Secret Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  A streak of anger shot through their minds, a flash of furious gray from beyond the ocean’s pull. A second later, the doors to Sarah’s quarters slid open. Jeff Coleridge and a Watcher team filled the tiny room, prepared to neutralize whatever new threat the Temple Legacy posed to the Brotherhood.

  “Step aside,” Jeff demanded, his presence displacing the last of the healing energy Madeline had helped Richard create.

  Richard fought to stay grounded to the scene in Sarah’s quarters. His vision blurred as he sustained his presence in the nightmare, too. Jarred was blocking Jeff from advancing on Madeline.

  “Don’t touch her,” Jarred said. “They’re—”

  “They’re dreaming beyond Metting’s control, or you wouldn’t have called us.” Jeff grabbed Madeline’s arm. He tried to pull her away.

  Madeline shuddered, Jeff’s aggressive energy swamping her hold on the dream. Richard sensed her mind surfacing.

  “Don’t . . .” Her eyelids fluttered but didn’t open. Her identity straddled reality and the nightmare. Her body began to tremble. “Sarah?” she called out.

  “You’re hurting her.” Jarred grasped a fistful of Jeff’s black shirt. “Let her go. Give her and Metting a chance to—”

  “Step back.” Jeff’s voice was cool steel.

  The recovery team stood waiting with a portable defibrillator and a crash cart that held the pharmaceuticals Richard had designed to enhance the dreaming mind’s reintegration into its body. Each Watcher’s psychic talent would prove invaluable, too, as the dream’s damage to the twins’ minds was triaged and treated.

  “The less you resist,” Jeff warned, “the easier ending this will go for everyone.”

  “Ending it how?” Jarred demanded.

  “However it takes.”

  “Lieutenant . . .” Richard warned. He couldn’t finish the sentence. He could feel Madeline’s distress beginning to stir Sarah’s mind. He only needed a few more seconds. One more push to wake Sarah up.

  He and Jeff shared a tension-filled stare. Richard nodded his consent to his second’s unspoken plan. Jeff’s methods wouldn’t win him points with Jarred, but his instincts were as on the mark as ever.

  He pulled Madeline away from the psychiatrist. The twins’ hands and minds lost contact.

  “Sarah!” Madeline screamed. She collapsed to the floor.

  “Let her go.” Jarred fought his way to her side. “You’re—”

  “Hurting her,” said the woman in Richard’s arms. Sarah’s consciousness surged back to her quarters. But her eyes didn’t open. The nightmare still owned too much of her. “Let go of my sister,” she demanded.

  “That’s it,” Richard whispered into her ear, hating the pain and the mess and the hopelessness he couldn’t seem to banish from her life. “Wake up and kick the crap out of all of us for hurting Madeline.”

  In the dream, his raven’s wings folded her closer.

  “Battle your way back, Sarah,” his mind demanded. “Fight me. Hate me forever, but come back. Trust me just one more time . . .”

  He heard himself begging and accepted what it meant. Right or wrong, the emotional distance he’d forced between them was gone, and there was no going back. Not for him. Not after this.

  “She’s coding,” someone reported as his men worked over Madeline.

  “Damn it, Maddie,” Jarred demanded, “don’t do this.”

  The zap of the defibrillator sizzled through Sarah and Madeline’s link into Richard.

  “Maddie!” Sarah’s image cried in the dream.

  Her eyes jerked open in her quarters.

  Her mind jolted fully back to reality.

  “Maddie?” She strained against Richard’s hold.

  “Let them work with her.” Richard held Sarah down while he clung to the shadow of her mind that was still joined with his. “Madeline was unprotected in your dream. No shields in place. No recovery plan. And I’m in no shape to help her. Let my men stabilize her.”

  Richard’s ability to move between psychic states was far stronger than the twins’, and he was barely staying on his feet without the aid of the metabolic stabilizers he’d developed to lessen a dream link’s toll on a dreamer’s body.

