall, Jed brought up in his mind's eye the 
report that shadowy agents Jed pretended not to know about had copied 
from Sandburg's notes on Sentinels after making a discreet incursion into 
the loft at 852 Prospect: 

Heightened senses are perfectly normal amongst humans. In 20th Century 
Vietnam, the Viet Cong had hyperactive smell, forcing LRRPs to change 
their diet as the VC could smell "Westerners" by their faeces; a less violent 
use of the talent is amongst those employed by perfumers. Those with 
heightened taste often work for vintners or in catering, those with hearing 
are often musicians and so forth. However, having all five senses does not a 
Sentinel make. Some have all five senses weakly heightened and might be 
called "Sentinel Sensitives", but their senses are only better than most, not 
hyperactive, as required to be a Sentinel. As with Beta Sentinels – those 
with at least 3 or 4 (but not 5) very strongly enhanced senses, Sentinel 
Sensitives do not suffer from zone outs and do not require Guides, they can 
also enter a full, Alpha Sentinel's territory with impunity, since they are 
not a threat. 

The "territorial imperative" of Sentinels was well known. Usually only one 
Sentinel operated in a specific geographic area, and if more than one 
Sentinel lived in one place, there was a distinct pecking order. The most 
powerful Sentinel became the Sentinel Prime, or chief, of the others, and 
his or her word was absolute law in matters Sentinel. Less than 24 hours 
after bonding with Gage Butler, Race Keegan had somehow become Senior 
Sentinel Prime of the Washington DC Sentinels, despite being younger than 
most of them. Within weeks of bonding with Blair Sandburg, an entire Clan 
of Sentinels had relocated to the city of Cascade, some of them, what were 
their names, yes, Sentinel Prime Edwards, Sentinel Lisa Pais, Sentinel Dr 
Hervey among others, transferring to the Cascade Police Department's 
various precincts, including Cascade Major Crimes, workplace of Senior 
Sentinel Prime Detective James Joseph Ellison and Senior Guide Prime Blair 
Jacob Sandburg.   
  
However, it was partway down one page of Sandburg's notes that had sent 
varying Government "agencies" into a tailspin of speculation and 
fascination:  

Above the Sentinels, there exist the rarest: Dark Sentinel. If Sentinel is a 
throwback, Dark Sentinel is throwback of a throwback. Sentinels are 
controlling, Dark Sentinels are control-freaks. Sentinels are aggressive, 
possessive, territorial and anally-retentive – Dark Sentinels are exactly the 
same but increased by a factor of ten.

What was the betting Jim Ellison had not read these notes? Jed had mused.

 Unfortunately for them, Dark Sentinels often had the lifespan of a 
depressed lemming.

Sandburg had a great style of prose, Jed had decided on reading that 
sentence.  

The problem was that Dark Sentinels are very impatient, and if "their" 
guide does not appear when they think they should, they will try force a 
partial bond with any Guide they can kidnap. Dark Sentinels 
attempt/demand to have a totally submissive Guide, but unfortunately this 
simply does not work in the real world. When the Dark Sentinel zoned, the 
Guide was often too mentally and emotionally subordinate to be able to 
"reach" them and bring them out of the zone, assuming that the kidnapee 
did not simply seize the opportunity to turn and walk away – or insert a 
dagger into their kidnapper's heart to make really sure! Exit one Dark 
Sentinel. Only a Dark Guide, who underwent rigorous mental and emotional 
training at the Temple of Guides, could be bonded with a Dark Sentinel, 
unfortunately, Dark Guides are even rarer than Dark Sentinels, so the 
chance to see a pair in action is almost unheard of…

There had been various telling phrases in those notes, Jed mused now as he 
leafed through the current report. "Dark Sentinels" and "Dark Guides" had 
been used in the present, not past, tense. The Dark Guides had been 
kidnapped by the Dark Sentinels, not stolen. You kidnap people, but you 
steal property. Dr Jensen was insistent that Sandburg was a Dark Guide, and 
surveillance had provided film that was definite proof of "another" 
personality submerging the Blair Sandburg one, relegating Blair Sandburg to 
some other part of the brain. The Dark Guide was a lot more dangerous, 
somehow trained in lethal self-defence, as his grim attitude and ferocious 
protectiveness towards Ellison had demonstrated. Surveillance had also 
shown that Ellison actually deferred to the Dark Guide. There were times 
when Sandburg commanded, and Ellison followed, profound heresy to the 
GDP doctrine.

But of course, Sandburg had the "mental and emotional training" to be a 
Dark Guide. He had suffered more abuse and torment because of his 
empathic abilities than anyone ever should, but it had not broken him, as it 
would have others. Jed had had firm words with Dr. Claydove about the 
abuse suffered by Sandburg in the "corrections facility" and had been 
assured it would not happen again. That pointed conversation had taken 
place in this very office, and Dr. Claydove had visibly sweated under the 
glares of six sentinels. It was also the only time Jed could remember Gage 
Butler appearing more animated than a stuffed dummy. He had glared at 
Claydove's throat as if wishing he could get to it, to the extent that Race 
Keegan had put himself between his Guide and the GDP director. Twice 
Butler had ignored or not noticed Keegan's command signals, and the Senior 
Sentinel Prime had become grimmer as he picked up on the man's acute 
dislike. Dr. Claydove had been as white as a sheet when he finally left.
  
The final factor in the Sandburg-Ellison equation was the apparent existence 
of their animal spirit guides, a subject Jed found particularly fascinating. 
Again, Sentinels and Guides in the United Americas, the only nation with the 
GDP, were the only Sentinels and Guides who did not lay claim to such –

"Sir, I think you might find this report relevant." 

Taking the pages from the FInCOM operative, Jed opened them eagerly, and 
found that they were relevant to the animal spirit guide conundrum. 
Sentinels and Guides supposedly had animal spirit guides to assist them with 
their abilities, derided by the GDP as pure hokum, despite the fact that all 
non-GDP Sentinel and Guide pairings claimed to have them. However, James 
Ellison had treated Blair Sandburg like a human being with rights, not an 
object and the two openly claimed to have animal spirit guides – a panther 
and a wolf. Jed read the report quickly and thoroughly. A few weeks 
previously, Ellison and Sandburg had been called to San Felipe, California, 
on a case that had proved dangerous, causing the "Dark Guide" to emerge 
from Blair Sandburg and kick some GDP ass.

The pair were already notorious in many circles, and their overt contempt 
for the GDP had shaken the San Felipe tree very hard. Following their visit, 
the San Felipe Sentinel Prime decided in turn to allow his own Guide more 
frequent visits to his parents to see what would happen, and arrived at the 
Guide's parents' house to inform them that he was allowing them to see 
their son for five days per month instead of one. At this point the Sentinel 
discovered that his Guide, a former teacher, was secretly teaching children 
and being paid for it by grateful parents and the school who despised the 
GDP. Fleeing the scene, the terrified Guide had tried to commit suicide 
until forcibly stopped by his Sentinel.

What Jed found most fascinating, however, was the outcome. The Sentinel 
was outraged and furious, not with the Guide, but with the GDP – the Guide 
was supposed to assist and bolster the Sentinel, but how could he do that 
effectively if he was so terrified of his "owner" that death was preferable to 
being with him? How could he work well with his Guide when the man was 
convinced that he was some sort of evil monster? The Sentinel had stormed 
into the school, and insisted that they take the Guide back into his old 
teaching job, something they had only been too happy to do, and had then 
done "an Ellison", providing the Guide with what were essentially his own 
vehicle, cell phone, bank account and credit cards, albeit in his own name. 

Finally, most significantly, the GDP approved "leash" had been discarded, 
even though now it had been abolished by Claydove entirely for all Guides. 
Less than four days after implementing these changes, the Sentinel began 
having dreams about a mountain lion and a smaller lynx, dreams that 
quickly became waking visions. The point  - that the Sentinel and Guide got 
their animal spirit guides the instant the Sentinel threw out the "approved" 
GDP doctrine and started treating his Guide with respect as a fellow human 
being – was not lost on anybody. All over the country, Sentinels were 
surreptitiously beginning to discard the GDP doctrines as they had physically 
discarded leashes, and Lo! the sky hadn't fallen in!                  

