Dark Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  Metting began to run toward wherever their transportation was waiting. Jarred raced beside him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Maddie hadn’t been back to Lenox since she and her mother moved away. Leave it to her maniac sister to finally drag her home. Kennedy Park was only a few miles from their old house. Not that far from where their father had died.

  Maddie looked up at the winter sky and shivered. Cold seeped through the insulated gear Metting’s people had provided. The bare oak trees looming above the familiar bike trail she was following were the trees from Sarah’s nightmares. It was dark, but a harvest moon laced everything with ghostly beams of light. Its illumination shifted with the howling wind blowing around Maddie. The sound of the storm overhead and of ever-moving branches, of her boots kicking dead leaves off the frozen ground, hinted of rustling feathers looming closer with every step she took.

  And with every step, she could feel Sarah more, as if her twin was reaching for Maddie somehow, even though Sarah’s plan had been to do this alone. Their link had grown stronger, the closer Maddie got to the park. She’d first noticed it when the Watchers’ van crossed into Berkshire County. Now, with Metting and his men following her at an undetectable distance, all she could feel was the darkness of the night. Sarah’s fear, closing in. Her sister’s confusion and exhaustion and determination to end this.

  Sarah was hiding. Watching. Trying to find Phyllis with her mind. To sense the Wolf before he could draw Sarah into the open.

  Maddie stopped, panicked that she’d do something to expose her twin to danger. The confusion of Sarah’s chaotic emotions was spiraling higher. Taking over. Blurring everything but the impulse to be good, finally, or die trying. What was the plan—that Maddie should wait for Sarah to make her move? Or was she to wait for the Wolf to show himself? Or should she avoid a confrontation, grab her twin before Sarah could reveal herself, and restrain her until Metting’s men could recover their mother?

  Maddie couldn’t remember.

  She couldn’t think.

  She had to hide.

  She grabbed her pounding head and ducked behind a tree. She slid down its trunk until she was squatting on the forest floor, her mind exploding with streaks of red and black…Sounds of death circling ever closer. Flashes of her father’s accident. The explosion. The fire that she needed to get to, because this time she had to—

  Die!

  “No!” Maddie whispered. “It’s only a dream. The Wolf’s dream…”

  She had to keep it together. She was the Raven’s decoy. She was Sarah’s sanity. Her light.

  “Get your hands on Sarah,” Metting had said. “Hold her down if you have to. Control her emotions. The Watchers will take care of the Wolf.”

  Maddie could do this. She could make this right for Sarah. For herself. They were getting Phyllis out. They were ending Dream Weaver. It was the only way Sarah could be free of the darkness. The only way Maddie could go back to Jarred, assuming he’d want her after the way she’d left him.

  No more death.

  No more insanity.

  No more lies.

  White. Healing white. Maddie was born to be a healer. Jarred had helped her see that. This time, she’d heal the other half of her soul. Her twin. It was the only chance either of them would have to start over.

  After several cleansing breaths, Maddie opened her eyes to the darkness surrounding her. She opened her mind even more—letting Sarah’s turmoil flow through her. Letting it lead her. No more fear. No more hiding. She stepped back onto the narrow trail that wound through the dense forest of their childhood.

  “Find your sister,” Metting had reminded her just before she’d left the Watchers’ van. A full day of strategy and travel, armed warriors that had her back for when things got ugly, but ultimately it was all up to her. “Don’t contact Sarah. Try not to alert her that you’re there, or that we’re behind you. Focus on her emotions. Let them lead you. Secure her. Don’t let Sarah engage. The Wolf will be waiting. He’ll be overconfident and careless. My men and I will take things from there. Just keep Sarah out of it. Remember…You’ve reached her twice now. Inside your dream link, you’re stronger than the Wolf. You can control Sarah regardless of his plans. You have to believe that, so Sarah can, too.”

  Closing her eyes, Maddie pictured her twin, crouching and still, the way Sarah had looked hiding in that abandoned building. Only there were trees and underbrush around her now, and wind and fear and hate…

  …hate for the loss and the death and the lies and the center and the Wolf—even for her Raven. But not for Maddie. Not anymore. Maddie would take care of their mother. She’d take Phyllis somewhere the center would never find them. And Sarah would finally get to be the good sister.

