Secret Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  “I would have helped you process the dream’s pull and found a way to stop it from coming for you.”

  “Who said I wanted it to stop? There’s a child out there, and the center is using her. What if we’re too late already? I couldn’t live with myself if I ignored her the way the rest of you are.”

  “Without my corroboration, the council has no reason to believe anything you’re seeing in your dream. And you haven’t given me the chance to uncover the proof they need. As it stands, your psychological instability is their only concern. You wouldn’t be allowed to reengage with the nightmare now, no matter what you and Madeline uncover.”

  Sarah knew she’d crossed an unforgivable line, dreaming on her own when her mind had already caused so much destruction. The reckless path she’d chosen hit home for the first time as she absorbed Richard’s intimidating stare.

  “An innocent little girl is being ripped apart, the same way Maddie and I were,” she tried to explain, hating him for being her only chance to get back to Trinity. “I wouldn’t . . . I couldn’t let them hurt her, too.”

  Sarah closed her eyes against the unwanted memories of her own mind at Tad Ruebens’s mercy, invading others’ thoughts, programming them, hurting strangers the way she was being hurt. Her will had slowly eroded, dying, until there’d been no light left to cling to.

  The gentleness of Richard’s finger caressed her cheek, ripping her back to the present. She could handle intimidating and angry from him. But not gentle. Gentle could never happen between them again.

  Except she was leaning into his touch before she could stop herself. Then into the flicker of his consciousness—into the part of him she still remembered as Rick. The voice from the darkness of her coma that had promised intimacy. Closeness. Belonging. The perfection of what she’d thought she’d found called to her from their shared memories, rushing her deeper into the emotional dependency on him she’d forced herself to abandon. Everything she’d believed she and Richard could be together was still waiting for her in his touch. Everything he’d destroyed, when he sacrificed her to fulfill his duty to his Watchers.

  A tear streaked down her cheek.

  “Stop blaming yourself,” he said, “for what the center’s done through you.” His thumb wiped the corner of her eye. “Stop running from the wealth of information we could pull from your memories of Ruebens’s programming and from your life before you came to the center. You have to trust me enough to tell me—”

  “I have told you, but you won’t listen.” Sarah steeled herself against his compassion. “Trinity’s all that matters now. I can’t go back and change the rest, but I can reach her in my dreams. We have a real lead to finding her now. Let Maddie and me work through the nightmare’s memories and figure out what they mean. If you want me to trust you, get out of my head. Stop pushing me. Focus on convincing your council that another dream projection has to happen. Go get my sister so she can help me.”

  His pupils narrowed to pinpricks of emotion. She felt his struggle for control. He dropped his hand from her face.

  “You always were a smart woman,” he said. “So why are you so determined to rush back into danger? You were lured into that ocean, Sarah. Your nightmare’s intent was to control your mind, not help you find the truth. I felt it, just like I finally felt how real Trinity’s cries sound to you. I watched Madeline’s mind crumble under the dream’s control. What makes you think that won’t happen again? Does your sister have to die before you accept my help?”

  Sarah slapped his face. His hands snapped to her arms. His frustration fired through their deepening connection.

  “I love Maddie,” she insisted. “I tried to protect her from what I had to do.”

  His biting grip softened, his thumbs rubbing soothing circles. His consciousness wrapped around Sarah’s with a gentleness that made her dizzy.

  “You were protecting yourself,” he said. “You were looking for a way out of doing the real work you have to do, and disguising it as some reckless mission to dig for the truth. The truth is that the two of you still don’t know enough about what you’re doing to control something as powerful as this projection. Blame me for doing my job, but don’t take your hatred for me out on Madeline. Or Trinity, assuming she turns out to be real after we analyze your nightmare.”

  “She’s real.”

  Sarah struggled against his hold. She gave up when it became clear he wasn’t letting go.

  “Then so is the danger she’s in if you don’t let me take the lead from now on.” Richard released her and watched her wrap her arms around her body. “Without my help, you won’t find the proof you want that something’s calling to you from the nightmare.”

  “It was Trinity.”

  “Was it? Did you see her?”

  Sarah didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. Because Richard was there now, sensing her memories and her doubts.

  “The only thing we know for certain that’s waiting in your nightmare is death,” he said. “Yours and too many others, if we aren’t careful. Other legacies are in play because of this mess. Developments I don’t have time to explain. Things are about to get even uglier, and I can’t give you a choice of whether to cooperate. My mind anchoring yours, understanding all of you, is your only shot to prove what, if anything, is real about Trinity.”

  “You said you heard her.”

  “I sensed you needing to find something, someone, who kept moving away the further you fell into the dream. And there was fear holding you back. Weakening you. Tell me what you were afraid of.”

  “I . . . I don’t know.” She couldn’t remember anything clearly with Richard so close, except for his dream raven’s demand that she come back to him. And the growing connection between them that had once felt as effortless as breathing.

  “There was no little girl. Not the way you described Trinity in the dreams you and Madeline shared when Ruebens first drew your minds together. There was a dark presence. Voices. Power and purpose. Who knows what the programming he embedded is doing now. It’s possible none of this is about the missing piece to your legacy.”

