Secret Legacy (5 page)

Sarah longed to close her eyes and let the ocean take her again. To quit, just as Maddie had said, so she didn’t have to face the reality of the commitment she’d just asked Richard to make. But that would mean sacrificing her sister and Trinity, and protecting her family was all Sarah had left.

“Promise,” she said, “that you’ll bring us back to find Trinity.”

“You have my word.” Richard’s raven panted as he fought the ocean’s pull. “Break your links with the dream, and we’ll figure out the next step together.”

But she could no longer feel the safety of his strong wings wrapped around her, or the comfort of Maddie’s heart beating
close by. Trinity’s cries were softer, too. Even farther away. It was becoming harder to hear anything at all, even her raven’s voice in her mind.

“Let go,” the ocean chanted. “This is where you belong.”

“
Stay with me, Sarah,” Richard called.

Her dreaming reality dissolved to darkness
. . .

“Sarah!”
Richard shouted inside the dream.

She was unconscious. Without her awareness feeding their link, sustaining his identity, the ocean vision was rapidly draining his psychic reserves. The matrix began to waver. He closed his raven’s wings even tighter around the twins.

The second she’d welcomed him into her nightmare, he’d felt another mind scanning his from somewhere in the sea. Something beyond Sarah’s awareness, most likely whoever was projecting the nightmare to her from the center. A consciousness he’d have to identify, for him to have any shot at protecting both Sarah and his brotherhood.

He blinked her sleeping quarters into focus. Her head lolled beneath his chin, her body convulsing. Madeline still clung to her sister’s hand, but she’d collapsed, unconscious, against Jarred. The doctor was wiping at the blood trickling from her nose.

“What the hell is going on?” Jarred demanded. “Why are they still dreaming?”

“Maddie’s too weak to disengage. They’re both unconscious inside the dream.”

“Then pull them out.”

“I can’t risk it.”

Richard told himself to reach for the comm unit beside the bed, but his arms wouldn’t obey. He couldn’t make himself let Sarah go.

“I need at least one of them lucid,” he said. “The nightmare’s already disintegrating. If I force a break now, both twins’ minds could be lost.”

“Maddie’s brought Sarah back before.”

“The nightmare’s in control this time.”

Richard stared at Sarah’s slack features. She was dying in his arms.

“Disengage from the dream, Alpha,” he ordered.
Alpha
had been her clinical designation at the center. She hated the name. She’d be furious with him for using it now. He was banking on it.

“Jarred.” He could barely force the words out. “Call for backup. I won’t be able to hold on to their minds much longer.”

There was an angry pause.

“Metting needs a dream-recovery team in Sarah Temple’s quarters,” Jarred finally shouted into the comm unit to an operator who wouldn’t miss the fear in the psychiatrist’s voice.

Richard felt Sarah’s chest above the collar of her cotton nightgown. Delicate skin. Racing pulse. Too-weak heartbeat. He sent his consciousness deeper into her sleeping mind. There was nothing now where her thoughts had been.

“Stay with me, damn it,”
he projected.

The sisters were so close to the surface, lying limp and unresponsive, encircled by his raven’s wings. He’d
only need a flicker of consciousness, one of them awake and willing, to bring them both back.

“Do something to get through to Madeline,” he growled to Jarred, “before my team arrives and the situation is removed from my control.”

“Maddie?” Jarred shook Madeline. “Sarah’s still in danger. She’s not free of the ocean. Save your sister, sweetheart. Open your eyes in the dream. Wake up!”

There was a feminine moan, followed by a flash of lavender light streaming through the dream link—Madeline’s consciousness reengaging. Her mind, weak but determined, wrapped around Richard’s. In the dream’s ocean, her image and the raven’s faltered, then held. She stirred and reached for her sister’s hand. In Sarah’s quarters, Madeline’s fingers tightened around her twin’s.

“Sarah
. . .
”
her mind called.
“We’re almost there. Let the dream go. Please
. . .
You have to—”

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.

“We’re getting closer with every projection,” the raspy voice 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.”