Secret Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  The immediate threat eliminated, they made it to the woods, gaining on the remaining center operatives who were now advancing from their concealed positions. Richard continued to cloak the team’s movements while he breached the opposition’s shields and thoughts.

  “Five seconds until they’re in range,” he told his men. “Two in flanking positions. Donovan, you and Jeff fall back. Reese and Simms, take the point. I have the trees.”

  Advancing his team into the assault, using their momentum to their advantage, Richard counted down.

  “Three,” he said. “Two. One.”

  His men opened fire before they could physically see their marks. Richard trusted them to hit their targets, while he kept his attention, his mind, his Beretta, trained on the threat he sensed lurking somewhere in the winter-stripped branches above them.

  He closed his eyes.

  He shifted once again to instinct alone.

  Fear made its way to him on the wind, a spark of it that was quickly covered. But not quickly enough. Richard kept walking, shifting Sarah’s weight to achieve better balance. He lifted his shooting arm, opened his eyes, and fired at the shadowy figure perched a hundred yards away, twenty feet up.

  The body fell to the ground, the man dead before he landed.

  Richard knelt, laying Sarah onto the blanket of leaves that covered the frozen ground. He ripped off his night goggles and removed the adrenaline from the pouch at his hip. It only took a glance to verify the medication and its dosage. He plunged the syringe into Sarah’s heart, then tilted her head back, cleared her airway, and began to breathe life into her deflated lungs.

  “We need to get to the helo.” Jeff’s voice was thin with pain. His thoughts clouded Richard’s with a wave of anger. “We’re exposed here because of whatever connection the center still has to her. We have to move.”

  “I need another minute.” Richard linked his hands, his fingers locked, and pumped Sarah’s chest.

  He needed to feel her heart beating beneath his touch, or he’d lose his mind. He needed her consciousness connected with his again. Mission or no mission, a growing part of Richard needed Sarah, period, and that piece was in control now. He touched his lips to hers. Forced air into her body.

  “Transport is a minute away, Colonel.” Jeff’s use of Richard’s title held a biting edge. “Two, tops. There’s a defibrillator. We’ll get her back once we’re airborne. We’ll secure her mind for the council’s debriefing, but we need to get out of here.”

  Richard glared up to where his second was leaning against Donovan, Jeff’s leg a bloody mess from the bullet he’d taken fulfilling the same duty to their Watcher’s Creed that he was now demanding Richard honor.

  “Thirty seconds.” Richard lurched to his feet, cradling Sarah’s insubstantial weight to his chest. “I want us in the air in thirty seconds.”

  He moved toward the alternate rendezvous, stumbling, his body screaming at the nonstop psychic load he’d been shouldering since racing from the control center to Sarah’s quarters. His men fell in step around him. As a team, they pushed to reach their ride in time to revive the dangerous mind likely responsible for the attempt the center had just made on their lives.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Agony arced through Sarah, clenching every muscle in her body. Air was forced down her throat, while thoughts, feelings, minds battered her consciousness. Somehow, from somewhere, she found the energy to struggle up from the darkness. Dazed, she turned her head away from the face hovering over hers. She batted at the hands pumping her chest.

  “Sarah . . .” Richard’s swell of relief was immediately followed by the silencing of every mind intruding on her own, except for his.

  “Take it slow,” he projected.

  “Leave me . . .” She curled into a ball. She realized she was on the floor of the helicopter. She tried to take a breath, to clear the haze keeping her from thinking. Her chest throbbed in retaliation for whatever they’d done to her. “Leave me alone.”

  Richard’s hand cupped her cheek. His mind pressed closer instead of away. Relief. Worry. Fury. His thoughts consumed her with raw emotion.

  “I almost lost you,” his mind whispered.

  “What . . .” She licked her lips. They were dry. Cracked. “What happened?”

  Instead of answering, Richard shut his mind away again and reached for something clipped to his belt. “This will help you rest.” He pressed the needle into her arm.

  “You bastard.” She turned her head to find Jeff Coleridge sitting near her, on one of the helicopter’s benches. His cheek was bleeding. A wound in his leg had been tied off with rubber tubing. “Tell me what . . .”

  Snippets of memory descended before she could finish. The mission. Her parents’ house. Her ruined bedroom. The unreal confrontation with herself as a child, only it had been someone else. Someone who—

  “It wasn’t Trinity.” She grabbed for Richard’s hand, her gaze locking on to Jeff’s hate-filled expression as he stared directly in front of him.

  She glanced to the rest of the team, none of whom would make eye contact. There were huge holes in what she could recall, just like her unreliable memory of her ocean dream. But she could remember her mind being controlled by a power beyond her understanding. Her mind, linked with another, had shoved Jeff and a second Watcher back. She’d forced Richard away with more power than he could control. She’d wanted, needed, to kill.

  “It wasn’t me.” But she had felt a connection. Another consciousness dragging her deeper into the parts of her own mind that terrified her. Her grip tightened on Richard’s hand. She looked back to him. “It wasn’t Trinity. Tell me you believe that.”

  “We’ll figure it out” was all he’d say, while he kept his own thoughts and feelings locked away now. “Rest until we get back to the lab.”

