Except Sarah’s work with Kayla Lawrence had never included the directive to purchase a weapon—not at this stage of testing. Not by Richard’s design. And he’d never had this much difficulty disengaging Sarah from a shared dream.
Richard extracted the IV line from the shunt in Sarah’s chest. He’d administered the recovery drug ten minutes ago. Standard protocol for aborting the REM state that nurtured the dream link. He stepped to the foot of the observation room’s bed and pricked Sarah’s arches with his probe. Nothing. No movement, except for her eyes darting from side to side behind their lids.
Damn it!
He’d infiltrated the center to stop this precise scenario from occurring. To be the one who brought Sarah Temple back from her coma, to discover what the other center scientists knew about psychically training the mind through dreams, and to limit their testing to experiments that caused no long-term harm. He was supposed to get Sarah out before Dream Weaver could be fully developed from her psychic gifts. Except he was no longer in exclusive control of her abilities. Maybe he never had been.
Sarah’s hand jerked, then her arm. Involuntary muscle spasms. The heart monitor kicked into a tantrum. Her condition deteriorated into seizure. Alarms blared from every piece of equipment in the glass-enclosed cubicle. A crash team would descend in a matter of seconds.
“Alpha!”
Richard pulled her headset free. Gothic echoes of wind and lightning and a thunderstorm surrounded them. He fought the instinct to yell Sarah’s name. To reach out to her, through the personal psychic link no one at the center knew he’d forged. He grabbed Sarah’s hand, his body blocking the gesture from the camera recording over his shoulder.
His mouth at her ear, he whispered, “Come back to me, Sarah. Don’t give in to this. Come back, so I can get you out of here.”
CHAPTER THREE
…almost free…
Anger burned through Sarah, harsher than the fear. Jagged-edged, like the storm raging outside the Temple family car.
And her father’s anger wasn’t the worst of it. The farther they drove from the police station, the deeper his hopelessness grew. For the little girl he’d lost. The perfect daughter she’d never been.
“You’re high again, aren’t you?” he demanded from behind the wheel. “Your mother and I just sprung you from county lockup, and you’re already high again.”
There was no surprise in his voice. He sounded tired. He was giving up.
It was only a dream, some still-sane part of Sarah knew. A shadow dream she couldn’t stop from happening over and over again. But believing this was real was the only blessing that remained. The only memory that was still her own. So she made her gaze lock with his in the rearview mirror. She took one more look, before—
“Holy shit!” Her father’s attention jerked to the rainsoaked country road. His panic sliced into her.
Their car skidded across the center line. She screamed, just like a hundred times before. Held her breath. Prayed the tires would grab. But they spun faster instead, death racing toward them, more precious by the second. Because like an addict, Sarah was reaching for it now. For the grace that came only in this moment.
Her absolution.
Because a split second before the tanker truck pulverized the driver’s side of their family’s Chevy, her father’s anger evaporated.
“Please, God, let my Sarah be okay. Make her okay again. Take care of my little girl.”
The truth was agony when it no longer mattered. But Sarah’s mind clung to her father’s thoughts of unconditional love. He’d never really given up on her, not completely, even if he hadn’t been able to say it.
Then she was ripped away. By her mother’s shock. By the truck driver’s curses. Her father’s pain.
The agonizing jumble swallowed her. The psychic energy flared, beating at her, splitting her, until it became the metal-on-metal of impact. Then she was flying, breaking, shattering into the darkness. Reaching for her twin’s mind…hating that Maddie had to be there…that Sarah couldn’t stop herself from reaching for her sister, any more than she could stop the dream.
Sarah let the wind and the storm’s anger surge through her. She pushed to her feet beneath the phantom branches of a looming oak. Her head splitting, her body broken, she fed on her mind’s tenuous connection with her twin’s. On the shared dream’s power. She stumbled toward her father and the twisted, burning mess that no longer resembled their car.
