Secret Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  “No.” She refused to be losing control again. “It’s just being back in the house. This became a horrible place for me. No matter how perfect it looked or how hard my parents tried to make us into a happy American family, this place was a nightmare. I was their worst nightmare here, and I can’t go back to being that person. Don’t let me go upstairs. I told you not to bring me here. Something horrible is going to happen.”

  Richard’s grip propelled her toward the steps instead. “We’re getting to the bottom of this.”

  “I’m—” She stumbled on the bottom step, only righting herself because Richard’s mind and physical strength were augmenting hers. “I’m not in control. I’m losing myself, I can feel it. Worse than in the dream ocean. I can’t stay in control here.”

  “Exactly.” He all but dragged her to the top of the landing. “Someone wants you losing it. They wanted the other family long gone. They wanted this place looking like the raw end of a nuclear meltdown, so it would make coming back hurt you even more. Why is that? What would they hope to gain?”

  “I . . .”

  It wasn’t a “they.” Richard had been right. It was just one voice this time. One mind.

  “Help me . . .” Trinity called down the dark hallway that led to where Sarah and Maddie’s bedrooms had been. “I’m here. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Sarah stumbled toward the lost child. Her bedroom door was closed. Its paint and condition had somehow remained pristine, the perfection of it a grotesque parody of the wasteland surrounding it.

  “Is it real?” Her mind flashed to the image of the horrible door in her dream.

  “It’s a mess,” Richard said, clearly not seeing the same thing she did. “But it’s real enough.”

  He reached for the doorknob. Turned it so he could push the door inward.

  “No!” She grabbed his arm, their psychic connection firing deeper until she could see the scarred, mottled reality of the door he was touching. “I can’t go in there. I won’t be able to stop whatever’s on the other side.”

  “I’ll be with you.” He shook off her hold.

  “No, you won’t.” She felt her identity slip even further away.

  The door swung open . . .

  . . . to a vision of the bedroom of her childhood.

  Richard’s grip disappeared from her arm. He was no longer standing beside her. The rest of the Watcher team was no longer circling the house and investigating the shadows and cobwebs downstairs. Sarah’s senses narrowed to her daydream of standing in the doorway of her little-girl room, staring at an image of herself sitting cross-legged in the center of her bed, facing the empty wall above her headboard.

  The child looked over her shoulder toward the door, her eyes a crystalline blue instead of Sarah’s gray.

  “You can’t stay.” Her voice was soft, drawing Sarah across her pink carpet toward the bed and its bright pink spread. “They don’t want you here. But I had to . . . I’ve been waiting for so long. I knew you couldn’t stay away forever. And I had to see if you were really real.”

  The childlike sentiment “really real” was something Sarah and her twin had said to each other during the dark nights they shared their hopes and dreams and the bizarre things that kept happening to them. Things their parents refused to accept.

  “The Watchers only gave me ten minutes.” Sarah reached her hand toward the child’s soft hair. She pulled back before touching, afraid to break the spell.

  “They made you come.” The child glanced over Sarah’s shoulder. “He made you.”

  “I . . . I was afraid.”

  “Of me.”

  “No, sweetie.” Sarah closed her eyes against the sentiment. She had to remember that whatever consciousness was driving this vision was dangerous. But it felt so real. She’d been searching for Trinity for so long. It was impossible not to believe just a little. “I’ve been fighting to find you.”

  “They don’t want you here.” The child turned back to the wall she’d been staring at. “They’ll find out, and they’ll come for me.”

  “The Watchers brought me.” Sarah inched closer, sensing the little girl’s growing distress and the resentment simmering beneath her soft words. “They want to help you.”

  “Not them . . .” Images began to form on the wall. Black-and-white, hazy reflections of an unforgiving ocean. “Them. The people telling me to dream.”

  “The . . . The center doesn’t know you’re here? They didn’t send you?”

  “I had to know. For me.”

  “Know what?”

  “If it was true, what he said. How much you’d hate me.”