  “She’s real . . .” Sarah saw the door again, deep within an unforgiving ocean, the memory growing stronger as more of Richard’s energy merged with hers.

  She felt his focus narrow. Hazy images took shape in her mind, blooming to life . . .

  A scarred door. Light shining just beyond it while Sarah allowed herself to be dragged away, her hands torn and bleeding, the ocean taking her to an empty, painful place that felt too familiar. Too right. Too much like the near death of her coma. Except there was more than emptiness there now. There was the shadow of a crumbling house that hadn’t existed in the nightmare. And a shadowy room waited for her within, where a mind called to her, demanding that she come back and—

  “Help me,” Trinity cried from inside the dilapidated structure while Sarah ran away, just as she had in the nightmare’s ocean. Only now she was running through the woods, desperate not to see . . .

  She shoved the vision away, along with Richard’s centering presence.

  “I can’t remember any more.” She opened eyes she hadn’t realized she’d closed and found Richard’s face inches away, his cheek reddening from where she’d struck him.

  “Can’t or won’t?” The intensity of his focus told her he’d seen everything she had. “Tell me about the house, Sarah.”

  “That . . . that didn’t happen in the dream. That place, it wasn’t part of the ocean matrix. It was—”

  “That place? You mean your nightmare’s reflection of the house you grew up in?”

  “What?” That’s exactly what it had been, she realized. And Trinity was waiting for her there. Sarah was suddenly certain of it.

  “I heard her, too,” Richard said. “Something broke through your memories from the ocean nightmare just now. A new matrix overpowered them. It felt like the same presence I sensed when I dove into your projection.”

  Sarah’s stomach surged. The liquid she�
��d swallowed threatened to force its way up. “There’s never been anything from my past in the dream’s matrix. My parents’ house isn’t part of the projection.”

  “It is now. Your mind’s telling you that’s where you’ll find Trinity.”

  “But that makes no sense. She can’t be there.”

  “Most likely not.” Richard’s features hardened into a warrior’s mask, everything except the worry in his dark eyes. “But something else is, and it’s affecting your control. Which means we have to get to the bottom of it.”

  “What? No—Maddie and I have to get back into my nightmare.” Dredging up the past would only make that more difficult, if not impossible. Sarah was barely clinging to her sanity now.

  “You’re not dreaming again without me,” he said. “Every time you project, every memory you have from now on, I’ll be there. Accept that, and the council will give you another chance to search your ocean. But this new projection is too important to dismiss. So is the surge of psychic energy near your family’s original home in Lenox that occurred at the exact moment that your dream took over your sleeping mind. A Watcher recon team is deploying in less than an hour to check it out, and you and I are going to be on it.”

  “Recon? But Maddie—”

  “Can’t help you. She almost died tonight trying to drag you back. The dream almost absorbed both of you. I have to convince the elders that won’t happen again and that it’s worth the risk of going back into your ocean to figure out what the dream wants. Something in Lenox is linked to you beyond the nightmare’s hold. That will be enough for me to secure us both a place on the mission.”

  “You . . . you want me to go home? I haven’t been there for—”

  “Ten years. Since your father died and your own injuries from the accident led to a psychotic break that left you in a coma.”

  Sarah shivered. “I can’t—”

  “You either go back with me now and help me sell the elders on your willing participation, or you won’t get another chance to find Trinity. Your questionable control and your growing psychic abilities have become too much of a wild card. We have to prove you’re an asset the council can’t afford to marginalize.”

  “I . . .” She was leaning closer to Richard, hating herself for needing him. “Promise me that if I do this, you’ll get me back to my dream. Make me believe you’ll protect my legacy no matter what happens in Lenox.”

  She was begging for a reason to trust a man who’d taken a blood oath to protect the world from freaks like her. A man who was holding her again, as if he couldn’t make himself stop. Richard’s fingers brushed at the fear leaving watery trails down her face.

  He shook his head and turned to go.

  “We’re wheels up in forty-five minutes,” he said. “Find a way to talk yourself into working with me and my team instead of fighting us.”

  “I want my sister,” Sarah said over the sound of his raven’s wings rustling through her mind. Their minds.

  He keyed the lab’s door open.

  “Get some rest,” he said. “You’re going to need it.”

  He left without looking back. The lab’s electronic locks clicked into place. The distant crying of a lost child Sarah shouldn’t be able to hear grew louder. Cries she hadn’t realized Richard had been shielding her from the entire time he’d been by her side.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “You’ll have ten minutes from touchdown to takeoff,” Richard said to Sarah. He’d positioned himself between where she was huddling in the corner of the transport helicopter and the remainder of the six-man team he was leading. “The team will secure the perimeter while you lead me to the source of the consciousness calling to you. It’s vital that the council understand how whatever’s here is linked to your dream.”

  At the moment, what was vital was that Sarah didn’t hurl in front of the Watchers as their covert helicopter descended swiftly and silently toward her past. The shadows of her abandoned childhood were only seconds away, while a little girl’s cries grew stronger in her mind.

