Ruins

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOSHUA WINNING, A FREELANCE JOURNALIST and author, was born in Cambridge. He studied film and communications at Anglia Ruskin University before moving to London to become a journalist. When he’s not daydreaming about monsters, Joshua is contributing editor at Total Film, and also regularly writes for Digital Spy and Grolsch Film Works.

  Visit: www.joshuawinning.com

  Follow: @JoshWinning

  Visit: www.thesentineltrilogy.com

  Follow: @SentinelTrilogy

  Like: facebook.com/SentinelTrilogy

  “Fast paced, surprising, and madly compelling.”

  Rosie Fletcher, Total Film

  “A great, imaginative, gripping read…”

  Nev Pierce, Editor-at-Large, Empire

  “Joshua Winning could well be on to a winner with this unsettling but entertaining icebreaker; hopefully Nicholas and this trilogy will mature nicely together.”

  Claire Nicholls, SciFiNow Magazine

  “Don’t think you’ve read this before in the Harry Potter books, Sentinel sets a darker, grittier tone. The action is fast and violent, the monsters, including a seductive vampiress, are memorable.”

  John Wyatt, The Sun

  “Written poetically, with carefully-drawn characters, this is an extremely promising YA debut by a young author.”

  Kate Whiting, Press Association

  “Winning’s eminently readable style, coupled with some strong characters and a pace that nicely rounds out the book make this a cut above the vast majority of the young-adult fiction market that tries the same approach.”

  Daniel Benson, HorrorTalk

  “One for fans of Terry Pratchett, Edgar Allan Poe and Tolkien. Joshua Winning’s Sentinel has everything fantasy readers could want: action, mystery, gore, magic and an orphan with wacky relatives.”

  Lizzy Fry, Culture Fly

  “Adventure, twists, demons and mystery abound in this spellbinding tale of a hidden earthly underworld.”

  David Estes, author of The Moon Dwellers

  “Sentinel first hooks you with a cadre of compelling and appealing characters, then before you know it, you’re trapped in a nightmare of intangible forces that become more and more threatening, more and more clever, more and more inescapable. You definitely reach a point where you can’t put the book down.”

  D.A. Metrov, author of Falcon Lord

  “A well-crafted, sharply honed novel that creeps into your subconscious, settling deep before springing a few surprises upon the unsuspecting reader. You won’t want to put it down, and you probably don’t want to read it on your own in an empty house!”

  Sarah McMullan, The 13th Floor

  First published in 2015 by

  Peridot Press

  12 Deben Mill Business Centre, Melton,

  Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 1BL

  Copyright © Joshua Winning 2015

  The right of Joshua Winning to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

  Set and designed by Theoria Design

  www.theoriadesign.com

  Visit: www.thesentineltrilogy.com

  Follow: @SentinelTrilogy

  Like: facebook.com/SentinelTrilogy

  Rules for survival

  Don’t make friends

  Don’t talk about your past

  Don’t tell anybody what you can do

  Don’t show weakness

  Don’t let the monsters see you

  - Anon.

  PROLOGUE

  TEN YEARS AGO

  SIRENS WAILED IN THE NIGHT AND the sky was a blood-red inferno of fire and ash. People gathered in the street to stare. They huddled in slippers and dressing gowns, transfixed by the burning house. Some offered reassuring murmurs. Others scrutinised the shadows, fearful that whoever had done this was still nearby.

  “It was her. She did it.”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  The girl hugged her knees, teetering on the edge of the kerb. She was only five years old, but her scowl made her look older. The fire danced in her eyes and her pink pyjamas were flecked with cinders.

  Across the street, smoke belched from a house torn apart. The building had been bisected and the girl could see her bedroom through a smouldering fissure. It was blackened and burnt. A nest of broken memories.

  Her foster parents stood with their backs to her, arm in arm, watching the blaze. Her foster mother glanced over her shoulder and the girl trembled, caught in the woman’s accusatory glare.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Let’s wait for the authorities to arrive.”

  “What are we going to do about her.”

  The girl screwed up her fists and shuddered at the keening of the approaching sirens. Her heartbeat quickened. Nobody was watching her anymore. She got to her feet, her eyes trained on her foster parents’ backs.

  As she turned to run, arms snapped around her and she was hoisted from the ground.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” her foster father warned in her ear.

  The girl thrashed and growled and angry energy flushed through her. The air shimmered with heat and her foster father dragged her into a neighbour’s garden.

  “Stop it,” he said. “Breathe.”

  He crouched down, holding her at arm’s length, his forehead creased with concern.

  She couldn’t. Her insides churned. The garden wall trembled and the grass rustled as if disturbed by the wind. She’d dreamed the house was collapsing around her, and when she’d woken up, the dream hadn’t ended. She wanted to sob, but she didn’t. She bit the emotion down, clenched her fists until they hurt. And still the rage roiled inside, causing sweat to trickle down her temples.

  Across the garden, a tree erupted in flames.

  Her foster father jumped and squinted fearfully at her.