  He wouldn’t let Sarah roll off the table to get to her twin. “Madeline’s system is in crisis,” he said. “My people know the transition protocol. They’ll—”

  “They’ll kill her . . .” Sarah blinked back tears. Then her gaze hardened. Madness transformed her expression. “Just like Tad Ruebens wants them to.”

  “Ruebens is dead.”

  “Just like you want them to!”

  “I want to—”

  “All you want is to get rid of us. You think I don’t know, that I can’t hear what your men are thinking? They want to let us go. To shut our minds down. Your elders want to. I won’t let you. You can’t send me back to the darkness, where I can’t help Trinity.”

  She dragged Richard to her bunk with startling strength and flipped him, pinning him to the mattress, straddling his waist, her knee pressed to his groin. She should have been too weak to move. The nightmare’s psychic backlash should have been incapacitating her the way it had Madeline. But Sarah’s fingers bit into the pressure points on either side of Richard’s throat exactly the way he’d taught her, first in dream sequences while her coma had imprisoned her, then in the center’s gymnasiums.

  From the start, Sarah had been a prodigy, mastering every physical challenge he placed before her. She was a natural at the combat skills that Watchers honed to stay mission ready. And she was at the moment in a killing rage, her mania focused on eliminating what she saw as her greatest threat—him.

  “Release, Alpha,” he rasped.

  “Don’t call me that.” Her grip tightened.

  Lack of oxygen would lead to blackout in under a minute. Ignoring the gray crowding his vision, Richard threaded his fingers through the dark hair cascading down Sarah’s neck. He pushed up until their faces were close, their gazes locked.

  “Do this—”

  His world narrowed until it was just her. Just them. Just as it had been at the very beginning, when recognition had fired inside him with the first brush of her mind.

  “—and Trinity will be lost. Madeline, too, because the Brotherhood will be done risking the security of our other legacies to foster yours. Kill me, and my men will take you out. whatever we could learn from your ocean dream will be lost along with you. No one will be there to protect the child you’ve risked all this to reach.”

  “Get your hands off him.” Jeff stood at the foot of the bed, leaving the recovery team and Jarred to their frantic work on Madeline. His sidearm was poised for a kill shot.

  Sarah’s hand clamped tighter around Richard’s trachea.

  Richard ran his fingers through her hair. He wouldn’t stop her. He wouldn’t hurt her again.

  “Let her go, Richard,” Jeff instructed. “She’s clearly still being manipulated by the center. She’s beyond even your mind’s reach.”

  Richard ignored him.

  “I’ll protect you and your legacy, no matter what it takes,” his mind whispered through his link to Sarah. “Believe that. Stop being a threat the Brotherhood has to silence. Be the warrior your sister and Trinity need.”

  “Drop your hands, Ms. Temple.” Jeff’s determination to stop her legacy flooded their minds. “Get your claws off Colonel Metting’s throat and out of his fucking mind, or I’ll drop you. Last warning.”

  Sarah flinched.

  Trembled.

  Her hate-filled gaze held Richard’s, then dimmed to a resigned emptiness that devastated him. Her hands slid from his neck. Her rage faded from their connection. As one, they fell to her bunk. Richard cradled her to his body, too weak to do more as she began to seize.

  “Get the recovery meds over here,” he ordered over the shock of feeling her mind slipping away.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “We’re getting closer with every projection,” the raspy vo
ice said over the scrambled connection. “Her mind is becoming even more unstable. That’s worth whatever risks today’s episode presented.”

  “Not if the Temples self-destruct before you get what you want,” he said.

  “They won’t. Keep reporting on schedule, and we’ll take care of the rest from our end.”

  “Metting’s been absorbed into the dream,” he said. “The Brotherhood’s on alert because of the leaks.” Developments that he had no doubt were connected.

  “Degrading Alpha’s condition to allow the dream to take control is the only matter you need be concerned with,” the voice said. “Dr. Metting’s interference is a variable we’ve already anticipated. His involvement tonight preserved Alpha for the next simulation. One more ocean projection will be all we need. Your job is to make sure that next dream happens, and then give us the details to control it.”