  She didn’t want to rest. She didn’t want to close her eyes. What if the council decided it was best that she never woke up, because of what he’d forced her to face here? What if she’d just proven that she was as crazy and unstable as they’d assumed.

  “It wasn’t me . . .” Her eyes closed, Richard’s meds taking over. “Please. I’m not crazy. Don’t let them . . . don’t let them take my mind away. Not before we can find . . .”

  Her ability to speak failed before she could beg for the chance he’d promised she’d have to reach Trinity—the real little girl she’d heard in her ocean, not the demon she’d found in her shattered past.

  “Please,” she projected. More than ever, Richard’s help was her only hope. “I’ll do whatever you want to figure this out. Just make them let me wake up . . .”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Richard fought to keep his mind on his dream database despite Jeff’s agitated stare from the other side of his desk.

  Jarred was monitoring Madeline’s recovery. Sarah was still unconscious, in isolation in the lab. And Richard’s consolation prize for the night’s insanity was a killer psychic hangover, analyzing his data for some clue that would protect the Temple Legacy for another day, and enduring his sleep-deprived second-in-command’s hair-trigger temper.

  “Sarah Temple never should have been allowed to initiate a dream sequence on her own.” Jeff, mobile with the help of crutches, had tracked Richard down in his quarters after the recon team had debriefed and their report had been transmitted to the council. “Let alone accompany us on a mission. If she’d have been restricted to the lab and stayed hooked up to your monitors—”

  “Moving her to private sleeping quarters was a calculated gamble. So was her participation in the trip to Lenox.”

  Richard reread what he’d recorded from his recollection of Sarah’s nightmare and his observation at her parents’ home. He erased the records, just as he had twice before. He kept typing gibberish, his mind refusing to process anything but the memory of Sarah lying lifeless in his arms before he’d revived her.

  “Building a working relationship with the twins is essential,” he said. “That wouldn
’t have happened, keeping Sarah caged in the lab around the clock.”

  “Are you calling what happened tonight Sarah working with us? We’ve been attacked twice because of her, three times, if you count the other legacy teams.”

  “I got into her nightmare. She joined the recon team and started facing her memories.”

  “I don’t expect the council’s terribly impressed with your results,” Jeff said.

  “Not yet.”

  Richard studied the man he’d come the closest to trusting of anyone in his adult life, weighing how much was safe to share of what he’d discovered when he confronted Sarah. But if he was going to keep his mind focused on his job when he returned to the lab, he needed to war-game what he knew. Something he and Jeff had done countless times before.

  “The ocean dream came looking for Sarah,” Richard finally admitted. “Exactly how I felt something, someone, controlling her behavior during her vision in the house. She didn’t initiate either link.”

  Jeff unclipped the portable comm unit from his belt and slapped it to the desk’s steel surface, waiting for Richard to spit out the rest.

  “It was like . . . feeling her being seduced,” Richard said.

  “It has to be the center. Clearly, Ruebens embedded the need to find a fictional child into Sarah’s mind. Her obsession with Trinity is the government’s link to our operations. tonight, they pulled the trigger on two other legacies and nearly took her twin, you, and our entire recon team down protecting her.”

  “Except Trinity didn’t feel like a figment of Sarah’s imagination. Or a fantasy that Ruebens planted. Or even a child, not in the ocean nightmare when I was joined with Sarah’s consciousness. The presence that possessed her in her bedroom was too strong to be an untrained child’s. The council has to approve another ocean-dream projection, so we can get to the bottom of what’s going on. When I debrief Sarah, uncovering the details the elders need to make that decision will be—”

  “You’re going to debrief her?” Jeff shifted in his chair, easing the pressure on his leg. “Alone. That’s Madeline’s job, isn’t it? You know, in your foolproof process for reclaiming control of their legacy for the Brotherhood.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Would that be because you’re no longer sure you can reclaim Sarah’s mind? Or because you suspect she’s a willing accomplice to what the center’s doing? Or maybe you’re just covering your ass.”

  Richard pushed back from his computer and stood. His friend’s stillness deepened, as if Jeff were bracing for a blow Richard had no intention of delivering. He needed the debate. He had to be sure, if he was going to convince the council to allow him to work with Sarah once she woke.

  “Those are the wrong questions.” Richard’s stride ate up the carpet from one side of the office to the other. Then he planted his butt back in his chair.

  “What’s the right question?” Jeff relaxed.

  “If this is the center making its move to reclaim Sarah for Dream Weaver, but Sarah’s not leaking information to them, how did they know the precise time to retarget her mind? Hearing the little girl she says is Trinity, feeling this connection to the child that her twin doesn’t, all of it grew organically from a month of recovery work.”

  “Or from someone at the center gradually feeding her imagery that they waited to trigger until she grew strong enough to do serious damage,” Jeff suggested.

  “Someone who would have needed intel to track Sarah’s ability to process the complexity of tonight’s visions.” Richard welcomed the violence growing inside him. Its toxic bite renewed his determination to do damage to whoever was orchestrating this.

  Jeff’s frown formed a trench on either side of his mouth. “You’re saying she wouldn’t have been strong enough to project the nightmare or the lucid daydream in Lenox before now, and someone knew that.”

