Secret Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  The sea slammed her against the door’s surface. Her nails dug into its battered wood. Her heart thundered, straining for oxygen. Her lungs burned, refusing to expand.

  “Open it,” a child insisted. “Help me . . . See what we’ve become.”

  Sarah clawed at the latch’s gnarled loops. There was light waiting on the other side, like morning’s new promise sprinkling hope across a diamond-kissed shore. Trinity would be there. A magical child no one else could hear. A fantasy born from a promise of redemption. A dream that Sarah had come to make reality.

  Except her mind had been trained for death, not dreams. Her fantasies bred deception, not promises fulfilled. Her nightmares had destroyed too much for her to be anyone’s savior now.

  What if the darkest part of her lurked just beyond her grasp—shadows waiting to use her for evil, instead of the light she needed to set free?

  Screams swallowed more of the dream.

  “Trinity . . .” Sarah begged.

  The water, the cries, the impassible door . . . Her dream ocean had become a soulless, empty place waiting for her to fail. She fought the latch. She yanked and twisted and pulled until there was nothing left. Ribbons of blood swirled into the sea’s eager embrace.

  “This is where you belong,” the ocean chanted, soothing her panic. “This is why you came alone. Let the light go. You don’t want to hurt anymore.”

  But there was suddenly another energy fighting to be heard, infusing the frigid water with vitality and warmth. A raven flew above the sea. His strength and logic filtered into Sarah’s mind, demanding that she resist the sea’s embrace. That she release the water and the latch and the door and her failure to reach Trinity. He wanted her to come back—to him.

  “Wake up,” he projected from the other side of sleep.

  His voice was every good thing that had once tempted Sarah. Then trusting him had been her greatest failure.

  “Damn it, Temple,” he said, “you’re in v-tach. Break the dream link before your heart gives out.”

  His psychic strength battered at the mental shields she’d secretly strengthened. The hidden place inside her still connected to him yanked her through the tunnel, away from the truth she’d risked so much to reach, until she was struggling with the calmer currents near the surface.

  “Help me . . .” Trinity begged from below.

  “Wake up . . .” the raven called.

  But his concern wasn’t real, Sarah reminded herself. His job was to control her legacy. He didn’t care about Trinity. He’d never cared about Sarah. Not enough.

  She dove deeper, looking for the door again. There was no gentle seduction now. The ocean grabbed her with greedy claws. She welcomed the brutality, as long as it took her back to Trinity. The raven flew above the ocean’s surface, tracking her descent. When she found the girl, he would see. He’d believe. He’d come back for the child even if Sarah couldn’t save her. He’d have no choice. Trinity would be too important for the Brotherhood to leave behind.

  “Release the dream.” Hands gripped her shoulders in her sleeping quarters.

  Fingers bit into her skin, shaking her. The powerful consciousness she’d once given her heart to layered storm sounds, wind and rain and lightning, over the roar of her sea-swept currents. Their familiar vision of a misty summer forest tempted Sarah. He knew exactly where she was weakest.

  But she clung to her nightmare, free-falling with no end in sight. There was no more tunnel for her to run through. No maze leading to the truth.

  “Trinity,” Sarah called into the icy water.

  “Come closer,” the ocean chanted.

  “Help me,” a lonely child begged.

  “Wake up,” demanded the voice that had saved Sarah from the darkness before, only to feed her to a monster that had destroyed her mind. “Release the dream,” he demanded. “Come back to me before it’s too late.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Wake up!”

  Richard braced his hands on each side of Sarah’s body. He wasn’t sure which he wanted to do more—crawl onto the bed and hold the woman whose mind was shredding itself or shake her senseless.

  “Why did you wait so long to call me?”

  His muscles clenched against the compulsion to force Sarah’s mind back to her sleeping quarters. He’d have risked it if they’d been dream linked. But interfering in whatever was happening behind her flickering eyelids when he wasn’t fully integrated into her dreaming reality would risk splitting her consciousness. He might permanently strand her identity in whatever vision controlled her mind.

