Disclaimer: The Sentinel et al, is owned by Pet Fly, UPN, etc. No money is 
being made. This story is rated 15 for content.

Notes: This is a “canon” (ish) version of my story “Bear Necessities – GDP 
universe”, which is a lot longer, and to be honest, may never be finished the 
rate I’m going! The OMCs of Shan and Alexei I brought over from that GDP TS 
fic (see Susan Foster’s TS fanfic page for her excellent GDP series) because I 
liked them so much and they wouldn’t leave me alone, loitering in my neurons 
and whining that they needed more “exposure”. This is set in the normal 
universe EXCEPT that TSbyBS hasn’t happened. (I think TSbyBS was 
catastrophic for the show because as a writer (though I’ve only just started 
writing fanfic) I know that what works best is conflict/contrast, which TS lost 
the instant it made Blair a cop with Jim.) I’m a Brit, so spelling and grammar 
are British, but I’ve tried to “Americanise” the language, attitudes, etc (e.g., 
car park is parking lot). One final warning to U.S. readers – I DO NOT AGREE 
WITH, nor subscribe to, Political Correctness.

Medical Note: Plasmodium Vivax is 1 of the 4 types of malaria – 2 nasty, 2 
bearable. PV is a bearable strain. 
				
BEAR NECESSITIES (canon non-GDP version)

Standing in the staff parking lot of Rainier University, Shan Davies winced as his 
excellent eyesight focussed on a skinny, mop-topped figure hurtling down the 
stairs at a pace almost guaranteed to send him base over apex. Shan grinned 
briefly, 99.9% certain that Blair Sandburg would not fall. Sandburg took every 
flight of steps like an express train with failed brakes, and despite all the crap 
that had happened to him over his 27 years of life, he’d never fallen down 
stairs, the Cosmos apparently deciding to give him that one small break. Shan 
sucked in the tobacco of his Raffles Black with relish, knowing that cigarettes 
would no longer be tolerated if Alexei managed to catch him. Shivering, he 
walked slowly forward to intercept the one person in the world he trusted to 
understand the meaning of loyalty.

Blair Sandburg tripped down the front steps of Rainier University, ferreting in 
his backpack for the keys to his Volvo. Not that anyone with any sense would 
steal the juddering rust-bucket, so why he bothered to lock it…He finally found 
them wedged in a corner; Jim would be working late on a particularly nasty 
homicide case and had made ominous remarks about the fact that Blair would 
be home in plenty of time to make dinner and clean up the “mess” (a couple of 
books on the couch, and Uptight Ellison went into a snit!) before he’d left the 
loft. Considering what he strongly suspected to be the cause of Ellison’s 
intermittent but increasingly frequent bouts of irritability, Blair had every 
intention of being the meekest, most biddable little Guide ever -

“What’s up, Doc?”

Blair’s head snapped up at the honeyed Deep South drawl; four years of being 
an observer in the Major Crimes Unit of Cascade PD and Detective James 
Ellison’s ride-along had got him into some very hairy scrapes, so he attempted 
to be a lot more discerning of the world around him. Standing in front of him 
was a slender man of his own height. Whereas Blair’s golden skin and long, 
curly brown hair hinted at his Jewish heritage, the man blocking his path had 
fine, pale, almost translucent skin, the sort that showed even minor bruises in 
vibrant glory but in contrast, he had thick, shaggy, rough-cut black hair and 
black velvet eyes - a dichotomy that marked him as a virtually pure blood Celt, 
despite his Southern accent.

“Shan!” Blair dropped backpack and student essays unceremoniously on the 
ground before enfolding him in an exuberant hug. Abruptly he pulled away, 
anxiously. “Are you okay? Should I call you Shan? I mean, if you’re in deep 
cover is it safe for you to see me –”

“Whoa, Sandi.” Shan cut off the flow, his grin tinged with relief that Blair 
Sandburg was still the same exuberant, bouncing-off-the-walls guy he’d been 
the last time Shan had seen him (which was too damned long ago…). “I’m 
retired.”

Blair’s eyes widened. “Wow! Er, can you do that? I mean,” he waved one arm 
wildly, “will they let you do that?”

Shan’s grin went from friendly to vicious. “We have an agreement, I ignore 
them and they don’t bother me.”

“Uh-uh.” Part of what made Blair Sandburg so trustworthy was the fact that, 
for all his incessant chatter, he knew when not to probe further. “Do you live 
in Cascade?”

“No, I’m just visiting. Lorelei Valley.”

Blair’s eyes went out stalks again. Due East of Cascade, past Spokane, Lorelei 
Valley nestled in the mountains and possessed a combination of exquisite 
natural beauty and terrain so rugged as to be virtually impossible to build 
houses on. The few houses that did exist there dwelled in the centre of acres 
of unbroken loveliness and regularly sold for in excess of 30 million dollars. 

“I was surprised when I found out you were in Cascade, knowing how you hate 
the cold, but Rainier got you your doctorate,” Shan continued. “I’m sorry, but I 
didn’t get chance to bring you a present –” 

“No!” Blair’s tone was a little too sharp and he calmed himself down. “Look, 
Shan, most people don’t know I’m a PhD now, and I’d like to keep it that way. 
Would you mind not mentioning it to anyone, please?”

Shan also knew when not to pursue things, and Blair’s flushed embarrassment 
had him quickly turning the conversation into an enquiry after Naomi. Nothing 
about his meeting with Blair had been accidental, so his background checks 
before approaching the young man again had been thorough, and he had been 
confused by Blair’s achieving his PhD. 

Sandburg had gotten his doctorate for his thesis on “closed societies”, based on 
his observations with Cascade PD Major Crimes Unit, but he’d asked for his 
graduation ceremony to be deferred until further notice. He’d also taken up 
the post of Teaching Assistant to Professor Rolands, Dean of Anthropological 
Studies, even though his doctorate entitled him to tenure as a professor or 
lecturer. TAs were notoriously dumped on by their superiors and woefully 
underpaid. True he was older than most PhD achievers, but Blair Sandburg’s 
entire life had been one long anthropological field trip, care of Naomi 
Sandburg, so from an experience point of view, nobody could top him. 

Interestingly, Blair’s police partner, James Ellison, the cops of Major Crimes, 
and everyone Blair was close to were apparently under the impression that 
Blair was still a student. Shan strongly suspected Blair’s actions had a great 
deal to do with his original thesis, the thesis he had mysteriously abandoned 
eighteen months ago, the thesis that had brought Shan half a world to him. 
He’d had Blair under surveillance for weeks, and had drawn some very 
interesting conclusions.

* * *

Sitting on the couch, ice-cold beer in one hand, Cascade Jaguars thrashing the 
opposition on the TV in front of him, Detective James Joseph Ellison, Cascade 
PD, frowned as Blair brought his dinner to him on the couch then walked away 
again. Watching with peripheral vision, he saw Blair rapidly wolf down what 
little he had on his own plate, wash the crockery, then disappear into his 
bedroom. Jim hesitated. The Masoli case was exhausting, which made him 
tired, which made him irritable. Maybe he had laid it on a little thick this 
morning when he’d chivvied the kid about leaving his books all over the 
apartment and making dinner, but he’d been secretly irritated that Blair was 
going to the Uni instead of coming into work with him.

“Chief?”

Blair looked up from the papers he was grading, an anxious expression crossing 
his face. “Yeah Jim? Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine. Don’t fall asleep at your desk.” 

Having given the order, Jim went and sat back down on the couch, unhappily. 
When he and Blair first met – even despite him slamming the man into a wall – 
Sandburg always looked at him eagerly, with sparkling eyes and rapt attention, 
as if everything Jim said or did was superlative. It had been – still was – very 
ego stroking. Recently however, Blair tended to look at him as if he were 
worried that Jim was going to beat him. When Jim snappishly refused to take 
anymore “Sentinel-skill enhancing” tests/games that Blair had devised a few 
weeks back, the anthropologist had caved in, whereas at one time he would 
have been right back in Jim’s face, arguing the point.

Scowling, Jim realised that Blair had never broached the subject since – and 
four weeks had gone by. Where was his partner, and why had he been replaced 
with this “Yes, Jim” lap-dog? His thigh muscles tensed as he made to get off 
the couch, but his suddenly returning headache changed his mind. On second 
thoughts, an obedient Blair was much easier, and quieter, to live with. Carry 
on the New Improved Silent Sandburg, he decided, settling back down to watch 
the Jags.

Blair finished grading the few papers he’d hadn’t managed to do during his 
break-times at Rainier. Professor Rolands was a legend in anthropology, and 
Rainier was very fortunate to get him, had only done so because the widower’s 
only daughter was a physicist in Cascade for CalTech. Rolands was a man who 
believed in precision and punctuality, and organised his department 
accordingly. His department operated as efficiently as a Swiss watch. He 
accepted only the best and brightest students and the best TAs. Blair had had 
almost no hope of getting the Teaching Assistant job, since his innate honesty 
compelled him to admit the amount of time he would have to dedicate to his 
role as an observer at the Cascade PD. 

Rolands had grilled him pretty thoroughly on the issue, then offered him the 
position on the spot. Once over his stunned amazement at getting the position, 
Blair discovered that Rolands was sick of candidates offering to work “eight 
days a week”, then crying off after the first few days of their new position. 
Rolands employed no less than an unprecedented eight Teaching Assistants, 
albeit some part-time, and factored Blair into his famous “Rolands Rotation” 
system so that Blair had maximum flexibility. In return, Blair agreed to work 
the unsociable hours that the other TAs wanted off, such as evenings and 
weekends. 

Blair’s trepidation had dissolved after the first two days. There were no 
slackers under Rolands, so very little time was wasted that could be spent 
doing productive work. Unlike his Teaching Fellow classes, he wasn’t faced 
with jocks expecting an easy ride to keep up their scholarship grades, or 
teenage Barbie dolls thinking they wouldn’t have to do any work. All the essays 
he had to mark were erudite, well-crafted, neatly word-processed and easy to 
grade rapidly. By working through his break periods and taking a short lunch, 
Blair found that he could easily accomplish more than his expected daily work-
load, leaving him more time to be at Major Crimes with his Sentinel. 

Thinking of how Jim got his hyperactive senses, in the jungles of Peru on a 
black op for the Rangers, brought Blair’s mind back to Shan. A smile tugged at 
his mouth. Shan was about three years older, thirty now, and they’d first met 
when Blair was 19 and Shan 22. Even then Blair was a better anthropologist 
than many full professors would ever be, and it had taken him about 10 
seconds to work out what the apparently bohemian youth who’d joined Naomi’s 
travelling group in Poland really was. Naomi was firmly “anti-Government” and 
would have thrown a fit if she’d known that a genuine U.S. Government spook, 
one of those employees of unnamed, unknown Government agencies, had been 
in her midst. Shan, in turn, rapidly figured out that Blair knew, but both men 
had come to an understanding and a friendship. He’d seen Shan twice more 
since then, once in Christchurch, New Zealand, once in Saudi Arabia. Each time 
Shan had borne a different name and a different accent, and Blair was far too 
wise to acknowledge him in any way, afraid of blowing his cover. 

On principle, he disapproved of covert operations, black ops, and all that 
paranoia. As Blair knew from bitter experience, it tended to attract amoral, 
maladjusted sociopaths who ought to have been securely locked away 
somewhere – Lee Brackett, please stand up! But there were the odd gems 
amidst the pebbles. James Ellison, former ranger, former – or then again, 
probably still if Blair read the signs right - black ops, was one, Shan was 
another. Shan was the first person other than Naomi to whom Blair had 
revealed his dream of anthropology, and of finding a Sentinel, though the agent 
would have forgotten that bit by now. Certainly everyone else had thought 
Burton’s work on Sentinels had been a joke, brought on by too much humidity 
and Amazon mosquito bites…

* * *

The hotel room was plush and expensive, but something he could easily afford; 
single, with no dependents, and far too sensible to fall in love with the 
“romance” of his lifestyle, Shan had managed to put a good two-thirds of his 
already healthy salary into savings or shrewd investments. Blair Sandburg had a 
“feeling” for horse races; Shan could read stocks and shares like an open book.

Lighting another Raffles Black, Shan, who had slept in everything from ditches 
to foxholes to sewers, lay on the huge bed watching the Jags game and allowed 
himself to relax, if only briefly. A wry smile tugged at his mouth. With a high 
IQ, a talent for acting and the ability to be inconspicuous, plus no living family, 
he’d been a prime acquisition for his paymasters.

He’d joined the U.S. Navy at 18 to see the world and get himself a degree in 
Bio-Technology; he had been promptly snapped up by Naval Intelligence, 
rapidly being head-hunted by those agencies of the U.S. Government that 
dwelled, first in the shadows, then in pitch darkness, as Blair would put it. Just 
as Blair’s whole life had moulded him perfectly for anthropology, so too Shan’s 
history made him adept at the chameleon like personality changes utilised by 
all good “spooky people”.

He was American by birth, born in the French Quarter of New Orleans to an 
almost pure-blood Celt Welsh father, from whom he inherited his Celtic 
appearance, and a well-to-do American mother, who had bequeathed her U.S. 
Citizenship. Their plan for Shan to be the first of a double-figure brood ended 
just after Shan turned fifteen months old, when a corporate executive 
completely smashed after a three-hour lunch of booze, dope and sex with his 
mistress came roaring back from their motel room at 90mph and smashed head-
on into the Davies’ Chrysler, sending the vehicle into oncoming traffic. 

Rescue crews considered it a mercy that both adult Davies had been killed 
instantly on impact, as removing their horrifically mangled remains from the 
twisted wreck of what had once been a car was traumatic, as was cleaning up 
what was left of the mistress who had been catapulted through the windscreen 
of the drunk’s car. The rescue crews had been amazed to find a crying but 
unharmed infant cramped into a small space in the mangled mess, saved from 
injury by the giant teddy-bear, now pancake, bought for him not two hours 
earlier by his father that had absorbed the impact for him. The stoned drunk, 
also barely injured due to the “boneless” quality demonstrated by the 
profoundly inebriated, ended up serving twenty-five years on three counts of 
vehicular manslaughter, and also flat broke after he was sued by the State of 
Louisiana on behalf of the orphaned infant.  

Thus Shan was set on his life course. Both his parents were only children, and 
his only surviving relative and Guardian was his Welsh maternal grandmother, 
with whom he spent his childhood on the border between France and Italy, 
which had made him fluent in four languages and given him a talent for 
mimicry of speech. She’d moved to Brussels when he was five and he spent the 
next two years in a linguistic maelstrom, fluent in two dozen languages by the 
time he was seven. As a way to “fit in” whenever they moved, he read up on 
the culture and learned the language of wherever they were going, until within 
a week he sounded like and had the attitudes of a native.

