“That it’s not a coincidence that Sarah’s gotten well enough to fight her way out of whatever’s going on in the center, while you’ve gotten sicker. That someone wanted you here with her.”
Maddie cringed at the sound of more sirens. “Do you really believe—”
“I don’t know what to believe.” Jarred shut her door and rounded the front of the vehicle. He slipped behind the wheel and started the engine. “All I know is that I don’t trust anybody but the two of us right now. Which means we’re on our own figuring out what to do next.”
Then he was driving the SUV like a demon. Careening down a rough trail, headlights off so no one would see them.
“We have to…” We? When had she stopped thinking of them as her and him? When had Jarred become the only thing keeping her from flying into a thousand pieces that would never go back together? “Where are we going?”
“Damned if I know.” Jarred swerved to avoid a tree she didn’t see until it whizzed by, scraping the paint on her door.
“My mother’s?” she asked. “Maybe she can—”
“No.”
“But she knows…” Maddie’s rage for Phyllis surged from the betrayed part of her that was becoming more like Sarah by the second. “That bitch knows more than she’s told me. She—”
“No.” Jarred burst from the woods, tires squealing as they caught on the asphalt of a rural highway. “It’s not safe there now. It’s not safe anywhere. You can’t go home again, Maddie, not until we’re sure this is over. Neither of us can.”
Jarred tried to focus past Metting’s threats. Past the memory of Maddie clinging to him in the woods. Her desperate kisses. Her need for him, even while she’d tried to run. They had to talk, but he had to get her—and himself—calmed down first.
“Tell me everything that doctor said,” Maddie demanded. She was more awake, but she was still altered. And her agitation was growing again. The unfamiliar environment wasn’t helping.
He’d brought her to his ex-wife’s apartment, the only place close he could think of that wouldn’t be an immediate giveaway to whoever was chasing them. Once upon a time, it had been his apartment, too. He still had a key. He’d been watering Victoria’s plants while she spent six months teaching in England. They couldn’t stay there long, not if Metting’s government conspiracy predictions where to be believed. But it was a chance to breathe. To try to swallow what had just happened.
Maddie wouldn’t stay put on the couch. She’d been pacing on and off since they arrived. And when she wasn’t, she kept picking up Victoria’s knickknacks and studying them as if she should remember them somehow. Then she’d back away, as if terrified to try to remember anything at all.
“How much of Sarah do you still…feel?” he asked. It was a nonsensical question. But it was the only question that mattered. That, and: “Are you feeling them, because—”
“Because I’m just like her?” Maddie finished.
“Like her, how?”
“When she runs, I’m there. When she tries to hurt people, I’m there. When she k-killed that woman, I was—”
“What woman?” Jarred swallowed his instinctive denial. “How do you know your sister killed someone?”
Maddie blinked. “I don’t know. But a part of me was there. Like she needed me there. Like I was killing—”
“You aren’t Sarah.”
But someone wanted her to be. Every outlandish thing Metting had said was ringing eerily true.
“Sarah needs me,” Maddie argued. “She’s always needed me. And now she’s—”
“I don’t think she’s causing this. Not intentionally.” Sarah was insane. Dangerous. But someone else was driving this runaway train Jarred had strapped himself to.
“Then who?” Maddie stared from across the room with those too-dark eyes. “Who’s causing this? That Metting guy?”
“He says he was helping her.” Jarred watched as Maddie began practically walking in place. She couldn’t seem to stop her hands and feet from moving.
“Sarah’s Raven was helping her?” Maddie’s laugh was empty, except for the hate that flared inside her each time the man’s name came up. “This is all his fault.”
“Metting said it’s a government testing program, and he was there to get Sarah out. That someone else was—”
“Testing!” Maddie was full-blown pissed now.
Jarred stepped closer as Maddie stared at a collection of crystal paperweights Victoria kept on the mantel. Amethyst, smoky quartz, lapis, black agate, and several others that she’d found since their breakup. Some of them were wicked sharp where they came to a point.
“Metting said he was trying to escape Dream Weaver with your twin, so he could protect her. You were linked with Sarah. You tell me—what the hell was going on when we got to the center?”
“They…” Maddie’s body stilled. “They were running…Sarah and the Raven were running together…He was…helping her…The bastard keeps telling her to trust him!”
Jarred winced as Maddie’s fist clamped down on the sharpest of the crystals. It sliced through the pad of her forefinger, but she didn’t seem to feel it. He snatched her hand away. And in that instant, everything that was Maddie rushed through him. Anger, then fear, then loneliness and anger, until he was deep enough to find the healing white that was truly her.
It was the white he focused on.
“How…” He couldn’t stop himself from asking. “Tell me how you know what Sarah was doing. How could you have felt—”
“She needed…” Maddie shuddered in his grasp. “Sarah needs me when things go dark. And then I know…whatever she knows. And she takes whatever she wants. Then she leaves. Until she needs something again.”
“She needs you in her dreams?” Jarred pushed.
“Before, it was dreams. But now she’s awake, and she still needs me and she’s hurting people, like…”
“Like?”
“Like she hurt my father.”
Jarred watched as the woman he knew faded away, and her past crept closer.
