The Sentinels of Eden, Books 1-4

Chapter 16

Chapter 15

The next morning my vivacious aunt fluttered around the house like a butterfly on red cordial. She tidied, she cleaned, she polished. In short, she fretted. It was obviously difficult for her to prepare to meet the boy she believed I would marry, and I was more than a little worried that she would blurt out something inexcusably embarrassing in front of him.

She’d set up our guest bedroom for him to stay in because she didn’t feel comfortable letting him use Harry’s place without being able to check with him first, but she didn’t seem too happy about us living under the same roof either. In the end she probably figured that it would be inevitable anyway so she cleared out the back room and then proceeded to clear out every other loose item in the house as well. When I caught her trying to vacuum the veranda I had to say something.

‘What are you doing? Why does everything need to be so clean? Honestly, it’s only Bane. You have no idea how … how … irritating he can be.’

‘I’m just trying to make a good first impression! We only get one chance at that.’

‘Or else what? He won’t think I’m a suitable match? Isn’t that a good thing? Maybe his disgust at our housekeeping abilities will override his compulsion to fall hopelessly in love with me.’

‘I just want things to go as smoothly as possible. This doesn’t need to play out like some TV daytime soap opera. I just want things to stay simple.’

Stay simple? Which part of any of this was simple?

A cloud of dust billowed up from the road behind a blue sedan.

‘Please just don’t say anything to him, Aunt Lily. He might not care about my housekeeping skills but scaring him off by acting crazy certainly won’t help to keep things simple.’

Humming nervously, I tried to look busy when our new employee knocked on the front door. Aunt Lily introduced herself and welcomed him inside, leading him down the short hallway into the kitchen where I was rearranging the knives in the knife block. Bane took one look at me and scowled, so I meekly sat down. The three of us were so much on edge that we all jumped a mile when the phone rang. Aunt Lily excused herself and took the phone into the other room.

‘Tea or coffee?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.

‘Coffee would be great, thanks.’ It was the first time he had ever said thank you to me for anything. In fact, in the last two days he’d spoken more to me than in our entire high school lives. If you didn’t count all the yelling. It was going to take getting used to.

For the next few minutes I pottered around the kitchen trying to find something other than fruit to offer him to eat. We had been so busy with lambing and graduation that we hadn’t had a chance to go to town for groceries for a while. All we really had were things we grew at home, currently consisting of eggs, lettuce, cauliflower and a glut of snow peas.

‘Nutri-Grain? Or some pears?’ I offered awkwardly.

‘Er, no, thanks. Just the coffee would be great.’

I put the milk and sugar out for him but he drank it plain and black. Sitting down with my cup of tea, I pried open a jar of bottled pears and poured some into a bowl. We were starting to run low on those too.

He watched me try to stab a slippery piece of the fruit with my spoon. ‘Listen,’ he said, clutching his coffee mug like he wanted to strangle it. ‘You and I both know that we don’t get along, and this is probably the last place on Earth I want to be.’

A pear slid off my bowl onto the table.

‘But I want you to know that I’m grateful. And I’ll try to … I mean I’ll try not to—’

‘Be such an asshole?’ I volunteered, wondering what he’d say if I still ate the pear. Popping it quickly into my mouth, I decided that since he hated me anyway I didn’t care.

He recoiled slightly, but nodded. ‘So, what sort of things will you need me to do?’ he asked after a moment.

Well, let’s see, take care of a few thousand sheep, protect me from all harm, keep the secret of Eden from the world, marry me and help me raise children who will probably not be human.

‘Oh, you know, just the usual things that keep a sheep farm going,’ I told him instead. ‘Have you driven a tractor before?’

‘No. But I can learn. What else?’

If I didn’t know better I might have thought he almost sounded enthusiastic. He was in for disappointment if he thought it was going to be exciting work.

‘Well, the new sheep need drenching. We’ll give that a go this afternoon and after that we’ll just see what jobs turn up. There’s always something.’

We sat in awkward silence for a minute. Aunt Lily was still on the phone. Why couldn’t she just take a message?

I fished around blindly for something to talk about. ‘So, um, do you have any hobbies? Interests? Extra skills we should know about?’

‘I play keyboard and guitar. And I used to play soccer,’ he reminded me.

Ow. He’d played soccer until I’d ruined it for him.

‘But what sorts of things do you do with your friends?’ I tried again.

He just stared out of the window, his face managing to look both sulky and irritated at the same time. Right. No friends. I knew that. He had always more or less kept to himself at school and was a bit of a loner. Oh dear God, please tell me I hadn’t just invited a budding psychopath to come and live with us …

That was when I decided that I had a new mission. Like it or not, I was going to have to get him to lighten up a heck of a lot if we were going to have to spend much time together. In fact, any time together. My eyes narrowed evilly as I studied him studying his coffee. Clearly I wasn’t going to be able to irritate him until he laughed like I did with Noah. I was going to have to be sneakier than that. I was up for the challenge.

Later, when Bane was unpacking his things, I noticed Aunt Lily slumped at the desk, doodling absently on a notepad. She’d drawn the Kolsom logo and was adding devil’s horns to it.

‘So the phone call was bad news then?’

‘My friend from Melbourne,’ she explained. ‘The contaminated water sample only shows very small amounts of mining by-products. All within safe levels. Nothing we can use to argue against Kolsom.’

