“Put the gun away.” The arm holding Sarah’s own weapon swung until it was pointed at Jeff.
Every Watcher on the team materialized into their human reflections, all of them holding automatic rifles trained on Sarah.
“Stand down,” Richard ordered from where he was still holding Maddie. “Lower your weapons.”
The Watchers obeyed their Colonel, all of them but Jeff.
“Now’s your chance,” Trinity said to him in Tad Ruebens’s voice. “The question is, do you have the balls to see your plan through?”
“Shut up.” Jeff’s gun pressed deeper into Trinity’s tender skin. “Shut the hell up. That voice . . . It’s—”
“The voice of your contact at the center?” Ruebens’s sarcasm dripped from Trinity’s rosebud mouth. “The voice of the man you passed key information to about the legacy that was tainting your brotherhood?”
“You were . . .” Jeff shook his head. “I was—”
“Feeding the center information about my work with Sarah?” Richard eased Maddie to the ground and stood. Shock hardened his features into a dangerous, feral mask. “You gave away tracking coordinates for our other legacies?”
“No.” Jeff glanced at Richard, then back to Trinity. “I only gave up the Temples.”
“Information we never needed.” Trinity laughed, her voice filled with the sound of a carefree child’s innocence, while her words reeked of the kind of evil it took a lifetime to cultivate. “Regular contact was what we required, regular access to Brotherhood logistics. So we let you think your role was vital to bringing about this dream’s resolution. We needed your council to believe that Sarah and Madeline and Colonel Metting could never be trusted again—say, at the exact moment that your Watchers were under imminent attack. That my handlers needed inside help to arrange. And we’ve managed just fine, you and I, haven’t we?”
“Shut up!” Sweat ran down Jeff’s face. “Who the hell are you? I didn’t betray any tactics about other legacies. All I gave my contact were details about Sarah’s dream work.”
“And it’s supposed to be okay that the only people you betrayed were my family?” Sarah said, feeling everything she’d fought so hard to believe about the Brotherhood and her legacy’s place in it disintegrate before her eyes. “You badgered me into trusting you. You’re supposed to take us home. That’s what you said in the lab. You gave us your word as a Watcher.”
“Like you were supposed to be learning to control your psychic powers and using them to protect others?” Jeff said. “Meanwhile, you were growing stronger and more out of control and the council did nothing to stop it. And you”—Jeff thrust an almost deranged rush of hatred at Trinity—“You’re the most dangerous threat of all.”
“You bastard.” Richard stepped closer. “Our job is to—”
“Watch. Defend. Preserve. I know.” Jeff turned his gun on his friend, stopping Richard from advancing. “Just like I knew I’d never make it back from this mission alive. But I betrayed my creed and you, and I came here to protect the Brotherhood anyway. I initiated contact over a scrambled comm link in my quarters, on a dedicated workstation. Nowhere else. I never would have put the viability of other legacies—”
“What contact?” Trinity asked.
Her hands behind her back, she toed the ground with her bare foot, the gesture so coy, so childlike, Sarah closed her eyes. There was so much anger, so much evil, inside her child. How could everything have gone so wrong?
“My communications with my center contact,” Jeff said. “I was given an algorithm to use to cloak our connection, but I have every conversation recorded for the council to review once I’m gone.”
“Or were those exchanges just a dream?” Trinity’s smile held no sympathy for the man she’d helped destroy. “A harmless daydream, except for the secrets our link allowed the center to extract from your mind and your bunker’s sophisticated computer network.”
Jeff spun back to Trinity, fear twisting his handsome features even worse than his rage had. “I’m going to—”
“Kill me?” Trinity asked. “Imagine my surprise. Except, this is my father’s dream projection, and he gave it to me to bring to life any way I chose. Watch closely. You don’t want to miss my big finish.”
Light shot from Trinity’s eyes, striking one Watcher, who dropped to the ground. Then a second. Both mortal wounds that Sarah could feel ripping through the men’s bodies back in the lab.
“Stop!” Sarah screamed, the dream’s hold on her senses lifting.
The men’s agony. Maddie’s pain. Trinity’s warped drive for revenge. Jeff’s shock and regret and hatred. It all sizzled through Sarah, distorting the web of consciousness holding the dream together.
Bodies were writhing.
Hearts were shuddering.
Systems were breaking down both inside and beyond the dream.
Sarah should be able to—she had to—stop this. But she was too weak, her mind too fractured, to even reach for Richard. His consciousness was the only one she couldn’t sense now. Just as she couldn’t sense her own existence beyond the nightmare’s surface.
She was trapped once again, unable to release the dream, with darkness closing in and no way to stop it.
“You bitch!” Jeff spat at Trinity, his face contorted with madness. “This isn’t how it was supposed to happen.”
“She’s just a child,” Sarah begged.
A child whose insanity had been hardwired into her mind the same way Ruebens had programmed Sarah.
Sarah’s grip tightened on her own weapon. The primal need to protect the daughter she hadn’t been able to accept before was obliterating her ties to everything else, including her vow to never again kill because of one of Ruebens’s dreams.
“You’re dead,” Jeff said, his impulse to shoot Trinity slamming into Sarah, giving her only a instant’s warning.