  “The elders know she’s capable of projection beyond Metting’s control. You won’t get another chance.”

  “Of course we will,” the voice insisted. “The dream patterns are in place. Her psychic strength is growing. Metting will champion her legacy. The council will be greedy enough to want more power at their command. Alpha is primed to reach for Trinity without Madeline to stabilize her. Once she does, the direction of the Temple Legacy will return to the center for good.”

  “Control will return to the child, you mean.”

  A circumstance he couldn’t allow to happen. Nor could he permit the Temples’ abilities to grow any further beyond Watcher safeguards.

  “The child’s actions are under our guidance,” the voice assured him. “Her devotion to the work she’s begun is unshakable. Her motivation is strong, if a bit immature. She’ll handle Alpha’s impending psychic break as skillfully as she’s caused it. Trinity will be ready to take advantage when Sarah herself initiates their next dream contact.”

  “ ‘The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world . . . ,’ ” he quoted.

  He swallowed his disgust at his own part in using a six-year-old girl to wage psychic battle.

  But Metting had lost his perspective. He’d left the Brotherhood irreparably vulnerable. If that meant staging a center victory in order to draw the Brotherhood into a battle they’d already have won if Metting had allowed the twins to be terminated along with Tad Ruebens—then so be it.

  “We’re making the world a safer place for all children,” insisted his center contact.

  This was the same shortsighted idiot who’d believed a Watcher could be lured into betraying his brothers with promises of fortune and a position of power within the government’s psychic testing program. For now, he’d play along. But he had his own agenda, no matter the sacrifice.

  “Realigning the twins with Trinity’s maturing abilities,” his contact said, “creates the capacity to protect all the world’s innocents from whatever evil strikes. The Temple Legacy’s promise can’t be allowed to languish because your council is too timid to take advantage of their potential.”

  The Temple Legacy had foretold of the arrival of psychic twins whose gifts would preclude the arrival of an even more powerful mind—Trinity’s. Augmenting the twins’ psychic abilities with Trinity’s mastery of Dream Weaver technology would allow the center to implant lucid daydreams into any subject’s mind. Those untraceable commands could then be remotely triggered, inducing behavior—from forcing someone to wear a color they hated to compelling her to bring a gun into a crowded mall and open fire. The subject would be completely powerless to stop her programming and would have no memory of its source.

  His contact’s rhetoric about protecting innocents was a cover for the center’s real objective—long-range weaponry, where any mind, anywhere, could become a government-targeted time bomb. And with the Temples fully under center control, the government would have secured an unstoppable mechanism for breaching other legacies like theirs. Other legacies that had just been exposed.

  For the safety of humanity, Sarah’s and Madeline’s and Trinity’s minds had to be silenced for good.

  “Just make sure,” his contact instructed, “your council allows Sarah Temple to continue her dream work. It’s time for you to earn your keep. Make it happen.”

  “Then my advice is to solidify the link between Sarah’s consciousness and Trinity’s as soon as possible. Metting’s going to be on a short leash. Even if the elders agree to risk another episode like today, their patience will be at the breaking point.”

  “As I said,” the voice agreed, “everything is proceeding exactly as planned.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I felt something in Sarah’s dream,” Richard said to his second-in-command. He and Jeff had just arrived at the Brotherhood’s secure surveillance location in the woods surrounding the center’s main complex. It was less than an hour since Sarah’s dream, and Richard’s system was still battling the toxic aftereffects of the projection. “Something organized. Planned. It was the same consciousness that was trying to trap her in the dream. whatever it was, it’s not here.”

  A mile to their left, a stretch of Massachusetts highway was a daily conduit for suburban commuters who spent a quarter of their waking life driving to and from Boston. But the center’s ten-year-old facility had been constructed at the heart of a thousand acres of government-owned property that was kept under constant surveillance.