  His fingers wrapped around her delicate wrist to track her racing pulse.

  He winced.

  He’d become Dream Weaver’s lead researcher to block the center’s attempt to harness the twins’ gifts. The center’s goal: to develop a weapon that allowed psychics to embed undetected dream programming into an innocent’s mind, then to control waking behavior by triggering daydreams the subject was powerless to stop. He’d coordinated years of psychic projection research for the Brotherhood before he’d been chosen for the mission. Now, thanks to his Dream Weaver study, the Watchers knew more than ever about how Maddie and Sarah’s gifts worked. Knowledge that wouldn’t do Sarah a damn bit of good if she kept self-destructing.

  She refused to regress her consciousness back to the past, to the memories of when her gifts had first begun to unravel. She refused to work on healing what was broken inside her—the damage the center had preyed on. She insisted on pushing further into the dream instead, and her dreaming mind was destroying itself.

  A REM state could turn lethal. If the mind lost control to a dream, the body’s reaction to the stress could stop the heart. Blood pressure could escalate beyond the circulatory system’s tolerance. Injuries inside a dream’s matrix wouldn’t correspond to identical damage in the real world, but the brain could literally attack itself if a vision was intense enough, causing bleeds and scarring visible only through ultrasounds and scans.

  “Sarah . . .” he whispered. “Let me in. Let me see what’s going on.”

  Her arm twitched. Her mind flashed the image of his raven soaring above a seething ocean. He caught a glimpse of the murky depths Sarah was sinking to while the nightmare hounded her, wanting to subdue, control, consume her mind. He sensed nothing connected with the Brotherhood’s security breach. Instead, he could feel a malevolent impulse within the dream itself, driving Sarah’s growing obsession to find a child she insisted was six years old. A little girl she called Trinity.

  Sarah was drowning in her nightmare, and help from him or any Watcher was the last thing she wanted. Which left Richard only one option to reach her besides alerting his elders. He fumbled with the communications unit installed beside the bed. The line opened, intercom on. He speed-dialed a two-digit number. The connection rattled to life.

  “What . . . Sarah?” a female voice stuttered, ragged with sleep. “It’s one in the morning. Why—”

  “Get down to your sister’s quarters.” Richard felt Sarah’s lungs starving for oxygen, straining to inhale, failing. “Your sister’s dreaming.”

  He disconnected. Madeline had been unaware of her sister’s crisis. Sarah was blocking wherever her mind had gone from her twin, too.

  The council’s orders had been clear. Sarah either gained control of her gifts, or the danger posed by the twins’ ability to project emotion and behavior into others’ reality would be silenced. The Brotherhood’s role in monitoring the line between a psychic’s potential benefit to society and the harm that could be caused had evolved into a policing presence over the last de cade. The time when their activities were limited to surveillance and guidance was fast disappearing. Entities like the center were maneuvering the Watchers into a war, and the Temples’ legacy was a prime target.

  “What are you doing?” Richard curled his fingers around Sarah’s. It was an inappropriate gesture between an objective Watcher and his principal, but he couldn’t let go. “Let someone help you bef
ore it’s too late.”

  A child’s desperate pleas echoed through their minds.

  “Move!” A rush of dark hair, a wave of fury, announced Madeline’s presence. She shoved herself between Richard and her twin. “What have you done to her?”

  “The dream reached me all the way in the control room.” Richard staggered from losing his physical connection with Sarah. He fought to maintain their psychic link. “We have to get her mind under control, or I’ll need to alert the Brotherhood.”

  Madeline took the hand he’d dropped. He sensed her attempting to send her mind into her sister’s. When the twins were linked in a projection, Madeline’s control balanced Sarah’s more impulsive gifts.

  “She won’t let me in.” Madeline glared over her shoulder. “What is she doing dreaming outside the lab?”

  Richard had no answers. Sarah’s daily drug regimen shouldn’t have allowed a dream state without his intervention. And without his monitors and specialized equipment, he had no way to buffer Sarah’s mind from the dream matrix’s pull.