They moved back to the land of his birth when he was ten, settling in New 
York, and he’d become “all-American”. His ability to absorb the culture and 
language of almost any area had made him invaluable in deep cover missions, 
since he picked up slang and dialect with almost ridiculous ease. By the age of 
25 he had achieved far more than many older agents.

Shan sighed; ferocious over-achievement had got him into this mess. They’d 
kept sending him against bigger and better guns, and he’d kept winning. 
Finally, though he didn’t know it, he was sent after the Winter King. Alexei 
Kimeninov, Iceman of the KGB. And after I barely escaped with my life, what 
did my arrogant ego talk me into doing…? I must have been nuts…!

***

The Night Shift motel manager licked his suddenly dry lips as he directed the 
latest arrival to his room; the man had been quiet and polite, but the manager 
had abruptly been reminded of some Siberian tigers he’d seen in a zoo when he 
was kid, who’d lain there watching the people with lazy menace.

He watched the man walk towards his room. Yes, that same predatory grace 
was there in the deceptively casual stroll. The man was tall, over six feet, with 
wide shoulders and long, tree-trunk-thigh legs. His high cheekbones were subtly 
foreign, as was his aristocratic blade of a nose, and he had light-gold hair, like 
those Norwegian folks or some such. 

But his eyes…the manager shuddered as he popped back into the warmth of his 
booth like a gopher down its hole. They were chips of ice set in his face, yet 
somehow they seemed to glitter, as if lit with an inner flame. They were also 
currently slightly blank, as if the man were only operating in the real world just 
enough to be functional but was really somewhere only tangentially connected 
with reality – a fruitcake.

The crooked eyebrow the man had, that gave him a perpetual air of sardonic 
amusement, should have been funny, but any laughter withered before that 
gaze. No way had anyone ever teased him at school, especially if those eyes 
had been accompanied by his impressive physique. The manager used to be a 
minor league baseball player – he knew the difference between solid and fat. 
The guy was big and wide, but it was pure, corded muscle. Silently determining 
not to be around when the guy came to check out the following morning, 
especially if he had that same blank look in his eyes, he went back to his 
programme.

Throwing the heavy suitcase on the bed as lightly as if it were a feather, Alexei 
locked the door, drew the curtains and then jammed a chair under the door so 
it couldn’t be opened very easily. For all its cheapness, the motel room was 
surprisingly clean. It wasn’t the Waldorf-Astoria, but it wasn’t the type of place 
where, as that American travel-writer, Bill Bryson, had put it: “You woke to a 
chilling scream in the middle of the night, and a female voice pleading, ‘Put 
the gun down Vinnie…’” 

Stripping off his suit to reveal the physique the manager had so accurately 
guessed at, he pulled on jeans and a T-shirt from his holdall, which contained 
all the baggage he really needed. The suitcase was just cosmetic. Nestled 
incongruously together inside the holdall were a large, pink teddy bear and a 
Glock, complete with silencer. It was the teddy bear he pulled out of the bag, 
his fingers unconsciously stroking the cuddly toy even as he scowled. Fur was 
an excellent trapper of scents, but with a major effort of will, he did not lift 
the bear to his face and inhale.

The expression of his face would have had the manager blubbering in terror. 
Alexei smiled slowly, his eyes empty and clearly seeing nothing of his 
surroundings, but something else. Instinct told him that he was closing in, 
drawing ever closer. When he found Shan Davies, the American would be very 
sorry that he’d run from him…
   
* * *

“Get a move on, Sandburg!”

Blair winced at Jim’s sharp tone and immediately took his breakfast dish to the 
sink and washed it, before going to his room and grabbing his backpack. Hidden 
in plain sight amongst his other texts were the rest of Sir Richard Burton’s 
papers, which he’d bought due to one of those serendipitous accidents that 
always seemed to happen in real life yet were decried as far-fetched by fiction 
writers. He’d gone to a new antiquarian bookstore near the campus, just 
opened by an English immigrant whose last job in Britain had been a house 
clearance for the heir of Sir Richard Burton’s great-great-nephew. The 
unwanted old books from the library had been on sale for $50 the lot, and Blair 
had nearly fainted when he realised what they were. 

The good news was that he now knew why Jim had gradually become more 
irritable over the past few weeks with him. As he sat next to a silent, obviously 
bad-tempered Jim in the detective’s truck en route to the precinct, he 
couldn’t suppress a tiny shiver. Dark Sentinel: an even more primitive 
throwback than a normal Sentinel, part of the reason why Jim had not been 
driven insane like Alex Barnes by his uncontrolled exposure at the Sentinel 
Temple - she, only a Sentinel, lacked the mental power of Jim’s Dark Sentinel 
abilities. Stronger, faster, with far more hyperactive and acute senses was a 
Dark Sentinel, also extremely aggressive, a total control-freak and, quote: 
“psychotically possessive of his or her Guide.”

The bad news was that Sir Richard Burton, while giving awe-struck, lyrically 
graphic descriptions of a Sentinel and a Dark Sentinel’s “Dark Side” didn’t 
provide any comprehensive advice on what to do about it. Whereas a Sentinel 
would instinctively try to “find” his or her Guide, the Dark Sentinel would 
aggressively “hunt” them – a definite distinction. The Dark Sentinel attempted 
to totally dominate their Guide, seeking total control, total submission. 

The eloquent Burton had at that point gone on to state firmly that this could 
not be allowed to take place by the Guide. A Dark Sentinel’s heightened power 
came at the price of deeper, more severe zone outs.  When a Guide was too 
subjugated, they often lacked the willpower, the mental “kick-ass” ability, to 
bring the Dark Sentinel back from the zone – Burton even strongly hinted that 
on many occasions, if a Guide had been kidnapped and forcibly claimed by the 
Dark Sentinel, he or she would deliberately stand back and do zip while the 
Dark Sentinel’s heart inevitably failed. 

What blasted Sir Richard Burton did NOT do, anywhere in his purple prose, was 
explain exactly how the Guide was meant to achieve that subtle distinction 
between submission and subjugation, how the Guide was to strike the balance 
between being placatory and a lily-livered pushover. 

At least Jim hadn’t come “on” at once, Blair acknowledged with relief as the 
hustle and bustle of Major Crimes swallowed him and the irascible Sentinel. 
Though Jim had been born a Sentinel, most only came “online” as adults after 
a period of isolation or trauma, springing forth full grown like Aphrodite from 
the forehead of Zeus. Jim’s tendency to repress things he did not like or wish 
to acknowledge meant that Jim’s abilities had grown gradually and 
manageably, but Blair’s tests had given Jim increasing control and like an 
engine idling over, that increased control was bringing it up to normal running 
speed – which was Dark Sentinel status. He had stopped the tests over a month 
ago, but apparently Jim had passed the point of no return, for his Dark Sentinel 
tendencies continued to display themselves.

Fortunately Blair Sandburg was very fluent in James Ellison Body Language, 
reading volumes in the single twitch of a minor muscle, and so had been able 
distract and control Jim by increasing his meekness and submissive behaviour, 
but eventually things would come to a head. Blair was under no illusions – Jim 
could break him in half with one hand. Burton had written about Dark Sentinels 
so possessive that they had chained their Guides in their homes so that they 
could not leave, had leashed them like dogs, had even tried to kill the Guide’s 
family in order to have the Guide all to themselves. Guides trying to flee had 
been beaten. Again, while Burton stated that the Guides had refused to accept 
such behaviour and eventually achieved a harmonious rapport with their Dark 
Sentinels, he conveniently forgot to give any instructions on how to do it; Blair 
had irascibly decided that Sir Richard Burton was like finding a clear, highly 
detailed map of some place you were lost in, only to discover that everything 
was written in Urdu. 
 
Jim was showing an increasing resentment whenever Blair left his side, 
especially towards Rainier University and Blair’s commitment to it. Blair had a 
foreboding feeling that Shan’s absolutely not coincidental arrival was going to 
lead to all sorts of complications…

***

The door flew open with an almighty crash as it bounced off the worktop, 
making a mockery of the new lock and safety chain that dangled, ripped from 
their anchor. He backed away, fear, anger, shame, confusion all battling for 
supremacy. He had sworn after last night and the night before that he would 
NOT suffer this humiliation again, but somewhere, deep inside, was a 
treacherous flaw, a traitorous vein of answering need and compassion that 
fatally damaged his ability to resist –

“NO!” He backed away from the door of the cheap short-lease studio 
apartment, his bags already packed, his body stiff with tension and resistance.

The intruder snarled, edging closer, eyes devouring him hungrily, obviously 
angered at the refusal. Knowing it was useless, he made a lunge for the door, 
but with a howl of rage, the larger man caught him and they struggled, but he 
was no match for that strength and he was knocked the floor, pushed down, 
his breath coming in ragged gasps as an open-handed slap rocked his face, 
stunning him long enough for the intruder to push him onto his back and 
straddle his struggling body, pinning him with enraged snarls at his continued 
fighting. 

“NO! Don’t….” Shame and rage engulfed him as he was mauled, his neck and 
torso bitten, hard, hurting hands forcing his legs apart and yanking down his 
zip, groping him, obscenely caressing his body into hateful, shameful response, 
brutally and explicitly grabbing and probing where they had no right to go. 
Tears leaked from his eyes but even as he fought to escape, he had held back. 
The intruder’s eyes were wide and unseeing, clearly locked into some night 
time vision only he could see and hear, utterly vulnerable in his obvious 
sleepwalking and therefore inviolable because of it. Too weak to fight 
anymore, he lay unmoving as the assault continued…

Shan woke up, gasping, drenched in sweat. He had this nightmare every night; 
shivering he got up and went into the shower, knowing return to sleep was 
impossible. He knew how the dream would end, for it was just the replayed 
images of past reality: It had never been actual rape, but Alexei would sexually 
abuse him several more times over the next hour. Then the Russian would lie 
down next to him, making wordless croons and petting him, cuddling and 
nuzzling him. As dawn broke, the Russian would stand up, and in blank-faced 
zombie mode, leave Shan’s apartment. Made aware through his contacts, who 
still worked for the same pitch-black covert ops government agency as Shan 
himself used to do, that ex-KGB assassin Alexei Kimeninov had decided to kill 
him, Shan had tried to disappear and thought he had. The first attack had been 
just after 2:00am when he awoke to see the shape standing over his bed. He’d 
been grabbed and fought back, amazed that he’d had time to do more than 
gasp before Alexei snapped his neck or just shot him where he lay. But the 
Russian had subdued him, pinned him, not tried to kill him, and then –

Drying himself off, Shan could not look at his reflection in the mirror. Too 
bewildered by the fact that the Soviets’ most ruthlessly efficient assassin had 
gone to all this effort to keep him alive, he hadn’t registered what was 
happening until Alexei bit his throat. For an eternity of shock and numbness, 
Shan had been physically and sexually mauled by the Russian, expecting to be 
raped any second. As the darkness of true night began to fade, Shan had seen 
Kimeninov’s face for the first time and realised through the shocked 
withdrawal of his own mind that the Russian was in some sort of sleepwalking 
trance-state. The Russian’s face, even as he sexually abused Shan, was empty 
of expression, his eyes fixed and staring, his own genitals flaccid and not 
aroused. At dawn, the Russian simply got up and walked out, closing the door 
behind him.

Several hours later Shan was still sitting there naked and shaking, rocking 
slightly, fully expecting Kimeninov to come back and finish him off with a 
bullet. By mid-afternoon when he’d managed to shower and then crawl onto 
his bed and shake some more, he tried to think rationally and realised that 
Alexei had found him only subconsciously. When asleep, Alexei knew where he 
was, when awake, the Russian reverted back to being a foreign agent seeking 
his intended victim, and had no knowledge of where Shan was.

It was that compassionate flaw that stopped Shan from killing. The second 
night he had heard the scuffling outside and then the Russian was in and 
grappling with him. Trained in many ways to kill, Shan had been unable to 
bring himself to end the life of the man whose eyes were blank and staring and 
unknowing, even when the Russian assaulted him again. After the last night, 
Shan realised that the sexual assault only started after the physical assault 
failed to render Shan submissive. So if I lie back and think of Uncle Sam, he 
won’t treat me like his personal sex toy? Shan shook his head as he picked up 
his bags and placed them next to the hotel room door before picking up the 
phone and calling Blair. He had no intention of staying here and putting his 
theory to the test should Alexei have somehow tracked him down tonight. He 
needed to talk to Blair – he was 99.9% certain what was wrong with Alexei and 
Blair’s answers would help him decide whether to run and keep on running or 
stay and try and work this out with Alexei.

* * *

The sun through the window woke him and he squinted against it. Raising a 
hand to block it, Colonel Alexei Kimeninov registered that he was holding 
something in that hand. He looked down.

Why was he holding a pink teddy bear? 

Unpleasant memories surged to the fore and he look around, relaxing as he saw 
that his shoes were exactly where he had left them and his clothes showed 
none of the damage they would have had if Alexei had been “sleepwalking” 
again. His decision to eliminate Shan Davies, one of the agents of the “other 
side” during his days working for the KGB, had seemed logical to Alexei in 
Leningrad, or St. Petersburg as it was now again. Alexei’s family had been 
White Russians, but wily enough not to openly show their support for the Tsar, 
a precaution shown to be extremely wise when the Bolsheviks murdered the 
Tsar, Tsarina, four princesses and the prince.

Great-grandfather Kimeninov had seen the writing on the wall long before the 
momentous events of World War I erupted, and so swapped titles, lands and 
power for cold hard cash and anonymity in 1903. By the time the Revolution 
started, the mysterious mass disappearance of the noble family of Kimeninov 
that had once owned most of the Ukraine had long faded from anyone’s notice. 
Great-grandfather had been a vocal supporter of the Communists but utterly 
contemptuous of them, claiming accurately that “real” communism would last 
all of two months before the power hungry opportunists slid their way in and 
started arranging things to suit themselves. Great-grandfather ruthlessly 
ensured that his own children were on the inside track, and the family had 
done well out of communism, increasing their wealth. 

Now all that wealth was Alexei’s and had been from the week after his twenty-
second birthday, when the Kimeninov family saved the startled Russian Premier 
and his wife from a bomb set by Slavic Separatists. Unfortunately the 
separatists had been more bungling amateurs than anyone realised. At his 
mother’s order, Alexei himself had escorted the grateful couple well away from 
the elegant Moscow concert hall, turning around to leave them and go back 
inside just in time to see the place disintegrate in a massive explosion as three 
of the erroneously constructed bombs detonated four hours early and caused 
the others to also detonate. The death toll was 1,319 from amongst the most 
high-powered and wealthy Communist families - including every last one of 
Alexei’s blood relations.