"Sir?"

Jed raised his eyes, aware of the sudden, harsh tension in his bodyguard 
Sentinels and their Guides, including Gage Butler, who looked as if he 
wished he could run. "Send him in."

A large man entered the oval office, tall, broad-shouldered, with a face that 
was good-looking in a "real deal" way not movie-star "plastic". The high 
cheekbones were pure Slav, complementing the aristocratic blade of a nose, 
whilst the flaxen-blond hair and pale skin was pure Scandinavian. His most 
striking feature, however, in a strangely inconspicuous face, were his eyes, 
chips of green ice that somehow glittered from within, as if back-dropped 
by fire. Given the sobriquet "Winter King", Alexei Kimeninov deserved such 
accolades. He was a spook, a shadowy agent in the world of government 
shadiness and black ops, only his government had been the Russian 
Confederacy, not the United Americas. His abrupt resignation and relocation 
to the United States had taken everyone by surprise, and surveillance had 
been made difficult by the fact that Kimeninov kept moving, from city to 
city, but relentlessly towards Washington DC, as if he was searching for 
something. 

Exactly what had been proven when Sentinels and Guides went to try and 
bring him in for interrogation – Kimeninov was a Dark Sentinel, in a major 
way. Luckily nobody died, but Jed had taken the unprecedented step of 
personally inviting the Russian to the White House. The great difficulty was, 
Kimeninov had no idea what he was, and vehemently rejected all 
suggestions that he was a Sentinel of any kind. That had lasted until he 
began waking up in strange places with no memory of how he'd got there. 
When he woke up one morning in a Washington DC back alley with his 
clothing torn and covered in bruises, he relented enough to seek assistance 
from the Secret Service psychiatrists, which had really opened a can of 
worms.

Alexei was a Dark Sentinel, and even was a bonded Sentinel, but his Guide 
had run. Run after hypnotising Kimeninov into repressing his Sentinel 
abilities and forgetting all about his Guide, for four years, until a week's 
isolation on the Russian steppes had brought them back online and they 
started to erode the post-hypnotic blocks. With his conscious mind still 
blocked due to the hypnosis, Alexei had been "switching" to the Dark 
Sentinel personality in his slumber, sleep-walking to find his lost Guide, 
then reverting back to the unwitting Alexei Kimeninov when he awoke, but 
the hypnotic barriers were gradually breaking down, causing brief flashbacks 
of memory.

The next problem on the list was that his Guide, Sean Davidson, did not 
exist. The two had only been together for eight months in Moscow before 
the Guide had done a disappearing act, and all the information on him, 
including his finger-prints and dental records, turned out to be as phoney as 
a three-dollar bill. Somehow the Guide had even managed to switch his DNA 
sample, for the results came back as belonging to one Herbert Wilcox, who 
turned out to be a recently deceased 97 year-old Canadian. All of which led 
to one conclusion – Davidson was as much a covert ops agent as his Sentinel, 
and had managed to hide his empathic status from his superiors in America 
(Kimeninov "knew" his Guide was American with unshakeable conviction).  
Alexei had drawn a sketch of his Guide from his uncertain memory, but he 
recalled that his Guide's blond hair had dark roots, and when he pointed out 
that a West Wing staffer's brilliant blue eyes were identical in colour to his 
Guide's, it was discovered the woman was wearing cosmetic contact lenses 
and her own eyes were green. Without accurate eye colour and only "dark 
hair" and white Caucasian male to go on, an exhaustive search had been 
instituted, only to fail. A "fingertip search" through the personnel records 
of every United Americas "secret" government operative alive, dead, active 
or otherwise had drawn a complete blank.
 
Sean Davidson had planned for every contingency but one – Kimeninov 
discovered that he could "track" his Guide using some weird inner sense. He 
could feel when Davidson had been in a place and whether recently or 
longer ago. According to Kimeninov, he and Davidson had both been in DC at 
the same time, and the forensic evidence from his torn clothing showed DNA 
that did not match Kimeninov's. What red-flagged it was the DNA did not 
show up on any database, and since all Americans including the President 
were DNA-tagged, it meant the other person did not "exist". (Sean 
Davidson, I presume?)

"Is something wrong, Alexei?" The President enquired on the heels of that 
thought.

"I just thought it important to inform you that I'm leaving Washington, Sir." 
A faint blush of what most people would believe to be discomfort, but which 
Jed correctly catalogued as rage, coloured the Russian's cheeks as he 
continued, "I….have …. to go."

"Do you know where?" Jed asked, then wished he hadn't. The truth was, 
Alexei detested being a Sentinel of any sort. Having spent most of his life 
and his entire career as a brilliant lone-wolf operative requiring no 
emotional contact with the rest of humanity, Kimeninov utterly detested 
requiring anything – in this case, anyone – to assist him. To be forced by 
instinct to travel the country like a hound dog tracking cougar, he 
considered utterly demeaning and humiliating. 

"North West." Alexei said with a sudden certainty that, Jed saw from the 
brief flicker of his eyes, was as much as surprise to him as anyone else. More 
hesitantly, Alexei said, "Seattle area."

"Keep me posted, please." Jed always tried to couch orders politely. "I'll 
arrange a plane." He nodded towards an aide who returned the nod and left 
the Oval Office. "I wish you luck, Alexei. Goodbye."

"Thank you." Alexei nodded sharply to the room in general and left, for his 
presence was making the Bodyguard Sentinels edgy, even Race Keegan, who 
was usually as aloof as a marble statue.

The relief the Oval Office was almost palpable and Jed quickly got everyone 
back to work, but as he sat at his desk, he was aware of conflicting desires. 
Part of him wished that Sean Davidson managed to escape, to live a happy, 
GDP free life. The other part was more practical; Alexei Kimeninov had 
been an outstanding agent even before his Dark Sentinel abilities came on-
line, with a Guide he would be almost perfect, an invaluable asset that the 
Presidency could not afford to lose.

Chapter III  

The Lear jet was sleek and luxurious and very fast; it got Alexei to Seattle 
and into the famous Queen Elizabeth II hotel in double-quick time. Alexei 
had been prudent with his money since childhood deprivation in the Ukraine 
during the post-Cahz Uprising economic collapse taught him it's value and 
he was now in the lower echelons of those that were classified as "rich". He 
also knew how to "assist" the right people. The Czarevich had been very 
grateful to Alexei for helping him out with that spot of bother in St. 
Petersburg, and a simple code word to the concierge had gotten him into 
the lush penthouse suite that was the Russian Imperial Apartments at the 
Queen Elizabeth.

Pouring a small glass of the superlative French cognac, he stared out over 
Seattle, idly playing word games in his head. Tsar and Tsarina, but the heir 
to the throne was spelled Czarevich, or Czarin, if female, though 
pronounced the same. His nostrils flared as he drew in a deep breath. 
Sometimes he longed for home with an ache that was physical.

Russia had been so subordinate to the Americas when Communism finally 
collapsed in the 1990s, but as history had brutally shown, genuine 
communism had lasted all of about three months after the events of 1915, 
before men with money, charisma, influence or just greedy ambition began 
to play the system. Fleeced and bankrupt by communism, the fractured 
former USSR "Russian" nations had lurched from one eco-socio-political 
crisis to another, often ending in bloody wars like the Chechen Wars of 
Independence, while the Americas went from strength to strength, first as a 
trading bloc, then a united political power as one nation, including affluent 
Canada, given as a present to the then President by King Charles IV of Great 
Britain.