  “Tell me what you hear,” he demanded. “The screams from her ocean sequence. I felt them—”

  “Luring her to her death . . .” Madeline’s and Sarah’s coloring was identical. Their toned bodies. The classic curves of their beautiful faces. It was almost as if Sarah were standing before him, dressed in rumpled pajamas, strong and safe and spitting mad.

  Madeline’s forehead wrinkled.

  He realized he was staring.

  She turned back to Sarah.

  “I . . . I think the cries are the same,” she said. During the twins’ dream work, Madeline had reported hearing faint sounds that could have come from Sarah’s phantom child. “A little girl needing help. But . . . something else is moving through the ocean, trapping Sarah in the nightmare. Or maybe she doesn’t want to let the water go this time. I don’t know . . .”

  Richard rounded the bed to Sarah’s other side. “In the last twenty-four hours, we’ve had two untraceable intelligence breaches. Your sister’s mind is being seen as the most likely source of a leak to the center, even before the council hears that her dreams have broken from our control.”

  “And she’s guilty until proven innocent, because of how badly your brotherhood mishandled protecting us from Tad Ruebens?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  Sarah’s head jerked. Her eyes darted side to side behind their closed lids. Her breathing grew choppier.

  Her physical responses to dream stimuli should have been suppressed by her REM rhythms. But whatever was happening in the nightmare was breaking through. Richard took her wrist in his fingers, needing to feel her pulse. Needing her touch again, period. Her heart was beating too faintly. Too fast. It wouldn’t absorb much more abuse. Her head jerked again.

  Maddie cupped Sarah’s face between her hands, deepening their connection. She gasped and staggered backward. Sarah shuddered.

  “Stop . . .” Madeline pressed her fists to her own temples. “Make the screaming stop. I can’t breathe. Sarah . . . she can’t breathe.”

  “Take her hand again.” Richard forced his own lungs to expand.

  He’d seen a stronger flash of Sarah’s nightmare, felt her more clearly, when he and Madeline were both touching her. Breathing deeply, he narrowed his focus to Made-line’s terrified gaze and downshifted to the mission tactics that had saved his life countless times since he’d left behind the reckless teenager he’d once been and became a Watcher.

  Nothing existed except completing the mission before him. His breath came in on the thought. He exhaled as the next took hold. There was no moment but now. Inhale. No feelings except determination. Exhale. Confidence. Acceptance. Inhale. No resistance. No regret.

  “We have to get into the dream together.” He kept his voice calm, his mind and his body functioning in perfect harmony now. “Don’t let her pain distract you. Don’t let the nightmare control you. Separate what’s real from what isn’t, just like in the lab. We have to help Sarah regain control of her mind. To do that we have to understand the parameters of the matrix she’s lost in.”

  Madeline shook her head.

  Distrust glazed her eyes.

  Shock.

  “It’s phantom pain,” he reminded her. “You’re feeling Sarah’s confusion, nothing more. Take her hand. Let your energy mingle with hers. She’s hunting for Trinity. Focus on her search. Merge your emotions with the dream. Emotions are the link that brought you back to your twin after ten years apart. Give us something to work with now. Be Sarah’s connection to this reality and accept my help the way she can’t. I promise, I’ll bring you both out of this.”

  Madeline swallowed.

  She blinked.

  Hatred flared in a gaze that was identical to Sarah’s, except Madeline’s eyes were a mossy green to her twin’s deep gray.

  She returned to the edge of the bed.

  “Damage my sister further—” Her fingers curled around Sarah’s. She jerked as their minds connected, firing fresh dream images to Richard. “Let one more piece of her be lost to the mess you’ve made of our legacy, and you’ll never dream again without wondering when I’ll show up to make you pay.”

  He nodded, accepting both Madeline’s terms and her ability to follow through on her threat.

  Sarah’s ability to read and affect others’ psychic energy was escalating. The backlash of not being able to control her powers was damaging her untrained psyche. While Madeline’s intuitive skills at redirecting emotions and conflict had eased Sarah’s confusion, she had also grown to be as offensively powerful as her sister, when properly motivated.

