Secret Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  Richard swept his fingers across the touch screen, sending his data scattering. He pushed away from his desk and his feelings for Sarah—and his own growing suspicion that if he had to choose between protecting her and honoring the calling he’d sacrificed everything to follow, he’d save Sarah.

  He forced objectivity into his memories of her nightmare and her lucid dream in Lenox. He analyzed and weighed possible alternatives and saw only what had been there. Felt only what the ocean’s murky depths had allowed Sarah to feel. He embraced only the facts that would help him save her and defend the psychic realm.

  “Someone’s feeding information to the enemy,” he said, “and I’ve sensed nothing from Sarah that tells me she’s responsible. We have a mole positioned deeply within our order, and the clues to who that is and what the center’s planning are locked in Sarah’s mind. The Brotherhood has to get back into her nightmare, not just to understand the consciousness Sarah’s labeled as Trinity. We have to identify who’s helping the center target our operations.”

  He sensed his friend searching his thoughts for conflicting motives. Hidden agendas.

  Jeff tapped his fingers across the screen, returning order to the chaos Richard had created. “The council may have already decided that you’re the weakness the center’s exploiting within the Brotherhood. And that the safest course of action is to return Sarah’s mind to a vegetative state, where she and your attachment to her are no longer a threat or a potential asset to anyone.”

  “Then my job is to convince them that they’re being premature.” To honor his Watcher’s Creed while somehow protecting Sarah and her legacy at the same time.

  “It’s going to be okay.” Maddie’s head lay cushioned on Jarred’s bare chest. “Once Metting lets me work with Sarah again, it will be okay.”

  She wanted to lose herself in the soothing rhythm of Jarred’s breathing. He was alive. She and Sarah were alive. They were free of the center, even though Sarah had agreed to participate in an insane mission to their childhood home that had resulted in more than one of the Watcher team members returning injured. Even though Maddie still couldn’t feel her sister’s mind because Sarah had once again been whisked behind Metting’s dream-lab barriers, for tonight they were all safe. And each day they stayed that way was a miracle Maddie hadn’t believed possible just a month ago.

  Jarred’s arms tightened around her. The magic of his mind stroked away at her confusion and doubt. She’d never needed to believe in him—in them—more.

  “I felt your heart stop beating tonight.” Her fiancé’s pulse raced beneath her ear.

  Her fiancé.

  He’d proposed the night they’d moved into the Brotherhood’s state-of-the-art headquarters, just hours after her mother’s death. Maddie had agreed without hesitation. Then she’d refused to plan a ceremony until they were free of the Watchers. Not that she and Jarred needed others to validate their bond. They were already joined as completely as two people could be.

  “You brought me back.” Maddie nuzzled her cheek against the ridges of muscle a month of physical conditioning had added to Jarred’s chest. “You always bring me back.”

  His memories returned her to Sarah’s nightmare, to the moment that the ocean’s negative energy had overcome Maddie. His love and commitment and protection hadn’t been enough to hold her.

  “Metting’s people got my heart started again,” she said. “They know what they’re doing.”

  “Until Sarah drags you into the next dream neither one of you can control.”

  “It was worth it.” Maddie forced her hand to relax its grip on Jarred’s arm. “Once Richard deals with the council and gets me back in the lab, he’ll help us figure out how to keep Sarah safe.”

  “A part of me hopes the elders shut down that damn lab.”

  Maddie pushed against Jarred’s chest and sat beside him.

  “Without the lab’s shields, Sarah will be vulnerable to her dream’s call. Look at what happened in Lenox.”

  “Then let Metting handle her like he did there, now that he’s back in her mind.”

  “I can’t. I—”

  “I felt your heart stop beating.” Jarred kissed her cheek. His lips feathered over hers, then he pulled her back to their warm sheets and tucked her beneath him. “I won’t let them take you away from me, Maddie.”

