Except the nightmare around her now was very real.
He’s there… Sarah whispered as she gathered the last of her energy for when the Raven showed himself. He did this to me. To both of us!
Wake up, Maddie, a gentler voice intruded. Stay with me.
Jarred.
He was there, too. He would always be there. Even after she’d stabbed him. After he’d watched her hurt that man back in their motel room.
That wasn’t you, he insisted.
I…More of the world was coming into focus. The forest floor Maddie was sitting on. The very real tree she’d been propped against. Jarred’s still body was sitting beside her. I wanted to cut them, the same way I did you. Get away from me, Jarred. Run!
Never. He didn’t move. Not his body. Not his mind. That wasn’t you with the knife. Either time. I’m not even sure it was your sister. It was—
The Raven, Maddie finished. He’d taught Sarah. Trained her mind. Turned her into this. And he was there, in the woods. Circling overhead. Waiting for the next dream. Maddie had to—
Wake up! Sarah screamed. Move!
Jarred’s arm circled Maddie, pulling her closer.
Stay still, he warned. Close your eyes and stay still.
Jarred, on the other hand, was shaking his head, making an obvious show of waking. Attracting whatever attention was focused on them to himself alone. He felt responsible. He wasn’t going to fail her again.
Don’t you dare try to be a hero! her mind screamed at him, but she closed her eyes like he’d asked.
If Jarred did something stupid, or Sarah did something worse, before Maddie could—
Be still! both of them ranted at the same time.
Idiots in stereo, Maddie snapped at them. Just the thing to keep a psychotic maniac from losing her shit!
You’re not psychotic, Jarred insisted.
Go ahead, lose your shit, was Sarah’s response. He’s coming…
Through Sarah, Maddie could feel the Raven moving closer. She sensed that he knew, somehow, that she was aware of his every step.
“Dr. Keith, it’s good to see you again.” the voice from Sarah’s nightmares said.
Khaki-covered legs appeared in front of them. God! Maddie was…seeing through Jarred…while she felt the Raven approaching, through Sarah.
The man knelt.
Jarred spat in his face.
The Raven smiled as he wiped his cheek. He had them right where he wanted them.
Kill the Raven! Sarah screamed through Maddie’s mind. He has to—
“Die!” Maddie launched herself into a deadly leap for the Raven’s throat.
“No!” Jarred yelled.
Maddie toppled the man to the ground, consumed by Sarah’s insanity and drive to hurt people as badly as she’d been hurt. Her hands clenched, crushing his windpipe. She was going to die tonight. Jarred was going to die, and it was all this man’s fault.
“Maddie.” Jarred tried to pull her away. “Stop!”
Maddie can’t stop me anymore, Sarah chanted, as her visions of a long-ago accident, a hydroplaning truck, consumed Maddie’s mind.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
We’re Death, and it’s the Raven’s fault! Sarah insisted, clinging to her fading link to Maddie’s mind. Kill him!
“You’re not Death,” Maddie’s weak-ass boyfriend said out loud.
“Get away from us, Doctor, or you’re next,” Sarah ranted through her twin. Maddie’s hands squeezed tighter. “It’s time to kill the Raven.”
“You’re not strong enough, Alpha.” The Raven’s body relaxed against Maddie’s hold. “You’re expending too much energy maintaining your link, and it’s been too long since you’ve rested. Madeline’s weak. She doesn’t understand how to channel her emotions yet. The…hate, is it? Is that what your shadow control taught you to use? You should have known better. Your power here is dwindling. Disengage, Alpha, before you fry your sister’s brain completely. Target—”
“Don’t you dare!” Maddie screamed Sarah’s threat. But she was fighting for her freedom, too, and starting to win.
Fuck that!
“I’ll kill her,” Sarah seethed in Maddie’s voice. “I’ll kill you all.”
The Raven’s men trained their weapons on Sarah’s psychic hissy fit.
“No!” Dr. Useless tried to break Maddie’s grip on the other man. “Turn him loose, before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late for Death!”
