Dark Legacy (31 page)

“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 yanked 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—”

“—kill her mother?”

“Stop her, Dr. Keith. However you’ve reached her before—”

“—in dreams. It’s mostly been in dreams!”

“Screw the dreams. Reach her with your mind. Now. Or I won’t be able to hold my men off.”

Maddie aimed the gun at her father’s killer—at the bastard who’d shattered it all.

Her sister’s hold on her sanity. Her father’s life. Her mother’s love for her daughters—forcing her to choose one over the other, and ultimately to lose them both. And Maddie’s life. Her family. Her future. Her dreams of having something that wasn’t tainted by darkness and death and destruction. Of loving a man who could accept what she was, and never having to let him go. This bastard had taken it all.

The killer of everything she’d ever had cowered before her, beside the burning carcass of the truck that had hit her family car. In her hand was the gun that would finally end the destruction. It was armed. The safety off. Killing him was the right thing. It would make the nightmare finally go away.

“Die!” she screamed into the night.

But the coward in Maddie couldn’t fire. Or was it the healer she’d once thought she could be?

“Kill him!” commanded the gray Wolf standing beside her.

“Sarah?” Maddie needed her sister. Sarah was there in the dream’s darkness. Was this really what they wanted? Did Sarah really believe killing would fix their legacy? Was that really who they’d been born to be?

“End him, you stupid bitch,” the Wolf screamed.

“Sarah?”

Maddie’s finger twitched on the trigger, but a surge of caution reached her from somewhere nearby. Concern. Worry. Love. She turned to find her twin staring off into the woods.

“Who’s out there?” Maddie asked.

A beam of light was shining behind the clearing, encompassing everything in its path. Warmth and love rolling toward Maddie, eating up the dream’s darkness.

“Don’t do this,” the light said in a familiar voice. “This isn’t you.”

The gun suddenly felt heavier.

Colder.

“Come back to me,” the light tempted. “Come away from the Wolf.”

The killer on the ground was crying now.

Soft, feminine sobs.

Familiar crying that sounded like—

“Kill him!” The Wolf’s demand ripped Maddie’s attention away from the light.

“Don’t.” The other voice was closer. “I’m here. You’re not alone in the darkness. You’re not a killer.”

“J…Jarred?” Maddie turned to find him right where he’d promised to be—by her side. Forever. And for a second, it was just her and Jarred and the light they’d made together. “How…Where…”

“It’s the shadow dream, Maddie. The Wolf’s nightmare. It’s the Wolf who’s evil, not your mother. You have to see that.”

“My mother?” Jarred was too far away to touch, and Maddie couldn’t move. “But she…Phyllis was in the car with my dad that night. The truck driver tried to kill them both. He killed my father. He has to—”

“Turn around Maddie. See her. See who the Wolf’s dream wants you to kill.”

“I have to…The driver has to…Where’s Sarah?” Maddie stared down at the ugly weapon in her hand.

“Turn around.” Jarred’s mind stroked hers. “You can stop this. You and Sarah can stop this together. It’s just a dream.”

Maddie wanted to hold him until her confusion evaporated. But the Wolf wouldn’t let her. This was the Wolf’s warped reality, she realized. Not hers and Sarah’s. The Wolf wanted her to kill, not her sister. Maddie turned and blinked the dream into sharper focus…

An old man, not a predatory animal, loomed over Phyllis, not the driver of the truck. And there Sarah stood beside Maddie—little-girl Sarah from the playhouse, looking bedraggled and terrified as she wrung her hands in guilt because it was their mother the old man’s dream wanted Maddie to kill.

“You psychotic bastard.” Maddie threw the gun to the ground. She tried to break away from the daydream, but his control held. “What the hell is this?”

“This is your legacy, Ms. Temple.” His smile was as demented as the dead gray of his eyes. “This is what you were born to be—what your mother made both of you into.”

“No…” Phyllis whimpered. “I loved you girls.”

“You loved them so much, you left them with no control over their powers.” The old man picked up the gun and raised a hand to stall the armed men heading down the slope behind him. “You did nothing to prepare them for their destinies. You loved your daughters so much, you abandoned
them to flounder in weakness and fear. Luckily, I’m here to guide them for you.”

Maddie could feel the light behind her still. Jarred belonged in the Wolf’s dream, too, because he and Maddie were one. But his wasn’t the only light she’d need to defeat the nightmare’s darkness. Maddie smiled at the little girl cringing beside her.

“Our mother gave us everything.” Maddie reached her hand toward her twin. Little-girl Sarah hesitated. Then she reached, too. “When she gave us this.”

“No!” The old man raised the gun as Maddie’s and Sarah’s fingers found each other…

The light of their legacy roared to life through their touch. Surrounding Sarah and Maddie and pushing outward. The power of it shoved the old man and Phyllis away. The light was inside Sarah and Maddie, too. It was them, as the little girl’s dark eyes glowed. Her hair shone, flowing around her porcelain complexion like silky rain.

“Sarah?” Maddie had forgotten that her frail, damaged sister had once been this beautiful.

“Wake up, Maddie,” Jarred’s voice whispered urgently.
“
Wake up and stop the Wolf before it’s too late!”

“He’s right,” Sarah said. “We have to stop this. Now.”

Maddie stared in awe as Sarah shifted back to her adult self. Their hands still clinging to each other, they turned to find the Wolf’s gun aimed at them.

“Stop this?” he jeered. “Are you really that deranged? You can’t stop me.” He raised the gun higher. “Dream Weaver doesn’t succeed or fail with your shadow simulation alone. And since you’re clearly of no more use to my plans, I’m happy to say that it’s time for you both to—”

“Die!”

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

“No!” Their mother’s scream ripped through the night.