His immediate family - parents, brothers, sister, paternal uncle and three 
cousins - were KGB operatives trying to evacuate the hall. His other relatives, 
including two maternal aunts, four cousins, three living grandparents, one 
great-grandmother, two great-uncles and a great-aunt, had all been members 
of the audience. Due to the family’s actions, Alexei had been given a great 
deal of latitude by the KGB and succeeding Premiers, and when Communism 
collapsed as Great-grandfather had prophesied it would “within a century of 
it’s founding”, Alexei ended up free and clear with large of amounts of cash in 
foreign bank accounts and, testament to the supremely ponderous bureaucracy 
that infected so many Western nations, nothing less than 100% genuine United 
States citizenship despite him being a Russian KGB Colonel. 

Tying up loose ends in his “new” home country had seemed like a good idea 
once Alexei was safely in residence in Orlando, Florida. Most of his enemies, 
acquaintances and former colleagues were too busy making the change to 
dealing with fractured terrorist cells, Islamic fundamentalists and organised 
crime in place of the Russian Bear to pay attention to getting rid of one KGB 
agent amongst so many who were now trying to control the Red Mafia and 
slaughtering each other before any assassins could in the process. Getting rid of 
Shan Davies, the only person who had affronted his pride in his entire career 
seemed easy and quickly done. 

Alexei had begun tracking down Davies, only for things to start going wrong. 
The blinding headaches and long periods of amnesia that had plagued him once 
before during his career had started up again. It had taken all his willpower to 
ignore both them, and the memory that previously only Shan Davies had been 
able to provide any relief. Alexei had exerted all his iron will to squash the 
unsettling occurrences, having no intention of succumbing to any weird stuff. 
He intended to spend the rest of his life on a sun-drenched beach, with a glass 
of something icy and alcoholic in one hand and a plump, nubile female in the 
other. Sex, sand, sun, sea, sangria and more sex…              
        
Then after going to the city of Atlanta on a “hunch”, for five consecutive 
mornings last month Alexei had woken up in his rented apartment with his 
shoes caked in grime and his clothing looking as if it had been mauled by a 
tiger. He had thought nothing could be worse than when he used to wake up 
and realise that he’d spent the entire night gaping at nothing in some sort of 
catatonic state. However, when an illegal forensic test he’d had done on his 
tattered clothing found blood and semen stains, Alexei had quietly freaked. 
The same illegally practising medic had done a full set of tests at Alexei’s 
insistence and reported back that the Russian had no narcotic and/or 
psychedelic substances in his blood, no sign of growths in his brain, had not had 
“receptive anal sex” recently, and was not the producer of either the semen or 
the blood on his clothes. That sixth night, Alexei had handcuffed himself to his 
apartment bed, only to wake up with a stiff arm and no sign that he’d tried to 
leave the apartment.      

With a growing feeling of dread that he resolutely refused to acknowledge, 
Alexei replaced the teddy bear on the bed and got up to shower, focussing on 
tracking down Shan Davies. Once the American agent was dead, all this 
weirdness would stop, and Alexei would be able to enjoy a life of soporific 
luxury…
 
* * *

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME, DETECTIVE!!”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“THEN GIT!!”

Jim smartly exited Simon’s office, marched towards the break room resolutely 
ignoring the rest of Major Crimes, and went inside, shutting the door behind 
him. Getting himself a coffee, he sank down on a chair, sipping the insipid 
excuse for a beverage and silently castigating himself. Simon was his friend 
besides his superior, yet he had just had a stand-up blazing row with him that 
had entirely been his own fault. Wincing, he realised that if he had been on the 
receiving end of that display of petulance, he’d have justifiably flattened 
himself with a well-deserved right hook.

It wasn’t just Simon, either, Jim acknowledged to himself. Over the past few 
weeks, Jim had noticed himself growing more edgy and irritable, especially 
towards Sandburg. Jim shook his head, unable to understand why he felt 
childishly jealous anytime Blair paid any attention to anyone or anything else. 
He kept having this irrational compulsion to snatch the anthropologist away and 
tell everyone to keep away from “his” friend. “I sound like a spoiled five-year 
old brat,” he muttered, realising that was exactly how he’d been behaving. 
First of all, he needed to apologise, profusely, to Simon, then he would go to 
Rainier, collect the kid, and treat him to a slap up lunch of bamboo shoots or 
alfalfa sprouts or whatever Blair wanted. Considering how much of a bear he’d 
been this past month, Blair should be nominated for sainthood due to the fact 
that he hadn’t come after Jim with a meat cleaver.

Discarding the pitiful excuse for caffeine, he went back to Simon’s office and 
grovelled, finally swinging it when he asked permission to take Blair to lunch to 
apologise to him. Simon, for all his growling, had a strong paternal affection for 
Sandburg. As he drove through town, Jim finally remembered Blair nervously 
saying how much of a heavy workload he’d got today at the university and that 
he might be home late; he winced anew, remembering how he’d bitten the 
kid’s head off. But he could stop and buy Blair a sandwich from that expensive 
deli he liked! Turning the truck, he headed to the more affluent part of 
Cascade that they rarely frequented. He pulled in and got out, scanning the 
street till he found it, the one right next to Blair.

What?

His Sentinel sight zoomed in on the very expensive Italian bistro next to the 
health food deli, a place of linen tablecloths, polished silver and floor-ceiling 
glass windows. At table was sat  Blair, across from a man Jim had never laid 
eyes on before - black hair, pale skin, graceful of movement. Rage and jealousy 
shot through him like a knife. Clenching his fists, he tried to extend his 
hearing, but the surrounding noise made it impossible without Blair to centre 
him –

He was in the road before the honked horn made him pull back to the kerbside 
and his senses. Jim shook his head in disbelief as he realised that he had 
seriously been about to go and drag Blair outside for what he was doing. What 
the hell is wrong with me? Blair can eat what he wants when he wants with 
who he wants! Lecturing himself firmly, Jim was about to drive away when Pale 
Skin leaned forward, and Jim’s enhanced sight caught a glimpse of the gun 
tucked into the back of his waistband. 

Returning to the truck, Jim climbed in and shut the door, then remembered a 
test of Blair’s that had helped him to “split focus” one of his senses. 
Concentrating his sight on the pair, he extended his hearing and “split” it so 
that part of his aural sense was focussed on their conversation, whilst the other 
part was tuned into Blair’s heartbeat. Thus “anchored” by Blair’s heart, Jim 
knew he could observe and listen to their conversation without risk of zoning 
out. He sat, watching and listening for the next half hour as the two ate and 
talked desultorily. The paler man’s tension was obvious, and often Blair would 
reach out a hand and place it soothingly on the other man’s arm, an action that 
made Jim’s jaw clench possessively. Finally, once dessert was devoured, Blair 
dismissed the small talk.

“What’s really going on Shan. Why are you here?”

Shan took a deep breath. “I’ve got a major problem.”

“How can I help?” The offer was immediate and genuine; Blair Sandburg gave 
total loyalty to his friends.

“I’m the Guide to a psychotic Sentinel.”

For an instant Blair merely sat there and then the words registered. He laughed 
nervously and shook his head. “Come on, Shan.  I ditched Burton’s fairy stories 
ages ago –”

“BLAIR!” Shan lowered his voice self-consciously after cutting off the 
attempted denial. “This isn’t some spur of the moment idea I’ve leapt to. I’ve 
been doing the research on your life for eighteen months, and I’ve had you 
under surveillance for a fortnight. I know exactly why you ditched your original 
dissertation and submitted the Closed Societies one that got you your 
doctorate. I’m freaking to the max here, buddy and the answers you give me 
will determine whether I keep on running or try and work this out with Alex- 
my Sentinel.”

Blair ran his hand through his hair. “Okay, keep your voice down. We can’t talk 
about this here.”

“Let’s go somewhere quieter,” Shan urged.

“Why don’t we?” 

The cold voice had both men jerking their heads round. Blair paled as he 
looked into the grim features of James Ellison and realised that the other man 
had been eavesdropping on most if not all of his conversation with Shan. Blair 
swallowed nervously - Jim didn’t do “other Sentinels” well, as spectacularly 
displayed by his violent reaction to Alexandra Barnes, a situation that had got 
Blair killed, literally, when the sociopathic female Sentinel drowned him in 
Rainier’s fountain. Now that he was displaying all the tendencies of an 
emerging Dark Sentinel, that rage would only be exacerbated. Blair felt the 
beginnings of a migraine – all he needed now was to break a major limb and his 
life would suck completely.

Giving a smile that had no hint of warmth, the big detective waited while his 
partner paid the check, then shepherded the two men over the highway to his 
truck. Shan’s total lack of surprise over the fact that Jim had been able to hear 
him and Blair clearly over a dozen yards of noisy traffic and pedestrians showed 
that the man was quite au fait with Sentinels. The drive back to the loft was 
conducted in total silence, Jim grimly pleased at Blair’s obvious nervousness. 
He would NOT have his Guide, HIS GUIDE, keeping secrets from him. Any 
secrets.

Finally the trio were ensconced in the loft. Jim walked into the kitchen and put 
the coffee maker on. Over his shoulder he ordered Shan, curtly, “Talk.”

Wisely not aggravating the issue, Shan sat down at the table and began to 
explain. “In many ways it’s my own fault. I was young and cocky and thought I 
was king of the castle. I did very well in black ops; I had a natural talent for 
the work and no family to worry about or cause to disapprove of me. I came 
across Captain Alexei Kimeninov during a large CIA/NSA operation in a Middle 
Eastern country I won’t name. Alexei Kimeninov is known colloquially as the 
Winter King and terrifies psychotic terrorists and homicidal drug barons on all 
seven continents. There are people who seriously believe to this day that 
Alexei isn’t human but some sort of unstoppable killing cyborg, like the 
Terminator.” Shan shrugged and went on, “I was only tangentially connected to 
the main job but to sum up I got hold of some classified military information 
right under Kimeninov’s nose. Quite simply by blind, fool’s, serendipitous, 
beginners luck and absolutely nothing to do with any talent or genius on my 
part.”

“What dumb grand-standing thing did you do?” Jim poured three mugs of 
coffee and carried them over to the table, sitting down and biting down 
another savage smile of satisfaction as Blair kept tossing surreptitious glances 
at him, unnerved by the big Sentinel’s calm in the face of this event.

Shan smiled weakly. “I was an arrogant ass. Kimeninov cleaned up – scored big 
time for the USSR, which is what got him the promotion to Major. But he didn’t 
know a thing about my military classified information coup until- ”

“You let him know about it,” Blair said.

Shan nodded. “Everyone has files on everyone else. Again by blind chance, and 
no talent on my part, I found out his home address in Moscow. His birthday 
happened a few days after the operation finished and I returned to the USA, so 
I sent him a big stuffed teddy bear, commiserating him on getting old, and 
helpfully pointing out what I’d done and wishing him better luck next time.”

“What the hell are your other hobbies – wrestling starving grizzly bears and 
trying to kiss man-eating tigers?!” Blair exclaimed.

“It gets worse,” Shan admitted. “I began to send him a bear on any special 
occasion – Christmas, Easter, birthdays, all with jaunty little notes. I sent big 
bears, little bears, rude bears. The last bear I ever sent was a bright pink 
anatomically correct female bear – don’t ask me where I got it, please – with a 
note to the effect that it was his 35th birthday and he hadn’t got a date. A few 
months later we met in person.”

“How did you survive?” Jim asked, genuinely interested.

“Luck.” Shan shrugged again. “It was a casino in Monte Carlo. Nothing could go 
down because Prince Rainier III and one of the princesses were nearby with a 
dozen heavily packing bodyguards, it was accidental really. We bumped into 
each other, turned around and recognised each other. If thoughts could kill I’d 
have dropped dead on the spot. For an instant we just stared at each other, 
but I could feel this buzz, this arcing electricity, and as I stared at him all of a 
sudden I heard Blair’s voice in my head, clear as if you were standing next to 
me, telling me about ancient Sentinels searching out their Guides. Somehow, I 
just knew.”

“Go on,” Jim ordered, while Blair merely looked stunned.

Shan rubbed his eyes wearily. “Three months later the US and the USSR clashed 
during an operation somewhere in Africa. Alexei and I ended up in a fight.”

“A fight?” Jim’s voice was incredulous.

“I don’t understand. What’s so unusual?” Blair looked from one man to the 
other. 

Shan sighed. “Blair, forget reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Great Game, as 
he called it, is not Boy’s Own adventure stuff with stiff upper-lipped men 
facing off according to the rules of some public school code of honour. It’s dirty 
and sneaky and quick. If you want to take out someone on the other side, you 
kill them as fast and expediently as possible, regardless of whether you have to 
shoot them in the back via sniper rifle from half a mile away, or rig their toilet 
so they’re electrocuted when they go to take a leak, or hire three thugs to 
beat them to death under cover of a “mugging”. Two agents do NOT roll 
around in the dirt thumping each other in some sort of adolescent battle of 
honour. To cut a long story short, that’s exactly what Alexei and I ended up 
doing, but as we were Kung Fu-ing each other to pulp I could feel the 
connection growing, and Alexei could feel it too. I could see him becoming 
confused and it’s the only thing that saved my life, because he is good at 
unarmed combat. So, I decided to split.”

“You ran away, oh man.” Blair shook his head. “Baaad move. You don’t run 
from Sentinels – they’re like, see the moving object, chase the moving object!” 
Abruptly recalling that his own irked Sentinel was sat right next to him, he shut 
up.

Shan snorted. “I know that, man. I took off and Alexei should have gone back 
inside the warehouse to take care of business like a rational KGB agent, since 
he didn’t have a gun to shoot me, but I activated every primordial trigger 
going. He came after me, knocked me down…”

“And?” Jim growled.