  His promise spread through their minds. He stroked strong, callused hands down her body. His fingers spread beneath her nightshirt, seeking, finding, making her crave his touch even more. It would be so easy to forget the madness. The danger. The threat to everything they’d become.

  But darkness was lurking, waiting to strike the next time her twin’s mind was undefended. Just like—

  “It’s been waiting all along . . .” Jarred said, his thoughts flowing with hers.

  Memories from the nightmare reached for them. A rising sense of desperation and pain and fear and . . . hopelessness. Sarah’s dream had been a sea of hopelessness.

  “Oh, God,” Maddie gasped.

  “Let it go for the rest of the night,” he said.

  “I . . . I can’t. I just got my sister back from her coma. From what the center’s deranged testing did to her. Now something’s lurking in Sarah’s ocean, trying to take her away from me. Something that’s—”

  “Been waiting all along,” Jarred repeated.

  Heat burst through them, sparking and building and consuming them with thoughts and feelings and emotions that weren’t theirs. Maddie felt Jarred’s mind fine-tuning images that had been hovering just beyond her reach for hours, begging to be understood.

  “I heard the screaming while you were there.” His next kiss was soft, gentle, coaxing. “The cries for help. I felt Sarah’s fear that she couldn’t stop them. Why was she willing to face such a terrible place alone?”

  Maddie gazed into the clear blue of Jarred’s eyes. Her twin’s memories had become hers the instant Sarah allowed Maddie into the matrix. Now they were his, too.

  “She was drowning . . .” Maddie said as a lifetime of pain rushed through her. “Trinity’s screams were killing her, and Sarah couldn’t make it stop. She never could. The screams, the voices . . . Sarah’s heard them before.” It was so clear now, with Jarred’s insight leading Maddie through her twin’s memories. “She’s tried to stop the cries and failed over and over again.”

  “In the dream lab?”

  “From the very beginning. That’s part of what she’s been afraid to remember.”

  Madness had been slowly consuming Sarah’s mind forever, stripping away her control. The call of her demons must have been even worse back at their old house.

  “Sarah’s been dreaming of drowning in her mind’s madness since—”

  “Since you were children.” Jarred laid his forehead against Maddie’s. His body nestled beside her. His arms pulled her closer.

  “When we were just little girls, Sarah used to talk about the strange things she heard in her mind. Things and people and places that would come to her when she was asleep or awake. Things that weren’t real. Our mother told her to forget them. Not to believe them. So Sarah forgot. She’s refused to remember it ever since. But the voices were so real this time, Jarred.”

  “It’s going to be okay.” Jarred kissed Maddie’s cheek.

  “No, it’s not.” Fresh tears flooded her eyes. Her heart. “Sarah’s been running from this her whole life. Now she’s seeing a dark ocean trying to kill a little girl . . . It’s madness. The same insanity that locked her into her coma before. It’s coming back. And I swear, Jarred, I don’t think she can escape it this time.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sarah sensed her twin’s fall into troubled sleep. The dream lab’s technology should have been blocking Maddie’s psychic energy. But Sarah had known the exact moment when Maddie was informed about what happened on the Watcher mission to Lenox. She’d felt her sister accept just how dangerous Sarah’s instability had become.

  Maddie was now wrapped se
curely in the arms of a man who would do anything to help her. Sarah felt herself smile, when not too long ago she’d hated her twin for having that kind of honest connection to cling to. But you didn’t hate family for having what you never would. At least Sarah didn’t. Not anymore. Not the Sarah she wanted to be.

  She allowed herself a twinge of jealousy as she thought back to her naive belief that she’d found the same kindred spirit for herself in Richard. Then she remembered his ultimatum from before the recon mission—that she had no choice but to work with him, remember with him, or her battle to regain her sanity was over.

  She didn’t know how to belong to either her past or her present, not the way Maddie did. From the very start Sarah had been too messed up to make relationships work, even within her own family. Now, if she didn’t find a way to accept Richard’s help when he came back for her, she’d lose all that was left—her twin and Trinity—for good.