  Through the dreadful churning in her belly, she heard the pad of determined footsteps behind her.

  “Elizabeth, no–” her foster father began.

  Something struck her in the back of the head and the girl felt the grass whisper against her cheek.

  The last thing she saw was fire and ash in the night sky, and she knew it was all her fault.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Festival Of Fire

  PRESENT DAY

  “YOU’VE BEEN OUT HUNTING AGAIN, HAVEN’T YOU?”

  Sam Wilkins sucked his cheeks and gave the doctor as much of a surprised look as he could muster.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he grunted, hearing the falseness in his tone. At seventy-one years old, he really should be able to come up with a decent little white lie. He had one of those honest faces, though. Everyone told him that. The nervous smile and hooded eyes always gave him away. He ran a hand through his thinning silver hair as Dr Geraldine Adams glared at him over the rim of her glasses.

  “Your blood pressure’s not so much through the roof as swooping about with the sparrows,” she said sternly. She was in her early sixties, crinkled around the edges, but fiercer than ever. She had been a savage Sentinel in her day, wily and ruthless as a coyote, but like many older Sentinels, she had forgone hunting in favour of her day job. A loss, Sam thought, but at least he could still rely on her in a pinch. And she remained formidable; spectacles magnified her eyes and they were inescapable.

  Dr Adams removed the apparatus from
his arm and dumped it on the desk, pausing to slip an escaped strand of her own silvery hair back into the neat pile pinned atop her head.

  Sam rolled down his shirt sleeve and said nothing. He was glad Dr Adams’ check-up hadn’t involved removing his shirt. He’d never be able to explain the still-yellow mottling of his skin; slow-fading bruises from the fight in the temple beneath the cemetery.

  “You know you’re gambling with your health, Sam,” Dr Adams persisted, tapping notes into a computer. The office was small but light, slatted blinds letting in fingers of sunlight. A framed photo of a puffy, toothless child rested on her desk. A scrap of A4 paper was pinned to the wall. Chubby handprints had been eagerly pressed into multi-coloured paint.

  “Samuel Wilkins!”

  The elderly man nodded and returned the doctor’s stare, twisting the battered grey fedora in his hands.

  “You should be taking it easy,” Dr Adams said. “Let the youngsters do the hard work, it’s their turn now. You should be enjoying retirement. Get a dog. Play chess. Learn French. Forget about monsters.”

  Sam didn’t tell her that sounded like his idea of hell.

  “Would that I could. There’s bad stuff coming, worse than we’ve seen in our lifetimes. You don’t just sit back and let that happen.”

  “But you certainly don’t go out looking for it,” Dr Adams told him. She knew him too well. Softening, she touched his liver-spotted hand. “I’m begging you, stop. It’ll be the death of you.”

  Sam held her gaze. It was now or never – the real reason he’d submitted himself to Dr Adams’ scrutiny.

  “Ever heard of a Dr Snelling?” he asked.

  She removed the hand. “Why’d you ask?”

  “He worked somewhere here in Cambridge.”

  “Smelling?”

  “Snelling,” he corrected her. He checked his pocket watch. Two pm. He would have to hit the road soon.

  “Doesn’t ring any bells,” Dr Adams mused. “Should it?”

  “Nothing important,” Sam assured her. “Though, there is something.”

  “I’m not going to help you on any monster hunts. You should know better, and frankly–”

  “Just… a nod or a shake of the head,” Sam interjected. “Has anything ever crossed your path, you know, anything regarding possession and the such? I’m asking you as a professional, of course. I don’t want to know what you get up to outside of work hours.”

  Dr Adams shot him a look that would have left his left cheek glowing if it had been a slap. “Samuel Wilkins–”

  Sam raised his hands and got to his feet, backing toward the door. “Don’t mind me, just an old fool with an overactive imagination,” he said, opening the door.

  “Snelling,” the doctor said suddenly.

  Sam paused. “Sorry?”

  Dr Adams bit her lip. He’d never seen her do that before. “There was something, back in the nineties,” she muttered. “Now what was it? No, I can’t think.” She glared at him, jabbed a pen in the air. “And you shouldn’t be rooting around in anything of the like.”

  “I’d best be going,” Sam said. “If you happen to think of anything, drop me a line, won’t you?”

  She was sterner than ever. “No more hunting.”

  He assured her, as convincingly as he could, that he would do nothing of the sort. Even as he said it, he knew he had no intention of stopping. What else was there? If he went to his grave fighting, that’s the way it had to be. He was born a Sentinel and it was his duty to protect people from the dark things that prowled just out of sight, unnoticed until it was too late. He supposed ignorance was bliss.

  Dr Adams prescribed him some pills for the blood pressure and Sam begrudgingly fetched them from the pharmacy. He’d never remember to take them.

  The walk home was balmy, the sun heavy on his shoulders as he hurried down the street. The fedora clung to his forehead and the heat made him nervous. The snow had melted the day after that terrible night in the mausoleum, when he’d discovered that even more Sentinels had been turned against them – had become Harvesters. The cold evaporated like a bad dream and the sun blasted apart the lingering clouds.

