Dark Legacy (2 page)

Ten Years Later…

“Die!”

The command echoed. A raven’s wings spread. Bare tree limbs swayed.

The gun in her hand fired.

A scream ripped through the night.

“No!” Kayla Lawrence jerked awake to a room filled with shadow and silence and the dampness of a summer storm.

Her bedroom.

Another stinking nightmare.

She shivered, sitting up, her legs twisting in the sheets.

She rubbed her hands down her arms, calming herself. Her head slid back to the pillow. She closed her eyes. The rustle of wings was still there.

…deeper than before…a humming…growing louder…closer…

…the sound of her car’s engine, revving too high…

Her foot punched the gas pedal to the floor.

Acceleration ripped her from sleep.

“Shit!”

She yanked her foot back. Shook her head as her bullet-fast Mustang decelerated. She’d fallen asleep driving!
It was dark as death outside. What was she doing in her fucking car in the middle of the night?

Rain beat at the windshield. There were no wipers to clear her view. No headlights. Thankfully, no other cars in sight. She hit the brakes and swerved toward the side of the road. Stumbling into the warm rain, her silk nightshirt glued to her body, she rounded the back bumper and reached the grassy shoulder of a country highway.

Lightning flashed. Sheets of shiny black water rained down. She tilted her face toward the bare branches of the tree she’d stopped beside. The same one from her nightmares. She lifted a shaking hand to shove back her hair.

The next flash of light illuminated the gun she held before her face—an automatic, covered in blood.

“Die!”

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

The gun fired.

A scream ripped at the night…

“No!” Kayla lurched awake, in her bed once more.

A frantic glance to her window revealed a crystal clear winter night. No summer storm. No ghostly tree haunted by eerie specters with demonic, piercing eyes. She winced against a flash of lightning that wasn’t there.

God, she was losing her mind.

No! They were just dreams. Twisted, increasingly bizarre. But they were just nightmares. Meaningless. They’d go away eventually. She rolled to her side, curling beneath warm flannel. She closed her eyes, refusing to let the ghosts win.

“Die!”

The malevolent command sent her scrambling, reaching for the bedside lamp. But the golden haze it cast only
added to her panic. Her gaze traveled down the nightshirt that was soaked to her skin by the sickening sweat of fear. Down to the pistol she clutched in her left hand.

“Oh, God!” Her arm bent. The barrel dug into her temple.

Summer thunder rolled.

Raven wings spread.

A tree’s ghastly limbs swayed.

“Die!”

Dr. Richard Metting rechecked every monitor. He listened to the information streaming across the intercom from the center operatives observing Kayla Lawrence’s dream simulation. He accepted the reality that he’d failed to protect the woman lying on the exam table before him.

Not that he allowed his shock and surprise to register in his expression. Neither he nor Sarah Temple would make it out of Trinity Psychiatric Research Center alive if he didn’t play the next few minutes right. Like the dispassionate scientist he’d been portraying for the last year. He nodded stiffly at a tech checking the leads to their research subject’s heart monitor.

Sarah’s pulse rate was up. Respiration choppy. Nothing they hadn’t seen before. Nothing deviating too far from acceptable norms. Except Richard’s test subject should be awake. And a handgun he hadn’t designed to be part of the dream she’d projected into Kayla Lawrence had appeared in the other woman’s nightstand drawer. Oh, and the still-unaware Lawrence was currently sleepwalking, trying to commit suicide with a weapon she wouldn’t remember buying if she survived long enough to wake up.

He studied the young woman lying on the exam table.
The headset feeding Sarah sensory stimuli would play until his “Alpha” projector broke free of her shared dream with Lawrence. It emitted a seamless backdrop for tonight’s storm variation, anchoring the reality Sarah’s and Kayla’s minds were locked into.

Using Dream Weaver techniques, Sarah linked with her host’s unconscious mind. She utilized a set of symbols to implant a custom-designed dream that would be triggered later. Then she was supposed to retreat back into the collective unconsciousness—leaving enough echoes of nightmare to encourage her host’s mind to forget she’d ever been there. The center’s recon team tracked the host’s actions after Lawrence woke, to isolate whether the embedded daydream was triggered on cue. And to make sure the host didn’t become suspicious of the real origin of her behavior.

Except Sarah’s work with Kayla Lawrence had never included the directive to purchase a weapon—not at this stage of testing. Not by Richard’s design. And he’d never had this much difficulty disengaging Sarah from a shared dream.

Richard extracted the IV line from the shunt in Sarah’s chest. He’d administered the recovery drug ten minutes ago. Standard protocol for aborting the REM state that nurtured the dream link. He stepped to the foot of the observation room’s bed and pricked Sarah’s arches with his probe. Nothing. No movement, except for her eyes darting from side to side behind their lids.

Damn it!

He’d infiltrated the center to stop this precise scenario from occurring. To be the one who brought Sarah Temple back from her coma, to discover what the other center scientists knew about psychically training the mind through dreams, and to limit their testing to experi
ments that caused no long-term harm. He was supposed to get Sarah out before Dream Weaver could be fully developed from her psychic gifts. Except he was no longer in exclusive control of her abilities. Maybe he never had been.

Sarah’s hand jerked, then her arm. Involuntary muscle spasms. The heart monitor kicked into a tantrum. Her condition deteriorated into seizure. Alarms blared from every piece of equipment in the glass-enclosed cubicle. A crash team would descend in a matter of seconds.

“Alpha!”

Richard pulled her headset free. Gothic echoes of wind and lightning and a thunderstorm surrounded them. He fought the instinct to yell Sarah’s name. To reach out to her, through the personal psychic link no one at the center knew he’d forged. He grabbed Sarah’s hand, his body blocking the gesture from the camera recording over his shoulder.