  Sleep promised a blissful reprieve. Her mind and body were clamoring for rest. But losing consciousness risked inviting the voices and images in her mind closer, even with an IV in her arm that should render her chemically incapable of achieving REM state. She would dream again. And the cries for help reaching her through the lab’s psychic safeguards made dreaming alone too dangerous.

  She closed her eyes instead and relaxed into the mental exercises Richard had taught her. Routines that had balanced her mind during the secret hours they’d worked together inside the center. Using them, linking their energy, he’d strengthened her ability to read and project emotions. Through dream-sharing, while she was still too weak to move from bed, he’d helped her retrain her body to walk and then run. Once she recovered enough to work with him in the center’s gyms, his routines and ability to focus psychic power had augmented the speed with which she learned to execute an array of skills and disciplines.

  The memory cut deep. He’d still been “Rick” then. She’d still wanted the partnership, the unity, that she’d have to force herself to accept now. She hadn’t known yet how addictive and dangerous trusting Richard would be. Or that he’d turn out to be no different than the other scientists. Except he’d lied, when the others hadn’t, which had made him the worst of the bunch. He’d made her believe. He’d saved her from her coma, only to make her his Dream Weaver guinea pig. He’d planned to betray her from the very first touch of his mind.

  Shaking off the anger that always came with thinking of the past, she released the pointless memories, imagining them as insubstantial as a gust of wind blowing past her. She sat, legs crossed, on her bunk. Her arms rested against her knees and the loose black sweats the Watchers wore off duty. She normally wore scrubs in the lab, but tonight Richard had left her sweats.

  Breathing in, she focused on the smooth feel of fleece against her skin. Breathing out, she felt the T-shirt’s matching texture. The featherlight fabric’s softness registered with each breath. The cloth’s loose folds allowed for unrestricted movement. Uncomplicated ease. Sarah closed her eyes, picturing the sensation of clouds sweeping across her skin. Clouds that she’d first discovered in her coma’s nothingness.

  She directed her mind to reclaim the images that had tempted her back from that darkness: A summer storm blowing on a misty day, shot through with sparkling streaks of sunshine. Tendrils of light reaching into darkness. Illumination that had first been Richard’s voice, then his thoughts, and finally his touch, as his mind taught her how to find him in the beautiful imagery, then to trust him, and then to follow him out of the silence that had consumed her.

  She kept a flicker of her awareness grounded in the bunker’s dream lab while she used the cloud imagery to soothe away the last of the fear and panic and guilt that had taken hold in the nightmare, then at her parents’ house. She was floating, not sitting. Breathing, not grasping. She was searching for balance and clarity and purpose, instead of returning to the chaos of her visions.

  Richard had taught her to let go of then and now. That there was no before. No next. There was only the silvery texture of moving freely. The silky feel of floating in a cloud’s embrace and letting everything else go.

  Then it was time to fly free, through sparkling light and wisps of color and the flickers of cloud shadow and sunbeams dancing across the sky. The vision became Sarah. Flying became breathing. Breathing became her path. Inhaling the clouds and the light. Exhaling as she soared higher.

  But the darkness followed, no matter how fast she moved or how high the light took her. There was no escaping it. Dread competed with the vision’s brightness. An ocean’s murky depths called for her to return to where she really belonged.

  Her breath faltered.

  Her meditation’s silvery promise began to fade.

  She needed . . .

  She needed to—

  “—absorb the clouds’ freedom into your mind,” Richard’s voice said. “You have to find a way to feel them despite all the rest. Become them. Let their freedom fill you until there’s no room for conflict.”

  Sarah opened her eyes, not surprised to find the main source of her conflict standing in the doorway. Trinity’s cries and the nightmare’s call had lessened as soon as Richard arrived.

  A quick sweep of their telepathic link told her he’d disabled the sensors that would have alerted his team to the lab’s sealed entrance being breached. The cameras recording every move she made would see nothing of what happened next. He was a wizard with electronics, as much as he was at harnessing psychic energy. He’d personally designed most of the bunker’s safeguards.