He was still alive, his panic searing through her. And she would save him this time. She had to. They would both be free if she just made it before—
The explosion hurled her backward, slamming her into the tree’s scarred trunk. Fire engulfed the Chevy, denying her again. Then she was crawling through the mud. Pleading, when there was no one but her sister to hear.
“Maddie…help me…” Sarah begged, needing the greedy flames to take her, too.
Before she and her demented dreams were responsible for someone else’s death.
“God, please don’t let me—”
CHAPTER FOUR
“—kill anyone else!” Maddie Temple cried, waking from a recurring nightmare of fire and destruction and loss. “Oh, God!”
She stumbled to the bathroom, consumed by ten-year-old memories that belonged to her coked-out twin. Memories, like the emotions Sarah had bombarded her with the night of the accident, that weren’t Maddie’s but wouldn’t go away. She retched into the toilet, her father’s desperation and shock and death still churning inside her.
Empty, her mind finally quiet, she collapsed against the side of the tub.
“Damn you, Sarah.” And damn the guilt that heckled Maddie’s revulsion for what her sister had become.
It hadn’t been Sarah’s fault that they’d always known things. Felt things they shouldn’t. They hadn’t dared let anyone see how much. Their mother would have been terrified. So Maddie and Sarah had turned to each other for support and comfort and control. But while Maddie’s intuition had developed until she could sense enough of someone’s pain to help them, Sarah’s had escalated until she was experiencing everyone’s everything.
Schizophrenia, one doctor had labeled it by the time they were ten. Bipolar disorder, another diagnosed at fifteen. By then, Sarah was self-medicating away the worst of her mania with drugs. She’d said it was like she became the person she was feeling through—a debilitating burden from which Maddie had tried her best to shield her twin.
Then at sixteen, Sarah had become their father, the night her reckless behavior put him on a collision course with a thunderstorm and a hydroplaning truck. The night Sarah had lost what was left of her mind and her toxic link to Maddie had been shattered.
Sarah had spent the last decade in a vegetative coma in a special-care facility over a thousand miles south of their Massachusetts hometown. After the accident, Maddie and Phyllis had moved to a sleepy Boston suburb to piece their fractured lives back together. As best they could, at least, while Phyllis’s nerves grew so unpredictable she couldn’t keep a job for more than a few months at a time. Which had left Maddie shouldering the responsibility for making the normal life they craved a reality.
She’d almost succeeded.
Then the dreams had come. Each more terrifying and vivid than the last. The emotions, as strong as the night of the accident. Just as clear. Just as horrifying. Every night of the last three months, Maddie became a teenage Sarah in the throes of the addiction Sarah had turned to in order to cope. She’d watched their father die, felt him die, over and over again—knowing it was her fault, Sarah’s fault, as surely as if she’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
In the dream, Maddie saw it all, felt it all, became it all, right along with her twin. The images of the storm and the crash and Sarah’s desperation to die waited for her every night. Each dream exactly the same—until tonight.
Tonight, the truck driver hadn’t been shocked as Gerald Temple’s car skidded toward him. Sarah—and through her, Maddie�
��had felt him waiting for the Chevy to cross the center line. Tonight, she’d seen the crash through the stranger’s menacing gaze.
The truck driver had accelerated into the impact, taking dead aim for the car. His final thought echoing through Sarah’s mind…
And Maddie’s…
Die!
CHAPTER FIVE
“How could you not know someone else was programming her dream projections!” the raspy voice demanded over Richard’s cell phone. “You’re one of the Brotherhood’s strongest psychics for God’s sake.”
Sarah was safely sedated. Her mind was back under Richard’s control—at least as much under his control as it ever had been.
“If dreams were that easy to manipulate, the Trinity Center wouldn’t have needed me so badly.” Richard stepped deeper into the cover of the woods that ringed the center’s property. It was dark, he hadn’t breached any of the facility’s perimeter sensors, and he was using the Brotherhood’s secure satellite link. But Richard couldn’t be too careful with his cover. Not now. “Sarah might not even be aware that someone besides me is guiding her Dream Weaver work.”