She fired the gun, the bullet flying—
—into thin air.
Jeff’s body had already dropped to the nightmare’s floor.
Richard gazed up from Jeff’s dead image, while Sarah felt the lieutenant’s heart strike its last beat beyond the nightmare. The rifle Richard had used to kill his friend hung limply at his side. His horrified expression told Sarah exactly how badly she’d failed—how empty their dreams for the future had become.
“See,” her daughter said as the projection began to fade, along with the last of Sarah’s sanity as she listened to the desolation, the loneliness, in her child’s voice. “You’re just like me. You’ve always been just like me. Death follows us everywhere. It’s who we were born to be. Can you see it now? Can you see what we’ve become?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Maddie!” Jarred was screaming as Richard emerged from the nightmare.
The doctor was trying to stabilize Madeline’s blood loss, while Richard’s lab techs worked furiously to save the lives of the two Watchers Trinity had attacked. All three had gaping chest wounds, physical injuries that a dream reality shouldn’t have been capable of projecting beyond its matrix.
Richard stood amid the chaos, listening to the unbroken beep signifying the flat line on Jeff’s heart monitor. His second, his friend, had been the center’s spy from the start, while he’d baited Richard and war gamed with him and maneuvered the Brotherhood into the exact position the center had wanted them in. Richard shook off his shock and sadness and fury at his friend’s betrayal while he tried to regain enough of his own senses to search Sarah’s mind for a flicker of consciousness.
Her energy was gone, both within and beyond the matrix. Lost to him. She wasn’t releasing the dream, even though the rest of the Watchers were slowly coming around. He could sense Madeline’s consciousness returning to her body. But Sarah’s mind had disappeared into a darkness he couldn’t reach, while her stats on the machines tracking her condition were maxed to the red zone.
“Come back to me,” Richard begged.
She’d trusted him. She’d done everything he�
�d asked her to do. She’d given herself to her dream, to her team. She’d even trusted Jeff, just as Richard had taught her to. And none of it had protected her from Ruebens’s destruction. The bastard had created the third volatile component of the Temple Legacy and trained her in secret. He’d cultivated and programmed Trinity’s gifts into a sociopathic super weapon. Sarah had a child, and her daughter had been the danger barreling toward all of them from her nightmares.
Richard bent over her table, somehow managing to keep himself on his feet as he used the last of his energy to sustain his presence in the lab as well as her projection.
“Sarah . . .” His mind said as he swam through the dream’s empty, churning sea. “Let me see you. Wherever you’ve gone, you have to come back. I need you here to fix this. The Brotherhood needs you, and so does Trinity.”
Maddie’s healing touch wasn’t there to help him reach her twin. No recovery team was rushing to Sarah’s side. There were too many other critical injuries to contend with. Jeff would never again be at Richard’s back, supporting him as brother, as a sworn warrior. Richard’s mind alone clung to his faith in Sarah.
“You have to be Trinity’s Watcher now,” he said. “We have to make the elders see that—”
“Step away, Colonel,” a voice said. Mike Donovan stood beside Jacob’s hologram. “I have orders to take you both into custody.”
Richard faced the armed lieutenant and their elder, his hand remaining wrapped around Sarah’s, his mind still searching for hers. A four-man security team backed Donovan up, weapons drawn, all of them Watchers Richard and Jeff had busted their asses to train. Richard couldn’t detect any of their thoughts. Which meant their psychic shields were being augmented. He shifted his focus to Jacob.
“I’m not a threat to the Brotherhood,” Richard said. “Neither is Sarah, nor her sister.”
“All evidence is to the contrary,” Jacob said.
“You can’t attack the center complex without the Temples’ support. The center’s waiting for us to make the first move, just as I sensed at the surveillance site.”
“I suspect they won’t know how we’re coming,” Jacob said, “if your participation is removed from the planning. Taking you and the Temples out of the equation gives us the tactical advantage.”
“You’re being manipulated, sir.”
“We’re very aware, Colonel, of our egregious errors in judgment where you and the Temple Legacy are concerned. One of our top lieutenants is dead. Two other Watchers are in critical condition. Legacies have been exposed. Principals most likely taken by the center. How much more damage would you have us absorb before we decree this legacy too out of control and dangerous to be allowed to continue?”
“You’ll have to come with us.” Donovan stepped closer.
“Not until I recover Sarah’s mind from the nightmare’s matrix.”
“That’s no longer your concern,” Jacob said.
“It’s my only concern at the moment.” Richard looked around the lab at the dazed Watchers beginning to stir from the mission. At Madeline, whose condition seemed to have stabilized thanks to Jarred Keith’s efforts. But she wasn’t yet fully back. None of the mission team were conscious enough to help him explain what had happened. He had to buy them more time.
“The matrix shouldn’t have been capable of physically harming any of these people,” he reasoned to Jacob. “Trinity Temple’s powers are beyond anything we’ve dealt with before. We have to understand—”
“And we will,” Jacob said. “Once we debrief the team we sanctioned to guide the dream—at the same time we ordered you not to interfere. Then we’ll take care of the center and Trinity before any more damage can be done to our order or the other legacies we protect.”