  Through her and Sarah’s link, he could feel new warmth flowing into Sarah’s mind. Powerful healing. Clear purpose. Unconditional love. The admirable traits Madeline had somehow retained, despite the darkness the center had inflicted on their lives.

  “Sarah?” Madeline merged more fully with her sister’s dreaming mind. “Where are you?”

  “Focus first on where she’s been.”

  It was a familiar pattern. Madeline linked with Sarah while Richard listened and directed and tried to draw meaning from the symbols and emotional patterns the sisters experienced within the ocean Sarah’s mind kept returning to.

  “She’s resisting leaving the dream,” he said. “She’s swimming closer to danger. We have to reach her before I call more Watchers down here. Where was she when her survival instinct kicked in, and she reached out to me?”

  “There was darker water . . .” Madeline’s gaze grew vague, but her eyes never closed. Never blinked. Then they glittered with new awareness and the strength of the twins’ minds when they were fully joined. “She was terrified of the ocean’s heart. Afraid she’d fail, that she’d never get the truth out. Then you were there, and she won’t leave now until she proves it to you . . .”

  “Proves what?”

  “Trinity . . .”

  The thought, in Sarah’s voice, whispered through their minds. The child’s cries grew even louder. Madeline’s expression clouded with fear as she absorbed Sarah’s desperation to save a terrified little girl, a haunting echo of Sarah’s Dream Weaver programming that Richard had yet to clear.

  “There were beautiful colors waiting for her in the water,” Madeline said. “They led her to . . . a door that hurt her. She was bleeding when she let go. But she can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

  The cool green of Madeline’s irises darkened, deepening to her twin’s smoky gray.

  “I can’t leave her there,” Sarah’s voice said through her sister. “You have to see that she’s real. You can’t let them destroy her, too.”

  The skin on Richard’s arms prickled as Madeline—Sarah—begged for his help.

  Jarred Keith stumbled into the room, his eyes heavy with sleep. But his body and his mind were alert and focused.

  “Can’t let who destroy whom?” The former psychiatrist pulled Madeline into his arms, careful not to disturb her connection with Sarah.

 
; He caressed Madeline’s face with steady fingers. He stared into her eyes, silent communication rippling the air between them.

  “The . . .” Madeline’s voice returned to its own timbre. Tears streamed down her face. She turned toward Richard. “There’s a voice calling her from the deeper water, telling her to give up. The center’s already put her through so much. What if they’re taking her mind back?”

  Madeline leaned into Jarred. Richard didn’t push for details. Jarred would balance Madeline’s mind and, through Madeline, the twins’ link. Richard forced himself to stay the hell out of the way. He checked his watch.

  He had to call in a Watcher team.

  Sarah’s mind was too powerful to leave spiraling.

  “I’m here,” Jarred said to Sarah’s twin. His voice was firm. Confident. Demanding, without imposing itself, the way Richard had taught him to focus his own newly discovered psychic talent when Madeline needed help. “I’m here, sweetheart. You’re not alone.”

  “From now on, we’re not in this alone . . .” Madeline’s mind whispered.

  The promise she’d made Sarah the night they’d defeated Ruebens reached out to both Richard and Jarred, absorbing them into her deepening connection with her sister. She squeezed Sarah’s hand.

  “We’ll find Trinity together,” she promised her twin. “Let me help you. Show me what’s happened so I can look for her, too.”

  Sarah’s consciousness shifted closer . . .

  Through Madeline’s unshielded mind, Richard saw a rush of color. A swirl of dark confusion. The ocean’s jumbled demands were luring Sarah to a truth that was too deeply hidden, maybe not even real at all. And she was too far in to turn back, to survive alone, or to heed the call of a raven circling so high above the water’s surface that only his shadow was visible . . .

  “Oh, God.” Madeline stared up at Jarred. “I can feel her. She’s dying.”

  “Sarah?” Jarred’s attention shifted to Richard, then back to the woman shaking in his arms.