  She could feel Richard’s strength augmenting her barriers, shielding her from her dream’s echoes and the thoughts of the other Watchers. Not that any of them had spared so much as a glance her way since he buckled her into her seat. Jeff Coleridge seemed particularly determined to pretend she wasn’t sitting there, dressed in Watcher blackout fatigues and ignoring her right back.

  “What if whatever your sensors detected here has nothing to do with me?” she asked.

  The whisper-soft whoosh of the helicopter’s blades slowed as the pi lot touched them down in the clearing just beyond the house her father had purchased the month before Sarah and Maddie were born. Across the secluded lot where she’d played as a child, the two-story Colonial’s appearance shimmered in the moon’s pale gray reflection. Its shattered windows and peeling paint and drooping shutters accused her of neglect. Of running. Of forgetting everything so she could survive, only to end up feeling just as empty and broken and irreparable as the home she’d once loved.

  “This is all about you.” Richard stood, bending enough to keep his head from smacking the transport’s low roof. He helped her to her feet. “My men are trained to track psychic threats. They’ll have your back while you lead us to whatever’s connected to you here. Something spiked when you were lost in your dream. We have to know what.”

  “Do we?” Sarah let him lift her to the ground. Her fingers clenched in the smooth fabric of his shirt while he adjusted the Kevlar vest he’d strapped on her when they arrived at the bunker’s flight bay. “This place feels like a grave. Digging around here is only going to make things worse.”

  She’d never been more certain of anything in her life.

  “Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.” Richard wrapped his arm around her, his mind, too, and led her toward the rusted-out screen door at the top of the back porch. “Something’s calling to you here. Something real I can sense. That gives us leverage with the council. It’s time to prove to the Brotherhood that you can be trusted to align your personal search for Trinity with our strategic needs. Let’s get this done and get out of here.”

  He nodded to Jeff, whose hand gesture sent the team fanning around the house’s perimeter. Sarah sensed more was being communicated among the men. But Richard was shielding her from the Watchers’ telepathic communications while he blocked the team from picking up on the growing sense of dread consuming her.

  He led her up the rickety steps, guiding her around loose, splintering floorboards until they were at the dilapidated door. The frayed edges of the torn screen were razor sharp. Sarah’s fingers twitched, feeling again how the latch to her ocean dream’s door had sliced into her tender flesh.

  “This is wrong,” she said.

  “Yes.” Richard pulled against the weather-roughened frame. The door opened, its hinges protesting with an unholy screech of metal against metal. “But I’m going to help you see it through.”

  It was a living nightmare, stepping back into what had been a sunny kitchen, seeing the cobwebs and layers of dust and rodent droppings covering everything. It was as if the darkness that had consumed her and Maddie’s legacy had cloaked this place, too.

  “How did this happen?” She didn’t resist as Richard led her through the kitchen to the equally empty dining room, the tattered curtains there no match for the moon. Its light sought out each speck of decay. “My parents sold this house to another family after they moved. They had a little boy, Mom said. Lenox is the perfect place to raise children. How could those people have abandoned everything like this?”

  “Our research turned up police reports,” Richard said. “Five years ago, the family began reporting strange sounds. Unexplained damage and accidents. Voices racing through the house at all hours of the night. No perpetrators were ever caught. The father finally fell down the stairs one night after hearing a commotion below. He said he’d been pushed. There was no evidence of a break-in. The family moved away but
has been unable to sell the property. It’s developed the reputation of being—”

  “Haunted.” Sarah could feel a malevolent energy seeping through the place. It was the same consciousness that had been calling to her for a month. Richard could buffer his team’s thoughts from her mind, but there was a presence here stronger than even his powers to block, and it was glad she’d come.

  “Help me . . .” a child’s voice called from Sarah’s memories, and from—

  “Upstairs.” She raced through what had been her family’s sitting room. She couldn’t stop herself, no matter how badly she wanted to run back to the he li cop ter instead.

  Her foot caught on uneven floorboards that had warped from years of disuse. She lurched toward the ground, her balance still compromised from the dream’s aftereffects. Strong arms caught her, pulled her close, and wrapped her in the present, while the past screamed for her to give it control.

  “I’m with you, remember?” Richard said into her ear. It wasn’t a whisper, but she could barely hear him. “Every dream. Every memory. We’re doing this together.”

  Sarah struggled to get away from him. She had to get away from him. The house was insisting. Her nails bit into the intimidating muscles of his arms. He calmly set her on her feet as something inside her, beyond her, kept building, hating, demanding that she make him pay. That she make all of them pay.

  “Pay for what?” Richard’s grip tightened. “Why would she want to make us pay for anything?”

  “She, who?” Sarah pressed her hand against the pressure throbbing behind her right temple and focused on his voice alone. It wasn’t real, she reminded herself—the other mind reaching for her wasn’t really here.

  “Trinity,” Richard said.

  Sarah’s knees buckled.

  He caught her closer. “whatever’s plugged into your dream of her wants you here, upstairs, remembering your fears of this place. It wants you fighting me and the team of men outside who are protecting you.”