Alexei finished his cognac and moved restlessly round the room, mentally 
reciting his history lessons to keep other thoughts at bay. It had been 
started one of Alexei's own ancestors whom he was actually named after, a 
then incredibly youthful Aleksandr Turek, a man of stern but not 
conventionally handsome visage, charisma and great talent. A minor 
politician of no note, but he'd argued, coerced, wooed, and by the time he 
was thirty-eight, Aleksandr Turek stood as head of the newly formed Russian 
Confederacy. For the first time in generations, children did not know what 
bread queues were, they accepted designer clothes as a fact of life, and had 
a living standard comparable to the newly formed United Americas, all done 
without the Russian Bear having to go cap in hand to the Eagle for cash. But 
Aleksandr Turek refused the Presidency, the Premiership, and all other 
offers of high office laid at his feet, ignoring the growing demands of the 
populace. 

Finally, the people had spoken, at a Russian Democracy party conference in 
Moscow, larger than usual, but nothing special. The bombshell had been 
detonated by accident, by the spontaneous demands of the massive crowd. 
Alexei had precious DVD footage, now as obsolete as lithographs with 
datastreams and tight-beam technology, of that day from his mother, whose 
cousin had been a child in the crowd, watching his illustrious relative and 
clearly seen with his family at one point.

As if the roaring of a great sea, thousands of voices chanted that Turek must 
become the next Russian President. Aleksandr went out to them, and 
refused. It had been an anonymous but loud voice that demanded a reason, 
and Aleksandr had given them one. The Princess Anastasia, horrifically 
scarred, had survived the massacre of the Russian Royalty so long ago, 
crawling out of the rough, shallow grave she had been thrown into with her 
dead brother, covered in blistered burns from the botched cremation 
attempt, found by a peasant couple. She had never forgotten her rage, and 
passed it down from generation to generation. Aleksandr Turek would not 
accept the Presidency because he was the great-great-grandson of a 
vengeful princess, scion of family massacred to make way for a now proven-
corrupt ideology that had failed more miserably than that which it replaced. 
" 'My birthright is the Tsardom of Russia, which I cannot have. I will accept 
nothing less, so I will accept nothing at all.'"     

Several months later, Aleksandr was the "contistutional" Tsar of Russia, 
within a year, Emperor of the Confederacy. The restored form of 
government had even been catching. When the French Premier was found 
guilty of massive embezzlement and fraud that came within a whisker of 
causing half the economies in Europe to collapse, the direct descendant of 
King Louis XVI, a high-ranking European Minister in Brussels, had been put in 
as queen to pacify the populace; quickly consolidating her position, the 
astute woman had turned her "figurehead" office into a very real monarchy 
for her daughter to inherit. Some time later, when communism collapsed in 
China, under similar blows of corruption, free information and consumerism, 
there had come a new Emperor to the throne. 

Young King Henry IX of Britain, thrust abruptly and tragically onto the 
throne after the murder of the queen by eco-terrorists, had at the same 
time vigorously reversed the decline of his own sovereign power and his 
nation's political eco-political influence, discerningly riding the wave of 
public fury over the death of his mother and carefully marketing the image 
of the vulnerable fourteen-year old king who carried heroically the burdens 
of his great heritage. Now Britain & the Commonwealth, the Russian 
Confederacy and the United Americas were the Great Triumvirate that 
brought unity, prosperity, order -

The faint but definite snap! was barely audible. In his hand the fractured 
cognac glass had pierced skin, ruby blood welling slowly up as the invisible 
film of alcohol left on the glass began to sting. Uttering a Ukrainian curse he 
hadn't heard himself since Grandfather had had his foot run over and 
broken by Uncle Vsvleved's car, Alexei ruthlessly removed the glass, 
depositing it in the trash, before carefully cleaning his hands.

He hated this, absolutely detested it with every atom of his very being. He 
was Colonel Alexei Kimeninov, the Winter King, even, albeit minor, a 
member of the Imperial Family. The most feared men in the world half-
believed that if shot he would not bleed, since beneath the thin veneer of 
skin he was solid ice, so great his repute. He had needed nothing, nobody, 
since he was eight, since the day his parents made the fatal error of 
stepping off the Moscow transport in the middle of the First Cahz Riot. 
Where had his vaunted Sentinel abilities been then? He saw the way people 
ogled him, greedily, like a child eyeing up a giant bar of chocolate. He could 
practically hear their thoughts. Even Jed Monteith, the personable U.S. 
President, who would have hesitated to offer him a position as a "normal", 
would fall over his own feet to have the services of a Dark Sentinel, 
especially one with the superlative training Alexei received in the grim, 
black and bleak world of espionage and secret agencies.

Raising his head as he washed his hand in the opulent bathroom, he met his 
own eyes in the mirror. Lurking behind his eyes, a stubborn stain that 
wouldn't be gotten rid of, he could see the Dark Sentinel. He could feel it 
surging up, stronger with each swell. It knew what it wanted.

Alexei snarled involuntarily, then cut the sound off before going back into 
the bedroom, slamming the bathroom door hard enough to make it quiver. 
Primitive, throwback, pre-civilized…pathetic, soft words from the shrinks. 
Caveman, Neanderthal was what they meant. He looked down at himself. 
Alexei Kimeninov was urbane, aloof, elegant, master of all that he 
surveyed, gazing out sardonic wit and languid ennui, possessing effortless 
élan. This …this…fury, this obsession, this driving need was anathema to he 
who had been above and beyond such petty considerations as other human 
contact. Now he was reduced to less than them, betrayed by his own 
genetics.

Alexei ground his teeth in rage as he brutally fought down the urge. His suit 
was hand-tailored, conservative but stylish, his hair was cut back and short, 
his wristwatch Piaget but not ostentatious. He was not going to shirk the 
irksome clothes and lay on the silk-sheeted bed, mussing his hair against it 
like some street urchin. Gingerly he sat down on the huge bed, his fingers 
twitching, as they lightly caressed the fine material. Ice-White, silk so fine 
that it's lost it's lustre after a minute's exposure to sunlight. That was 
it…breathe….in…out…in…but another scent was borne to him.

The threadbare stuffed soft toy, appropriately a bear, was in his hands 
before he was conscious of retrieving it and sitting back down. He itched 
with the need to bury his face in the fur and breathe deeply, but he fought 
down the Dark Sentinel, even as it howled it's hunger. To be reduced to this 
pathetic wanting simply by the smell of ….spiced apple mixed with 
chocolate …he snapped out of a potential zone just in time, ruthlessly 
thrusting the bear away from him. When he got his hands on Sean Davidson, 
he would –

Clutch the American involuntarily as the catwalk gave with a sharp 
splintering of wood. They fell only a foot before they bounced safely apart 
on top of some packing crates. Sean Davidson had the agility of a cat as he 
bounded away, the microfilm both he and Alexei were after tucked 
securely in his jeans pocket. As he sat up, Alexei was baffled. If it became 
necessary to kill an agent of the "other side", you took them out with 
surgical precision and minimum fuss, so how had he ended up rolling in the 
dirt in some pseudo-schoolboy fistfight? He twisted, saw Davidson fleeing, 
and everything inside him seemed to slow down, like the freeze-frame on 
TV. From some bottomless pit deep, deep in his core, something roared in 
fury as what was his dared to run from him. Alexei was racing after the 
fleeing American with the heedless speed of a yearling colt, his blood 
thumping frantically in his ears. The scent of spiced apple mixed with 
chocolate taunted him, drew him on with it's siren song of yours, yours, 
yours…

There was a tangle of limbs and a jolting impact, but he was faster than 
the human eel that he pinned. Drawing in great lungfuls of air and that 
intoxicating, euphoric scent, he focussed on the eyes staring up at him as 
his straddled his prize, ruthlessly pinned to the floor. Huge, velvet dark 
and wide, he could willingly drift away in those eyes, but other desires 
were crowding in. The strong, rapid pulse at the base of the throat, 
channelling the sweet, tart blood that would taste so good, the silky hair 
that needed to be combed through and absorbed, strand by strand, the 
trickle of sweat at the base of that throat that would carry his prize's 
unique taste. Delicate veins pulsed near the surface of the translucent skin, 
unconsciously he rubbed his thumbs back and forth over the pulse-points of 
the wrists he pinned down, crooning reassuringly as already bruises were 
blooming on the fragile flesh. Taking in that wondrous scent, he lowered 
his head to the vulnerable throat, to possess what was his…

The bang of a door and coarse male voice raised in ire made Alexei drop the 
bear. He came back to himself abruptly. Standing up, he went to the phone 
and dialled the direct line of Race Keegan, the American President's Senior 
Sentinel Prime. "I've just had another flashback," he rasped, "Sean 
Davidson's natural eye-colour was brown, dark brown I think." 