“A project you fought to spearhead, because you insisted you were the only Watcher who could control the outcome.”
“I was fighting for Sarah Temple and her legacy. I still am.”
“Not much longer. Not if you can’t control the risk the principle’s becoming to—”
“The principle’s risk to anyone but herself has been contained.”
“For now. The government won’t be allowed to perfect a direct-strike psychic weapon. That was your guarantee to the Brotherhood. Your only choice now is to—”
“Get Sarah out, I know.” Wind whipped the trees overhead, mimicking the sensory stimuli that had helped Richard map Sarah’s dreams and build her psychic strength. But had he gotten her strong enough to face what came next?
“Extract her and all your dream research from center control,” the voice spelled out unnecessarily. A mission didn’t get more covert than this. If Richard failed, he failed alone. “We’ll take the Temple woman in as long as you can control her. But if you can’t get her and the footprints of your work out, with no ties to the Brotherhood, we’ll be forced to contain the exposure. Everyone connected to Dream Weaver will be terminated, you included.”
CHAPTER SIX
Maddie’s breath misted in the frozen morning air. She’d been up for hours. It felt like she’d been standing there forever. Shivering in the hospital parking lot. Still not ready to go inside. Not ready to pretend for another day that her life wasn’t falling apart.
Anger bubbled beneath the calm that people expected from Dr. Madeline Temple, ER trauma specialist. Her twin’s anger and insanity had come only in the dreams at first. But echoes of Sarah owned more of Maddie’s waking mind every day. No matter how hard Maddie fought, her comatose sister’s demented memories kept taking more.
Or maybe it was Maddie’s own mind. Maybe it was simply her turn. Like Sarah and her mother, this was her destiny. Maybe that was the prophecy Phyllis had been so terrified of. Maddie had managed to do some good with her life. It was time for the darkness to take the rest. Could it really be that simple? That hopeless?
She squared her shoulders against the ridiculous thought.
She was a grown woman, not a scared teenage girl. She didn’t believe in curses and phantom prophecies. Besides, she had real problems to deal with. Problems like Dr. Jarred Keith, who’d become St. Christopher’s chief of psychiatry less than a year ago. Notorious for keeping to himself, he’d surprised her by wanting to take their casual dates to a level she hadn’t been ready for. He’d found the calm, sweet Maddie she’d been too charming to resist. She’d told him she needed to stay focused on her career. Then she’d stopped returning his calls. Ignored his repeated voice mails. Until last night.
Last night, Jarred hadn’t left her a choice. He’d said he was sorry that it had come to this. He was sorry, but they’d find a way to clean up her mess of a life together.
Right.
Shrugging off a shiver, Maddie marched up the granite steps that led to the wall of windows fronting St. Christopher Memorial Hospital. Focus on what’s important. Forget about everything else. She had a residency to save. After scraping and fighting for years to get where she was, she refused to let everything slip through her fingers. She wasn’t losing herself now. She wasn’t weak like her sister.
Maddie would handle Jarred Keith. Then she’d handle her nightmares, the shadows from her past, and her family’s penchant for instability—alone. Whatever it took to not let the darkness win, the way it had with Sarah.
“There’s something you’re not telling me.” Jarred was staring at Maddie from his expensive chair, behind his expensive desk.
Maddie stared back, swallowing the instinct to trust him. To invite him deeper into her messed-up life. Into her mind.
Expensive suited the man. But not as well as the warm, inviting clutter that softened the periphery of his office. His reputation with hospital staff bordered on hard-ass. But Maddie had always known better. Even if she hadn’t, the sight before her would have confirmed what she’d felt the first day they’d met. The walls of Keith’s office were covered with a hodgepodge of diplomas and civic awards. Small prints of impressionists’ work. Those of modern realists. There was even a sampling of what looked like children’s Crayola creations. His bookcases were filled floor to ceiling with volumes on varied topics. Fiction and nonfiction, aligned with less and less care the easier the titles were to reach.