His mouth at her ear, he whispered, “Come back to me, Sarah. Don’t give in to this. Come back, so I can get you out of here.”

…almost free…

Anger burned through Sarah, harsher than the fear. Jagged-edged, like the storm raging outside the Temple family car.

And her father’s anger wasn’t the worst of it. The farther they drove from the police station, the deeper his hopelessness grew. For the little girl he’d lost. The perfect daughter she’d never been.

“You’re high again, aren’t you?” he demanded from behind the wheel. “Your mother and I just sprung you from county lockup, and you’re already high again.”

There was no surprise in his voice. He sounded tired. He was giving up.

It was only a dream, some still-sane part of Sarah knew. A shadow dream she couldn’t stop from happening over and over again. But believing this was real was the only blessing that remained. The only memory that was still her own. So she made her gaze lock with his in the rearview mirror. She took one more look, before—

“Holy shit!” Her father’s attention jerked to the rainsoaked country road. His panic sliced into her.

Their car skidded across the center line. She screamed, just like a hundred times before. Held her breath. Prayed the tires would grab. But they spun faster instead, death racing
toward them, more precious by the second. Because like an addict, Sarah was reaching for it now. For the grace that came only in this moment.

Her absolution.

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

“Please, God, let my Sarah be okay. Make her okay again. Take care of my little girl.”

The truth was agony when it no longer mattered. But Sarah’s mind clung to her father’s thoughts of unconditional love. He’d never really given up on her, not completely, even if he hadn’t been able to say it.

Then she was ripped away. By her mother’s shock. By the truck driver’s curses. Her father’s pain.

The agonizing jumble swallowed her. The psychic energy flared, beating at her, splitting her, until it became the metal-on-metal of impact. Then she was flying, breaking, shattering into the darkness. Reaching for her twin’s mind…hating that Maddie had to be there…that Sarah couldn’t stop herself from reaching for her sister, any more than she could stop the dream.

Sarah let the wind and the storm’s anger surge through her. She pushed to her feet beneath the phantom branches of a looming oak. Her head splitting, her body broken, she fed on her mind’s tenuous connection with her twin’s. On the shared dream’s power. She stumbled toward her father and the twisted, burning mess that no longer resembled their car.

He was still alive, his panic searing through her. And she would save him this time. She had to. They would both be free if she just made it before—

The explosion hurled her backward, slamming her into the tree’s scarred trunk. Fire engulfed the Chevy, denying her
again. Then she was crawling through the mud. Pleading, when there was no one but her sister to hear.

“Maddie…help me…” Sarah begged, needing the greedy flames to take her, too.

Before she and her demented dreams were responsible for someone else’s death.

“God, please don’t let me—”

“—kill anyone else!” Maddie Temple cried, waking from a recurring nightmare of fire and destruction and loss. “Oh, God!”

She stumbled to the bathroom, consumed by ten-year-old memories that belonged to her coked-out twin. Memories, like the emotions Sarah had bombarded her with the night of the accident, that weren’t Maddie’s but wouldn’t go away. She retched into the toilet, her father’s desperation and shock and death still churning inside her.

Empty, her mind finally quiet, she collapsed against the side of the tub.

“Damn you, Sarah.” And damn the guilt that heckled Maddie’s revulsion for what her sister had become.

It hadn’t been Sarah’s fault that they’d always known things. Felt things they shouldn’t. They hadn’t dared let anyone see how much. Their mother would have been terrified. So Maddie and Sarah had turned to each other for support and comfort and control. But while Maddie’s intuition had developed until she could sense enough of someone’s pain to help them, Sarah’s had escalated until she was experiencing everyone’s everything.

Schizophrenia, one doctor had labeled it by the time they were ten. Bipolar disorder, another diagnosed at fif
teen. By then, Sarah was self-medicating away the worst of her mania with drugs. She’d said it was like she
became
the person she was feeling through—a debilitating burden from which Maddie had tried her best to shield her twin.

Then at sixteen, Sarah had
become
their father, the night her reckless behavior put him on a collision course with a thunderstorm and a hydroplaning truck. The night Sarah had lost what was left of her mind and her toxic link to Maddie had been shattered.

Sarah had spent the last decade in a vegetative coma in a special-care facility over a thousand miles south of their Massachusetts hometown. After the accident, Maddie and Phyllis had moved to a sleepy Boston suburb to piece their fractured lives back together. As best they could, at least, while Phyllis’s nerves grew so unpredictable she couldn’t keep a job for more than a few months at a time. Which had left Maddie shouldering the responsibility for making the normal life they craved a reality.

She’d almost succeeded.

Then the dreams had come. Each more terrifying and vivid than the last. The emotions, as strong as the night of the accident. Just as clear. Just as horrifying. Every night of the last three months, Maddie became a teenage Sarah in the throes of the addiction Sarah had turned to in order to cope. She’d watched their father die, felt him die, over and over again—knowing it was her fault, Sarah’s fault, as surely as if she’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

In the dream, Maddie saw it all, felt it all, became it all, right along with her twin. The images of the storm and the crash and Sarah’s desperation to die waited for her every night. Each dream exactly the same—until tonight.

Tonight, the truck driver hadn’t been shocked as Gerald Temple’s car skidded toward him. Sarah—and through her, Maddie—had felt him waiting for the Chevy to cross the center line. Tonight, she’d seen the crash through the stranger’s menacing gaze.

The truck driver had accelerated into the impact, taking dead aim for the car. His final thought echoing through Sarah’s mind…

And Maddie’s…

Die!

“How could you not know someone else was programming her dream projections!” the raspy voice demanded over Richard’s cell phone. “You’re one of the Brotherhood’s strongest psychics for God’s sake.”

Sarah was safely sedated. Her mind was back under Richard’s control—at least as much under his control as it ever had been.