  All she had to do was free Phyllis. Maddie would figure out the rest. Both of them would finally see that Sarah wasn’t Death—not in the end.

  Sarah knew she could do this. She was feeling better. Focused, now that the moment was finally here. Ready to end this. It would be okay. Once Sarah took out—

  The Wolf…

  He was in the clearing.

  Clutching Phyllis to his side.

  “You can’t hide from me,” said the man who’d painted himself as a gray wolf in her dreams. The night was storming around him, blurring the scene into more dream than reality. “Stop hiding, Sarah. Your life for your mother’s, that’s our deal. You dragged me here. She’s fine, just like I promised. Live up to your end of the bargain, and I’ll let her go.”

  In Sarah’s mind, a raven circled overhead. Drawing closer by the second. Fitting. He’d get to see her victory. But he’d be too late to stop her. Sarah would beat the Wolf while the Raven watched and finally knew she didn’t need him. He’d started this. She’d end it.

  “Come out now,” the Wolf demanded. “I’m losing patience.”

  But Sarah couldn’t leave her hiding place.

  A buzzing was tickling her mind. An alarm. Something telling her not to move. Someone. Or was it just the wind and the trees and the shadows and the Raven and how much it all reminded her of what the Wolf wanted? What he’d wanted from the start…

  No! Her mother. Sarah had to remember her mother, not the Wolf’s shadow dream. She had to stay focused. Save Phyllis. Beat the Wolf. Make her mother and the Raven watch.

  “Let her go,” Sarah called from her perch beneath the grandfather oak—Maddie’s name for the ugly, looming tree her sister had never guessed was Sarah’s secret hiding place.

  It was the same tree the Wolf had painted into each of their shared dreams.

  “If you want me,” Sarah called out, “let my mother go fi rst.”

  Then Sarah would walk up to the Wolf, pretending to cooperate. She’d walk right to him and slit his throat. His men, hidden at the edge of the clearing, would try to open fire. But they’d be dead, too, before her mind was gone completely. Because they’d turn their guns on each other, not her. Sarah could see it in her mind—all of them, shooting one another. Killing. Dying because they were too weak to fight the daydreams she’d plant inside them while she hid.

  She’d take care of them after the Wolf was down.

  After Phyllis was free.

  “Let her go!” Sarah projected whispers into the Wolf’s men’s imaginations. Distracting them, so they wouldn’t detect where she was hiding. “Let my mother walk across the clearing. I won’t come out until you do.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll do exactly what I say.” The Wolf pushed her mother to the ground. “Come out, Sarah, or I’ll kill her.”

  He raised his gun. The raven circled closer. So did the buzzing in Sarah’s mind.

  “Leave my mother alone!” Sarah stumbled away from the tree’s cover. “Let her go.”

  The Wolf’s smile lit up his gray face. Phyllis stared at her. The Wolf flicked the safety off his weapon.

  The raven’s wings spread. Bare tree limbs swayed.

  The gun in his hand fired.

  A scream ripped throu
gh the night. Sarah’s scream, as she sprinted for her mother…

  “No!” Maddie’s mind broke from their psychic link as she bolted into the clearing, too. She was too late. Always too late. “Damn it, Sarah! Stop. Stay away from him!”

  Sarah raced from the grandfather oak. Her head was splitting. Her heart was breaking. Flames of defeat consumed everything. She was too late. Always too late.

  The Wolf’s thin laughter reached her. Engulfed her. Destroyed her absolution.

  “God, please don’t let her be dead…” Sarah prayed for her mother. The way she prayed for her father in every dream the Wolf had forced her and Maddie to have.

  “She’s not dead,” the Wolf chided. “Not yet.”