  Cries began to call to Sarah from the pictures on the wall. There was no color there, no clear form to the images. But something about them, something about the whole vision, seemed alarmingly familiar.

  “Who said I’d hate you?” she asked. The scene on the wall began to shimmer. The bed and floor beneath her began to quake.

  “He told me you wouldn’t ever believe,” the child said. The distorted image of a wolf appeared in the picture’s corner nearest her. “That you’d never want to.”

  “Sarah?” Richard called from the other side of the daydream. “What are you seeing? Who are you talking to? The room’s empty.”

  “He said you’d want them more.” The little girl pouted. The wolf in her picture snarled. “He said if you found me, all you’d do is run. From me. And he was right. You’re finally here, but you hate me just like he said.”

  “Ruebens?” Sarah’s heart kicked against her ribs as the beast in the image grew clearer.

  She did want to run.

  She didn’t want to believe any of this.

  “Ruebens is dead,” she insisted to the child on the bed.

  “So are you,” the little girl responded in a deeper voice. It was the ocean’s voice from Sarah’s nightmare. “All of you are dead if I want you to be.”

  Pain seared through Sarah’s body. She dropped her knees, her head screaming.

  “Stop!” She could feel Richard’s agony beyond her vision.

  He was stumbling closer, hitting his knees beside where she’d collapsed in the dilapidated bedroom.

  “So easy,” the wolf hissed from the wall scene in the ocean nightmare’s voice. “Your fear makes it so easy.”

  “Stop it.” Sarah’s lungs were filling with water. She fought to be free of the daydream she’d been sucked into, to find her way back. Every muscle in her body clenched in spasms of pain.

  “Break the dream’s hold.” Richard gripped her arm. “The team’s on its way up. They’ll stop you if you don’t end the attack on your own.”

  “They’re coming,” said the little girl on the bed. The angelic-looking, psychotic child Sarah refused to believe was Trinity. “They’ll take you away from me forever, just like he said. And you’ll let them. You’ll do anything not to believe in me.”

  There was pain, fear, hatred in the words. And it made no sense. None of it. Why the hell couldn’t anything make sense anymore?

  Sarah slammed her hands to the floor, feeling the last of her control shred. “You’re not real, little girl. None of this is real. Why am I here? What the hell to do you want from me? All of you, why won’t you leave me alone?”

  They weren’t her words, she realized. The dream’s demands were flowing through her, owning her, directing her to make the world pay for her loneliness and pain as the child and the bed disappeared, replaced by a menacing raven standing beside Sarah in her otherwise-empty bedroom, reaching for her, poised to destroy her . . .

  Richard felt Sarah’s mind return from wherever she’d gone, but her consciousness hadn’t come back alone. The presence he’d sensed in the ocean dream, then again when she’d stared transfixed at the empty room they’d walked into, was still controlling Sarah and blocking him from getting through to her consciousness.

  “Come back to me.” He knelt beside where she’d crumpled to the ground, shaking off the pain that had sizzled throug
h both of them. He was holding her, clutching her close. “Release whatever you saw.”

  She’d been talking into thin air, experiencing an altered reality he couldn’t see.

  “Get off me.” Her anger surged through them.

  “Not a chance. You’re having a lucid dream. You have to break the projection’s hold.”

  The door to the room slammed shut as she trembled. It flew open again. A demented wind howled down the hallway, funneling into the room, around them, then out the shattered window, blowing out even more glass.

  Tuning into his team’s psychic link, Richard sensed them advancing from the stairs, drawn by Sarah’s screams when her vision had attacked both herself and Richard.

  “Stay back,” he ordered through the team’s link. “Sarah’s not stable.”

  “We’ve got to move,” Jeff replied. “The bunker’s detected multiple telepathic energy surges. We’re on someone’s radar.”

  “The center’s. Sarah was sucked into a vision as soon as she entered the house.”