  Sam shuddered. So sudden a change in the weather didn’t bode well. It was a diversion; a distraction from what was to come. How could spirits buoyed by the return of bright August mornings ever imagine the darkness that awaited?

  He surveyed the street. Cambridge was different in the wake of that night. True, it had always been subject to demonic activity, that was the reason he was stationed here. The demonic activity had stepped up in recent weeks, though. Ever since Anita and Max Hallow were killed in a train crash and the demon Diltraa picked its way through the city’s child population. Diltraa was banished, but still Sam worried. There were others, and the Harvester population was only swelling. And then there was Malika, the red-haired witch. There had been no sign of her since Diltraa’s demise, but Sam suspected she was merely licking her wounds before leading a fresh assault.

  When he got home, he double-bolted the front door and wound string from the handle to the radiator. The string was lined with little bells that tinkled when he plucked it. He was taking no chances. After checking the back door and downstairs windows, he fixed himself a late lunch. A cup of tea and a few slices of toast. He took them upstairs and climbed the step-ladder into the attic, ignoring the ache in his right knee as he went.

  The attic was as he’d left it the day he and Liberty had found the message on the Ectomunicator, the old typewriter-like device that the Sentinels had once used to message one another. He hadn’t been up here since that evening; he couldn’t face it after what had happened at the church. The guilt sat like a stone in his stomach. Immovable and constant. Richard. Vince. Jack. He’d killed them all. They had been Sentinels, but something had turned them; transformed them into bloodthirsty Harvesters whose sole desire was to kill Sentinels.

  There was only one thing he could do to stop himself succumbing to the gnawing guilt – he had to find out why. What had turned them? And who was behind it? Somebody was assembling an army. He had to stop them.

  Liberty was doing what she could in-between looking after her daughter. Though she was a handy person to have around – Liberty was a Sensitive and attune to psychic activity – Sam was relieved she was focussing on family. He was loathe to drag her into this again, especially so soon after she had been used by Malika to open a portal into Hallow House. The trauma of that nasty ordeal had nearly killed her and, five days later, Liberty was only just starting to resemble her old, sarcastic self.

  No. He wouldn’t bother Liberty. The weight of responsibility rested on his shoulders alone.

  With a sigh, Sam seated himself at the desk at the back of the attic. He clicked on the lamp and a circle of light fell on the Ectomunicator. Wearily, he drew the dust cover over it and retired the contraption to the back of the desk, making way for his meagre lunch.

  He sipped the tea, crunched the toast unenthusiastically, popped one of Dr Adams’s blasted pills, then opened a drawer under the desk and took out a clunky old laptop. He powered it up, hoping he could remember everything Max had taught him – he hadn’t used it in some time. The little lines in the corner of the screen told him he was connected to a wireless network, so he opened a browser and started typing.

  He wasn’t sure what he was looking for – there was no information regarding Sentinels or Harvesters on the Internet beyond the ramblings of the conspiracy hounds. He tried a few random searches. Nothing useful came up.

  Sam leaned back in his chair. It had all started with Richard. Richard and Dr Snelling. Sam had tried to call Dr Adams when Richard was attacked, but she had escaped the snow for two weeks in Mauritius with her husband. Sam wished she’d been there to see Richard. Maybe she could have figured out what Snelling had done to him. She could have helped Sam save him.

  He remembered those cold, accusatory eyes boring into him from the kitchen floor and shuddered.

  “Snelling,”
he muttered, shaking the image off. He typed the name into the browser, which returned over seven million unique results. Sam puffed in exasperation and clicked through the first few links. Most of them were useless. Building companies, some scientist called Snelling who didn’t seem relevant, and reams of other unrelated news stories.

  He paused, his hand hovering over the mouse pad. Sam squinted at the website he’d opened.

  “How interesting,” he murmured.

  *

  The book made a satisfying thwack as it hit the wall and thumped to the floor.

  Nicholas Hallow grunted, disappointed it hadn’t smashed through into the next room – at least then he wouldn’t have to look at it. Instead, the book sprawled on the carpet. The way it had landed, he could still read the silver words along its spine.

  The Sentinel Chronicles – August 1997.

  He’d found the book on his bedside table five days ago, the morning after he’d fought Diltraa. It was the one book in the Sentinels’ extensive records that he’d been unable to uncover. The book’s absence from the library had aroused his suspicions because he was born in that very month. And then suddenly there it was, as if the room had coughed it up, taunting him with the promise of answers.

  Every page was blank. Every single one of them.

  The disappointment thudded in his chest.

  Another dead end.

  Nicholas couldn’t help feeling he was the punchline to a particularly stupid joke. Jessica Bell, the leader of the Sentinels, had revealed something that even now made his skin crawl, as if he’d shrunk inside of it. Almost sixteen years ago, he’d been born in the village of Orville, less than a mile from here. His birth had almost destroyed the village and every single person living in it. They were all killed, their souls frozen in time.