Shan shook his head. “It seems so unreal, even now. We fell over, I landed on 
my back, face-up, he grabbed my arms and pinned me. His eyes were like 
totally dilated and it wasn’t Alexei looking at me, it was the Sentinel…”

Shan arched helplessly under the weight of the heavier Russian. Kimeninov’s 
eyes were aware but had a peculiar blankness to them that Shan intuitively 
recognised as a Sentinel operating on instinct. The Sentinel rumbled with 
satisfaction that he had caught his prey. Shan felt a strange, almost narcotic 
lassitude seep into his limbs, dazedly he wondered if this was what rabbits 
felt like being hypnotised by a cobra. Strong teeth bit into his throat over the 
vulnerable jugular, and he vaguely realised that the low moan of submission 
was his own. With a growl the Sentinel inhaled his Guide’s scent, returning to 
nibble at the deliciously tender throat…  

Shan shook off the memories. “Basically, the country was in the middle of a 
coup d’etat. A bunch of soldiers started firing just outside the hanger we were 
in and shocked us both back to reality. Alexei, understandably, freaked. One 
minute he was a Colonel trying to whack a US agent, the next thing he 
remembers he’s pinning said agent to the floor using his throat as an all-you-
can-eat buffet and said agent is not only not resisting but totally submissive. I 
clobbered him with a bit of packing crate and ran off while he was stunned. 
After that I kept tabs on the situation. Alexei began to suffer from severe 
headaches, amnesia, catatonic episodes and food allergies. He caught up with 
me again on a mission in what was Yugoslavia, but I lucked out. I saw him 
sitting in his hotel room from my own hidey hole across the street and finally 
realised he hadn’t moved a muscle for over an hour. Thanks to Blair being 
willing to talk forever about anything Sentinel related even when he was a kid, 
I recognised a zone out when I saw it. I managed to sneak in and get to the 
room. He was just sitting on the bed, staring at nothing. I had an inspiration 
and hypnotised him.”

“Hypnosis?” Blair leaned forward, intrigued.

“I talked to him really softly,” Shan explained, “so he focussed on my words 
but was still zoned. I told him he was a brilliant agent, that he didn’t need his 
Sentinel senses so he should just switch them off, that Shan Davies was a minor 
US agent not worth bothering with. I told him he was healthy, confident and in 
control. Then I left. It worked like a charm for two years.”

“What happened to him?” Jim had an inkling of what was coming.

“Shortly after communism collapsed and Russia began to socio-economically 
disintegrate, Alexei’s chopper went down on the Russian steppes, an early 
battle casualty of the supremacy war between two factions of the Red Mafia. 
Four people survived including Alexei, but the other three all died – one of 
internal injuries, one of hypothermia and one who insisted on abandoning the 
wreckage to go to a nearby village the maps pointed out. He got lost in a 
snowstorm and froze to death. Alexei was all alone for two weeks with the 
helicopter fending off raging sub-zero blizzards, bears, tigers and lack of food 
before he was rescued. His Sentinel abilities kicked in to help him survive and 
the hypnotic blocks began to crumble. He remembered everything, including 
me in his hotel room hypnotising him to forget about his Sentinel abilities. I got 
word that he’s trying to kill me –”

“Why?” Blair started; was Jim the only non-homicidal Sentinel on the planet?

Shan sighed. “Kimeninov is in serious denial. Alexei doesn’t want to accept 
this, big time. I realise this is amazing but, thanks to Federal bureaucracy, 
Alexei Kimeninov is a bona fide US citizen. When Russia was falling apart 
around his ears he simply took all his money and came to live in America. He 
decided to whack me because he thinks it’ll all go away if I’m dead. He’s a 
pragmatic opportunist. He doesn’t want to accept what he considers to be 
“mystical fairy story mumbo jumbo”, so he’s convinced himself that his 
Sentinel abilities are temporary hallucinations caused by some weird allergic 
reaction to me.”

“So what happened when you met last month?” Jim asked, going on, “I can still 
smell his scent on you. It’s faint, but it’s there.”  

Shan blanched and for the first time looked vulnerable. “He – I don’t think I can 
tell you this.”

“The door’s there,” Jim said bluntly, turning a glare on Blair that stopped the 
younger man’s protest dead in its tracks.

“I moved about to make it harder for Alexei to track me; I ended up in 
Atlanta.” Shan focussed on a spot on the wall, he couldn’t look at their faces. 
“In a temporary apartment. I woke up in the middle of the night with Alexei 
standing over my bed. I was surprised I’d even had time to wake before he shot 
me but then he grabbed me and started to maul me. I fought back and we 
ended up on the floor. He began to bite me and I freaked, but he was stronger. 
He…sexually abused me.”

“Did he f-…rape you?” Jim belatedly amended with a callous bluntness that 
made Blair try to kick him under the table.

“No, never.”

“It happened again?” Blair asked softly.                    

“It was like it wasn’t happening.” Shan took a deep breath. “He abused me, 
making me climax several times, but he didn’t rape me. At dawn, he suddenly 
stood up off me and I saw his face. It was like a store window mannequin. 
Blank. He was sleep-walking or whatever but Alexei wasn’t aware. He was like 
a zombie; he just turned and walked out of the apartment like an automaton, 
his clothing spattered with blood, and…my semen.” 

Raising his hand to forestall their words, Shan went on, “I couldn’t stop 
shaking. It was nearly dusk again by the time I got myself calmed down, but 
just before midnight Alexei was back. I fought again, but I was still too shocky 
from the first night. He slapped me and bit me, growling all the time. Then he 
groped me again, making me come. As soon as I was too exhausted to fight 
him, he stopped abusing me and started to pet and cuddle me. Then at dawn 
he just turned and left again. I finally figured out that at night his subconscious 
knew where I was but during the day he repressed all that he didn’t want to 
know and reverted back to being Colonel Kimeninov – night-time Sentinel, 
daytime KGB assassin. I made arrangements to get out of Atlanta but couldn’t 
leave for two days. On the last night before I left, I didn’t fight him when he 
came into the apartment and he didn’t attack me. He bit my throat, but at he 
did was hug and cuddle me all the time and he didn’t even try to sexually 
abuse me. By the afternoon of Day Six, I was halfway to Cascade.”

“Of course!” Blair, who had been silent, sprang up at this point. “Bonding!”

“Huh?”

Blair paced. “It makes sense. During the day, Colonel Kimeninov – practical, 
rational, in serious denial - is in control, using conventional methods to track 
down Shan Davies because he won’t acknowledge his Sentinel side exists. But 
at night, when he goes into REM sleep, the Sentinel lurking in his subconscious 
takes charge. The Sentinel can follow your scent across a city; can hear your 
heartbeat ten blocks away; can pick you out of a crowd of millions because you 
are his Guide. So the Sentinel found you during the night. But you rejected 
him. You wouldn’t submit, so he had to subdue you. But you were still resisting 
mentally and emotionally.” 

Shan scowled at this theory but Jim had no doubt that his Guide had figured it 
out.

Waving his hands around like a startled bird, Blair enthused, “Sex is the most 
intimate form of communication between two human beings – with sex, all 
barriers of clothing, culture, language have been taken away – you’re both on 
equal terms. The sexual abuse was an attempt at forging the connection, 
making the bond between Sentinel and Guide. When you didn’t resist his 
attempts to bond, he didn’t abuse you. At dawn he would start to enter 
shallower sleep and his conscious mind would begin to reassert control, so he 
left and would wake up in his own apartment or hotel room with no memory of 
where he’d been. The state of his clothing probably freaked him out as much 
as his attacks did you.”

“Whoa!” Shan blanched. “Look, I’m strictly Het, so if doing the nasty with 
Alexei Kimeninov is part of the Guide deal, forget it –”

“No, no, no,” Blair flapped a hand irritably as he was interrupted in full 
teaching mode. “Most Sentinel-Guide pairings are same sex but most don’t 
involve sex. It gets in the way too much.”

“You just said –” Shan began.

“This context is in extremis, as it were.” Blair explained. “Sex is the most 
intimate form of communication, yes, all very good, but no Sentinel-Guide 
relationship would survive if sex was the foundation. In the immortal words of 
Meatloaf, sex is “‘never built to last’”. A relationship where the strongest, or 
indeed only, thing both parties have in common is sexual attraction is doomed. 
In that situation, the whole thing falls apart as soon as one suffers an illness or 
injury or gets to an age where sex isn’t going to happen for a long time if at 
all, because they don’t have anything in common.”

“So?” demanded Shan, his eyes dark with distressed memories.   

“So, the Sentinel-Guide bond is based on compatibility of mind and soul, not 
hormones, it is about shared ideals and ambitions. It’s not about standing there 
gazing at each other; it’s about walking side by side in the same direction 
towards the same goal, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery put it.” Blair replied. 
“Alexei Kimeninov has no real desire to jump your bones now or ever, but he 
has an instinctive drive to hunt for his Guide –”

Jim shook his head negatively at this juncture. “Blair, that is ridiculous. I’ve 
never tried to abuse you or hunt you down –”

“Jim, your situation was – is - different from what is usual in Sentinels. Most 
Sentinels are trained from birth by responsible elders in the tribe or culture to 
be Sentinels. You weren’t, you spent most of your life repressing your abilities. 
Most Sentinels go in search of their Guide when they get close to starting to 
suffer from zone-outs. In your case, I was the one who came looking for you. 
You didn’t have to hunt me down and bond with me, as I was more than eager 
to help you out.”

Jim looked unconvinced. “If Alexei doesn’t want Shan as his Guide, why 
doesn’t he just go find someone else?”

Shan looked blank, but Blair admitted, “I don’t think he can.” Explaining he 
said, “My theory is that a Sentinel is instinctively attuned to a certain type of 
Guide, not exactly a pre-destined match but close.” Seeing Jim’s sceptical face 
he went on, “Burton’s research backs it up. He mentioned accounts in his 
journals of un-bonded Sentinels working with a variety of temporary Guides for 
quite a while without so much as twitching, then suddenly going all primal on 
one particular new Guide and dragging them to his or her hut virtually by the 
hair. Why not the previous Guides? Why that particular one? Alex proved the 
theory for me, Jim. She wanted a Guide but couldn’t bond with me, and she 
killed me for it.”

“So you think that Alexei and I are some kind of matched pair and neither of us 
can break that even if we wanted to? What happens if I keep as far away from 
Alexei as I can?” Shan demanded suddenly.

“He’ll die,” Blair admitted softly. “But he’ll go insane first. The sensory spikes 
will increase until his senses are each and every one running on maximum 24/7; 
the constant sensory overload will drive him crazy, until one day he’ll zone 
out. He’ll remain catatonic until eventually he’ll just…”

“Stop,” interposed Jim grimly.

“That’s why zone-outs are so dangerous, because after a few hours the 
Sentinel’s body starts to shut down.” Blair said softly, “Like a spring-wound 
pocket watch running down; heart slows, respiration becomes shallow, kidneys 
and liver gradually stop functioning. By that time Alexei will be so tortured and 
so utterly mad that death will be a mercy.” Blair took a deep breath, aware of 
Shan’s utterly white face but needing to make the point clear, “If you seriously 
decide that you will NOT be Alexei’s Guide, the best thing you can do for him 
would be to put a bullet in his head.  It will be a lot kinder than the death he’ll 
suffer otherwise.”

“So what do we do?” Shan demanded. “If Alexei finds me during the day, he’ll 
shoot me on sight, and if he finds me at night he’s a neo-rapist virtual 
zombie!”

“Catch him,” Jim said succinctly. “We hunt Alexei. We find him, capture him, 
bung him in a nice prison somewhere and explain to him what the deal is. If we 
can provide him with incontrovertible evidence of what he is and what will 
happen to him without Shan, he’s got to be realistic enough to stop trying to 
kill you.”
 
Shan’s lips thinned. “I can give you proof,” he said, cryptically. “Any ideas on 
how to find him?”

“Jack Kelso –” Blair began.

“I know him.” Shan nodded then stood up. “I’m staying at the Cascade Plaza 
Hotel. Is it okay if I come back around seven tomorrow night?”

“We’ll need to see Simon Banks – he knows I’m a Sentinel,” Jim said, “to get a 
few clear days to sort this out. But let’s be clear on this Davies – however this 
turns out, I want Alexei Kimeninov and you out of my city, and if the only way 
for that to happen is for the pair of you to leave in coffins I have no problem 
with that!”

Blair ushered Shan out, then went back inside to where Jim was looking at him 
with his patented, “we are going to talk” expression. He took a deep breath 
and tried to calm his vital signs down.

Jim stood up and folded his arms. “Okay, Chief, let’s start with, “submitted 
your Closed Societies one that got you your doctorate” unquote.”

“I had an epiphany,” Blair mumbled, “with the Osman case, you know, how we 
nailed him because of a “love letter” he wrote twenty years ago and forgot 
about?”

“Yep, so?”

“I realised I could never submit my Sentinel diss. Even if I removed all 
references to you, any reasonably bright child could factor in that I’ve been 
your room-mate for the past three years and do the math. Besides, the 
committee would insist on interviewing you at least once, and even if I got 
them to honour your anonymity, the university automatically publishes every 
doctoral dissertation once it’s been accepted.  So all it needed was for one Lee 
Brackett/David Lash clone to read the thing and boom, instant disaster.”

Jim frowned. “Are you sure Rainier would insist on seeing me?”

Blair nodded. “They’d have to, Jim, to protect themselves. Just like 
performance enhancers in sport, scientific fraud is epidemic and for the same 
reasons – the financial rewards alone are fabulous and statistically the chances 
of getting caught are low enough to make it worthwhile to try. Sometimes 
colleagues collude with them unwittingly, lowering the odds of getting caught – 
Piltdown Man wasn’t exposed as a fake for over forty years, not because it was 
particularly good, but because a lot of anti-religious scientists wanted to 
believe it was a genuine missing link, so they made sure they never got around 
to examining it that closely. A scientist called Menchu actually got a Nobel 
Prize before being exposed as a fraud –”

“I get it.” Jim cut off the nervous lecture. “So you submitted a second 
dissertation and got your doctorate, which you’ve tried your best to hide from 
us – from me. Why?”

Blair looked at the floor. “Jim, once I got my doctorate there was no excuse for 
me to work with you any more, I just…” He risked a glance at the Sentinel’s 
face, and saw to his surprise that Jim’s expression had softened.

Jim felt himself melt a bit. Blair had worked his ass off for his PhD, then 
accepted some lowly TA job just so he could stay working with Jim. He sighed. 
“Chief, a lot of major cities PD’s now employ civilian forensic anthropologists. 
Simon has been assiduously pointing out to the Commissioner for over a year 
that, since you minored in Psychology, if Cascade employed you once you got 
your doctorate, we would have a forensic anthropologist and a profiler rolled 
into one person, a “two for the price of” deal. The Commissioner signed off on 
it ten months ago.  We were just waiting for you to complete your dissertation, 
Sandburg!” He put a little snap in the final sentence.

“Oh!” Blair flushed. “Jim, I’m sorry, man, I thought…”

Jim made a rude sound. “Okay, Chief, save the self-flagellation for later. Now 
let’s go onto to my second issue: what the hell is going on with me?”

“Huh?” Blair looked genuinely baffled.

“Sandburg, for the past few weeks I have been acting with all the grace and 
charm of a constipated grizzly bear with toothache, and the ONLY person who 
has been able to head off the Ellison temper tantrums at the pass has been 
you, time and time again you’ve stepped in as if you knew what was going to go 
down before I did, which means either you’ve suddenly become psychic, or you 
already know what’s going on.” He leaned forward and growled warningly, 
“’Fess up, Chief.”

