"I have got to protect my Sentinel." That one thought continued to loop through the tired brain of one Blair Sandburg, Guide and Protector to the Sentinel, as he carefully sorted out all the remaining papers in his files.

The return of his Original Thesis from one Lee Brackett had taught him a valuable lesson. He had to change his dissertation subject to the closed societies one. He could get his Ph. D , become a police profiler and continue to work with Jim.

Changing topics had not been hard -- his dissertation committee had been trying to get him to do just that anyway. Now with that done he could destroy all information on Jim's senses. It took two days of going through his files, sorting and eliminating, but he was done. Borrowing the school's shredder, he first shredded all the files, then took the shredded paper to the loft. He had sat a full day in front of the fire place burning all the paper.

Nothing would remain, save Jim's allergy books. The hardest to burn were the disks -- he had even wiped his computer, but with today's advances he had been told that "they" could still retrieve the info, so he had taken the hard drive out of his machine, and burned it as well. First had been a hammer, smashing his hard drive and all floppy disks into small pieces, then the fire. Nothing remained that could endanger his Sentinel again.

Then the melted remains were carefully gathered into a zip lock bag. The University was building a new parking garage, and he fully intended to add the remains of his floppy disks and his computer's hard drive to the cement.

In the loft basement, he had buried a small metal lock box that contained Burton's book; his Original Thesis, stolen from the school library, after deleting all information about Sentinels from their data base; his half-written Sentinel dissertation; and a few old documents from his original research on Sentinels.

The removal of a chest in the storage area belonging to the lady next door had allowed him to find the damaged floor, where he could keep things safe. By burying those items he could never destroy, he would be able to maintain his Sentinel's safety. With a small amount of cement to cover the well packed dirt, the lock box was safe.

Blair Sandburg sat gazing at the flames consuming his life's work and knew he had done good, he had done what needed to be done. No clandestine organization or government agency would ever harm his Sentinel now. Slowly, as the flames died away, he began to prepare himself for his new future.

Blair Sandburg, Ph.D. Profiler, Guide, Protector to the Sentinel, Cop.