Dark Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  Maddie had never felt stronger. Freer. There was no weakness in her now. No fear. Only hate. Sarah’s hate for the Raven.

  And Maddie’s, for the men trying to hurt Jarred. She wouldn’t let them take him away from her, the way the storm and the truck had taken her father…

  Jarred’s guards were down. Maddie’s eyes had gone dark. Her expression was a numb kind of blank that terrified him. There were security officers collapsing all over the hallway because of whatever Maddie was doing. If he could just get to her, maybe he could stop this. But he couldn’t make his body move. She wouldn’t let anyone move.

  “Stay with me, Maddie. Don’t do this. This isn’t you.”

  “Of course it is.” Her smile was the saddest thing he’d ever seen. The men who’d been holding Jarred rolled to their backs, their eyes open and staring blind, their chests straining for oxygen. Maddie admired her handiwork. “I can’t let them take you away, too…I won’t let them…They have to—”

  No, they don’t, Jarred argued with his mind. I’m here. No one’s taking me away from you.

  There were tears in her eyes now. She’d heard him. Good girl.

  Let me get you out of here, he said, before—

  “Ah!” A sharp pain bloomed in his upper arm. Buzzing roared through his ears. Then the ground was rushing toward him. He landed on his guards. A scream sliced through him. Maddie’s silent scream of rage as she clutched the dart sticking out from her neck. Their minds were still joined, and together their worlds misted to a vision of a bird soaring down the hallway, transforming into a flesh-and-blood man.

  Raven! Maddie said in the dream. Sarah’s Raven.

  Jarred blinked the real world back into focus, only to see the same man standing over him, blood oozing from a gash in his forehead. He trained a very real semiautomatic on Jarred.

  “Release my men, Ms. Temple,” he ordered. “Or your doctor friend dies.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “No one inside this room but me,” Richard instructed the security team guarding the holding suite.

  He wiped at the blood trickling down the side of his head, trying to piece together the various ways his and Sarah’s escape had gone completely to hell. Culminating with her bashing his head in with her gun and running on her own. Then he’d barely stopped Madeline Temple from either killing a center security team, or getting herself killed by them. Now Richard had her and her companion, both of them tranquilized, to deal with before he could disengage himself and his work from the center for good.

  He applied his palm to the security scanner. Leaning in, he waited for the secondary system to verify his retinal imprint.

  “But what if—” the security guard to his right muttered.

  “No one!”

  “But the directors—” The man was one of the guards Madeline had been strangling downstairs. He grabbed Richard’s arm. “They’ve ordered the center locked down and the intruders isolated. The directors want to interrogate them themselves.”

  “Then by all means.” Richard ripped his arm away. “Escort the directors here personally—after you show them how well you’ve secured every last inch of this facility. That should take at least a half hour once they arrive, wouldn’t you say? I’ll have completed my examination of our guests by then, and you’ll be free to personally introduce Madeline Temple to our illustrious board. She should be awake and thrilled to see you again.”

  The guard swallowed. Hard.

  Weak little shit.

  Richard pushed into the room. Recessed lighting blinked from dim to full, triggered by motion sensors. Dr. Keith and his patient were laid out on side-by-side, stainless steel tables. A fast-acting sedative had taken care of Keith downstairs. Richard hadn’t been nearly as accommodating with Madeline. He’d custom designed her tranquilizer for her sister almost a year ago. For the weeks just after she’d emerged from her coma. Richard had later perfected his mind-control matrix to keep Sarah’s psychic abilities muted when his mind wasn’t there to guide hers. But a dose of the tranquilizer had always been available, just in case.

  Richard ignored the center’s unconscious guests and logged into the computer console on the opposite wall. Two minutes was all he needed to shut down the suite’s video and audio recorders. Next, he reverted the unit to a discrete workstation that could no longer be accessed via the central network.

  He needed time to think. To assess. To regroup and figure out how to convince the Brotherhood not to issue a termination order for Sarah or himself. Or her twin now.