  The flames cleared from Sarah’s vision, enough for her to see Phyllis sobbing uncontrollably but unharmed at the Wolf’s feet. For her to sense the very real nightmare approaching from behind. Running toward the Wolf, exactly the way he’d planned all those times he’d made Sarah reach for her sister’s mind. Torture it with memories of their father dying. Implanting the shadow-dream simulation that was about to unfold, no matter how hard Sarah had fought to keep Maddie out of this.

  She spun around.

  “You bitch!” she shrieked in her twin’s face. “You just couldn’t stay away, could you? You couldn’t stand it—letting me win. Letting me be good for once. Now look what you’ve done!”

  “Sarah.” Maddie reached out her hand, the way she had in the playhouse. “Back away from the clearing with me. It’s going to be okay, I promise. But—”

  “Okay?” Sarah felt the Raven drawing closer for real.

  For a fleeting moment Sarah let herself hope she could stop this. But the Wolf’s men were closing in, too. She couldn’t stop once the Wolf’s simulation took over. No one could, not even the Raven.

  “You have to take my hand,” her sister insisted.

  “No!” Sarah shouted over the Wolf’s laugh. “Run away, Maddie. Now!”

  “Not without you.” Maddie stepped to her side, her eyes already going vague with the shadow dream Sarah had no choice but to project. “We’re in this together, and—”

  Maddie flinched.

  So did Sarah.

  Their gazes met.

  Their minds.

  Their dreams.

  One dream…

  The one Sarah had been forced to project into Maddie’s mind every night, while Sarah worked with the Raven’s host. Over and over again. All of it building to this awful moment.

  It’s too late…Sarah’s mind whispered across the buzzing link that the Wolf had somehow kept her from recognizing was Maddie.

  Too late… Maddie’s mind repeated back, as the raven’s wings spread overhead and bare tree limbs swayed.

  The Wolf stepped closer.

  “Lucid field simulation,” he commanded. “Engage.”

  Sarah watched Maddie’s eyes glaze as they both fell into the nightmare. They were awake. But the Wolf’s dream was all they could see…

  “Holy shit!” Their father’s attention jerked to the rainsoaked country road.

  His panic sliced into them.

  Their car skidded across the center line. Sarah and Maddie screamed, just like a hundred times before. Held their breaths. Prayed the tires would grab. But the car’s wheels spun faster instead. Death raced toward them, more precious by the second. Because like an addict, they were reaching for it now. For the grace that came only in this moment.

  Their absolution.

  Because a split second before the tanker truck pulverized the driver’s side of their family’s Chevy, their father’s anger evaporated.

  Please God, let my girls be okay.

  Make them okay again.

  Take care of my little girls.

  The truth was agony, when it no longer mattered. But Sarah’s and Maddie’s minds clung to their father’s thoughts of unconditional love.

  Then they were ripped away…

  The agonizing jumble of what followed swallowed them. Psychic energy beating at them, splitting them, until the racket of the crash drowned out every other sound.

  Just like every other time…

  Except the Wolf was in the dream this time, dragging Maddie toward the crumpled truck that had ground to a halt near the car.

  “No!” she and Sarah cried in unison.

  “Look who killed your father.” He forced Maddie to gaze into the driver’s window. “Look who has to—”

  “Die!” she and Sarah screamed, as the truck driver from the earlier nightmare, the one with the Raven’s black eyes, disappeared.

  In this final simulation, it was Phyllis Temple in the driver’s seat.

  Their mother had done this. All of it. She’d lied about the legacy since they were little. When their father was gone, she’d hidden Sarah away and lied again. She’d let the Raven and then the Wolf turn Sarah into Death, so Maddie would never know the truth.

  And the truth was, that Phyllis Temple had to—

  “Die!”

  Richard and his men arrived at the Wolf’s rendezvous less than a minute behind Madeline. But everything had already gone to shit.

  Madeline stood in the clearing, facing her sister, their mother sprawled on the ground. And behind Sarah, forcing her to direct whatever psychic confrontation she and Madeline were locked into, was the man who’d made himself Sarah’s Wolf.

  “Ruebens,” Richard said.

  “Sir?” Jefferson, his second-in-command, was tracking the line of armed men ringing the far edge of the clearing.