  “But they weren’t counting on her reaching out to me when she got in over her head, or that our connection would be strong enough to pull her back both times.”

  “She tried to kill you, Richard.”

  “Because you were hurting her sister, and then I was threatening her connection with the child she thought she was seeing at the house.”

  “Or were we threatening the projection’s plans? Either way, she’s the wild card here—her dreaming mind, and whoever’s controlling it. The council wants to shut this circus down. How can you rationalize talking them out of it?”

  Richard saw again Sarah’s heartbreaking desperation in the chopper, when she begged him for the second chance he’d promised if she endured the recon mission. He shoved down the compulsion to spare her from how much worse things had to become if they were going to identify what or who was driving her breakdown.

  “Maybe hearing Trinity in the dream is a premonition.” Richard rolled the possibility over and over in his mind, needing more than mere logic to lead him to the right conclusion. “When she was on the run from the center, Sarah saw the rendezvous point for her showdown with Ruebens long before the confrontation occurred. Madeline decoded the dream’s symbolism and we terminated Ruebens and his team.”

  “Barely.” Jeff’s skepticism was a reminder of how close Richard had come to watching his men take out Sarah and Madeline along with the center’s director.

  “We can’t discount the possibility that Sarah’s mind is projecting the child’s image to warn us,” Richard said.

  “About what? That she’s dream-sharing with someone besides her sister? Someone pulling the same strings as Ruebens?”

  “If I don’t explore the nightmare that started this”—Richard was listening to his instincts now more than to Jeff—“we’ll never know what the center is gunning for.”

  “They want the twins under their control.”

  “Actually, the center wants the Temple Legacy, and I’m no longer convinced Sarah and Madeline are the only players in their sights.”

  Richard ran another search through the database that tracked every detail he’d gleaned from the twins’ accounts of their dreams. His second-in-command used his crutches to round the desk and watch him sift through observations that could be sorted by date, time, symbol, and theme.

  “You keep circling back to the child,” Jeff said.

  “We can’t afford to rule out the possibility that Ruebens set Sarah’s latest breakdown into motion before his death to secure the center’s advantage in controlling a piece of the legacy we haven’t found yet. Which means shutting down Sarah’s mind would eliminate our only link to reaching Trinity, if she truly exists, for the Brotherhood.”

  Richard’s fingers flew over his keyboard. A grid formed on the oversized touch screen, contrasting date-specific entries against the most common symbols in each dream and their frequency of appearance. He manipulated the image with his fingers, overlaying the report onto his sparse entries from tonight’s dreams. He tweaked the display, focusing on instances of voices speaking from Sarah’s ocean.

  The frequency of occurrence had increased at a marked pace, while other repeated incidents and symbols had come and gone from Sarah’s dreams with little or no pattern. Almost as if the voices and the cries calling to Sarah had been driving toward tonight’s episode. He closed his eyes and felt for the answers, trusting the data. He had to be sure, at the precise moment that he’d never been less confident that his instincts could remain impartial.

  As Sarah had become stronger and more stable, her results in the dream lab had grown more splintered. Her dream work became less predictable and produced fewer successful results as her primary focus became getting out of the lab and away from his probing questions. Richard had wanted to see her need for independence as a good sign. He’d agreed to her private sleeping quarters in return for her improved cooperation in their lab work. All of which had been documented in his daily reports to the elders, which were distributed to every Watcher in his chain of command. His weakening hold on Sarah’s mind would have been an easy extrapolation for anyone to make.

/>   The suspicion growing inside Richard knotted like a fist in his diaphragm.

  “Someone with access to the details of my work with Sarah is acting as a pipeline to the center,” he said. “They’re using my reports to track the appearance of the exact symbols they’d need to manipulate Sarah’s mind.”

  “A Watcher?” A wave of disgust shot from Jeff’s mind to Richard’s. “You don’t think Sarah is our leak, even though someone’s possessing her mind. But you believe a Watcher is helping the center?”

  “Someone who could relay the locations of other Watcher teams and even tonight’s mission details.”

  “Someone on our team?”

  One of the trusted comrades they’d served with for years, some of whom Richard and Jeff had personally trained and handpicked for command positions.

  Richard didn’t want to believe it either. But there was a bone-deep truth to his suspicion. And he’d long ago learned to trust his ability to knit seemingly unconnected facts into unshakable reality before others could see the patterns. This wasn’t the time to second-guess his own gifts.

  It was how, when he was just a boy, he’d known to trust the Brotherhood when his own legacy began spiraling out of control. It was how he’d known over a year ago that Sarah Temple’s mind was in play, based only on a routine Brotherhood status sweep of the family lines they’d tracked for generations. His reputation for alerting the elders when it was time to engage before a legacy’s principals were in play was unparalleled. So he’d been given unprecedented latitude to initiate, monitor, and control the dream testing performed on Sarah.

  “You’re going to sell the council on one of our own working with the center?” Jeff asked. “That’s your reasoning for continuing to empower the Temple Legacy, instead of neutralizing it the way most Watchers think you should have a year ago?”