  He’d bluffed his way out of cooling his heels in his own holding cell. Barely. If Sarah hadn’t attacked him, giving him grounds to say she’d been using him as cover all along, he wouldn’t have made it this far. As it was, he was treading very precarious waters. And he was doing it with a concussion—blustering and ordering around the few center security guards not out tracking Sarah. He’d controlled where the intruders were secured. Now he needed a Plan B—since Madeline Temple’s arrival had torched his A Game.

  But why had Sarah’s twin been there at all? The better question was, who had gotten her there. Her presence had helped Sarah find the psychic wherewithal to escape not just half the center’s security, but Richard, too. Sarah had fallen into her twin’s mind and harnessed the power of their connection as if she’d done it countless times before.

  Damn it!

  Someone else’s dream programming had reconnected the Temple twins’ minds. The same programming that had disrupted Sarah’s recent dream simulations and triggered Kayla Lawrence’s death.

  He felt with his mind for increased activity in the hallway. So far, nothing. But his reprieve wouldn’t last a second longer than it took the center’s directors to review the surveillance tapes of Sarah’s escape and the sketchy story he’d given security. Richard pulled a syringe from the lab coat the guard hadn’t bothered patting down and administered a stimulant directly into a vein in Jarred Keith’s arm. The Temple woman was on her own. Her mind would be in disarray once she was fully conscious. Lord knew what damage her link with Sarah was still doing. But Richard’s primary concern at the moment was keeping the three of them alive.

  A groan drew his attention to Keith’s exam table. The other man’s eyes were blinking.

  “Rise and shine, Doctor.”

  Richard helped him sit.

  “There’s very little time for me to explain what’s going on.” Even if he could explain what he didn’t fully understand himself. “Twenty minutes on the outside. There are forces working here that are beyond my control. It’s crucial that you know our lives are in danger, and that—”

  A low growl was Richard’s only warning before Keith launched himself off the table. Richard sidestepped and stared with clinical fascination at the rumpled, moaning heap the other man had made on the floor.

  “Admirable, Dr. Keith, considering the narcotic swamp I’ve made out of your nervous system. But save your strength for getting your patient out of here. Is anything I’m saying making a dent? Cough twice if you understand. Once if you don’t.”

  The other doctor’s hate-filled glare was a positive sign.

  “Good.” Richard waited for Keith to collect his thoughts.

  “Who are you?” the man rasped. “Where are we?”

  “I’m Richard Metting, Sarah Temple’s doctor. And you’re in the bowels of an underground, governmentfunded research facility that’s doesn’t exist on any blueprint ever drawn. Even though Trinity Center is the toast of Boston’s nonprofit fundraising circles, you and your Ms. Temple have obviously already discerned that more goes on here than the pedestrian study of ailments of the mind.”

  “You mean like—” Keith tried to struggle to his feet, lost his balance, and landed back on his ass. He stayed there, still glaring. “—like the psychic testing of patients without the consent of family, like you’ve been doing to Sarah Temple?”

  “Your instincts are good, Doctor, and to the point. But explaining what I’ve been doing
here would take too long. You’re just going to have to trust me to—”

  “Trust you?”

  “To give you the high points, yes.” Metting sighed. “For instance, during my tenure here, I’ve discovered several features of this facility that few others know about. There’s a labyrinth of hidden corridors leading from each of my research theaters, including this one. And the one behind that panel”—he pointed to the wall Keith had propped himself against—“will take us beyond the center’s perimeter sensors. I would suggest we get as far away from here as we can, before Madeline regains full cognition.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “We?” Jarred shook his head, certain he’d heard the other man wrong. “And when exactly will Maddie be awake, after you shot her full of God knows what?”

  He made it to his feet this time. Then, a more difficult challenge, stumbled to Maddie’s side so he could examine the puncture wound in her neck.