Sandburg winced, this was going to go down like a lead balloon. “You’re a Dark 
Sentinel.”

“Huh?” Their baffled roles were now reversed.

Blair began to pace agitatedly. “There are dozens of great footballers, but only 
a couple up there with Pele, dozens of great boxers, but only one or two like 
Ali –”
<In the U.S., we call them soccer players.>

“Grasping the concept, Sandburg, move on.”

“A Sentinel has super-senses, a Dark Sentinel has super-super-senses. 
Unfortunately, a Sentinel’s hyperactive senses are hardwired into the 
subconscious, the primitive, instinct-led parts of the brain, which is why so 
much Sentinel behaviour is instinctive, like your “territorial imperative” when 
another Sentinel, Alex Barnes, invaded your turf. Just as a Dark Sentinel’s 
hyperactive senses are a bit more turbo charged than a normal Sentinel, all 
your other responses are, too. A Sentinel is assertive, focussed, dominating. A 
Dark Sentinel is aggressive, obsessive and domineering. A Sentinel searches for 
his or her destined Guide and is coaxing; a Dark Sentinel hunts his or her Guide 
and is coercive. Both the positive and negative aspects of the Sentinel are 
taken to the nth degree in a Dark Sentinel.”

“Why is this just happening now?” Jim asked. “I’ve been online for four years!”

Blair shook his head. “Jim, we’ve done everything about your senses in reverse. 
Most Sentinels are born in cultures where they are trained from birth and go 
online at about thirteen, or when they hit puberty. You were forced to repress 
your abilities till Peru and repress them again once you were rescued and back 
in the U.S. Normally Sentinels go out and find their Guides, but I came looking 
for a Sentinel. Your Sentinel abilities have improved and developed further 
gradually over the last four years, till you’re now at the point where you are 
able to cope with being a Dark Sentinel. That’s why your senses have moved up 
a gear.”

Jim took a deep breath. It was talking about feelings time, which made his 
stomach churn, neck-hairs prickle and palms sweat in a way that not even a 
drug-crazed crack-head with an Uzi could manage. “I’ve been feeling…anxious, 
on edge, when you’re not there.” (Bingo!  Sandburg’s heart just went into 
orbit.) “I don’t like you talking to other people; I don’t like other people even 
looking at you…” Frustration coloured Jim’s tone as he finished, “I feel like a 
petulant three-year-old who needs a good smack!”        

Blair hesitated.

“Tell me, Chief.” 

Wincing, Blair admitted, “You’re not going to like it. We’ve never bonded.”

“Huh?”

Blair ran a hand through his hair. “Jim, you heard what Shan said about Alexei 
pinning him down after that fight in the hangar and biting his throat? That 
wasn’t instinct but “race memory”. From prehistoric times, when a Sentinel 
found his or her Guide, they went to the Temple where they Bonded. It was a 
life-bond that could only be destroyed by death and, often, the survivor died 
within a few days. Basically, there were rituals and ceremonies the pair went 
through before and after the actual bonding – it’s why you and Alex Barnes 
were drawn to the Temple in Sierra Verde - but to be blunt, the Sentinel 
“claimed” his or her Guide, which basically involved “mapping” the Guide with 
his or her heightened senses and using that as a “baseline” or anchor. The 
Sentinel could then utilise their heightened senses much more frequently and 
for greater distances without fear of zoning because he or she was “grounded” 
by the Guide’s scent, voice, heartbeat, respiration or whatever.”

“I sense a great deal of ickiness approaching,” Jim muttered.

Blair sighed, “Jim, your most used senses are sight and hearing, when you’re 
dealing with external things, but a Sentinel and Guide are soul mates. When 
the Sentinel claimed the Guide it requires close physical body contact without 
clothing –”

“Whoa, hold it right there -!”

“Exactly my point!” Blair overrode Jim’s attempt to hit the brakes. “You should 
have been trained from birth to claim a Guide, but you were brought up by an 
emotionally crippled, uptight, anal retentive parent who tried to turn you into 
a mental robot and an emotional desert!” Taking a calming breath as Jim’s 
eyes flashed dangerously, he moderated his tone, “Claiming is ABSOLUTELY 
NON-SEXUAL, Jim, but it does require INTIMATE bodily contact between the 
Sentinel and the Guide. The Sentinel has to use his sight and hearing, but also 
his “intimate” senses – taste, touch, smell – to map the Guide’s body. Every 
morning the Sentinel sensory scans his or her Guide - ” he saw the startled look 
of acknowledgement on Jim’s face, “- and compares the results subconsciously 
with his “baseline”. Things that are out of kilter with that baseline, such as a 
pulled leg muscle, germs multiplying in the lungs ready for a streaming cold, 
pre-cancerous cells in the Guide’s testicles –”

“Sandburg!”

“- or breasts, will provoke a response in the Sentinel to protect the Guide. A 
sick Guide means a less effective Sentinel, so the Claiming/First Bonding 
Ceremony gets them off on the right footing. A sort of “prevention is better 
than cure” philosophy.”

“You’ve never even hinted at this!” Jim challenged.

Blair glared at him incredulously. “Are you kidding?! Jim, you freak out at 
anything even slightly emotional to the point where you will leave – no, make 
that storm out of - the room rather than discuss anything about feelings. You 
have a major anxiety attack at just the thought of having to publicly display 
any emotions other than rage or sarcasm, and you seriously expect me to stroll 
in one day and explain that in order for us to be properly bonded as Sentinel & 
Guide we have to strip down to our birthday suits, following which you pin me 
down to the nearest reasonably soft surface and taste, touch and sniff your way 
over my entire person!”

There was a long moment of silence. Jim’s face flamed, but finally he 
mumbled, “Am I really that bad?”

“Yes.”


“So I have turned into William Ellison Two, the new, unimproved, nastier 
version.”
 
Blair softened at the bitterness in Jim’s tone. “No, Jim! You’ve progressed 
beyond that, but you’re still nowhere near ready to bond in the traditional 
Sentinel and Guide way. The situation has never come up because you never 
needed to claim your Guide. I came looking for you, I volunteered to stay with 
you, so there was never any need for that.”

“When Alex Barnes came,” Jim turned and took his jacket off the hook by the 
door and slipped it on, “if we had bonded as Sentinel and Guide PROPERLY, as 
we should have, would that have happened? Me throwing you out of the loft? 
Alex…killing you?”

Blair bit his lip, but the truth was unavoidable. He shook his head, wincing 
inwardly as Jim flinched. “If that had been the case, you would have 
recognised another Sentinel’s invasion of your territory instantly and her scent 
on me. You’ve wouldn’t have thrown me out, you would have chained me in. 
Alex decided to kill me because she couldn’t bond with me, but the Sentinel’s 
imperative to protect the Guide was so strong that even as crazy as she was, 
she couldn’t make herself kill me directly, otherwise she would have just shot 
me in my office. Knocking me unconscious with the gun butt so I fell in the 
fountain was the closest she could manage, but…”

“…She would not have even TRIED to bond with you if we’ve been properly 
bonded in the first place,” Jim finished.

Blair nodded.

Jim blew out his cheeks. “Okay, Chief. Never let it be said I don’t learn from 
my mistakes. We’re going to go to Simon, we’re going to take a week off, 
we’re going to use Shan as bait to capture Alexei, we’re going to get them 
bonded and OUT of MY city, then we’re going to explore this Dark Sentinel 
thing a lot more clearly.”

* * *

Actually, what made Jim and Blair come perilously close to being dangerously 
unprepared was the sheer ease with which they accomplished their self-
appointed mission, as if the universe had been waiting around for them get off 
their collective booties and do something so it could get on with the show. 
Their carefully marshalled explanations, speeches and arguments for Simon 
were never uttered – Jim discovered that saying “new Sentinel in Cascade” in 
the same sentence as the words “Alex Barnes” resulted in a usually 
exasperated Simon Banks bending over backwards to be co-operative and giving 
them unofficial carte blanche to do whatever was necessary. 

Part Two, finding Alexei Kimeninov, also turned out to be very easy. Just like 
with Alex Barnes, Jim had felt a sharply increased irrational anger as the 
Russian Sentinel entered Cascade. However, since during the day the Russian 
was in denial of his abilities, refusing to be anything other than ex-KGB Colonel 
Kimeninov, this meant his Sentinel senses were powered down and off line. Or, 
as Blair had summarised after explaining this, Jim could use his senses to 
pinpoint Alexei’s location in the city, but Alexei could not do it back to Jim. 

Setting off from 852 Prospect, a forty-minute drive around the upper-
middle/lower-aristocratic class hotels near the business district found Jim 
drawn inexorably to one discreet hotel, The Cascade North West. As they sat 
and watched, a man matching the photograph given to them by Shan exited the 
hotel, and walked slowly down the block, rubbing his head and squinting in 
pain as he passed the resident Sentinel’s position of surveillance, though Blair 
assured Jim that Alexei saw the symptoms as nothing more than a sudden, 
puzzling headache. 

Blair spent the next few days with a video-camera in a rented room above one 
of the stores over the road, establishing Kimeninov’s general routine. It had 
been decided that snatching Alexei of the street just after he came out of the 
hotel was to be the plan du jour. They informed Simon of the plan in detail so 
he could intercept in the unlikely event of any witnesses to the abduction 
calling 911, but as both Jim and Blair knew from military and anthropological 
experience, humans tended to be woefully unobservant of their surroundings. 
The vast majority of city dwellers in the United States were so wrapped up in 
what they needed to do and where they needed to go, that they walked around 
with metaphorical blinkers and earmuffs on, not noticing anyone around them, 
especially on much-crowded streets. Shan agreed to the plan, and all systems 
were good to go.        

* * *

Blair took a deep breath then slowly exhaled to calm himself. Timing was 
critical in this little scenario and he had enough pressure on him already. Jim’s 
emerging Dark Sentinel persona had been spectacularly unhappy at the thought 
of his Guide anywhere near another Sentinel and Jim was having to do some 
serious repressing, which in turn made Cascade’s Cop of the Year decidedly 
cranky. Jim was currently down the block, sat in the driver’s seat of a taxi that 
he had borrowed “on behalf of the PD”; he had to be close enough to swing 
into action but not so close that he caused Kimeninov to spook. 

From his vantage point over the street, ostensibly looking in a store window, 
Blair saw the reflected figure of Kimeninov through the hotel’s banks of glass 
doors, walking down the main staircase into the lobby. Instantly Blair turned 
and hurried across the road, lithely dodging traffic so he was on the same side 
of the street and began to walk along the sidewalk in a manner that would take 
him directly past the hotel entrance. He swung his backpack in front of him as 
he walked, for it was a prop.

Alexei Kimeninov walked out of the hotel and stood for a moment on the top 
step, looking like nothing more than a rather buff businessman. He raised his 
hand to rub at the sudden sharp headache – then stiffened in surprise. Directly 
across the street from the hotel, a familiar figure had exited a building and was 
striding purposefully along the sidewalk, not even glancing towards the hotel. 
Shan Davies!!

Alexei went down the steps at an angle, his gaze fixed on the rapidly walking 
figure, only peripherally aware of the people around him. A young 
grunge/hippie kid, face buried in the backpack he was rummaging through 
instead of watching where he was going stumbled into Alexei’s path. Alexei 
automatically put out a hand to steady the youth and absently heard the 
murmured apology – then agonising fire shot through his entire body. Unable 
even to cry out, his eyes rolled back and he lost consciousness.

The “tazer” Blair held in his palm was not yet on the open market, instead 
being something cooked up by some science boffins that Jim “knew” – 
something neither Blair nor Simon had pursued – and required direct contact 
with skin to work. When Kimeninov stretched out his arm, Blair simply pressed 
the tazer against the Russian’s flesh and pumped a knockout bolt of electricity 
into his nervous system. As the Russian stiffened in shock Blair was dropping 
the tazer in his backpack and swinging it back over one shoulder. Stepping 
forward, Blair clapped an arm around the Russian’s waist and hugged Alexei 
tightly to his side, leaning his body slightly to one side so the Russian’s dead 
bodyweight didn’t collapse in a highly suspicious heap at his feet. 

Shan had managed to dash across the road and he suddenly appeared at Blair’s 
side with a friendly greeting, clapping another friendly arm around Alexei as he 
and Blair eased the Russian to the sidewalk so as to keep him upright and 
apparently conscious. Suddenly a taxi screeched to a halt in front of them and 
Blair wrenched open the rear door, after which it appeared that he, Shan and 
Alexei simply climbed into the car. Shan yanked the door shut as Jim pulled 
away, the man’s rigid jaw and beating neck pulse showing his view of having 
another Sentinel anywhere near him, or more specifically nearer to Blair than 
Jim was. Shan let out a breath as he hauled Alexei’s dead weight into a sitting 
position – the Russian would be unconscious for several hours yet.

“Home, James!” muttered Blair, glancing nervously at the unconscious 
Sentinel. This was going to be interesting to say the least…

***

Colonel Alexei Kimeninov, formerly of the KGB, couldn't help the hitching of his 
breath even though his training prevented him from all that theatrical groaning 
like in the movies. There was a rock concert in his head and his arm throbbed 
as he raised it to his forehead.

Everything ached. He felt like - oh, yes. Like some bastard had pumped serious 
electrical voltage through his body. His acute memory recalled the event and 
he groaned aloud this time at his folly. 

He had spotted Shan Davies and instantly reverted to a naive tenderfoot, 
oblivious to his surroundings; he'd barely registered the hippie kid and his 
backpack. Alexei's KGB instructors would have shot him for such a stupid 
mistake.

Speaking of dead...Alexei for the first time seriously realised that he wasn't, 
which didn't make sense; Alexei had been resigned to Davies finding out early 
on that Kimeninov was out to tidy up loose ends, paramount of which was 
Davies. The skill with which Davies had eluded Kimeninov and avoided his 
assassination traps over the past months had proven that the American knew he 
was a walking dead man if Kimeninov got the drop on him. So why, if Davies 
had been behind Alexei's mini-electrocution, had he not capitalised on it by 
eliminating his enemy when Alexei's was unconscious and helpless? It was the 
logical thing to do. It was what Alexei would have done.

Since his headache had subsided to a dull roar, Alexei risked opening his eyes, 
squinting slightly against any sudden glare of lights. He was lying down, on a 
bed?