  “Alpha’s wolf. Her shadow-dream control. The man who drew the Temple twins back together.” The gray-haired, gray-bearded bastard had always seemed more cruel and unforgiving than the center’s other scientists. But he’d never appeared as evil as he did now, smiling while the twins squared off. “Dr. Thomas Ruebens is the Wolf.”

  But it was only when Madeline reached for the man’s gun, only when he stepped aside so she had a clear shot at her cringing mother, that Richard fully understood what was unfolding. Why the man had allowed Sarah to contact her sister undetected. Why Sarah had been allowed to run free, after escaping the center, so her psychosis would pull herself and her twin together.

  It had all been planned. Every move. Even Richard equipping Madeline and Jarred with just enough information to motivate them to play along. The Wolf had seen it all. Planned every move.

  “Oh, my God. The Beta field simulation the center was pushing for. The shadow dream about the Temples’ car accident, that the Wolf used to link the twins…The center directors never expected me to complete full lucid dream testing. Ruebens had his own design in the works. He knew exactly which dream host would most impress the DOD, when the host was forced to kill against character…to kill her mother in a lucid daydream that made Phyllis Temple responsible for her husband’s death.”

  Jefferson stared at Richard, then at the nightmare unfolding before them.

  “Prepare to take all targets,” he said into his com link.

  “No!” Richard ordered into his own. “Belay that. Stand by, but stand down.”

  “If the legacy evolves fully into darkness while the Wolf controls the twins,” Jefferson argued, “then—”

  “There’s still time. I’m not giving up on Sarah yet.” Even though Richard had promised himself he’d end her suffering before he’d let the center have her back.

  He’d promised not to let Sarah kill again, and there she was, aiming Dream Weaver’s Beta prototype—her twin—at her own mother. Both women were primed to blow Phyllis away. Dream Weaver was about to become a very deadly reality.

  “Sarah won’t go through with it,” he insisted. “I don’t care what programming the Wolf’s embedded. Madeline won’t let her. Together they’re—”

  “An unstoppable evil, if the Wolf can get them to do this! You took an oath,” Jefferson insisted. “We all did. The elders want this contained tonight. I’m not going to sit here and watch—”

  Richard yanke
d the other man up by his Kevlar vest.

  “You’ll damn well watch whatever I tell you to watch until I’m removed as lead. Is that clear!”

  Jefferson shoved him away. They’d been through too much together, on too many suicide missions they’d somehow survived, to be intimidated by each other.

  “The twins will take us all out,” Jefferson said. “They’ll do whatever the Wolf’s programming tells them to do.”

  “Or they’ll kill him,” Richard countered, “and with him our worries about the center and Dream Weaver.”

  Jefferson glanced back at the frozen scene in the clearing. Madeline still held the automatic weapon, while Sarah and Ruebens and Phyllis and all of the center’s men watched in either awe or terror.

  Disengage, Alpha, Richard demanded, dropping his psychic shields and blowing his team’s location. Target release.

  Ruebens’s head came up to find Richard and his men on the other side of the clearing. Sarah and Madeline jerked in unison. But instead of dropping the rifle, Madeline raised it higher.

  “Die!” Madeline’s voice carried over the sound of an approaching storm.

  “Prepare to—” Jefferson started to say on his com.

  “No!” Richard grabbed his friend’s arm. “Just a little more time. Give them just a few more seconds.”

  Please, Sarah. Disengage. See your mother. See your sister. See what’s really happening. Trust me just one more time…

  Jarred shouldered his way to the front of the armed men he’d followed through the frigid park. He’d heard someone give the kill order over the com system.

  He skidded to a halt beside Metting and another man, and looked out into the nightmare scenario that Maddie was never supposed to have walked into.

  “What happened?” he demanded.

  “Talk to her,” Metting insisted without preamble.

  “What?”

  Jarred stared at the moonlit clearing. At the positioning of the people grouped in its center. At Maddie as she—

  “What the hell is she doing?”

  “She’s trapped in a lucid dream,” Metting said. “She’s trying to—”