Sarah tried to make her twin squeeze harder. She was in control of Maddie’s daydream, fuck what the Raven thought. She and Maddie had been here so many times in the Wolf’s simulations. The storm, the wind and rain, and the truck driver taking aim for their family car. The loss. Anger. Hatred. Sarah feeding on Maddie’s surging emotions. Funneling them into a drive to—
“Kill!” Sarah shrieked through her sister, pointing Maddie at the Raven like the lethal weapon the Wolf wanted them to be. “It’s all his fault. He has to—”
“No!” her twin’s companion insisted. “Don’t do this. Listen to me, Maddie. You’re a healer. Remember? You healed me.”
The Raven smiled at Sarah—at Maddie, whose fingers had loosened around his neck.
“I’m…I’m a healer.” Maddie shuddered, fighting Sarah’s hold. “I’m not alone. I’m not Death. I don’t want to—”
“No!” Sarah was losing. Slipping back into the lonely darkness she’d never escape.
“There’s something powerful inside your twin, Sarah,” the Raven said. “Something stronger than your hate. You have to let the hate go, or the…Wolf, is it? Don’t let the Wolf win.”
The Raven wasn’t smiling now. He was concern and care and protection—everything he’d been at the very start. Everything Sarah had believed when she’d let him lead her out of the coma so the Wolf could drag her back into darkness.
“Can you remember, Sarah?” the Raven asked. “Can you remember what I taught you?”
“Ja…Jarred?” Maddie sputtered.
“I’m here.” Jarred pulled one of Maddie’s hands from the Raven’s throat to cover the useless heart Maddie had kept beating. His love flooded Sarah along with her twin. He was making Sarah feel again. Making her believe there was another way. “I’m here with you, and I’m not going anywhere. I prom—”
“No!” Sarah forced Maddie to say. “The Raven has to die.”
“Then kill the bastard yourself!” Jarred pulled Maddie’s palm to his cheek, their link surging. “You’re done using your sister to do your dirty work.”
Sarah felt herself fading and the Raven watching. She’d seen him as a bird of prey for so long in the Wolf’s dream. Blamed him for the evil the Wolf wanted her to become. But in her mind now, in her sister’s mind, her Raven morphed back into the man Sarah had let herself believe in. The dream weaver who’d promised to be there for her no matter what, just like her twin’s doctor. The protector who’d asked for her trust while he’d trained her gifts and taught her everything he’d said she’d need to keep her safe.
“Richard…” Maddie whispered in Sarah’s voice.
He caught her—Maddie’s—other wrist and pulled it from his throat, holding Sarah through Maddie’s touch.
“I’m sorry, Sarah,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t protect you better. But this is your chance. Whether or not you’re ready for it. Are you what this Wolf wants you to be? Will you and your sister lose everything to his darkness—everything your legacy could become? Or will you trust Maddie to help you? Stop using her like a blunt instrument of destruction. Stop trying to kill. Trust me, and I’ll—”
“Never!” In her mind, Sarah was still strangling him. Squeezing until the life drained from the Raven’s eyes. “I’ll never trust you again. I’ll never give up. I’ll find another way. And the next time I get my hands on you, I won’t fail!”
“Target release, Alpha,” the Raven said. Disappointment drained the warmth from his eyes until he was once again a soulless scientist putting h
is lab rat through its paces. “Reset to zero.”
“I won’t stop!” Sarah gathered herself. Shoved Maddie’s consciousness aside. “I won’t stop until you die!”
Maddie’s hands snapped back to the Raven’s neck. Squeezing, crushing, going for the kill…feeding Sarah the Raven’s shock and pain…Jarred’s fear…Maddie’s disgust at what Sarah was capable of making her do.
“Help me,” Maddie begged as her fingers dug deeper. Her nails pierced skin until blood ran down the Raven’s neck. “I…I can’t stop…Please, help me.”
“It’s…it’s a dream,” the Raven croaked. He was a flesh-and-blood man again as he reached toward Jarred.
“You have to…wake Madeline up,” he said to the other man. “You’re the only one who can. My men won’t let her…kill…You have to…stop her, Dr. Keith. Madeline has to break her link with Sarah now!”