‘And the other sample?’ I asked. ‘What’s in it that I need?’

She leant back in her chair to look at me. ‘The only differences he could see between the two samples were slight variations in some organic compounds that were impossible to identify. He just said that it would be difficult to prove if the contaminants had caused them to break down faster than normal. I’m sorry, Lainie, but whatever it is, it’s not anything we can find anywhere else.’

So not only was I stuck in Nalong indefinitely, but if Harry didn’t return soon to replenish my magic water potion, I was basically stuffed. And we were also no closer to getting rid of Kolsom. Our local council representative had been politely frustrating when we’d met with him, assuring us with all the right words that he would uphold our right to deny the miners access to our property, but he hadn’t offered any practical suggestions whatsoever.

Aunt Lily handed me another notepad and a pencil, and together we came up with some pretty creative logo variations until Bane returned and cut short our art therapy session.

That evening when we all returned exhausted from the paddocks, he began to appreciate what it was like for us when he realised we still had to cook dinner and do all the usual evening chores.

‘So where’s your usual farmhand? Harry, is it? Will he be away for long?’ he asked, holding a bunch of snow peas as if he’d never seen such things before.

My aunt and I looked at each other uneasily. We hadn’t even thought about what we were going to tell him. That was when I found out how good Aunt Lily was at coming up with cover stories without lying.

‘He had some personal business to attend to. He couldn’t give us a timeframe but I think it’ll be at least a month until he returns. Will you be able to stay that long?’ she asked, taking the snow peas from him to give them a rinse.

This time Bane looked at me nervously. This was going to be annoying, keeping secrets that didn’t really need to be kept. ‘Sure, I can stay as long as you need me,’ he replied.

I didn’t even want to think about how long that might be.

After our uncomfortably quiet dinner I went outside with Aunt Lily to put the chooks away in their fox-proof shed.

‘How much do you know about this compulsion he has to protect me?’ I queried, nudging the obstinate rooster with my foot to hurry him up.

‘Only what little I know from your parents. Lucas protected your mother. With his life, eventually,’ she said, leaning on the gate. Her flash of grief for her lost brother tightened the air around her.

‘Just my mother? Did Harry have someone to protect him too? Someone he was “destined to be with”?’ If only girls needed protectors then I had a whole flood of arguments ready, and Bane could just go and do his scowling somewhere else. I had never seen Harry in a relationship with anyone, and I wondered if Aunt Lily might have had the role.

She glared at me, her blue eyes flashing like ice crystals at dawn. ‘Harry’s business is his own. You’ll have to ask him yourself.’

Although I had clearly touched a nerve there, I couldn’t let it rest. ‘I can’t ask him though, can I? Are you certain he’s not hurt somewhere? There was a landslide after all. What if he didn’t make it to Eden?’ I didn’t want to push but it had been playing on my mind for such a long time.

‘He’s fine, Lainie, I promise. I’m just concerned that he might not come back,’ she said, staring off to the northwest.

‘At all?’ I panicked. ‘Doesn’t he have some sort of compulsion to get back here? He has a job to do, right?’ My voice climbed about an octave.

‘You’re here now. He might not … remember to come back. Harry said that once you cross into Eden this world can sort of fade from your list of priorities. If you weren’t here it might be different but since you’re around to guard this side … well, I’m worried he might forget how unprepared you are.’

That was unthinkable. I needed to talk to him. I had way more questions to ask him and we hadn’t even finished with the three he was prepared to answer yet. I clenched my jaw. ‘I’ll just have to go and remind him then.’

All the colour drained from my aunt’s face, and she stared at me, like she was about to cry.

‘What is it now?’ I asked, shoulders slumping. ‘Do I have to slay a dragon to get into Eden or something?’

‘What? No! Not as far as I’m aware. I just don’t want you to go, that’s all.’ She fiddled with the gate latch. ‘I wasn’t kidding about this world fading from your priorities. I mean, look around you, Lainie. Do you really think this place can compare with Paradise? Why would you bother coming back?’

A bit self-consciously, I wiped some chook poo and feathers off the edge of my shoe onto the dead grass.

She didn’t notice because she was busy staring at nothing with tears welling in her blue eyes. ‘What if you decide to stay there too? I’m not ready to lose you yet, honey. I know I have no right to keep you here, but I can’t just wave goodbye to you and not know if I’ll ever even see you again …’

Her tears felt hot against my neck as I hugged her. ‘Okay,’ I soothed. ‘I won’t go. I think you’re wrong anyway. Harry will be back soon, I’m sure of it.’ She sobbed and crushed my ribs and I realised how she must have felt when my mother had left us. ‘Besides, I would never do that,’ I mumbled into her ear. ‘This is my home. I don’t care how pretty the Garden of Eden is—I would never just abandon you.’

She sniffed and wiped her eyes as she let me go. ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep.’

The following week was spent trying to teach the bane of my life all there was to know about farming. Astonishingly I found it was kind of fun when he wasn’t shouting at me. It wasn’t until I tried to teach someone else that I realised just how many skills I had that I’d taken for granted, from fixing water pumps to simple things like opening hay bales and feed bags without a knife. I laughed openly as he practised driving the tractor around one of the smaller paddocks, having to pop it into reverse each time a corner came up. He only hit the fence once. Then I had to teach him how to re-strain a fence.