  “Assuming she’s as resilient as her sister,” Metting said, “taking into account the adverse effects of whatever lucid dream she and Sarah were cycling through when Sarah escaped—”

  “Lucid what?” Jarred’s already-pounding head cramped a little tighter.

  “—and given her tranquilizer’s typical half-life, I’d say she’ll be able to move in under an hour, but she’ll be disoriented. You should expect some short-term memory loss, from the seizure more than my drug protocol.”

  “And exactly how did you know she had a seizure?”

  “It’s an expected side effect of a link as powerful as I suspect Madeline and Sarah share. Especially since Madeline’s psychic endurance hasn’t been strengthened to cope with separation.” The other man checked his watch. “Her connection with her twin is going to be unstable until—”

  “You mean the bipolar twin whose mind you’ve been exploiting?” Jarred felt like a damn idiot for hanging on the bastard’s every word. But these were the answers that Maddie needed, and he was getting them for her. Then he’d happily take Metting’s head the rest of the way off.

  “Technically, Sarah Temple’s never suffered from a dissociative disorder.” Metting grimaced. “But I suspect that the dream work of one of my colleagues is responsible for creating that very condition in both women now. Sarah’s been resisting that unauthorized interference. I assume Madeline has, too. But the resulting conflict has taken a psychic toll. Add in the way the twins’ psyches have been thrust into close proximity today, and each woman’s individual consciousness will deteriorate further the longer they’re kept apart.”

  “Forced? You’re saying Maddie was driven to the brink of insanity, so she’d stumble into this circus!” By nightmares and voices her sister…sent her?

  “By someone at this facility who—”

  “By you!”

  “No, by someone who didn’t fully understand what they were doing. Bringing these women together, while their mental barriers have been weakened by whatever dream contact they’ve shared, will reap disastrous consequences I never would have initiated.”

  “Then who?” It was the only question Jarred could process. He ran a protective hand over Maddie’s hair. “If all this wasn’t your doing, then who?”

  “I don’t know yet.” The other doctor’s clinical expression slipped to something as close to fury as the soulless man likely got. “Someone else working on Dream Weaver.”

  “Dream Weaver?”

  “A government weapons program. One that’s been infiltrated by an inexperienced third party operating beyond my control. Whether she realizes it nor not, Madeline has been sloppily subjected to—”

  “Oh, she knew. You’ve been driving a brilliant doctor insane for three months!”

  “Three months? She’s been having nightmares for three months?”

  Jarred nodded; then he was in the other man’s face. “How did you know about the nightmares?”

  “Because projecting Sarah’s dreams is my domain here. But it’s become clear that someone else has been performing unauthorized experiments with both twins’ psychic abilities.”

  “Experiments?” Jarred clutched Maddie’s hand again.

  “We don’t have time for this.” Metting’s exasperation came complete with a sigh that was going to get his teeth knocked down his throat. “Your twin is psychic. My twin is psychic. Their minds are now joined, both inside and outside their dreams. Hence, the homicidal scene I walked in on in reception.”

  “That was…” Jarred dropped Maddie’s hand. His twin?

  “That was what?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “Exactly. What you need know is that as long as my patient’s on the run without someone to control how she projects her psyche into the world, your patient will continue to be in as much danger as her twin.”

  “As opposed to the danger Maddie’s in right now, from you?”

  Metting sighed again and glanced toward the door. “If you really want to save your patient’s sanity, you’re going to have to trust me and do exactly as I say.”

  “You’re insane!” Jarred’s shout caused Maddie’s head to jerk. “I don’t trust a damn thing—”

  “It’s no coincidence, Dr. Keith, that these women’s minds are connected again.”

  Jarred stiffened, his brain fully engaging for the first time. “How the fuck do you know my name?”