Cautiously he straightened. He had been placed on a single bed; the mattress 
was firm enough and the quilt and pillows were encased in plain white cotton 
covers - certainly no rickety cot in a stinking cell.  He was not bound or 
shackled in any way. Directly in front of him was a large TV and VCR placed on 
a table high enough so that Alexei could watch it from the bed and also a pile 
of moth-eaten books. Next to the table was a thin door that was ajar, through 
which Alexei could see a washbasin and via the mirror on the wall above the 
washbasin, a clean-looking toilet.

To his right was a whitewashed brick wall, and to his left - bars. Alexei looked 
at his wider surroundings. He was in the basement of what had to be very old 
warehouses. He could smell and hear the water of Cascade Bay. Tall columns 
supported the ceiling, helped by arched buttresses that formed shallow niches 
in the outer walls. More than one of these niches visible had a little 
toilet/washbasin room; the nineteenth century officials must have recognised 
how ideal they were to sit in and tally cargoes while staying out of the way of 
the unloading. The bars, however, were gleaming and solid, and sunk down into 
recently poured concrete.

The addition of bars to any niche containing toiletry facilities made it instantly 
the perfect cage to hold a prisoner if you were considerate enough to require 
their incarceration in relatively humane conditions. Toiletry and cleanliness, 
even with just a washbasin, could be maintained without having to take the 
risk of letting the prisoner out to use a bathroom. 

Food, clothing, soap, etc., could also be passed safely through the food slot in 
the bars; the jailer merely required the prisoner to stand against the niche's 
back wall. Even someone of Alexei's superlative speed and training couldn't 
cover the distance fast enough to grab the jailer and forcibly remove the keys 
or hold him hostage should the guy not be foolish enough to carry them on him. 
Besides, if Alexei had been the jailer, he would have required the prisoner to 
face the back wall with his arms and legs spread in the starfish position 
customarily demanded by police officers, which would slow him down even 
more -

Three figures approached his cage across the warehouse. The one in front was 
the hippie-kid who'd delivered, literally, a hell of a shock. Of medium height, 
with too-long, bouncing chocolate curls, twinkling eyes and bronze skin, the 
kid's nose hinted at Polynesian, African or Arabic ancestry. He was dressed like 
he'd just rummaged through a yard sale, but a single glance told Alexei he had 
no guns on his person.

The next figure was also familiar: Shan Davies. Despite himself, Alexei tensed 
as he felt a frisson of something indefinable stir deep inside. Mostly, however, 
he was surprised by Davies' face. He had expected the American to show 
satisfaction at his capture, impatience to kill him, probably active dislike. 
Instead, Shan Davies glared at him with a depth of pain and rage that startled 
Alexei. He was clearly taking Kimeninov's assassination attempts way too 
personally. Clearly he had forgotten that like so much in their world, business 
was just business.

The third man - Alexei stiffened involuntarily. Tall, with his receding brown 
hair cut almost "down to the wood" as the saying went, the last man had icy 
blue eyes that were fixed on Alexei mercilessly. His stance was rigid and his air 
authoritarian. He wore no uniform but wore his gun openly and 
unselfconsciously in a shoulder holster over his cream button down sweater. 
Cop, Alexei determined immediately, but he would bet that the big guy had 
also been in the military, too. Something about the big cop sent tingles through 
Alexei's scalp, somehow just looking at him made the Russian's skin itch. It was 
an instant, vehement and total dislike of the cop. A dislike that Alexei realised 
was increasing when the policeman moved closer to Shan Davies.

"Colonel Kimeninov!" The hippie-kid brought his attention back to him by 
speaking clearly, firmly - and in flawlessly St. Petersburg accented Russian.

"Yes?" He responded coolly in the same language, as always evaluating and 
assessing. He already knew Davies was fluent in Russian, but the kid’s ease of 
use was a great surprise, and the big cop also obviously understood the hippie’s 
words, which indicated more than mere run-of-the-mill U.S. soldiering. At least 
some Special Forces experience, Alexei decided, Deltas, Rangers, SEALs and 
the like. How the hippie-kid got to be fluent in Russian Alexei couldn't grasp, 
nor his connection to Davies and the cop.

"I'd like to apologise for your current accommodations, but since you were 
trying to kill my friend and I don't really like you, I won't." His easy tone at odds 
with his stern face, the kid went on, "I'm Dr Blair Sandburg; this is my partner, 
Detective James Ellison. We're here to help you sort out your little problem 
with Shan."

"You're going to kill him for me?" Alexei challenged.

Instead of getting angry or defensive, Blair Sandburg rolled his eyes and went 
on as if Alexei had not spoken. "You will not be physically harmed or abused in 
any way. Over the next few days we are going to have a frank discussion over 
certain past occurrences, at the end of which I'm confident you'll see that Shan 
is no threat to you."

"He's never been a threat to me, he's merely an inconvenience," Alexei drawled 
insultingly. "But since you seem to be in such a sharing mood, do you mind 
telling me why a pair of American cops are so concerned about this?"

Like a wave washing away writing in the sand, Sandburg's face was wiped of 
humour. "Because I never thought I'd come across anything as stupid as a 
Sentinel trying to murder his own Guide."

For a moment the words hung in the air. Alexei had been unable to prevent his 
reflexive reaction. He hated even thinking about the crazy things that had gone 
on periodically over the past few years - his sudden abilities to see for miles, 
hear a pin drop in another room, smell fresh coffee streets away, taste every 
spice in his Baklava, and even have finest silk taste like sacking cloth to his 
fingers.

"I'm afraid I don't understand those terms," he parried, even though the entire 
conversation had been conducted in Russian.

"Somehow I doubt that," Dr Sandburg looked at him, "but in any event, you will. 
If I might suggest it, you'll find the books on the table very...instructive." 
Turning on his heel he walked away.

Also silently, Davies turned away too, but as he did, Ellison put a supporting 
arm around his shoulders as the two men walked away. For an instant, Alexei 
could barely see for the wave of fury that swept over him. He almost shook 
with the desire to leap forward and knock Davies away from Ellison. Struggling 
to get a grip on himself Alexei looked up just as Ellison turned back to meet his 
eyes with a smirk. Alexei blinked - Ellison had known the rage that would hit 
Alexei. How? 

Unless...if Ellison and Sandburg knew about Sentinels...Sandburg had said 'a' 
Sentinel, not 'the' Sentinel, They had acted as if he being a Sentinel was not 
that unusual. Which meant that there were other Sentinels besides Alexei -

Instantly the Russian shut down that thought. He was not a Sentinel or 
whatever title the crazy Americans thought up. He was a perfectly normal 
man. His previous problems were doubtless down to some virus that was all.

But despite this mental self-lecture, Alexei's mind kept drifting back to that 
sensation of satisfaction he'd felt when he'd seen Shan, and the irrational 
dislike he'd had of Ellison being near the American agent…and his immediate 
way-over-the-top feeling of rage when Ellison had touched Davies. He looked 
over at the books on the table. It wouldn't hurt to read them. Of course all the 
training manuals gave detailed non-cooperation scenarios, but there was no 
point. Right now, his captors held all the cards, and assuming that they were 
serious about not wishing to kill him, doing what they wanted might result in 
an early release. Of course, then Alexei could get on with having all three men 
killed, not just Davies.

Cheered by this idea, Alexei reached out and picked up the topmost book.

***

Two floors up, the three men watched him on the CCTV monitor. The old 
warehouses down at the furthermost end of Cascade Bay were ideal for their 
purpose; their exposed position on the promontory made them colder, damper 
and less hospitable to vagrants, while being solidly constructed. Indeed, this 
very warehouse was the one Shan had been using as a hideaway when he'd 
contacted Blair.

It hadn't taken much to persuade Simon to divert any patrols away from that 
area. He was in full "I don't want to know" mode.

Setting up one of the niches as a makeshift cell had been the easiest 
proposition. Back when the warehouses were last used, CCTV was science 
fiction; getting a camera and feeding it back to a monitor had been made 
Shan's job by Jim, who made it clear neither he nor Blair were contributing 
cash to that job. Shan's contacts had quickly enabled him to obtain what he 
needed, and he'd spent the few days while Jim and Blair were running down 
Alexei setting things up. 

This room had space for a couple of camp beds as well as the CCTV monitor, so 
Jim and Blair had set up temporary home in here, while Shan merely continued 
to use his bolthole, a large room at the end of the next corridor. Though 
windowless, the end-room Shan had been using was large and surprisingly 
clean, with a solid thick-timber door. That room had been the one used to 
store the fine imported brandies and calicoes for Cascade's richest families, 
and care had been taken to ensure the hoi polloi couldn't get their plebeian 
hands on any of it. Shan had made up a decent single divan for himself, with a 
table and chair upon which resided his laptop, powered by a portable generator 
he had ‘liberated’ from a Cascade hardware store.

"Do you think this will actually work?" Shan now asked sceptically, reverting to 
English. "That you can really persuade Alexei Kimeninov to ride off into the 
sunset and leave me alone?"

"Honestly, I don't know, but it's the best plan I've got," admitted Blair. "The 
trick is getting Alexei to see past his own pigheadedness."

"Once we've proven it to him, surely...?" Jim suggested.

Blair shook his head. "Were it that simple. Like Alexander Pope said, "A man 
convinced against his will, Is of the same opinion still." If Alexei didn't believe 
he was a Sentinel, there wouldn't really be a problem, but -"

"He doesn't want to believe he's a Sentinel, which is a whole different ball 
game," Shan finished gloomily.

"Sounds familiar," Jim muttered with definite sheepishness.

Repressing his heartfelt agreement, Blair instead answered obliquely, "Alexei is 
a classic A-type personality. He's intelligent and brave, but also competent and 
authoritative and above all, a loner by nature. He's spent years doing his job 
and winning through every time, often with nothing but his own 
resourcefulness to get him through. Now a trio of Americans are trying to 
convince him that he needs someone he considers inferior in talent and skill 
not just to get by but to literally survive… How did you feel?" Blair risked 
instead of the more tactful "how would you feel?"

"Angry, scared, frustrated, trapped, cynical and totally mistrusting," Jim 
answered honestly.

"Don't sugar-coat it," sniped Shan.

"I won't," Jim glared. "I want you pair of jokers out of my city pronto - and I 
won't cry if it's in a box."

Blair winced at Jim's unusually up-front aggression, and hastily suggested they 
all get some rest. Casting a final angry glance at the CCTV monitor that showed 
Alexei apparently engrossed in Burton's The Sentinels of Paraguay, Shan turned 
on his heel and left.

***

Alexei looked up as smelled food and coffee approaching. His watch [unless it 
had been altered] declared it to be lunchtime the day after he had been 
captured. His teeth set on edge at the sight of Ellison carrying a large tray, 
with the hippie kid, Sandburg, almost bouncing along beside him. Alexei had 
wondered why Sandburg didn't upset him as much as Ellison, but Burton had 
provided the answer to that one. It was obvious that Ellison was supposedly a 
Sentinel, and Sandburg his Guide, just as Shan Davies...uh-uh, absolutely not. 
This was all smoke and mirrors, designed to bamboozle him. He was a KGB 
Colonel, not some credulous toddler at a circus.

"Move to the back and turn to face the wall," ordered Ellison in gruff but again 
flawless Russian, with a strong Muscovite accent that could have fooled many 
he was a native, helped by his light-brown hair and intense blue eyes.

Alexei obeyed, listening as the food tray was slid onto the inner ledge through 
the opening, turning slowly to find that both men had retreated too far from 
the bars to be grabbed. Instead of plastic, the tray was set with real china and 
cutlery. There was a mug of black coffee with a miniature jug of cream, and to 
his surprise, considering the many delicious combinations of American eating, a 
plain cheese sandwich, though it had been freshly made and not store-bought.

"Sorry, about the blandness," Sandburg maintained speaking in Russian, his lilt 
so effortless you would have sworn he was born and bred in the shadow of the 
city of the Tzars. "We didn't want the risk of you... suffering a bad reaction."

"I have no allergies." Alexei deliberately misunderstood the younger man's 
inference.

Sandburg merely smiled at Alexei's obtuseness, as if it was not unexpected, or 
anything he had not seen before. Shooting a glance at the glowering James 
Ellison, Alexei thought that maybe he had guessed the truth of it. Certainly a 
more unlikely pairing it was hard to imagine. Ellison looked like the poster boy 
for Fascism and was clearly military to his bootstraps. Sandburg, on the hand, 
looked like he'd just walked out of Woodstock and should be strip-searched for 
illegal herbage. 

Yet it was clear to Alexei despite only having a few minutes at a time to in 
which to observe the pair that Ellison and Sandburg were a true partnership - 
they anticipated each other's movements to the point of appearing scarily 
psychic and communicated without needing to speak.

"Is there anything you'd like me to explain about Sir Richard Burton's book? It 
can be a little dry reading."

"No. I understood it all. It was a very informative work."

Sandburg beamed with unaffected pleasure, making Alexei blink and realise 
just how many years it had been since he met anyone who didn't automatically 
dissemble to some degree. 

"Do you really think so?"

Alexei didn't answer immediately.  Despite himself, he found himself gripped 
by a compulsion to be honest with the engaging young man. "I think…Burton 
was an idiot."

Both men looked rather surprised at this assessment, particularly Ellison, 
however Alexei noted that Sandburg seemed more surprised at Alexei's 
perceptiveness.

"How so?" Sandburg enquired cautiously.

 Alexei shrugged. "He spends three chapters waxing lyrical about how the 
Sentinel/Guide thing was a symbiotic relationship between the two warriors 
Brother-to-the-Lion and Hunts-with-Wolves, about how they were essential to 
each other as breathing, two halves of the same whole – yadda, yadda, yadda – 
then he spends the rest of the book treating the Sentinel as Superman and 
when he bothers to mention the Guide at all he makes the guy sound like 
nothing more than a cross between a nanny and a servant."

"Everything post page sixty-three," Sandburg acknowledged wryly. "I always 
wish I'd been that perceptive when I read it."

"You didn't see it?" Alexei raised his eyebrows sceptically.

"I was ten when I first read Burton's work, and in French." Sandburg shrugged. 
"At that time I hadn't yet been to Britain and didn't understand their socio-
political history…or their class system. I was so enthralled by Burton's Sentinel 
book that the flaws went straight over my head. Burton was an honest and 
honourable man, but he was definitely a product of his age: middle-class 
Victorian Britain still in full backlash against the corruption and lechery of the 
preceding Regency. Any religion not Church of England was ipso facto inferior. 
The instant Burton found out that Hunts-with-Wolves was the Chopec’s tribal 
Shaman as well as a warrior and Brother-to-the-Lion’s Guide, he was instantly 
relegated to being a ‘superstitious quack’."

"Making the book spectacularly one-sided," Alexei concurred.

"The other books are hopefully a bit more balanced," Sandburg suggested.