Ringing off he ordered a room service supper to be left outside his door 
whilst he showered. Without the bear's seductive scent, he could focus on 
remembering, on eroding the blocks, without danger of zoning…

* * *

Shan leaned back against the wall where he sat on top of a workbench in 
the corner of Blair's "office". Thus positioned, he was hidden by the filing 
racks from anyone who suddenly entered, and had only to remain silent to 
avoid detection unless the intruder was a Sentinel. Blair had entered, taken 
one look at him, done a double take and instantly closed and locked the 
door behind him, but Shan knew personally how ineffectual the lock was.

"I know things are different now you're bonded, especially with Ellison - "

"Jim's not like that." Blair denied quietly. "I keep in touch with the 
Underground Railroad,"

"Through Colin Sharpe," Shan accurately estimated.

"I help out where I can but I don't have the level of involvement I did. Jim 
would never hurt me, but he's a Sentinel and a police officer and an 
honourable man. The Underground Railroad breaks a dozen laws just by 
existing. I won't put him in the position of having to ignore his own 
principles for my convenience. But I wouldn't turn my back on the UR, 
especially not with Grokk still out there."  

They shared a glance of mutual rage and fear, then Shan assured him 
quietly, "All I really wanted to know was the current cost of getting out of 
the country. Do you have any contacts in Australia?"

"Two half-sisters."

That did make Shan blink. "Naomi made so much of the fact that you were 
her only chick?"

"Paternal half-sisters."

"You're kidding." Shan stared at him.

Blair shook his head, lost in memories. "You remember that Sentinel 
Conference the GDP put on in Cascade a while back? There was going to be 
a mock murder to solve, to persuade Sentinels towards a career in the 
police. The death happened for real. A retired GDP administrator named 
George Goodman came in to set it up, Jim heard him arguing with a woman 
and then heard a gunshot. We ran in to find the woman gone and Goodman 
dying from a bullet wound to the chest. The woman turned out to be mom. 
To cut a long story short, Goodman was my father."

Shan shook his head in speechless amazement.

Blair explained, "About thirty years some GDP version of Dr Mengele figured 
that if he bred two people with the right combination of genes, he could 
breed empaths. He later extended the experiment to Sentinels, but that 
isn't relevant to this. Basically, the doctor ordered GDP agents with the 
right combination of genes to seduce and impregnate women of childbearing 
age who, usually unbeknownst to themselves, also had the right combination 
of genes to produce an empathic child. Goodman was one of his hirelings. 
He seduced two women, each of whom gave birth to a baby girl without any 
sign of empathy. His third seducee was my mom, with whom he fell in love 
and so he refused to continue with the operation when he discovered my 
mom was pregnant with me. Somehow she was warned the GDP were 
coming to snatch me and disappeared from the hospital despite just having 
gone through a 36-hour labour."

"Who killed Goodman?" Shan asked, finally finding his voice.

"He did. Goodman married a woman and had a son, but she turned out to be 
a middle-class bigot who couldn't stomach the fact that he'd had three 
illegitimate children, including a half-Jewish empath, and made his life hell. 
They divorced and she remarried a man named Campbell, giving their son 
his name. Goodman married again, and his second marriage was truly 
happy. He's got three sons, all three of whom are very weak empaths and 
actually decent human beings – Anthony, Jordan and Kirk." Blair sighed, 
"Then he discovered he had cancer and knew the medical bills would 
bankrupt him, whereas if he died, his family would collect a million dollar 
legacy and be fine. He set the suicide up as murder, intending for it to go 
down as "unsolved", but my mom was at the conference and recognised 
him. She went and confronted him, they argued, she left, he shot himself in 
the chest. But his accomplice saw the perfect opportunity to frame mom for 
the crime. If it hadn't been for Jim…"

"Whoa, what accomplice?" Shan said, to snap Blair out of the depression he 
seemed to be visibly sinking into.

"GDP Guard Thomas Goodman Campbell, his son from his first marriage. My 
other half-brother is currently doing two years in an open prison for aiding a 
suicide. Unfortunately, Campbell is just as bigoted as his mother, her 
second marriage produced no children, so his only siblings are his four half-
brothers: Me, Tony, Jordan and Kirk and his two half-sisters Melody and 
Amandine, but he lists himself as an only child. Me and mom talked after 
the whole thing and she told me about my sisters, Melody and Amandine. 
When Goodman confessed to her what was going on after he got her 
pregnant, she tracked down their moms and warned them to take the girls 
abroad. They teamed up and moved to Melbourne, allowing the girls to grow 
up together. Their empath abilities manifested when they hit puberty, but 
they were safe from the GDP. Melody is a Guide to female Sentinel 
paediatrician in Perth and Amandine is a Homicide Detective in Sydney. I've 
talked to them via vid-phone and they're really cool. When she found about 
Goodman's widow, mom tracked her and the three boys down and arranged 
a meet. She also found out about our nephew." 

"How many relatives have you acquired here, Blair?"

Blair grinned. "Mom looks fragile but she's steel. She did some research on 
Campbell and discovered he'd been married for eighteen months to a 
college lecturer named Shannon Machin, aged 24, before suddenly divorcing 
her. It turned out that her and Campbell's son is an empath, only just too 
weak to qualify for GDP Guide training. Campbell and his bitch-queen 
mother freaked." Blair shook his head at such unreasoning venom. 
"Campbell refused to accept having an empathic child and insisted Shannon 
had had an affair. He filed for divorce for adultery. It was thrown out of 
court once the judge realised Campbell's prejudice, and both a DNA and 
chromosome test proved conclusively that Brennan is his son. The pair of 
them made her life so much hell Shannon upped and left, but now she's 
being looked after by my mom and Marjie, Goodman's widow. She's a 
decent woman and Brennan Goodman will grow up without the bigotry of his 
father, hopefully. Are you really sure Kimeninov is after you?" He changed 
tack, pushing aside the memories of his trauma.

"I was his Guide for eight months." Shan admitted softly, wincing as Blair 
swore and nearly fell of his chair. "We ended up in a school-yard fisticuffs 
bout in a middle Eastern province that dropped straight into a civil war 
whilst we were there. I managed to get away from him at the warehouse, 
but he tracked me down and we bonded, at least partially."

"How the hell did you miss he was a Sentinel, never mind a dark one?!" Blair 
expostulated.

"It never occurred to anyone. His late mother, the Princess Illyana Turek-
Romanov, was a very minor member of the most insignificant branch of the 
Russian Imperial Family; his father, Colonel Ezar Kimeninov was minor 
Hungarian-Russian nobility and neither side of the family had ever shown 
more than one or two heightened senses, and then only infrequently. 
Besides, Alexei had undertaken missions that left him in isolation for several 
days with no hint of any emerging talent. Intel knew he would be in the 
country somewhere when I was there, and that'd he just come off a three-
day mission from the middle of nowhere with no human contact, but it 
wasn't considered of any relevance. Uncle Sam certainly had no idea I was 
even slightly empathic."

Blair nodded thoughtfully. "The combination of the recent isolation from 
human contact and the presence of a compatible Dark Guide, you, was 
probably what triggered his Dark Sentinel abilities to come online." Blair 
shivered at the thought – Jim was a Dark Sentinel, but that side of his 
personality had emerged slowly, like one petal after another unfurling on a 
flower; In contrast, Alexei had gone from 0 – 60 instantly. "What 
happened?"          