  They’d be alone for as long as Richard wanted them to be.

  Sarah knew little about the extrasensory gifts he’d inherited from his own family’s legacy, beyond the rumor that his had been one of the most powerful lines the Watchers had dealt with until they’d involved themselves with Sarah’s. He could sense, persuade, and neutralize minds, manipulate his environment without anyone knowing, leaving no trace of his presence when he was done. He could anticipate unseen danger and formulate an instant, brutally logical strategic response. He’d mastered psychic and emotional control that had once made her feel safe.

  Tonight his level stare felt like an ambush.

  “How’s your breathing?” The familiar cadence of his voice had the power to transport her all the way back to the beginning if she let it, to when she’d waited anxiously for him to arrive each night at the center so their secret work together could begin.

  “Not good.” There was no point in lying. He was already in her mind, searching out the truth for himself.

  “Shall we?” He motioned toward the gym that was connected to the dream lab. He’d changed out of his fatigues into sweats identical to hers.

  Sarah worked out in the gym alone or sometimes with her twin after dream simulations, or whenever the surging energy in her mind became too much. Physical activity was another of Richard’s methods for sorting through the illusive, half-formed thoughts she frequently couldn’t tame after a projection.

  “You want to pick my mind apart in the gym?” she asked the man her subconscious kept trying to kill.

  A man who could no doubt sense the violence blooming back to life inside her again. But that was evidently too damn bad. There was work to be done, and he was just the loyal soldier to produce the results his council demanded. The last of her meditative clouds evaporated. Hatred collided with her instinctive need for his calming presence. Richard inhaled deeply, breathing through the pain she hadn’t meant for her mind to thrust at him.

  God, she really was a monster.

  “It’s just fear and confusion,” he said.

  He freed her from the monitor leads and IV tubing that had restricted her to the bed, as if being the target of her psychic assault meant nothing.

  “It’s an instinctive response to tonight’s upheaval and the memories you faced,” he said, “and being forced to grow your skills too quickly. You should have been trained since birth to control the emotional component to your telepathic abiliti
es. Your parents’ denial of what you would become eventually led to their deaths. Now that job falls to me, even if it means taking a few stray blows along the way. That’s why we’re going to work in the gym. Your nightmare and lucid daydream were stronger than anything you’ve experienced since leaving the center. You can’t meditate their aftershocks away with gentle, rolling clouds. You need to vent.”

  Sarah froze in the middle of pushing herself off the table.

  “I need control.” She sounded weak. She felt weak. Incapable of facing what was about to happen. She felt trapped because she had no choice but to endure this man’s methods if she wanted Trinity and Maddie and their legacy to survive.

  Debriefing memories she couldn’t safely access on her own would require projecting them into a new vision. The alternate reality would have to be controlled, the same as if what she was remembering was happening all over again, or she could cause even more damage. Focusing and suppressing a vision’s impulses was difficult enough with Maddie’s help. Adding the strain of a workout with Richard to the mix was unnecessarily reckless.

  “The nightmare will come for me again when I start to remember,” she said. “Or the anger in my insane daydream will take over. And—”

  “I’ll be there from the start this time.” He sounded so sure, even after her disastrous results in Lenox. “But we need to get your body moving. We need to bypass whatever’s keeping your mind from opening fully to mine. I have to relive what you saw with you. No holding back. You’re going to work through your resistance and find a way to trust me.”

  “Trust you to push me into another psychotic break?”

  Richard’s eyes narrowed. “Whatever it takes to get to the truth.”

  Sarah’s feet hit the floor.

  She dropped the last of her mental barriers.

  Her rage swamped them both.

  “I just might kill you.” She walked past him on shaking legs. “Is that the truth you’re looking for?”

  “It’s as good a place to start as any.” He followed her into the gym. “Anything’s better than you continuing to run from the work we should have begun together a month ago.”