Tall, Dark & Heartless (Pyte/Sentinel 3)

The man stopped just inside of the room. He threw the tank filled with pink water and the floating arm a look of disgust before he looked between Caine and her with curiosity.

"If you have a moment, I would like to speak with both of you."

Chapter 9

Boston Compound

Boston, MA

"Again," he said as the two-hundred and fifty pound Sentinel, that could have easily been a linebacker had he been born human, glared at him as he dragged himself back to his feet. "This time guard your left, Cupcake."

"I am guarding my left!" the Sentinel snapped as he wiped the blood dripping down his chin with the back of his hand.

"No, you're not," Ephraim said quietly from the sidelines, not even bothering to look up from the intense game of peek-a-boo he was playing with his granddaughter. His precious baby girl of course backed her father up with several excited little coos.

"How the f**k would you know?" the Sentinel demanded. "You're not even watching!"

With an annoyed sigh, Chris dropped down and swept his foot out, knocking the big cry baby down on his ass. He jumped back up to his feet before the Sentinel's back hit the sparring mat.

"Don't swear in front of my precious baby girl," Chris simply said when the large man glared up at him.

The man opened his mouth to probably bitch some more about Chris' rules, but smartly kept his mouth shut. Since he took over as the compound and Sentinel's regional trainer a month and a half ago, everyone had learned quickly that his rules were simple and not to be f**ked with.

If his precious baby girl, Jessica, was in the room there was no swearing allowed, ever. When someone broke that rule he knocked them down and if they didn't learn that rule quickly, he gave them a lesson in fighting that they would never forget. When it came to his daughter, mate and family Chris didn't play around.

"Get up and let's do this again," Chris said, gesturing for the man to get up again

"I've been doing this for over a hundred years," the man bit out as he stood up. "I don't need these training sessions."

With a bored sigh, Chris backhanded him, sending him flying across the room. The man landed hard on the mat, twenty feet away with a loud whoosh.

"Clearly you do," Chris said, not even bothering to tell the man to get up since it looked like he was seconds from passing out.

That was one of the toughest aspects of his job, re-training men and women who had been doing this job for a lot longer than he had. The problem was that they took their natural abilities and the fact that they'd survived the job for this long for granted. Not all of them did. A lot of them trained just as hard as he did. He enjoyed sparing with them, learning new tricks and methods of fighting as well, but some of the Sentinels, like the one currently whimpering on the mat, didn't train nearly hard enough. They firmly believed the training they received back in their day was good enough.

It wasn't.

With the war currently making everyone's life a living hell, they needed to get their asses in gear as quickly as possible. The war had been going on for almost eight months now and it didn't look like it was going to end anytime soon. They needed to get their shit together and end this soon before they suffered any more casualties or the damn humans got a clue about the real world surrounding them.

The war originally started when the Masters, vampire leaders, united with one goal in mind; find Isabella McGuire and get their hands on her computer program Tattletale. Unfortunately for the Masters they hadn't known that Isabella was a Sentinel and his destined mate.

Sentinels were the natural defense against vampires, demons and shifters. Every ten years, ten Sentinels, five males and five females were born on November 25th to human and Sentinel females. For a Sentinel to be born to a human, the mother had to be carrying twins so that the entwined souls of the Sentinel could move undetected with the soul of the human sibling. Most of the human twins died during the birth, because they were unable to handle the changes that occurred in the womb when the half-human and half-angel soul combined to create a Sentinel. Every destined Sentinel pair shared a human and an angel soul.

Izzy, his little Munchkin, owned the other halves of his souls and his heart. She was the love of his life and the person who made him whole and happy. Before her he'd lived a barely there existence, only living for his family. She'd saved him in more ways than one and gave him the greatest treasure in the world, his precious baby girl.

He'd do anything for his family and it killed him that they were stuck here in Boston, where his Munchkin couldn't step so much as a foot out of the compound out of fear that a minion, demon, shifter or a vampire might spot her and realize that she wasn't really dead. About a week after his sneaky little stubborn Munchkin wiggled her way into taking a job at the compound to save her beautiful little ass from being shipped off to a Sentinel island where she would have lived a safe, yet secluded life, they faked her death. Not every Master bought it, but enough of them did, so it took some pressure off of everyone.

The attacks on humans and the searches for Izzy came to an abrupt halt, but unfortunately that didn't stop the war. Demons, shifters, and Masters decided it was time for an uprising. Packs all over the world were attacking each other as well as demons and vampire nests. Pack members were trying to take down their Alphas. Masters were feuding more so than usual and demons were coming in from behind and trying to make a power play while everyone else was distracted.

If they kept their damn squabbling amongst themselves it would be fine, but they weren't. They were attacking the Sentinels and some of them were uniting for the first time in centuries, to get the job done. Worse, the humans were getting caught in the middle. If they didn't end this shit soon, the humans were going to start questioning a lot of shit they never should have seen.

He wished the war was his only problem, but it wasn't. About three months ago his younger brother Joshua had been shot while protecting their little brother, Marc. By jumping in front of him, Joshua had also saved the life of a rogue Alpha as well as Marc's life. Kale, the shifter they couldn't seem to get rid of now, who came and went from the compound as he pleased and spent way too much time with his little Munchkin, gave Joshua blood and shoved him and Marc into a tunnel before a group of demons, intent on getting their hands on little Marc, could stop him.

Ephraim heard Marc's screams for help and found Joshua on the verge of dying and did something he still beat himself up for today, he gave Joshua his blood. It normally wouldn't have been a problem, but his father hadn't known that Joshua already ingested shifter blood. If Ephraim had been a vampire, Joshua would have died the instant the blood mixed with the shifter's blood, but he wasn't.