Shan spoke softly, his voice becoming almost sing-song as he remembered…

* * *

Alexei was brought back to sanity by a violent explosion way too close to the 
darkened warehouse for comfort. He was dislodged from his position as the 
other agent twisted out from under him, scrabbling up and running. Every 
instinct he possessed screamed in protest, but Alexei was too concussed by 
the din and the chatter of gunfire to gather his wits. Instinctively using his 
hyperactive senses to remove himself from the danger zone, he retreated to 
the small back-street hotel and managed to bring himself back to some form 
of rationality. Now however, he had only one focus – find his Dark Guide, 
and claim him. He began to make plans.

* * *
Shan ran, heedlessly, blood pounding in his head, ignoring the insidious 
voice that tugged him to turn around, to go back, to offer his throat to the 
man he had left behind. Shivering with shock, he hid out in a small copse of 
trees near the border, slipping over it during a lull in the fighting. He had to 
continue with his assignment, no way was the UA government finding out 
that he was a Dark Guide, but he intended to put as much distance between 
himself and Kimeninov as he could.

* * *
"I moved to Saudi and carried on as if nothing had happened." Shan told 
Blair. "I don't trust my former employers in the American government 
further than I can throw them, so gradually managed to make myself non-
existent. I joined Uncle Sam's covert ops with enough fake ID to "prove" I 
was Sean Davidson, then used what chances I could to establish him as real, 
whilst erasing Shan Davies from existence. I even managed to swap my DNA 
and chromosome samples in the national archives for those of a 
nonagenarian Canadian. My fingerprints and retinal scan exist only as Sean 
Davidson, not Shan Davies. By the time I went to that middle Eastern 
country, Shan Davies wasn't even a memory. In the end, as far as Uncle Sam 
knew, I just never came back from my assignment."

"But in between you were Kimeninov's Guide." Blair pointed out.

"Oh yeah. I dyed my hair blond, wore coloured contact lenses, strong 
aftershave. Kimeninov's bosses didn't know he was a Sentinel at all. By pure 
bad luck he ended up coming to the hotel where I was working as a waiter 
and all his senses starting ringing the bells…"

* * *
Hunger and triumph surged through Alexei till he was dizzy as he sat reading 
the paper. Unerringly he focussed on a waiter at the other side of the lobby, 
his suddenly perfectly-working Sentinel eyesight spotting the dyed hair and 
disguised eyes. Instincts screamed but Alexei remained very still. Slipping 
away from the lobby, he secreted himself just outside the hotel in a 
shadowed alcove and used his senses to monitor his prey's movements, 
casting out his senses to the rooms of the live-in staff, he quickly identified 
his Guide's scent, and abandoned his position, making his way to and 
slipping unseen into the room to wait. He lay on the single, hard-mattress 
bed, opening his olfactory senses wide to drink in the scent of his Guide 
until, a few hours later, he heard the approach of a heartbeat he could pick 
out from a billion others instantly.

Shan entered the room wearily, at least he had been on server not kitchen 
duty, so did not stink of food, but he was sick to death of the fact that this 
assignment was going nowhere fast – there was a blur and then he was 
grabbed and thrust back against the wall, his arms coming up automatically 
to push away the threat. He stared into a familiar pair of glittering eyes and 
the Dark Sentinel gave a rumbling purr as his Guide stilled. Abruptly there 
came a deeper growl and a huge bear walked through the wall of the room. 
Shan's stunned eyes tracked it as it padded to a much smaller artic fox, 
snow white bar the tip of his tail, which was standing defiantly bristling, in 
the centre of the room. The bear rumbled but the fox remained stiff and 
wary. Suddenly a massive paw lashed out and pinned the fox flat, causing a 
howl of rage, but the huge bruin simply lowered his head and began to 
groom the fox's fur. Twisting it's head up, the fox gazed up at the bear for 
a long moment, then lay it's head on a furry forearm as the tongue rasped 
massagingly over it's body. The bear wuffled happily at this acceptance.

Shan found himself being pushed down and instantly twisted away. No way 
was he going anywhere close to this carpet without some serious HazMat 
back-up, but the bed was tolerable. The Sentinel – not Alexei Kimeninov – 
snarled and moved to block him, but he shuffled onto the bed and sat, the 
Sentinel immediately following to pin him and nuzzle his neck, growling. 
Shan tilted back his head and allowed himself to relax, feeling the approving 
growl of his Sentinel as Kimeninov's teeth nipped his throat. Pleasure 
shuddered through him and he sighed in submission to the inevitable…

* * *
"Actually, it worked out rather well." Shan shrugged finally. "Only the 
United Americas follow the GDP doctrine, so Alexei hadn't got any of that 
Sentinel Superiority-Guide Slavery crap floating around his head. But after a 
few months it got harder and harder to keep off Uncle Sam and the Russian 
Secret Service so they didn't know what was going on. Then, one day, eight 
months after we'd bonded, I came back to our suite to find that Alexei had 
zoned while watching the sunlight flickering on a vase in the master 
bedroom. I knew it was my last chance so I took it."

"You hypnotised him."

"Yes. I talked to him just enough to make him listen to my Guide voice 
without bringing him out of the zone. I told him he was good enough without 
the enhanced senses. He was the Winter King, he didn't need a Guide, so he 
should forget about both of them. I told him to go to sleep and he'd wake 
up refreshed in the morning with only vague memories of an incompetent 
junior agent he'd sent on some errand who got himself killed. It only took 
me half an hour to make it look like nobody had ever shared the room with 
him, then I simply walked out. Sean Davidson sent in a routine report then 
"disappeared" like so many agents do. I came back to the UA as Shandon 
Davison, and settled down to live out my days as a respectable lecturer in 
economics at an insignificant Seattle Community College. As long as I wasn't 
arrested for being the local serial killer, my ID would hold up under close 
scrutiny. My DNA and chromosomes are listed as belonging to Shandon 
Davison, as are my fingerprints and retinal scan. You would have to really 
scour the records before you found out when and how they'd been inserted 
falsely into the databases."           

Blair rubbed his face. "Okay. Let's go see Colin Sharpe. He'll know the best 
and quickest way to get you out of the country a.s.a.p."

"I appreciate this, Blair." Shan said, quietly.

Blair grinned at him insouciantly, but immediately began to re-review his 
diversionary tactics to ensure Jim Ellison NEVER found out about this.   

SCENE*

(Rainier again) Jim, Simon, Eli Stoddard and Jack Kelso walked the verdant 
lawns in deep conversation, never giving a second look at the battered 
typical "student" van in the parking lot, or the casually dressed students 
that were unloading it. They looked like any other group of twenty-
somethings, so nobody noticed as they moved to and fro between their van 
and the university building, and how a variety of small animals slipped 
unseen away from that van…

SCENE*

(Loft). The voice was deep and sonorous. "DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET. We 
control the horizontal and the vertical. We'll be back." The momentary 
interference vanished as suddenly and inexplicably as it came.

"Whoa." Blair put down his coffee.

"You remember the first Screaming Reels Chief?" Jim asked

"Yeah, it was…before."

Jim nodded. Before – back when Blair had been just another PhD student at 
Rainier, before he was kidnapped by the psychopathic Alex Barnes tortured 
by the GDP as a "rogue" Guide. 

The first Screaming Reels had advertised itself the same way to appear on 
KNCN, which was driven to placing large disclaimer ads in the media and 
threatening to publicly sue any hackers into it's network. On the night 
screaming Reels was supposed to run, security at the channel was tripled, 
but somehow the program was broadcast, despite attempts to stop 
transmission. Several major crime syndicates had been utterly destroyed as 
members were filmed openly talking about their crimes.     