  “I know a great deal, Dr. Jarred Mathew Keith. That you found your way into psychiatry after surviving the loss of both your parents before the age of ten. That you and Madeline Temple have more in common than childhood tragedy. Not the least of which is your genius IQ that should already be stringing together the random details you’ve observed tonight and processing at least part of what’s going on here. And I know,” Richard added as Keith braced himself on the balls of his feet, “that you’re contemplating taking another crack at beating me to a bloody pulp.”

  “It would be satisfying to try.”

  “Curb the impulse.”

  “You people have—”

  “You have no idea who my people are or how critical it is that you and Madeline help me find Sarah.”

  “Help you?” Jarred’s laugh burned on its way out.

  “I’m the choice you have to make, Doctor. Between running blind or giving Madeline the only intervention that will save her and her twin.”

  “By bringing them under your control?”

  “Better me than the bastard who wants to use them as psychic killing machines.”

  “You’re the Raven, aren’t you?” Jarred squinted. “In the nightmares Maddie keeps having with her twin. I saw a raven in Sarah’s nightmare. And then you were there.”

  “You’ve…” It was Richard’s turn to stare. “You’ve shared their lucid dreams?”

  “Nightmares, Dr. Metting. Of an all-powerful Raven controlling Sarah. Making her do horrible things to people while she makes her sister watch, over and over again, until Maddie thinks she’s the one doing them.”

  “And in these nightmares, I’m a—”

  “You’re the Raven, you maniacal bastard.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Silence vibrated through the holding suite. Richard was too stunned to say anything. Sarah had projected him into her dreams—as a raven. And Jarred Keith had participated in the Temples’ link.

  Sarah’s sister moaned—a woman whose face was so similar to her twin’s that Richard felt the impact of it each time he looked at her. Footsteps approached the suite’s locked door. Followed by impatient knocking. Then pounding.

  “What’s wrong with this scanner?” Ruebens bitched outside. “Get this door open, Dr. Metting. What the hell’s going on? The directors are assembling, and they’re demanding answers.”

  “What do these people…” Jarred Keith’s tone was nonconfrontational for the first time since regaining consciousness. “What do you and the government want with Maddie? If you’re trying to say that someone in this place has been—”

  “—intentionally targeting Sara
h’s sister, to ensure that Madeline’s unstable enough to require intervention, too? Ah. The light flickers dimly.”

  “Dr. Metting!” Ruebens pounded on the door. “This is unacceptable. Dr. Keith, the directors of this institution apologize for you being held against your will this way. I assure you the administration will get to the bottom of your deplorable treatment. And, of course, we’d be happy to help Dr. Temple in any way we can. Please, help me get this door open so I can straighten out this misunderstanding.”

  Keith’s attention snapped to the suite’s door, then back. Richard pressed the hidden mechanism to open their escape route. He waited. Keith picked up the woman he’d kept a hand on from almost the moment he’d regained consciousness.

  “No one’s hurting her again.” Jarred hitched Maddie higher as he stepped to Richard’s side. “Try it, and you’re a dead man.”

  “Admirable, Dr. Keith, but naïve.” Richard ushered him inside the tunnel. “Madeline and her sister are both going to hurt more. All we can do is contain the damage that’s already been done and get them stronger. It will be quite some time before their minds are fully intact again and under their own control.”

  He flipped a switch to swing the floor-to-ceiling panel shut, secure it, and activate overhead lights. A flat-screen monitor flickered on. It revealed a split image of the nowempty room behind them, and of Ruebens and the guard attempting to override the suite’s security outside. Ruebens typed away at the scanner’s keypad, looking ready to rip the device free of its mounting.

  “It’s only a matter of time before they make it inside and discover the tunnel,” Richard mused. “I have a car hidden in the woods at the end of the viaduct. Take your chances here, with them, or come with me.”

  Jarred set Maddie’s feet on the ground. Her cheek came to rest on his shoulder. Her eyes were tracking back and forth behind their closed lids. She was dreaming. No doubt linked with her twin, who was outside somewhere, running while she was dreaming herself.