Movement to Richard’s right caught his attention a second before a sharp sting pierced his arm. He looked down to see the needle being removed. His brain registered a moment’s shock at being caught off guard. Then his psychic barriers were dropping, leaving his mind defenseless, powerless. The security team rushed forward.
Donovan and another lieutenant grabbed Richard’s arms. His knees buckled.
“My suppression protocol,” he mumbled.
“Yes, sir.” Donovan was apologetic, but resigned to his duty.
Richard’s hand was dragged away from Sarah’s. A scream of denial sliced through her mind, then through him to the security team that he could no longer shield from her thoughts.
“Wait,” he begged as they dragged him away. “Did you feel that? She’s waking up.”
“No,” Jacob said, “she’s not.”
Richard looked back to see the man’s hologram directing a lab tech to inject Sarah, then Madeline, with the suppression meds that would trap their realities wherever they were currently anchored—leaving their minds in limbo.
The door to his dream lab whooshed shut, and he was dragged away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
There was no color in the darkness. No gentle warmth or enticing currents. No healing touch calling Sarah to the surface. Everything had been stripped away by the sound of a gunshot she couldn’t quite remember. A child’s scream, which had become her scream, then had become a truth that she’d never wanted to know.
It was familiar, the emptiness floating around her.
It was home.
It was beyond the madness she’d run from.
Except . . .
She didn’t belong in this lost place. She’d sworn never to come back. She wasn’t crazy. She never had been. Forgetting and hiding wasn’t who she was anymore. It wasn’t who she’d been born to be. It had destroyed too much. There was a future waiting. A truth she’d run from. A duty she could no longer deny.
Specto. Tego. Asservo. The Watcher’s Creed. Sarah’s creed now. She’d been dreaming of this moment her whole life—the moment when she’d be called to protect her legacy. There were people needing her to wake up. People she needed. Maddie, bleeding in Richard’s arms. Richard, staring down at his dead friend. Trinity—her daughter—knowing only hate and revenge and destruction, never love. Her little girl’s faith dying while she cried into Sarah’s dreams for help.
Her daughter . . .
Sarah’s memories surged back, conquering the vagueness that had filled the chasm between where her body was being held in a bunker detention cell and where her mind had been stranded when her nightmare’s connection with Trinity dissolved. It was excruciating, drowning all over again in her dream’s destruction. But Sarah had to feel it. She had to see it. She had to escape the safe nothingness her mind had been banished to. She had to face the reality that was far worse than her dreams had ever been.
She needed her team. She needed to make this right, somehow, before it was too late.
She could sense frantic activity as her consciousness returned to her body. She couldn’t move, but she could feel powerful minds nearby prepping for battle. The minds of Watchers.
Debriefing.
Reviewing.
Securing.
Planning to . . . silence a deadly psychic power. A legacy that couldn’t be controlled. Sarah’s daughter had become the center’s ultimate psychic weapon, and the Brotherhood was going to stop her.
Sarah’s memory replayed the innocence lurking in Trinity’s angry eyes. The pain and the betrayal. The light that Sarah had glimpsed shining behind Trinity’s scarred, impenetrable door. Bright white light. The purest of colors, glowing with her daughter’s potential for redemption. Light that was trapped within darkness, like the dimness of the bedroom where Trinity had met Sarah.
Trinity had said then that she wasn’t supposed to be there, that they’d find out. Sarah had assumed she was talking about the Watchers, then the center team who’d attacked them. But now that she’d met her child, or at least the little girl Ruebens had brainwashed Trinity into becoming, she knew better. She’d heard the desolation in her daughter’s voice when their nightmare finally ended.
Trinity had felt trapped. She’d become
trapped as much as Sarah was, in the deadly evolution of their legacy. And at the Lenox house, Trinity had been afraid that someone at the center would discover her mind reaching beyond them. She’d been afraid that Sarah would never come. That she’d always be alone.
Trinity’s whole life had been Ruebens’s programming, believing that his evil was all she had. That Ruebens was the only one who loved her. That except for the death he’d raised her to cause, she was nothing. Exactly the way a part of Sarah had once felt, exactly the way she’d been vulnerable to Ruebens’s tactics before Richard had shown her a new dream to believe in.
Her daughter had been taught to hate Watchers and to hate her family and to hate all but the darkest parts of her legacy. She’d never learned to balance the explosive dichotomy at the heart of their family’s strength, any more than Sarah had before Richard taught her, protected her, and loved her.
But a part of Trinity wanted to be different, Sarah was certain of it. A part of Trinity was still searching, needing to believe Ruebens was wrong. The part that was dying, because no one else had come for her. The part that had haunted a house for five years, running everyone else away while she waited for her mother to come home.
Sarah still didn’t trust the Brotherhood she’d been absorbed into. A part of her would always blame the council for what their blindness had allowed Jeff Coleridge to do while they focused their distrust and contempt on Sarah’s weakness. But Trinity deserved the same chance she’d been given. She deserved a life beyond the prison of the center’s experiments and training where she’d been trapped since birth. A future Sarah alone couldn’t give her child.
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