“How did Sarah hurt your father?”
That night—her father’s car accident—was a watershed moment for the Temple family. Whatever the twins had been before that night had changed forever in a single moment of blinding tragedy.
“She killed him…” Maddie pulled her hand away. She wrapped her arms around herself. “It was only a matter of time. She’s—”
“That’s what you see in your dreams? Sarah thinking she killed your father?”
“Yes. No. Maybe, but—”
“Metting said the center was experimenting with dreams, and that you’ve become part of it somehow. You can’t trust anything you’ve seen with Sarah. Not at the center or in your nightmares. Your father’s death was an accident.”
“What if it wasn’t?”
“Why would Sarah want to kill him?”
“Because she’s a monster!” Maddie stalked away until the couch was between them. “Because I’m…we’re…she’s Death!”
Jarred didn’t crowd her. “Why do you think she’s Dea—”
“Because she told me!” He watched Maddie grab her head. Her hair. Pull as she listened to a world he couldn’t see. “She’s shown me…every night…”
“In your nightmares?” The dreams someone besides Metting had dragged Maddie into?
“They’re Sarah’s nightmares. She keeps having them, and she needs me there. It’s like she wants to be back at the accident, or she doesn’t have a choice, or she’s trying to make it right somehow. So she keeps dragging me with her so she won’t be alone, so she’ll be strong enough to stop it. And when she can’t, she starts blaming the driver of the truck and making it all his fault. So he’d be the one who had to—”
“What truck driver?”
“The bastard who aimed for our family’s car and killed our father!”
Maddie’s head came up. Her gaze swung from one end of the living room to the other. Then she stared at Jarred as
if she’d never seen him before.
“She wants me to…”
“What?” he asked.
He’d held this woman. Kissed her. He’d helped her professionally every way he knew how. And he’d almost gotten himself shot for his troubles. Maddie Temple had him on the run from mad scientists, outside the bounds of local law enforcement, and hiding in his ex-wife’s overdecorated living room. All because of her twin sister’s nightmares.
And that was when Jarred accepted reality, as he stared at the terror growing in Maddie’s expression and promised himself he’d make it better somehow. If he had to go back to that morning and do it all over again, he’d still be right where he was—by Maddie’s side every step of the way.
“You can trust me, Maddie. With anything. Tell me what Sarah’s nightmares want you to do.”
“Sarah wants me…I think she wants to kill the truck driver.”
“The driver that hit your family?”
“She actually thinks she remembers him aiming for the car.” Maddie was clawing at the skin on her arms again. As if a part of her was trapped inside and trying to find a way out. “It’s like we’re…becoming each other.”
“But they’re just nightmares.”
“And if they’re not? Like when…when I want to shut someone up and I’m angry and they keep talking, and suddenly they’re choking…and those guards…when they were hurting you, and then they were on the floor, and Sarah was making me—”
“You didn’t hurt them, Maddie. Not really. Sarah didn’t make you do anything.” Mostly because Metting had arrived. Metting and his outlandish excuses for the research he’d been doing into whatever Maddie and Sarah were experiencing.
The parapsychological implications of what the man had said fell so far outside any traditional diagnosis Jarred had studied, he didn’t want to believe them. But he could feel the conviction rolling off Maddie. The compulsion to face what neither of them wanted to.
“It’s only a matter of time.” She was staring at the cut on her finger. At her ravaged wrist. She rubbed at the blood trailing down her hand. “My entire family is cursed. My mother was so freaked about us, she turned Sarah over to be studied like a lab rat. To be turned into…”
Maddie looked up then, her glance begging Jarred for the truth.
“A government weapon,” he finished for her. He brought her hand to his lips. Then he wrapped her finger in a tissue from the box Victoria kept by the couch. Maddie was bleeding inside, too, where he couldn’t reach her. “Metting could just be covering his ass. But when he said the center wouldn’t stop hunting for you both…It was hard not to believe him.”
“Psychic weapons testing?” Maddie’s hand turned in his. She was holding on instead of shying away. “You can’t really believe that.”
She was searching Jarred’s face, maybe even his mind. Jarred had no idea what she was capable of—Metting had been right about that, too. Which meant Jarred was shooting blind and probably fucking up royally.
Was finding Sarah really their only chance, like Metting said?
“You…” Maddie pulled back. “You’re thinking I need to find my sister. Take her to the Raven, like he wants…You’ve been working with him all along…You’re—”
“What?” Jarred tried to hold on to her, but she jerked away.
“…help me convince Madeline to find her sister and bring her to me…” Maddie mimicked, in an exact replica of Metting’s voice. Verbatim what the man had said while she was still unconscious.
Jarred felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. She was reading his memories now?
“I wouldn’t take either of you back to him,” Jarred insisted.
“You want to use me to find Sarah.” Maddie’s entire body was shaking. “You’re just like him!”
“I want you to have the truth about what’s going on, and I can’t give that to you on my own. You have to know what’s inside your mind and Sarah’s, or none of this is going to get better. That means you have to find her. Screw Metting and what he wants.”
“I…I can’t.” Maddie backed into the couch and would have toppled over if Jarred hadn’t caught her. “I don’t want to know where Sarah is.”