"I'm sure they are, but I have no intention of reading them.'

"Oh?"

"I realise your purpose, and I'm not interested." Alexei sighed. "If promise to be 
a good boy and leave little Shan alone, would you end this charade?"

"I'm afraid not," Sandburg said seriously.

"What a surprise." Alexei's smile had no humour.

"If it were just you," Sandburg told him with every appearance of seriousness, 
"I'd consider it, but both yours and Shan's lives are at risk here, and I care about 
my friend too much to mess with that."

Alexei raised one eyebrow in an expression of patent disbelief, and deliberately 
began to eat his meal. Instead of arguing, the two Americans left.

"It's not working!" Shan declared when both of them walked into the monitor 
room; aware that Alexei's senses were likely to fluctuate since he had no 
conscious control, Blair had suggested making the monitor room 'secure' by 
installing white noise generators. Though Jim - now, thanks to extraordinarily 
patient teaching by Blair - could 'push past' white noise generators, to someone 
as untrained as Alexei Kimeninov, it was as if the monitor room and nothing 
within it existed.

"He's a KGB Colonel," Blair pointed out unnecessarily. "He won't cave in a 
couple of days, besides, like I said, our real fight is against Alexei's wishful 
thinking. He knows he's a Sentinel, he just doesn't want to believe it."

"He's not the only one," Shan muttered. "Look, I've got things to do. I'll be in my 
room."

Blair and Jim watched him leave and then Jim turned to Blair, secure in the 
knowledge that neither of the other two men could hear him. "Are you sure this 
plan of yours is going to work? Neither Davies nor Kimeninov are stupid." 

"It has to," Blair responded bluntly. "They've both gone too far. They're not just 
aware of each other's existence, they've even partially bonded. Even if they 
agreed to walk away from each other now, they couldn't maintain distance. It's 
like an occasional twinge in your jaw that eventually becomes a nagging 
toothache. Eventually, you can't avoid dealing with it."

***

Alexei discovered it was to be a process of attrition. Over the next four days, 
one of the three men would bring him unAmericanly unimaginative meals, but 
nothing else. The TV had no stations and was clearly only there to allow videos 
to be played, but there were no videos. There was also nothing else - no music, 
no books other than those in his cell, no conversation.

Though Alexei had never been formally trained in enduring incarceration by 
kidnappers whose fiendish ploy was to bore him to death, he managed 
admirably well. He maintained and increased his morning work-out routine to 
burn off energy to the point where his already excellently fit frame was 
beginning to acquire the superb delineation of a twenty year old male model. 
The washbasin in the bathroom was large enough for him to have a thorough 
daily strip wash, though of course it took him a lot longer than a bath or 
shower. Other than that, he sat on his bed using his eidetic memory to 
mentally recite poetry, the baseball scores and so forth.

However, Alexei came to realise Blair Sandburg's cunning. On the afternoon of 
the third day, Alexei was lounging on the bed, amusing himself by watching the 
death battle between a tenacious spider and an infuriated wasp. Intent on the 
battle going one way or another, Alexei came back to himself when he 
suddenly realised the combat was taking place in a window at the opposite end 
of the warehouse - something that even a man with Alexei's 20/20 vision should 
have needed binoculars to see.

Nor did it end there. He smelled the toasted cheese sandwich being prepared 
for his dinner a good fifteen minutes before it was brought, and as such was 
viciously rude to Sandburg when he brought it.

The night was equally fraught. Alexei found himself unable to get to sleep as 
he was constantly disturbed by a low, rhythmic noise, which sounded like a 
faucet dripping water steadily into a metal sink. No matter how much he tried, 
he could not turn it down or tune it out. It sliced effortlessly through the pillow 
he yanked over his head.

The morning found him irascible and downright poisonous, an attitude repaid in 
kind by Shan Davies, who brought him his breakfast and lunch looking as if he'd 
much rather string Alexei up from the nearest lamp-post. Picking up the fork 
for his macaroni cheese, Alexei dropped it in shock as he realised that the 
dripping faucet noise was actually coming from inside Shan Davies’ chest. His 
heartbeat perfectly matched the rhythm of the maddening night noise.

"Are you alright?" Alexei came back as Shan barked the question in surly 
irritation.

"Fine!" snapped Alexei in instinctive retort.

As Davies disappeared, Alexei fought a desperate but futile inner battle to 
prevent himself from tracking the other man's beating heart through the 
warehouse as easily as if he were walking beside Davies, until it suddenly 
stopped dead. Instantly alarmed, Alexei strained desperately to hear...

"ALEXEI!!" The bellow made him jump and he nearly knocked his plate off the 
tray onto the floor.

He looked up to see all three men staring at him with expressions of fear and 
concern, even Shan Davies, whose face was pinched and pale. Alexei realised 
he had a splitting headache. "What?"

"You zoned," Sandburg declared.

"What?" Alexei said again, frightened for some reason he couldn't understand.

"Zoned," Blair repeated. "A Sentinel's superior senses come with a price: if a 
Sentinel concentrates too much on one sense, he goes into a state similar to a 
trance, or catatonia. If the Sentinel isn't brought out of the zone, a few hours 
later the internal organs begin to shut down, and eventually he or she will just 
stop breathing."

"I've never gone into a trance in my life," rebutted Alexei. "I was probably just 
daydreaming."

"Alexei - what time is it?" asked Blair with the weary exasperation of one who 
has heard this argument ad nauseum before.

“One-thirty in the afternoon, why?" 

"It's four o’clock," contradicted Blair.

Alexei went cold as he looked at his watch and saw that he had indeed 
somehow 'lost' the last two and a half hours. 

Before he could open his mouth, Blair interposed, "And before you suggest we 
rigged your watch, did we also rig the position of the sun and the state of your 
lunch?"

Momentarily not comprehending, Alexei realised that the sunlight had actually 
moved position from where it had come through at noon to where it 
customarily was in late afternoon. He looked down again; the plate of macaroni 
cheese, which should have been warm and still bubbling, was a stone-cold, 
congealed slimy mass that unfortunately looked as if someone had vomited on 
the plate.

***

Reluctantly, Alexei picked up the other books he had been studiously ignoring. 
Obviously a master of psychology, Blair Sandburg had not used his zone out to 
try and earnestly convince Alexei of what he was, but had instead backed off 
and left the angry Russian to stew. 

Much as he tried to rationalise what had happened, Alexei possessed too much 
innate self-awareness to be able to do so.  After brooding for several hours he 
had, reluctantly, clumsily and tentatively, tried to do as Burton obsequiously 
described Brother-to-the-Lion doing in The Sentinels of Paraguay… 

The results had scared him to death - not because he had failed, but because 
he had succeeded. His eyesight quickly went on the back burner, because 
though he could see into every corner of this level of the warehouse, each 
corner contained nothing more interesting than a spider colony. Touch and 
taste, likewise, was of little use in this tiny cell. Hearing and smell, however, 
came into their own. 

The instant Alexei tried to extend his hearing, he locked on to Shan Davies' 
heartbeat, though it faded in and out for several minutes until Alexei found 
two other heartbeats that had to be Ellison and Sandburg. He could hear other 
heartbeats too, frantically galloping but also so slow you waited for the next 
dub to come. Incredulously, Alexei determined that the rapid heartbeats must 
be those of rodents and other small mammals while the ponderous ones were 
whales out beyond the bay. 

The smells hit him like a bucketful of cold water and he promptly abandoned 
that experiment in sheer self-defence. Concentrating on the auditory, unaware 
of how his face screwed up with effort, Alexei realised how, just by using his 
hearing, he could follow what Shan Davies was doing. He could hear the 
American’s heartbeat, hear the faint hih-haah rasp of his lungs; hear the more 
rapid beats of Davies' pulse. There was a faint rhythmic tapping overlaying a 
background hum, which Alexei discerned as Davies working on a keyboard, 
probably a laptop. There was the way he shifted slightly in his chair with a sort 
of sideways hitch of his ass as he stretched his spine. Alexei could 'see' the 
movement as clear as day in his head. There was a sound that he eventually 
worked out as Davies having a drink or eating, a chair sliding back, footsteps, a 
metallic rasp and a splashing sound that was Davies taking a leak following by 
the flushing of a toilet and gurgling of water and a faucet being turned back 
off.

Alexei had broken the connection as the footsteps ended and the chair 
creaked, shaken to the core by how stunningly simple it had been with barely a 
few minutes practice to monitor Shan Davies’ every motion and make what 
were probably reasonably accurate guesses as to what he was doing. By the 
Kremlin, if he’d had these abilities for his entire KGB career his status as one of 
the best agents would have been nothing compared to the stuff he could have 
done. Surveillance without having to plant cameras, eavesdropping without 
having to risk planting bugs that the best agents of the other side usually found 
because the few good places to hide them were exactly the places they would 
have chosen. Nothing could have stopped him, and Shan couldn’t have hidden 
from him… 
  
Angrily snatching up the first book on the pile, within five minutes Alexei was 
oblivious to the world around him. Sometime later placing one book down, he 
picked up the next. It had taken him all of twenty seconds to realise he was 
now reading an edited version of Blair Sandburg's experiences as Ellison's guide. 
It was far more comprehensive, insightful, illuminating and informative than 
Burton could ever hope to be. Sandburg didn’t understand the ‘shamanistic, 
spiritual side’ of the bond either, but unlike Burton he didn’t make the mistake 
of simply dismissing it due to an attitude of cultural elitism.  

Each book, however, made clear that the protection of the Guide was the 
Sentinel's paramount duty. The Sentinel who tried in every way to ensure the 
safety of the Guide by default also ensured the safety of his or her tribe or 
kingdom. As a general rule, it seemed Guides tended to be shorter and more 
slender than the Sentinels, but had greater speed and agility while the 
Sentinels had more stamina and strength. It was bluntly recorded (even in 
Burton) how the death of a Guide or the death of the Sentinel inflicted 
horrendous emotional and psychological injuries on the surviving partner.

Now Alexei understood why Sandburg was so eager for him not to kill Shan 
Davies, but his mouth set stubbornly. He had gone through his entire life 
without these senses. Surely it was possible to turn them off?

***

“That’s your master plan?” Detective Jim Ellison’s face was a study in scornful 
disbelief. “Make like an ostrich and hope that your Sentinel senses just go away 
if you give it enough time?”

“Conceding that I do apparently have better sensory abilities than most people 
– and that’s all I’m conceding,” Alexei retorted. “I don’t see why not.”

“Because it didn’t work,” Blair interjected softly, “as Atlanta should have 
demonstrated.”

Alexei stiffened, his eyes shooting towards the anthropologist. The next time 
the tiresome trio had come to his cell he had offered a compromise. He would 
not attempt any longer to kill Shan Davies, as long as the American made sure 
to steer clear of him. It was a big country. With Davies in Washington State and 
Alexei in Florida, there was a pretty good chance of never the twain meeting. 

“What do you mean, Atlanta?” Alexei couldn’t help the words slipping out; 
worries about where he’d been and what he’d done during those five ‘missing’ 
nights when his memory was a complete blank still haunted him.

“You have not accepted that you’re a Sentinel consciously,” Blair Sandburg 
claimed. “But your subconscious is not only with that program, its way ahead 
of you. When you enter REM sleep, the Sentinel side takes over and starts 
hunting for the Guide that should be there, but isn’t.”      
 
Alexei could hear Shan’s heartbeat suddenly start racing, the American’s face 
was pallid and drawn, his eyes full of that rage Alexei had previously glimpsed – 
and something akin to shame. “You’re not seriously suggesting that I 
was…what?…that I somehow managed to successfully sleep walk my way on a 
scenic tour around a major U.S. City in my jim-jams without getting mugged, 
raped or murdered not once but for five consecutive nights all because my 
inner caveman was looking for him?...My ‘Guide’?" resisted Alexei, waving a 
hand at Shan Davies disparagingly.   

"I don't want you anywhere near me, you bastard," Shan snarled the retort, 
“but that’s exactly what you were doing. You couldn’t stop yourself then, so 
how am I supposed to believe for a second that you can turn yourself off when 
you go night-night now?”     

“Because I don’t believe a word of it,” Alexei claimed. “I admit, I may have 
done a bit of sleep-walking – for the first time in my life, I might add – but I can 
quote two dozen medical sources off the top of my head to prove it was a 
temporary aberration due to stress. As for subconsciously searching for 
you…could you please peek around your own ego sometime? You barely made it 
this long as an agent; there are a hundred people more qualified to be one of 
these Guides, even admitting that I might at some stage need one.”  

“Alexei, grow up!” For the first time Blair Sandburg showed irritation. “You’re 
not stupid, but that’s how your pig-headedness is making you look, believe me. 
You knew you were a Sentinel and we’ve proved that to you beyond where you 
can refute it. Shan is your compatible Guide and you know that. You know you 
were hunting for him in Atlanta. You’re running out of time, Colonel 
Kimeninov; rejecting what you are is damaging to you physically as well as 
psychologically and likewise to Shan. If I have to make a choice between Shan’s 
life and yours, you will lose.” 

“You can’t prove that, it’s all supposition,” Alexei refused to give an inch, 
despite being inwardly bothered over the depth of conviction and sincerity in 
Sandburg’s tone of voice. 

“I can prove it.”

They all looked at Shan as he uttered the words flatly; Alexei noted that Blair 
Sandburg and Jim Ellison were as uncertain as he was about Davies’ sudden 
declaration.

“Prove what?” challenged Alexei.

“That you were sleepwalking in Atlanta. That you were hunting for a Guide.” 
Again Davies’ tone had a curiously empty tone to it, a flat robotic delivery like 
he was recording an answer-phone message, but his eyes were dark pools of 
pain.

“Really?” Alexei folded his arms. “How?”

Turning on his heel, Shan Davies simply walked away, followed a moment later 
by Ellison and Sandburg. Alexei waited five minutes, then ten, then fifteen; 
despite himself he was curious – and increasingly as time ticked by – concerned 
over Davies’ ‘alleged’ proof.  Finally Shan Davies came back with Sandburg but 
without Ellison and Alexei felt the hairs on his body prickle at the men’s 
expressions – angry, upset, disgusted…but grimly resolute.

With a flick of his wrist, Shan Davies shot a video tape through the bars that 
Alexei caught automatically against his chest before it hit him, then turned on 
his heel and walked away again. Sandburg paused, “I hoped we’d never have to 
show this to you, but right now I’m too angry with you to care.” Then he also 
was gone, following Davies.     

Alexei looked at the tape. There was nothing written on the label, and only a 
short section of tape had been wound on; he hesitated momentarily, but he 
had nothing to lose by watching it. Inserting the tape, he rewound it and then 
pressed play.