  “Shut up!” She beat against his chest. Her mind battered against the shields he’d been using to keep the others from detecting her meltdown. “I won’t let you destroy us. You can’t—”

  “Stop it.” He shook her. “Wake up, Sarah. We have to go.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.” Her voice rose with each word, softening as it grew more brittle, sounding almost childlike. “All of you, why won’t you leave me alone!”

  Richard flew backward, propelled by the force of her hands pushing against his chest and her possessed mind shoving against his. He crashed against the already-crumbling wall beside the door, his head making contact with a sickening crack. His ears rang. Plaster rained down.

  Jeff and Donovan rushed into the room.

  “Stay back,” he warned, but the other men were already airborne, landing in a heap in the hallway.

  The door slammed behind them.

  “Everyone stand down,” Richard projected, sensing the remainder of the team preparing to storm the room.

  He pushed himself to his feet. He ran his hand over the back of his skull. He wiped blood-smeared fingers on his pants and approached Sarah. His mind cautiously tried to reach the essence of the woman whose memories had somehow triggered this.

  “This isn’t you, Sarah. Something here is controlling your mind, and you’re still lost to whatever you saw. We have what we need for the council. You’re finally remembering and that gives us something to work with. Now we have to get back to the transport.”

  His meds would subdue her if need be. Her power to project others’ realities had been growing so rapidly, he always carried a complete series of his dream protocol whenever he worked with Sarah. But adding the burden of another round of psychotropic stabilizers to her body’s taxed stamina would further delay her full recovery. And the Brotherhood needed her mind whole. Richard needed her back in his lab by morning, remembering even more before the elders called them to the mat.

  “You hate me,” she whimpered in a child’s rasp, her dark eyes lightening until they became a crystal clear blue. “You all want to use me. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “Then wake up.”

  Sarah’s mind was growing even more distant, becoming even less her. The bitterness of whoever was controlling her was seething to full life. And it was someone psychically strong enough to toss him and his men around, and to block his search of Sarah’s mind for their identity. Debris lifted off the floor. Leaves and dirt and bits of trash swirled around them.

  “You don’t want me to wake up,” Sarah spoke for whoever was controlling her mind.

  “You’re right.” Richard swallowed his panic. He protected his eyes against the maelstrom of grit stinging his face. “Whoever you are, you can go straight to hell for all I care. But you can’t take Sarah with you. Alpha?” he called. “Release the link. Target release, and reset to zero. Reset, Alpha. Now!”

  It was the override command he’d embedded into Sarah’s Dream Weaver programming when they’d first worked together at the center. It was his back door into her dreaming mind, one he hadn’t needed to use since bringing her to the command bunker. Now it wasn’t making a dent. Nothing was reaching her.

  He felt for the pouch of meds snapped to his belt and withdrew a vial. He brushed Sarah’s cheek with his lips.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He jammed the hypodermic into the most accessible vein, given his awkward hold—in her neck—and pushed the plunger home. Her body seized instantly. Her beautiful eyes grew opaque, then warmed to their natural gray before her lids dropped. The flotsam racing around them fell to the floor like puppets whose strings had been cut. The room’s door creaked open, scraping as its top hinge gave way, clinking to the ground. The world grew silent in the same instant that Sarah’s rigid muscles fell slack. All of them, including her heart.

  Richard fumbled for his belt and the shot of adrenaline that would counteract his recovery protocol’s effect.

  His team stormed the room.

  “We have company,” Jeff said.

  Blood trickled from a gash along the man’s cheekbone, but his hands were steady on his assault rifle. He reached for the night goggles resting on his forehead and slipped them into place. Donovan and the rest of the team followed his lead.

  “The helo had to bug out,” he added. “Transport’s waiting at the alternate location.”

  Richard slipped his own goggles into place, then rose without administering the adrenaline, staggering to his feet as he brought Sarah with him. His team took position around them, three in front with Jeff leading, two guarding Richard’s rear.

  “Sit rep?” he asked with his mind as he carried Sarah down the hallway, then the stairs, his consciousness digging for hers.