And Maddie could. Sarah could feel her twin’s strength growing with these two men helping her. No one had helped Sarah. Maddie would win, and then she’d leave Sarah alone in the darkness forever.
“No!” Sarah ranted at her twin. “I’m not going to let you—”
“Come back to me.” Jarred’s finger drew Maddie’s face toward his. Their connection became a healing light that Sarah couldn’t fight. “I love you, Maddie. Come back to me.”
“No!” Maddie screamed again. But her arms were dropping. Her body, her heart, were falling into a place so safe, Sarah couldn’t reach her.
“Damn it, do something!” Maddie’s lover was yelling at the Raven. “Get up and help her, you bastard, or so help me God, I’ll…”
Sarah was floating above them now, insanity returning in a welcome rush as she left Maddie’s mind behind. She watched her twin’s body shake. Maddie’s doctor-love wiped at the blood running from her nose. From the corner of her mouth. He was frantic. Terrified. And there the Raven was, fighting to save Maddie, too.
The way he’d promised to save Sarah…
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Maddie was dreaming. She couldn’t stop, but she didn’t care.
She was running again, through the woods. But she was searching this time, not fleeing. She was herself in the gray of Sarah’s dream world. And she wasn’t just looking for her sister. She was digging for answers. The truth was there in the storm swirling around her. Maddie was going to finally understand what the hell her sister really wanted.
Jarred would be waiting for her when she woke. The Raven would be there, too. This time, she was going to have the answers she needed to deal with them. She’d know why her sister was so certain they were destined to be Death. She’d know how to stop her. Maddie was going to take her life back. Screw the curses and the government weapons programs and the mad scientists and demented dreams she couldn’t stop.
Sarah was the one running blind now. And Maddie was locked into the madness with her. Again. It was time for the insanity to end, whatever Maddie had to face once she got her hands on her sister.
“If you don’t take this fucking blindfold off me—” Jarred growled as he was led through yet another door, into yet another room in some mystery complex that might be the center. It might not be. No one was telling him a damn thing. “If I don’t see Maddie in the next five minutes, I’m going to become a deranged killing machine!”
“Relax,” Metting responded, speaking for the first time since giving orders in whatever forest the rendezvous had been in, to have Maddie sedated and Jarred blindfolded and carted along for the ride. “Your patient is safe, and my job is to keep her that way. Including making sure you can’t tell anyone how to find this facility, if you were to escape and subsequently be captured.”
The tightly wound cloth over Jarred’s face was ripped away. Bright light assaulted his closed eyes. He held up a hand and blinked until he could see. The room was a sphere of white on white. Even the exam tables and cabinetry. The only relief was the color of his clothing and Metting’s. Black.
“Your anger will make what Madeline is going through harder.” Metting’s tone was mild. Detached. “I’d recommend pulling yourself together.”
In the woods, Jarred had seen the man’s anxiety. Streaks of panic while he fought to regain Sarah’s trust. Both were gone now. The only evidence that this was the same person who’d begged Sarah to believe him were the bruises on his neck. Metting turned his back while he studied something scrolling across the screen of a laptop docked on one of the high counters.
“Everything you’re feeling,” he said, “Maddie’s feeling it, too. Interesting. She’s—”
“She’s dying,” Jarred raged as Metting’s men left the room. “Because of whatever you’ve done to her.”
“On the contrary.” Metting didn’t look up as Jarred stalked closer. “I have nothing to do with what’s happening to Madeline at the moment. It wasn’t my programming that targeted her for dream projections. It’s not my emotions ripping her apart through whatever connection you two have built.”
“Programming?” Maddie’s dissociative states and every nightmare Jarred had shared with her replayed in his mind. “What the hell are dream projections?”
“They’re how Sarah’s reached out to her sister.” Metting dragged his laptop to the edge of the counter and beckoned Jarred closer. “They’re the focus of the government’s latest covert weapons testing.”
“But…” Jarred started.
Then he realized he didn’t know enough to even begin to know what to ask.