An hour later the tape blanked out but Alexei didn’t move from his position on 
the bed, struggling to keep his face impassive for the monitoring security 
camera even as mentally he reeled from the psychological blows. The first part 
of the tape recording was at an atrocious angle, the light non-existent to the 
point where it was largely shadows, indicating that probably the first night’s 
recording was purely accidental after the video-camera had been left on. Only 
at the end of it was clear – Alexei watched himself stand up out of the darkness 
of the floor, the moonlight illuminating his head and torso sufficiently for the 
camera to record his blank, vapid expression, the mindless automaton that was 
his recorded self walking zombie like out of the apartment, leaving a darker 
shadow amongst many curled up on the floor…The second section date stamp 
showed it to be two nights later – and it  was far more terribly clear, as if Shan 
Davies hadn’t been able to believe what was happening until he’d seen it 
recorded himself. Alexei had flinched with each sound of flesh striking flesh as 
he watched himself strike the struggling American and throw him to the floor 
before…No! Don’t! Please, please don’t…the litany of appeals that he hadn’t 
heard; the strangled, gasping sound of a suppressed sob…he felt physically sick.
    
A soft scraping impinged on his consciousness and he looked up sharply to see 
Blair Sandburg regarding him with a mixture of anger, contempt, disgust…and 
pity.  

It was the last that irrationally provoked him; that this hippie reject should 
dare pity Kimeninov who could kill him with a single blow, as his sense of guilt 
reflexively tried to shift the blame for the unconscionable acts, and his fear 
made one last-ditch attempt to deny the facts so brutally proven. Alexei raised 
his eyebrows and sneered, "So all this has been because Shan Davies is piqued 
he wasn't good enough for me to actually f-"

“No!” Ellison barked the word and knocked Shan Davies’ arm into the air from 
where he had followed the agent down the stairs. 

Davies’ snarled wordlessly, his face twisted with hate as he grappled uselessly 
for a moment with Ellison before the latter finally wrenched the gun from his 
hand, Shan having not been able to fire it before Jim deflected his aim. “Shoot 
him!”

Blair Sandburg didn’t move or speak, simply continued to watch Alexei 
throughout the melodrama taking place behind him. His gaze was steady and 
mildly thoughtful. Somehow it made Alexei, who had been eyeball to eyeball 
with terrorist fanatics that would kill at the drop of a hat, feel like pond 
scum…and that broke him. “All right, I’m a Sentinel I admit it…and Shan Davies 
is my Guide.”

“Over my cold corpse,” raged Shan as he continued to try and get past Jim. 

“I share the sentiment,” snapped back Alexei. “I don’t want you as a Guide –”

“Davies, if you don’t quit right now, I’ll shoot you,” Jim snapped, provoked 
himself as the younger man kept trying to finagle his gun back from Jim while 
simultaneously squeeze past him down the stairs. 

“He’s not your Guide!” Blair suddenly came to life as if a switch had been 
thrown.

“What?” Alexei demanded. 

Blair looked from Alexei to Shan and back again. “That’s it! Of course there 
will probably be a ritual but that could be it.”

“Sandburg, so help me if you don’t start making sense right now, I’ll shoot 
you,” declared Shan.

“I really mean it,” Blair insisted. “It could be that simple: Formal rejection by 
both parties. Wait here.” Whirling he ran back to the staircase, impatiently 
gestured for Jim and Shan to come down and stop blocking his path, then ran 
up it and disappeared leaving the three men bewildered.

Two minutes later, he was back, scrabbling desperately inside a large, battered 
old backpack and pulling out a thick leather bound volume Alexei hadn’t seen 
before. Approaching the cage-niche with Ellison and Shan Davies on his heels, 
Sandburg actually grinned at Alexei as if the Russian had suddenly given them 
the answer to life, the universe and everything. “It’s in here. There should 
actually be a ceremony with two sacrificed goats and some burnt herbs but I 
think we can skip that.”

“Sandbuuurg…” this time it was Ellison who growled the word through gritted 
teeth. 

“Sorry. It says here,” Sandburg ran a finger along the page in the book, “that if 
Sentinel and Guide mutually agree that they are incompatible, the bond 
between them can be negated as long as they have not actually undergone First 
Bonding. Both sides must renounce the Bond in the presence of duly appointed 
officials of the state, after which…goats…yuck. So basically…I guess me and Jim 
constitute duly appointed officials in the Sentinel and Guide world…” clearing 
his throat, Sandburg intoned, “Sentinel-and-Colonel Alexei Nikolai Vasili 
Kimeninov do you, of your own free will, affirm that you do not wish to bond 
with Major Shan Gage Davies, that you irrevocably and completely renounce 
your claim upon him as your Guide and protector?”

“Yes!” Alexei responded promptly.

“Guide-and-Major Shan Gage Davies, do you, of your own free will, affirm that 
you do not wish to bond with –”

“Yes!”

“Sentinel-and-Colonel Alexei Nikolai Vasili Kimeninov, that you irrevocably and 
completely renounce your claim upon him as your Sentinel and protector.”

“Yes, in spades.”

“Fine.” Sandburg closed the book. “Colonel Kimeninov, go back to Florida, 
Shan, steer well clear of the Sunshine State. It will take about four or five 
weeks but you should then find the instinct to find each other dissipating.”

“That’s it?” queried Alexei, feeling suddenly a sense of anti-climax. It was like 
when he’d read the Lord of the Rings trilogy – he’d gotten to ‘the ring gets 
tossed into the lava and everyone goes home’ bit and felt…that’s it?

“More or less…unless you want me to get the goats…”

“I’ll pass,” Shan muttered, for once in total accord with the Russian. “I am so 
out of here.” He turned and began to walk away briskly, Ellison on his heels. 

“So…you’re going to let me out now?” Alexei enquired sceptically of Sandburg 
as the other two walked away. 

“Ah…not quite.” Sandburg looked apologetic as he rooted in his rucksack for 
space to reinsert the book. “We’ll get Shan clear and then bring you the key – 
ah.” He shoved the book in. “It’ll be an hour, tops, I promise.” Hoisting the 
rucksack over his shoulder he dashed after Ellison and Davies.

Alexei watched him go and then sank down on the bed, his fingers closing 
around the shiny silver key of the lock. It had missed his head by a millimetre 
when it had flirted out of Sandburg’s rucksack as the young man dug through it, 
sailing miraculously through the bars to hit the bedcovers. Ellison had been a 
good thirty feet away with his back to the cage, Davies had been charging up 
the stairs, Sandburg apparently oblivious to what he’d just done. He looked at 
the lock. He could be out of here in ten seconds flat…kill Davies – if he still 
chose to – or just walk away. But had they got back to wherever they were 
monitoring the camera from in time to see him make his Great Escape or was 
he still in the clear?

Cautiously he extended his ears, latching on instantly to Davies’ heartbeat, 
hearing the three men’s conversation a micro-second later.

“Blair, I owe you big time. I can’t believe it’s actually over –” Shan was saying.

“It may not be.” 

Hearing Blair Sandburg’s sheepish and hesitant tone put Alexei on high alert 
and automatically he dialled up his hearing even as he determined from the 
resonance of their voices that they were in a corridor on the next floor above, 
which was highly doubtful as the place where they’d set up the surveillance on 
his cell-niche. Even as he listened he placed the key in the lock and turned it – 
like the bars the lock was new and modern and also small, so harder to pick, 
but it also opened in silence, without warning clicks or scraping of internal 
metal. He focussed his hearing again as Shan’s heart jumped slightly.

“What do you mean, it may not be? I may not like Kimeninov but he’s the 
ultimate pragmatist. Once he’s made a deal he usually sticks to unless given 
extraordinary reasons not to – and I don’t intend to ever be in the same 
hemisphere as the guy.”

“I’m not talking about Alexei.” 

Even from a floor below, the Russian could practically see guilty reluctance 
dripping from the words.

“What exactly are you talking about?” Now Davies’ sounded exactly like what 
Alexei, for all his disparaging remarks about the American’s abilities, knew him 
to be – a highly trained, highly skilled, very talented and very dangerous covert 
operative.

“You may encounter…another Sentinel.”

“Another…? You’re kidding?” Shan exclaimed. “You don’t seem to be worried 
about –”

“I’m not up for grabs, you are!”

“Easy, chief!” Jim said, his voice controlled. “Just lay it out for us, okay?”

There was the sound of the younger man sucking in a breath and automatically 
Alexei noted a subtle dissonance about his lungs, as if for some reason they 
weren’t working as efficiently as normal. Everyone breathed differently, but 
there was a basic, underlying generic similarity common to everyone…Sandburg 
didn’t have that…Alexei shook his head as Shan’s pulse spiked, stopping him 
from falling too deeply into straining to listen properly to what was wrong with 
Sandburg’s breathing.

“Shan, I’m not worried about other Sentinels because I’m a Bonded Guide. The 
longer a Sentinel and Guide pair are together the more difficult it is to break 
the bond; within a couple of years at the most, most Sentinels and Guides are 
so closely linked within the pairing that each one literally can’t survive if the 
other one is lost. Losing one side of a Bonded Pair is not like trading in your old 
car for the latest model, it’s for life.”

“So?” Shan snapped.

“Alexei released you. His relinquished his claim to you. You’re an un-bonded 
Guide, therefore any un-bonded Sentinel or Sentinels have the right to make a 
claim if you turn out to be a compatible Guide.”

Shan Davies’ heartbeat shot through the roof and his voice became hoarse, “I-I-
I…I’m going to be a-a-attacked by Sentinels? T-trying to – to hurt me…”

Alexei Kimeninov had always been a man secure in his convictions, never one 
to second-guess. Right now, he hated himself for the fear in the American’s 
voice, vivid video images replaying in his head to match the anger, shame and 
stark terror he could hear in Shan’s every syllable. But his own anger was 
suddenly rising too, a hot, inchoate fury that surged through him at the mere 
thought of any other Sentinel daring to try to take what was his. 

“No!” Blair’s rapped out voice brought both Shan and Alexei back from the 
brink – one from terror, one from fury - did he but know it. “What Alexei did to 
you was inexcusable, but it was an aberration. Remember, I told you, the 
Sentinel was trying to bond, it didn’t understand, all it knew was that you were 
rejecting it…most Sentinels are born in agrarian, non-technological societies 
where their abilities are detected and directed from birth. The chances are 
that any other Sentinel who approaches you will be fully aware of First Bonding 
ritual and won’t try to assault you in any way.”

“But you don’t know that…” Shan claimed, “…like Alexandra Barnes aka Alicia 
Bannister was just anther anomaly, hey Sandburg?”

“That’s enough,” growled Jim.

“Enough?” barked Shan furiously. “I’m in more danger now that when I started! 
Sandburg got one Sentinel off my back only to make me open season for every 
other one who hasn’t got his own little Blair bastard to –”

There was the clack of a fist against a jaw, followed by Blair’s exclamation, 
“Jim!”

“No, I deserved that,” Shan said contritely but gingerly, as if flexing his jaw. 
“You were only trying to help.”

“Go pack up your stuff,” Jim ordered. “We’ll try and come up with something 
to take you off Sentinel radar.”

“I guess there’s no way I could do like Alexei wanted with his senses and turn 
the damn Guide thing off?” Shan demanded bitterly.

“Unfortunately, no,” admitted Blair. “A Sentinel is a Sentinel as long as he – or 
she – chooses to be. It is possible to switch off the heightened senses and 
become Joe Average again for them, but not for a Guide. A Guide is basically a 
strong empath. It’s a totally different area of the brain than what controls our 
physical senses, in the dead zone that scientists don’t understand anything 
about all, and they barely understand a fraction of the rest of the human mind 
anyway. It takes a lot of effort for an empath to master control over his or her 
abilities and unfortunately unlike a Sentinel you’re stuck with what you’ve got. 
You can’t dial it up, or down, or turn it off.”

“Terrific.” Turning on his heel, Shan walked away, his shoulders set rigidly.

“Come on Chief, let’s go pack up before we let Mr Congeniality loose. Shan’ll 
get over it.”

Alexei, who was halfway up the stairs, smirked but paused to determine where 
the two men were going.

“I hope so,” Blair muttered with clear worry. 

“How likely to you think it is that another Sentinel –” Jim broached tentatively.

“Very.” Blair’s voice was flat but distorted in a way that indicated he was in 
motion as he spoke.

Alexei felt the rage surge again at this admission but controlled the urge to 
abandon caution. It was more difficult than he anticipated.

“Look, forget Alexei and Shan’s I’m a better-spook-than-you pissing contest,” 
Blair was advising. “The truth is that Shan is a very strong empath. He’d be an 
asset to any Sentinel. Don’t forget, Hunts-with-Wolves was a Guide, and a 
shaman, but he was also a warrior, a soldier…it took Brother-to-the-Lion three 
attempts to capture him from his tribe in battle in the first place. Later on 
Wolves fought side by side in battle with his Sentinel along with the other 
soldiers. I’m a Guide and a Shaman, but not a warrior; Shan isn’t a Shaman, but 
he is a warrior. Basically, Shan is a very big, very juicy marrow bone that is up 
for grabs because the dog who had it dropped it. He won’t go unnoticed for 
long…”

Sandburg’s voice cut off, as did Ellison’s as the bigger man started to reply. 
Alexei nodded – some sort of shielded room? But he wasn’t really interested. 
Standing at the stop of the staircase in front of the door, he was unaware of 
the predatory expression of his features or his coiled stance. He’d heard 
enough. Alexei looked at the door, understanding it represented more than just 
a way out of this warehouse. He’d agreed to stop trying to kill Shan Davies, 
agreed to go back to Florida, and he’d meant it once he’d been forced to 
accept that his problems weren’t some weird virus or stress-induced reaction 
that the American was ‘somehow’ triggering …but…

Alexei took a breath and tried to dispassionately consider the possibility of 
another Sentinel managing to get Shan to be his Guide; his fingers twitched 
spasmodically and his eyes snapped open again. Bad idea. The wave of sheer, 
unadulterated fury that swamped him at the mere hint of such a notion was 
terrifying. Every instinct Alexei had plus some he was sure had just 
spontaneously developed in himself was screaming that Shan belonged to him. 
Did he ignore those instincts? Just walk away and spend the rest of his life in 
Florida, sitting on an endless succession of beaches with an endless succession 
of umbrella-laden improbably named cocktails, with an endless succession of 
whatever nubile nymphet he’d managed to lure for the day? Alexei had no 
affinity for his house in Florida, and the empty vista of years finding new ways 
to stave of boredom…

Shan would fight him…but Shan would lose. Alexei closed his eyes as he 
remembered that first desperate fight