After 3 broadcasts now Screaming Reels simply hacked into the system of 
every major TV studio and broadcast on every channel simultaneously. The 
networks didn't mind since ratings went stratospheric and nobody would 
have watched anything anyway. What really got people going and produced 
a whole host of conspiracy theories was the excellent quality of the film, 
yet it was clear that some footage had been filmed in close up, as if the 
camera crew had been invisible. Experts were still argueing over how it was 
done…

SCENE*

Jim and Blair carried on as normal. Despite all that happened since their 
traumatic bonding neither man was so egotistical as to think for a second 
that they were worth filming. The idea never occurred that they might be so 
special. Jim was a Sentinel, not Superman – he had enough on monitoring 
the important things in the world around him to notice small things. Small 
things like how some pigeons and squirrels did not eat like their fellows ate, 
how some cats and rats, no matter how they ran and scurried maintained a 
steady, rhythmic heartbeat. Had he noticed and pushed past the surface 
beating, he would have heard faint whirrs and clicks. But like the rest of the 
world, Jim didn't notice birds and squirrels and alley cats, or bats and large 
rats and small stray dogs.


SCENE*

(Loft) both Jim and blair looked at the screen in anticipation. Jim had 
splurged on the massive, new bio-cybernetic plasma technology TV with 
Total Surround Sound Experience when he noticed how Blair squinted at the 
screen through his spectacles; often when Jim popped out of the loft to the 
store his enhanced hearing would pick up Sandburg replaying a show they'd 
taped despite already watching it and had detected strange shuffling sounds 
that he finally worked out were Blair going closer to the screen so he could 
see what he was missing. Now Blair no longer squinted.  This Screaming 
Reels was different. The adverts had stated that due to the length of film 
the program would start 5:30pm. It also advised parents not allow their 
children to watch unaccompanied. Anticipation was high. Screaming Reels 
had never given a warning before…

Blair's stomach turned to ice as the first image showed him and Jim at the 
university. For an instant he was torn between the fear the GDP had beaten 
into him and the Dark Guide persona of Blaer, but then Blaer won – the 
ancient had a fatalistic streak a mile wide. Jim's face was a picture of 
astonishment as he stared at himself…

SCENE*

The warehouses were old and dank and smelly but a lot of people came out 
of the shadows when Blair and Shan arrived. It was clear they were 
empaths, empaths in hiding.

(SCENE * Blair acts like a commander throughout the tape, kick ass Dark 
Guide Blaer type). Bring in Grokk.)

SCENE* Blair's chest tightened as he saw Danny Jackson enter the 
warehouse, his grim face causing silence to ripple out. Some of the empaths 
brought guns to bear before Blair stepped in. "This Dr Daniel Jackson, he 
works at Cheyenne Mountain – and he's nearly as powerful an empath as me. 
Danny, what happened?" Blair's tone showed he already knew.

"The Saratoga was lost off the coast of Tasmania."

"How many empaths died?" A bitter-faced middle aged man challenged.

"27, including 8 children."

Old Dimitri chimed in, "The Saratoga was seaworthy."

Danny shook his head – "She was holed below the water line. The USS Nimitz 
heard a boatload of refugee empaths had fled the United Americas for 
Australia and was looking for them – unfortunately a bunch of sex slave 
traders and paedophiles heard the ship to shore scuttlebutt and found the 
Saratoga first. The empaths couldn't go forward when the slavers attacked, 
and they also knew the Nimitz was closing in from behind. They had some 
weapons and it was a pitched battle between the empaths and the slavers. 
Thanks to that bastard Leo Kessler the slavers were used to empaths being 
drugged and helpless when they got their stinking hands on them and 
empaths ready, able and willing to kill weren't on their agenda. Both sides 
took heavy casualties and the Saratoga started to sink. They knew what 
would happen if the slavers got them so a lot of the empaths went down 
with the ship, those that were in the water fought off the slavers attempts 
to drag them out and then the Nimitz arrived. By the time she'd mopped up 
the last of the slavers it was too late to do anything except recover what 
bodies they could."

He fell silent and people began to move, comforting those who began to sob 
the families. The camera followed Blair as he walked up to and embraced 
one woman who did not weep but who rocked back and forth uttering a low 
keening sound. As he hugged her she began to whisper, over and over again, 
"My husband and son were on the Saratoga, my husband and son were on 
the Saratoga,"

SCENE* (real time). Jim hauled Blair into a tight embrace as he watched his 
Guide comfort the woman. Blair turned his head away suddenly and Jim saw 
why – the film jumped to two days later and this time the hiding empaths 
were carrying a poorly wrapped body away; Blair went up to the makeshift 
bier and pulled back the cloth to reveal the woman's face. "how?"

"She slit her wrists last night."

SCNE* Even for the New York catacombs the double cavern, like a figure 8 
pushed to the left with the smaller behind and at an angle to the first, was 
huge. What made the hairs stand up on the flesh of many was that it was an 
obvious shrine. Photographs and images of men, women and teenagers of 
every colour covers the walls, adorned with flowers, illuminated by candles 
in holders, adorned with jewellery and beads. Interspersed were a number 
of large cabinets, a variety of old, battered chests of drawers, Welsh 
dressers and the like. (Old woman explaining to George Freeman): "My 
parents founded this place. Dad was a maintenance subway engineer, he 
found these caverns. My brother made a small fortune in the computer 
business, but he was discovered to be a guide strength empath 2 years after 
the GDP was formed. His Sentinel stole his company – when my brother tried 
to reject the bond and reclaim his property he was sent for retraining as a 
rogue Guide – the GDP guards nearly beat him to death. He managed to 
smuggle out to my parents some jewellery and heirlooms - they placed them 
in this drawer here, where they will remain forever, for I have no children – 
I dared as long as the GDP existed for fear they would be empaths. 
Fortunately the monster that enslaved my brother died early in a car crash. 
He knew he would spend the remainder of his life on suppressants and go a 
bit strange in the head, but he was so relieved to be free of that 
creature…he always blamed himself because when the Sentinel died his 
family inherited everything that should have belonged to my brother. The 
Pendletons' still control the company, living fat off my brother's hard 
work." Her voice was thick with contempt and hatred.     

George Freeman placed a large gilt framed photograph of Sarah on the wall. 
"My wife's dying wish was that I keep my daughter safe from the evil that is 
the GDP and the Sentinels. I failed…" He blinked back tears, then held 
something out, "These earrings have been in my wife's family for 7 
generations. Sarah refused to accept any legacy from my wife's estate – she 
was always afraid that if she ever were captured that her Sentinel would be 
a female who would steal them along with everything else she owned."

SCNE* (warehouse – adult empath has a lifesize cut out of a GDP officer and 
one of a Sentinel male and is teaching the children to run away from these 
as they are evil monsters who will hurt the children.)

"We do it because we have no choice!" Blair's tone was angry – pure Dark 
Guide. (In real time Jim flinched back from it.)

"A toddler who is an empath is still a toddler! Look, Dr Claydove, Dan Slater 
and Good Guards like Harris and Gibb are doing a lot to weed out the sickos 
in the GDP, but they're still there." Blair spat, "Wilson and his cronies 
tortured and raped me for six weeks – they filmed the torture sessions and 
sold them on the black porn market and they worked with Leo Kessler who 
made a fortune pretending to get empaths safely out of the country only to 
sell them as sex slaves or to illegal experimentation labs so monsters like Dr 
Amy Jenson could torture them to death in the name of science." On screen 
Blair gestured at the nearby children.  "Do you really think someone like 
Wilson would balk at paedophilia? I know it's not fair but we have no choice 
– a two year old is incapable of telling the difference between GDP officer 
like Dan Slater and the late Wilson. We have to keep these kids safe, and 
the only way to do that effectively at the moment is to teach them to fear 
anyone in that uniform."            

SCENE* (Warehouse)

Daniel Jackson snorted derisively whilst gage Butler smirked. Jackson said, 
"I have FOUR doctorates from Harvard, Princeton and Yale in Egyptology, 
Biblical Archaeology, Chinese Archaeology and Anthropology. I have seven 
university degrees. I'm a medal winning charity tri-athelete. If the USAF 
GDP find out that I'm an empath, the only thing you'll need to wonder is 
how many of them I'll kill with myself when they try to take me down. Do 
you seriously think I'm going to take any Guide slave crap from a bunch of 
guys not bright enough to change a light bulb?"