  Jeff’s finger went to the communicator clipped around his ear, adjusting his reception of the intel streaming from the bunker’s command center.

  “Are you saying you sensed the source of our leak in the nightmare?” he asked.

  “It wasn’t looking for Brotherhood intel,” Richard answered. “It wanted Sarah, and it wasn’t happy when Madeline and I showed up to get her out.”

  “You completely sure?”

  Richard sighed. Being completely sure of anything could get a warrior killed.

  “You should have let me deal with her,” Jeff said. “Seeing Sarah’s hands around your neck was enough to convince me that she’s a risk we can’t continue to take.”

  “How would that have benefited the Brotherhood? Her mind is our only connection to whatever the center may be using Dream Weaver to do.” Richard stared at the complex through the leafless oaks, silently willing the building he’d infiltrated a year ago to reveal its secrets.

  “You didn’t win yourself any points with the council. You should have alerted them as soon as her rogue dream started.”

  Richard kept his mind tuned to the forest’s energy and to his faint connection to Sarah. “I’ve given them even more reason to question my loyalty to my oath.”

  “Should they question it?”

  “No.”

  He’d proven his allegiance to his Brotherhood long ago. When he’d had to choose between following his parents’ misguided use of his gifts or helping stop them. His fight for Sarah’s chance to embrace her legacy didn’t change his commitment to the path he’d chosen on that fateful night.

  “You have our reports.” Mike Donovan, the surveillance team’s lead, approached from Richard’s other side. “Nothing’s been missed here.”

  “Your intel is in order.” Richard refocused on the task at hand.

  Donovan’s team had detected no traces of psychic activity at the center, either while Sarah was dreaming or when the Brotherhood’s two satellite teams were exposed. Meanwhile, an energy spike had registered off the charts at an unmanned surveillance site on the other side of the state. A deserted but strategically significant location the Brotherhood couldn’t afford not to investigate.

  Every Watcher team not currently entrenched in a level-one mission had been recalled pending further orders, all but the recon team the council was staffing to fly out within the hour. A team Richard had yet to be placed in charge of. Instead, he’d been directed to make a final, hands-on determination about the need for further observation at the center, to return to the bunker to debrief Sarah about her nightmare, then to advise the council on how to
deal with the chaos his continuing dream work with the Temples was causing.

  He turned toward a child’s distant cry making its way to him on the late-night breeze.

  “You want a read from the inside?” Jeff asked.

  Richard had helped vet a center infiltration plan the Brotherhood had yet to execute. After his time within the complex posing as Dream Weaver’s project lead, he knew every access point to the facility. How to disarm every sensor. There were hidden passageways and unmarked entrances to labs and storage rooms that he alone was aware of.

  “They’d know we’re coming,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I can feel it.”

  “And you’re sure of this how?” Jeff asked.

  Richard wasn’t ready to admit that Sarah’s mind, though momentarily sedated, was still speaking to him. That through their link, he somehow knew that making a move on the center tonight would be a mistake.

  “Call it gut instinct,” he said. “We’re not going to find any answers here, not now. And they’re waiting for us to try. That gives them the victory before we step one foot inside.”

  “You can’t go to the elders with nothing but your gut,” Jeff warned. “The council wants answers that will end this mess with the lowest possible body count, while keeping our other legacies intact.”

  “Messes have a way of ending bloody whenever they damn well please.” Richard closed his eyes and listened to the sound of a lost child crying and an angry ocean laughing in victory. “We need the twins’ minds functioning and open to cooperating with us so we can understand what’s threatening the Brotherhood through them.”

  “Are you ready to explain to the council exactly how you’re planning to guarantee Sarah and Madeline’s cooperation?”

  “No.”

  He’d promised Sarah they’d save Trinity. Following through on that pledge would garner her further cooperation with the Brotherhood, but the answers they needed to get the job done were still trapped inside her mind, memories that she refused to analyze. And she still didn’t trust Richard. Not enough to let him guide her back to her past, or forward into another pass through her ocean dream.