“She’s your best chance to—”
“I won’t look for her.” Maddie stepped away. “I n-never should have gone to that place tonight. Now I’ll never be free of her. I hate her. I won’t—”
“You don’t hate your sister.”
“Don’t I? She’s still running. I can feel it, the same way I can feel you when you touch me. Except she’s not here. She’s out there somewhere, insane and running for her life and hurting people still. And I can still feel her. I want her to keep running, so I’ll never have to think about her again. Except, I can’t think about anything else. She wants to kill the Raven. She wants me to wrap my hands around his neck and—” Maddie shuddered. She clenched her fists, and Jarred could feel invisible fingers closing around his throat. “—squeeze until the hate goes away. Like our father went away. Like Phyllis and I abandoned Sarah at that place, for those people to do whatever they wanted to her, as long as she never bothered us again…”
“Stop this!” Jarred backed Maddie into the wall. He took her hands and forced them around his throat. He stared into her beautiful green eyes and watched as another woman’s darkness fought to take over. “This isn’t you, Maddie. It’s Sarah, trying to make you believe you deserve to—”
“To die!” She squeezed, her strength surprising them both. Her eyes widened as he fought for breath.
“You can stop this,” he said against her grip. “Don’t give in to your sister. You don’t have to be afraid of finding her, Maddie. You’re a healer, not a killer. You can stop this. You have to. Stop her now!”
“J…Jarred?” Maddie’s eyes rolled upward. Her fingers loosened without letting go. “Jarred, I…I don’t want to…”
“I’m here.”
Her entire body began to convulse.
“Shit!”
He caught her when she would have fallen. Laid her down on the couch and held her arms against her side.
“Stay with me, sweetheart. Maddie!”
He’d pushed her into this. He’d been pushing her since that morning. And every move he made only created a bigger mess. He wiped at the blood trailing from her nose, then at his own unshed tears. He kissed her hair and found himself praying for the first time since he was a child.
“Hold on,” he begged as her body convulsed. “Please!”
Damn it. Maddie was so certain she and Sarah were cursed. As if the dreams, their link, were innately evil. And he couldn’t keep her with him long enough to tell him why she was so sure. He needed more answers, danger or not. He grappled in his pocket for the cell phone that bastard Metting had tossed him. He flipped it open and stared at the number on the display. The number Metting had punched in. Ignoring it, he dialed information.
“Give me the home of Phyllis Temple—Boston,” he said as soon as the line connected. When he was switched to a recorded message, he selected automated dialing.
“Hold on.” He curled Maddie’s body tighter against him and listened to her mother’s line ring.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“…needs to know what she’s facing…getting worse.”
Maddie felt the words more than she heard them. And she felt warm. Safe. It was a wonderful dream…
“…she can’t talk right now…” the voice said. A man’s urgent voice. “No, it didn’t go well…Mrs. Temple, you don’t understand. I have reason to believe that Sarah’s no longer at the Trinity Center. She and Maddie are both in bad shape…”
Maddie felt the words get closer and the sentences longer and the voice more like…Jarred’s.
Mrs. Temple?
The Trinity Center?
Sarah?
The dreams. The government. Death.
Run!
A ghoulish flash of darkness and woods and hysterical fear jolted Maddie awake. She wa
s chilled to the bone but still wrapped in warmth…in Jarred’s arms.
“Mom?”
Jarred smiled. A reassuring turn of his lips that mocked the worry in his eyes.
“No, ma’am,” he said into the phone. “She can’t talk right now. But she needs answers if she’s going to find her sister and figure out—”
Maddie yanked the phone away.
I’m not looking for Sarah!
Jarred’s hand covered hers over the phone.
“Talk to your mother, Maddie. If there’s anything she knows—”
“About Sarah?”
Jarred blinked. “Talk to her about you. Because…” He brushed her bangs from her face, while Phyllis’s chatter continued on the other end of the phone. “Because I love you, and I can’t stand to think of these people hurting you anymore. I don’t know enough yet to stop them. Maybe your mother can remember something that will help us.”
Us?
Love?
The government—the Raven—were after Sarah. They’d used Maddie’s mind to do God knew what to her sister’s. And Jarred loved her? He kissed her lips with a softness that brought tears to her eyes.
“Ask your mother if she agreed to the Trinity Center’s dream experiments,” he said. “Don’t let Phyllis off the hook until she tells you exactly what the doctors at that facility were looking for.”
He was being so careful with her. But Maddie could feel the barely leashed violence inside him. A determination to fight whatever this was. Whatever he had to do to help her. Maddie brought the phone to her ear. Her twin’s voice whispered through her mind, trying to drown out what Phyllis was saying. Maddie shoved her confusion—Sarah’s confusion—away.
“Mom—” Her voice shook. She felt her sister stumble somewhere. Fall…Sarah’s fingers were grasping at the dry leaves covering the ground…“Mom, you have to tell me what’s going on.”
“How should I know? It’s been hours since you stormed out of here, and that doctor friend of yours is talking nonsense. You didn’t really go to that place, did you? Why couldn’t you leave things alone?”
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