The laptop displayed something that looked like an EKG. But Jarred’s familiarity with heart-monitoring technology told him that’s not what he was watching.
“This is Maddie?” he guessed.
Metting nodded. “I tracked her sister’s sleep states the same way, when—”
“Sleep states?”
“Brain activity is different, depending on the phase of sleep the mind is in. Maddie’s mind will cycle in and out of the REM stage, six or seven times during an eight-hour period. She should be—”
Jarred grabbed the man by the shoulders and spun him around until Metting’s back was pressed against the counter.
“Where is she? Stay the hell out of her brain and tell me where she is. Now!”
“That would be inadvisable, given your current emotional distress.” The man sounded like a goddamned robot. “If Madeline’s going to have any chance of surviving this, you need to pull yourself together.”
“Surviving what?”
“What you came to me to protect her from—the center’s plans. Which we know now means this Wolf’s shadow programming, which he’s had Sarah embed into Madeline’s mind.”
“The…what wolf?”
Richard studied him, then the laptop, before answering. “Does this mean you’re ready to listen like a brilliant scientist, instead of a panicked lover?”
Jarred scowled at the wicked spikes on Richard’s monitor.
“What wolf?” he asked with more control.
“A wolf is the dream symbol Sarah chose to represent the person controlling her shadow programming.”
“Like you’re a raven…” Jarred added this new bit of information to the rest.
“Except that I was never supposed to become an active participant in Sarah’s dream projections. A control can’t risk becoming the target of a simulation gone awry. He has to remain separate, so he can bring the dreamer back when needed. So she’ll still trust him when everything in the dream is telling her not to. Given the fresh scars on your chest, Dr. Keith, I’d venture to say that you’ve already had some experience overidentifying with a dream projector. Now that you’re immersed into Madeline’s dreamscape, you can’t afford to let your guard down. Not until her mind is trained well enough to tell the difference between dream and reality.”
Jarred scowled. “You’re talking like I’m—”
“A control? Yes. Madeline turned to you when Sarah’s dream work began to split her from reality. Which makes you the only thing standing between your patient
, and her absorbtion into the center’s plans.”
“You were with the center.” Jarred glanced back at the laptop, at the ugly spikes and chaotic drops in Maddie’s brainwaves—pain that this man had a part in causing. He suddenly wanted to be the one throttling Sarah’s Raven. “Because of you, Maddie’s sister’s out there alone, spiraling out of control, and she’s taking Maddie’s mind with her.”
“Yes.” Metting’s clinical facade slipped, for no more than a second; then it fell back into place. “And no. I was there to protect Sarah, and I failed.”
“Right. This government defense program you said you infiltrated. And you were there to do what, exactly?”
“To strengthen Sara’s mind so she could resist the center’s plans for Dream Weaver.”
“And now you want me to believe that a wolf, not you, is the real threat to Maddie and her sister.”
“The Wolf’s simulations piggybacked my progress with Sarah, but they were kept secret from me. Which can only mean one thing.”
It didn’t take Jarred long to guess what. “The center suspected you weren’t there to give them a weapon. So they hedged their bets with the Wolf.”
“So it would seem.” Richard nodded, as if to welcome Jarred on board his sinking ship.
“Okay,” Jarred said into the silence that followed. “I’ll grant that it’s highly unlikely you’re working with the center, if they’re gunning for your operatives with tear gas and automatic weapons. So who’s behind this mission of yours to stop them?” He gestured around the lab. “Who’s so concerned about Sarah Temple they sent you on a suicide mission to stop what was being done to her?”
Jarred was battered and bruised and felt like he’d tangled with a freight train and lost. But Maddie’s life depended on him seeing things as clearly as possible. He took his first close look at the man beside him. At Metting’s rigid posture and the violent way his fingers snapped against the keyboard as he typed. Jarred saw controlled rage and a scientist’s desperation to find answers. But there was no malice. No careless drive to hurt. This was a man on a mission to protect a patient who was now beyond his reach, the same as Maddie was beyond Jarred.
Dark Legacy Page 17