  “Minor injuries,” Jeff reported.

  Richard could feel his second’s mind scouting ahead for attackers as the team moved through the house to the kitchen. They paused as a unit at every corner. At each critical point of exposure, Jeff scanned their escape route while the rest of the team remained alert, their rifles at the ready, anticipating possible attack from every vantage point.

  “The bunker detected a six-person assault team before their position was cloaked.” Jeff glanced back to Richard before continuing through the kitchen, his unspoken evaluation of the situation clear.

  As Richard had suspected, someone at the center had known their team would be there. They’d known long enough to not only deploy a response while someone screwed with Sarah’s mind, but to utilize psychic cloaking, a rare telepathic talent. One Richard had mastered as a child.

  “Break contact with command,” Richard verbally ordered. “No psychic communication until we’re in the air. We’re going black.”

  They heard the deafening report of automatic gunfire a second before what was left of the kitchen windows exploded inward. Shards of glass flew around them as they dropped to the floor. Gritting his teeth, exhaustion dragging at the last of his power reserves, Richard covered Sarah’s lifeless body with his own, closed his eyes, and envisioned the dark cloak of anonymity that was now the team’s best chance to rendezvous with their helicopter in a secluded clearing three-quarters of a mile away, an alternate location Richard had selected, anticipating a trap. One they had to assume the opposition knew about as well.

  “They’re driving us,” he said over the blast of another round of automatic gunfire.

  He drew his Beretta from his holster, shouldering off his rifle and handing it to Donovan, where it might do some good if the team needed backup ammunition. His free hand shifted to his med kit. Cursing, he made himself not remove the adrenaline. He curled Sarah’s body closer instead. Oxygen deprivation wouldn’t take a toll for several minutes, and the team couldn’t afford the distraction of Sarah recovering consciousness while they were under siege, her mind most likely out of control.

  “I want the strike team down in two minutes,” he commanded. “Understo
od?”

  “Let’s get it on,” Jeff responded for the team.

  “Take point,” Richard ordered. “Simms and Jackson, flank. Donovan, Reese, and Walker, you’re with me. Protect the package.”

  Each man silently regained his footing, crouching low and out of the range of the bullets still flying in through the windows. So far, the house’s solidly built walls were holding. As a unit, they checked the positioning of the Kevlar suiting that protected their vital organs. The rest of their shielding would come from their unity as a team and their trust in Richard to hide their movements while they countered the opposing team’s assault.

  They approached the kitchen door from the right, shielded from the screen’s non ex is tent protection. Richard closed his eyes and moved with his men, his instinct tracking their progress, his intuition feeling out the field of operation beyond the house. His mind pushed through the psychic resistance of the center’s soldiers, arrowing straight to the information he needed and leaving no trace of his presence.

  “Four securing the yard,” he said. He could see their opponents in his mind. They were confident that their positions were secure. “Two moving to the right: automatics. One to the left: sniper rifle. One on the roof. Three are waiting beyond their team’s assault position, holding back in the woods between here and the alternate rendezvous. Counterattack,” he ordered. “We breach their assault, prevent further communication of our position back to the center, and carve a path to the helo. We’ll take them all in under sixty. Move!”

  Jeff challenged the door first, firing cover rounds. Reese and Walker advanced, followed by Donovan, then Richard, who slipped Sarah over his shoulder so his right arm was free. Reese and Walker covered next, firing continuous rounds through the screen. Jeff pushed past them, rolling and coming to his feet as the rest of the team exited the house behind Reese and Walker, who opened fire to the right and left.

  While the men took out the attackers on either side, Jeff pivoted and downed the sniper on the roof. A bullet slammed into his thigh, dropping him.

  “Son of a bitch!” he said as Donovan helped him back to his feet, the younger lieutenant still firing. He and Reese and Walker took care of the last man securing the yard. Simms and Walker secured the rear as the team kept moving, their rifles and gazes in constant, coordinated motion.