SCNE* (warehouse)

Aware of Gage nearby, ready to lend a hand, Blair explained a few home 
truths. "Look, the GDP is a scam, it's always been a scam. A small group of 
rich businessmen and powerful politicians wanted to control Sentinels, but 
they were too cowardly to try it directly, so they came up with the GDP 
because they realised that it is whoever controls the Guides that controls 
the Sentinels."

Gage took it up, "Once they'd got the GDP going they worked as fast as 
possible to strip empaths of all human rights – first we lost our right to vote, 
then we had all our property transferred to our Sentinel, then we couldn't 
own a car, then we weren't allowed to drive, have our own insurance.  The 
GDP has been a golden goose for scum like Leo Kessler whilst the United 
Americas, the only nation in the world to have a Constitution protecting 
civil liberties, stood by and did nothing while over a third of it's population 
were gradually turned into slaves under it's very nose."

Blair concluded bitterly, "If all Guides were women, or always black, or 
always Jewish the GDP would never have succeeded. The organisation is a 
breeding ground psychopaths like David Lash and perverted sadists like 
Wilson and Wilde or amoral monsters like Dr Amy Jenson who wouldn't know 
what the Hippocratic oath was if it hit her in the face."

SCNE*  The Americas – the world – watched the Screaming Reels continue 
on, virtually every viewer transfixed to their screens.


"But Sarah…" He whined, expecting sympathy from the fragile teenage 
Sarah Freeman – after all, she was barely 18 and her whole life had gone to 
hell in a handbasket. 

He got nothing but hard truth. "Here's a quote from the Sandburg Zone – 
it's not about you. After my mother died, my dad and my older sister spent 
their entire lives trying to protect me from the GDP; they sacrificed 
everything to keep me safe -  and I blew it! The very first time something 
untoward happened I freaked like a hysteric and did everything bar 
broadcast: Secretly Empathic Teenager live on CNN. I wake up every 
morning with the guilt of knowing that I let my family down, that all the 
time and money and fear it cost my dad and sister to protect me was 
wasted because I lost my head when I needed to keep it the most and that 
was it. One life, down the pan. Flush and let go. No college, no degree, no 
career – no Doctor Sarah Freeman, super-paediatrician. But you know what, 
it isn't about me. Yes, it hurts to think about what I lost when I see all my 
school friends walking through the gates of Rainier as freshmen, but it 
would be even more disrespectful of all the efforts my family made to keep 
me safe if I spent my life wallowing in self-pity and recrimination. I moved 
on, and you need to do the same."

Not too many miles away, Hunter gasped aloud as his chest seemed 
suddenly caught in an invisible vice. Down the toilet. She didn't want to be 
his Guide….she thought he'd ruined her life…but the TV played 
remorselessly on: 

"Get over it and get on with it, is the gist." Put in Gage as Sarah wound 
down. "My life got blown apart at 3:15pm on Wednesday 21st March. I spent 
my whole life avoiding the GDP and I could run rings round their tests. When 
I had my accident and end up in the training program I was just 2 weeks 
from being home free. I tried so hard to please my trainers yet always 
ended up near the bottom of Guide class. I was two weeks away from being 
patted on the head, given an empathic inhibitor and washed out of the 
program. It would have taken me about ½ a second to disable the chip and 
then back to palaeontology and freedom. I'd just finished an exam were I 
was careful to be in the bottom 10% and boom! I'm walking back to my dorm 
knowing I'm on the home straight when suddenly this guy grabs and pins me 
against a walking, looking at me like a big hungry dog and I'm a nice juicy 
steak!"    

In the suddenly cold Oval Office, Jed Monteith saw the stricken look on Race 
Keegan's face before the Sentinel's expression turned to stone. How hard 
must it be to stand there and listen to his Guide say that his life had been 
destroyed by bonding to Keegan? How hard must it be not just for Sentinels 
but for ordinary men and women watching on TV, faced with the 
unpalatable truth that they were viewed as monsters and bigots, sadist 
slavers and narrow-minded betrayers?

SCNE* (real time, days after broadcast).

Absolute furore erupted. The United Americas were publicly humiliated on 
the international scene. Several countries including Britain threatened to 
recall their ambassadors, the public in other countries boycotted UA goods. 
The day before the broadcast, GDP families were fawned over and feted, 
now GDP officers spouses found that store owners refused to serve them, 
their children were ostracised at school, neighbours shunned them – they 
discovered what life had been like for an empath for the past century and a 
half.   

90% of Guides left their Sentinels and moved back to their families – 
extreme distress, Sentinels physically restraining Guides, anger, 
resentment. (Casdcade Jags auditoriam, Blair on rostrum, news media 
there, packed with Guides).

"You are angry and upset and you have a right to be. But it doesn't give you 
the right to take it out on your Sentinels." Blair's tone was stern and a 
murmur swept around. "The Sentinels have been taught from birth that they 
are demi-gods. They aren't but how would you feel if everything you 
thought you knew disintegrated in a matter of minutes? The people 
responsible here are the GDP and the government for letting it get to this 
story state. Work with your Sentinel, be patient with him or her – they will 
make mistakes many times, but nobody here is perfect either. Only if your 
Sentinel continues to be a bullying asshole – then you can ditch them!"

#~~~~~ scene 

"..and stay out, dammit!"  Race Keegan yelled, firmly ejecting the small 
but irritating bird that was the African equivalent of a pigeon, before 
turning an irate eye towards his Guide.

Who had been no help whatsoever, mainly because, as now, he was standing 
in the doorway, leaning against the wall for support, silently shaking as 
tears of laughter streamed down his cheeks.

"And as for you…" Race got no further as Gage took the most prudent course 
– like a startled rabbit he raced up the stairs to the next level and locked 
himself in the room as Race skidded to a halt outside. 

For several moments the Sentinel listened to his Guide making his way 
through another room in that suite, then Gage began to sing, loudly  "Gonna 
buy a drink, yes I am, for a nubile unbonded Sentinel…"

The lock had no chance against the President's ex-Sentinel Prime, and the 
irritated Sentinel began to stalk his errant guide. Not that was much 
stalking required, as Gage's progress was easy to mark. Between fits of 
giggles and unsteady footsteps, the Guide began to sing the refrain from an 
old 20th Century cartoon, hiccoughing chortles causing him to stutter, "c-c-
c-catch the pigeon, catch the pi-pi-pigeon, catch that pigeon nowww!"

Race's low growls became full-throated snarls when Gage began to 
intersperse that with a little ditty of his own: "A tale I wannna teeeell, of a 
luscious girlie unbonded Sentineeeeel!!" He was going to grab his Guide, put 
him over his knee and paddle the Butler butt red raw!

Abruptly Race came out on the mid-level as Gage was stumbling chuckling 
along the balcony above, and the Sentinel gave a rumble of intent as he saw 
his prey. Abruptly, Gage's expression changed to one of alarm as Race went 
for the bottom of the stairs. "Race, stop!"

The Sentinel stopped, instinctively casting out a sensory net, but detect no 
dangers animal, mineral, vegetable or structural.  "What?"

"The stairs!"

Race double-checked. The stairs were sound. "What's wrong with them?"

"Well, at your age you've got to start slowing down," said Gage with wide-
eyed innocence, and promptly fled.

Race roared and bounded after him. It wasn't much of a race – Gage was by 
now almost helpless with laughter and his doubled up, shuffling gait, 
punctuated by gasping snorts of mirth telegraphed his exact position. Race 
grabbed him from behind and the pair went sliding on the hearthrug to 
collapse in a tangled heap on the couch, which was fortunately large and 
sturdy enough to accommodate an entire platoon, ending up face to face. 
Race moved to pin down his Guide and Gage rolled back slightly onto his hip 
and shoulder as Race shoved, allowing the entrapment. Raising his unpinned 
left arm, Gage placed it on Race's back, around his shoulders, drawing him 
down towards him, increasing the imprisonment. Immediately the 
powerfully corded muscles of the man pinning him began to relax, and the 
near-snarls changed to low growls. Race lowered his head and buried his 
face in Gage's hair, taking a deep breath of his Guide's intoxicating scent. 
The part of the Sentinel that was Race Keegan heard the echo of nubile 
unbonded Sentinel. A large hand reached over and delivered an ungentle 
swat to his Guide's backside.