Jarred’s was an ordered but approachable mind. Intelligent but sensitive to subtlety and the value of indulging the imagination. Maddie had liked that about him—his logic and his no-bullshit approach to taking life as it came. The softness underneath the reserve he kept firmly in place for others. She’d liked it a lot. She’d felt drawn to him, first just a little. So little, she’d thought she was imagining the intensity of that instant connection. Just like she’d imagined all the other weird things that had started happening around the same time. But before she’d known it, Jarred had gotten inside. With each smile or his jokes or his gentle touch, and the way it all had eased the chaos brewing in her mind.
Not a good thing as it turned out. Not now that her job was on the line, and he had the final say. Not when she found herself wanting to reveal everything she didn’t understand herself to a man who held the keys to her professional future.
“According to you and your bosses”—Maddie willed away her blank stare, settling for a smile that was closer to You’re imagining things than Help me!—“there’s plenty I haven’t told Dr. Yates.”
“I’m not Dr. Yates. And I don’t like the hospital board putting me in the middle of this any more than you do.”
“But here you are.” And there his voice had been on her machine last night, saying that her administration-mandated therapy sessions would be conducted in his office from now on. That accepting his help was her only shot at salvaging her future.
“You seem almost desperate to disengage this morning,” he said. “If I didn’t know you well enough to be worried, I’d be intrigued.”
“Intrigued?” Actually, he was a smug son of a bitch, just like everyone had said. “Is that what shrinks are calling it now, when you stare at someone as if they’re a juicy journal article you can’t wait to write up?”
Before Sarah’s nightmares began haunting Maddie, sparring with Jarred had been a guilty pleasure. First over a quick bite in the hospital cafeteria. Then when they ran into each other, grabbing coffee from one of the machines sprinkled about the building. Dr. Untouchable had finally admitted that he’d been inventing ways to accidentally hook up with her. They’d moved on to latenight or early-morning meals at a diner near her apartment, before or after one of Maddie’s grueling ER shifts. Out of sight of any St. Chris staff who might find it gossipworthy to catch them together. Because just six months ago, the male-dominated realm of emergency medicine had b
een Maddie’s playground. She’d finally made it. She was home free. No more worries.
Then Jarred had started to notice the bizarre things Maddie had hidden from everyone else. How she’d found herself eating food she hated but didn’t remember ordering. She’d say something out of character—something rude and hostile like Sarah used to say. But when Jarred commented on it, Maddie wouldn’t remember whatever had shocked him.
“So,” he said, “you made things difficult with Matt Yates because he was treating you like just another patient. Well, you’re not just another patient to me, Maddie”—he leaned forward—“but you’re not giving me anything to work with, either.”
“Maybe I’m trying to keep you on your toes.” She took her own stab at smug. “We can’t have such an important doctor wasting his time.”
“Is that what I’ll be doing? Is that what I was doing every time I tried to get the most intriguing woman I’ve ever met to open up about what was bothering her?”
Jarred flashed his Harrison Ford, circa Raiders of the Lost Ark, smirk.
For a moment, Maddie forgot how to breathe.
“Do your bosses know how inappropriate this arrangement is?” she countered.
“Do you want me to remove myself from the situation? Because if Yates had had his way, that call last night would have been your termination notice. Not me sticking my neck out to give you one more chance.”
“Don’t tell me you’re pissed because I’m not thanking you for this!”
“Something’s changed”—Jarred did that head-cocking thing shrinks do when they think they have all the answers—“since the last time we spoke. When was that, three weeks ago? Things have gotten even worse, and I remember offering to admit you to psych back then.”
Dark Legacy Page 2