Gage accepted Race's bodyweight, and with his other hand free reached up 
and gently laid his palm against the side of Race's face, stroking his cheek 
with his thumb, showing his acceptance not only of the bonding they had 
just begun, but Race's dominance as his Sentinel. There were no growls 
now, only the intense, focussed gaze of the Sentinel. Race began to comb 
his fingers through Gage's hair in a petting motion, his expression becoming 
goofier as he breathed in Gage's unique woody scent, stronger in bonding 
heat and deliciously euphoric. He nuzzled Gage's throat were the blood 
pulsed temptingly, using his enhanced touch to guide his fingers from Gage's 
shoulder to hip and back, trying to press through the irritating clothing, 
almost purring with pleasure as Gage moved both hands to his back, rubbing 
the muscles in gentle circling motions and gentling massaging his nape, all 
the while talking softly to him, his eyes gentle and caring as they looked up 
at his Sentinel…more than caring, trusting. His Guide, his own.

"Yours, only yours." Gage assured, moving his hands to Race's arms and 
gently stroking from shoulder to elbow even as they banded his body. "My 
Sentinel."

Once again Race's nostrils flared, taking in that scent. Memory surfaced - 
somewhere in this hotel lurked an unbonded Sentinel, a rival. "Mine." He 
growled possessively, his teeth nipping the vulnerable throat just enough to 
draw the tangy blood that he licked away as he marked his Guide. "Claimed 
and marked, Guide." It was a deep-throated rumble.

"Claimed and marked, Sentinel." Gage responded ritually, tilting his head 
back to allow complete access to his throat, showing total trust in the man 
that could kill him between one heartbeat and the next.

Race was in full bonding heat now, determined to claim his Guide, but he 
was still rational enough to feel a surge of rage against the GDP and their 
prissy strictures. The "bonding platform" which had been as uncomfortable 
as a bed of nails, designed so due to their own hang-ups about the bonding 
of Guide and Sentinel. The "proper" bonding position – laying face down on 
the stomach, hands behind the back, no seeing, no touching unless the 
Sentinel ordered - so a Sentinel couldn't even see the Guide's face – to hide 
the fear and despair of a human being stripped off their rights because of 
being born with one kind of genetic enhancement and not the other? All 
because of the GDP's twisted ideals of prudery and appropriateness, their 
erroneous conviction that any form of intimate bodily contact between two 
unrelated adults had to be sexual because any other kind was "unseemly". 

There was nothing to compare with being in this soft, comfy nest, plaited 
round each other tightly, no mental barriers between them, being able to 
see every nuance of trust and devotion on his Guide's face. All the times he 
had hurt Gage, treated him like an object, tied him like a damn dog….the 
shame ate at him like acid…

Abruptly his hair was yanked painfully and his attention snapped back to his 
prize. Gage cupped Race's face with both hands. His mental pathways were 
fully open, unprotected, confident in his Sentinel's ability to shield his 
empathy from the emotions of anyone else. "no," he growled, "you are not 
going to wallow in self-loathing over the stupidity of that bunch of idiots. 
You did not know any better, Race, and as soon as you did, you put things 
right. Are you ever going to leash me again?"

"No!"
 
"Beat me? Torture me? Rape me?" Gage held his Sentinel's face. "You are 
my Sentinel, claimed and marked, Keegan. I trust you, I believe in you and I 
love you. You won't hurt me!"

Keegan buried his face in Gage's neck, humbled by such trust for him, who 
had done nothing to earn or deserve it. The finest silk was coarse sackcloth 
to Sentinel fingers, Gage allowed Race to unclothe him and returned the 
favour, gently petting Race and talking softly as Race lost himself in the 
physical sensory delights of scent, taste and touch with the added bonus of 
completely open mind to mind contact. Even when Race touched him 
intimately, there was no sexual undertone, but the foolish GDP would never 
be able to understand this bond, and they weren't worth trying to explain it 
to… Race's presence gently brushed along the empathic pathways of Gage's 
brain, soothing, relaxing, nourishing, easing away stress and wrapping him in 
a soft, warm emotional blanket. Gradually hands grew slower, lazier, Gage 
turned and laid his head against Race's chest and snuggled closer into his 
warmth, rubbing his cheek against his safe harbour, and they fell asleep, 
cocooned in the bonding.


The following morning a young female Sentinel exited the hotel, looking 
around her sharply as she sensed an empath nearby – a strong, Guide-
strength empath, though   her own powers were as yet only sporadic - but 
growing. Her eyes lit up as she spotted what instinct told her she needed. 
She stopped… the Guide reeked of the scent of another, her enhanced sight 
easily picking up the bite on his throat – he had been claimed. Every inch of 
him was touched by the maddening scent of another Sentinel. Her skin 
prickled with fear as another man came out of the hotel and turned towards 
her as if she were a magnet. Dark Sentinel. He didn't posture or pull the 
Guide possessively to his side, there was no need. His arrogant belief in his 
superiority flowed out from him. Not arrogant, self-assured. The Guide was 
his, claimed, marked, possessed absolutely and he could break her in half 
without even thinking about it. Prudently she backed away and left. Pity the 
idiot who tried to challenge for that Guide.

***
"Umm, Chief?"

Finally. Blair exhaled with relief. Ever since Gage and Race had gone on 
their palaeontology expedition to Africa, (President's Sentinel Prime resigns 
so he can go fossil hunting with his Guide, didn't the media have an 
absolute field day with that!) he'd caught Jim giving him odd, thoughtful 
looks, and their bonding had changed, Jim had bonded within twice more 
than usual, and the bonding had been more intense – his body still bore the 
bite marks – yes, Jim was definitely feeling possessive, but there was no 
reason for it. No other Sentinel was currently around. Hunter had taken 
Sarah to the Ovarian Cancer specialist in New York, in the company of none 
other than William Ellison. Gage and Race were on the Dark Continent, Shan 
and Alexei ensconced as President Monteith's new Sentinel Prime and Guide 
Prime.

"What, Jim?"

"I was thinking, would, you…like to go back to being a proper 
anthropologist?"

"What? No! Jim, it's not the same. Being Presidential Sentinel Prime was 
just a job to Race Keegan, so he had no problem swapping it. To you being 
cop is a vocation." Stepping up to Jim, he laid his head against Jim's chest. 
"I'm happy where you are." He encouraged Jim's need to bond…   

Blair snuggled closer to Jim and yawned, being careful to keep his heartbeat 
steady. Jacking in Cascade PD for Anthropology was actually his idea of 
heaven, but Blair was under no illusions about the future. The two year 
emancipation program and the prohibition of leashes, followed by the vote 
to abolish the laws that basically made Guides slaves were but the first 
steps – and that Screaming Reels program had propelled those tentative 
steps into an all out race. The United Americas government had been 
publicly humiliated by being the only country in the world with the GDP 
organisation, and the only country in the world that empaths routinely fled 
from. Ordinary Americans were outraged on the behalf of Guides and the 
same pressure groups that had once been headed by such greats as Martin 
Luther King formed again.

The GDP had been dealt a stunning blow, but for too long the GDP had been 
a cash cow and a gravy train to power and influence, and there were too 
many greed-consumed people who would fight to the death to protect their 
easy ride, such as Dr Jensen. Dr Haynes had tried to pull a "no confidence 
vote" in Dr Claydove, only to be had promptly kicked out of the GDP ruling 
council. But Blair knew most of the remaining bad guys were a lot smarter 
and much more subtle. The first shot had been fired in what was going to be 
an ugly little war, but being a detective might give Jim some protection 
from the intrigue and plotting that was going to erupt all over the place. 
They had rocked the established order to its foundations, and Blair knew 
that wackiness was about to ensue.

As he drifted off, he remembered again the curse of the ancient but 
obviously wise Chinese: May you live in interesting times…..