Dark Legacy (11 page)

Maddie flinched at his brutal description of her sister.

Jarred rested his forehead against hers. “I’m sorry. I know she’s your twin, and you still care about her no matter what’s happened. But Sarah’s dreaming all this up and forcing it on you.” He rocked, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying. “All these months, when you’ve been…losing yourself in her dreams, has any of it been anything but your sister’s deranged fantasies?”

Maddie blinked. She let herself really hear what he was saying. Process what had just happened. See what was real.

“It’s not just a fantasy,” she said. “Someone…someone’s designing Sarah’s nightmares…Only they’re real, somehow. It feels like someone’s forcing her to do what she’s doing. To kill. And tonight, she…” In the back of Maddie’s mind, she sensed her twin still running for real…Hating for real…Shooting a real weapon at real people…Drawing on Maddie’s control, the way Maddie had balanced Sarah’s gifts when they were kids. Which meant a part of Maddie was trying to hurt people, too.

“Get away from me!” she begged, but she couldn’t let go of Jarred’s arm. “You have to…”

Run!
the Raven hissed through her mind.

And Sarah was running. Fighting to be free. Running into the darkness and the rain. The thunder and gunshots…while her mind whispered that she had to kill the Raven.

“Wake up, Temple! Stay with me.” Jarred’s voice brought Maddie back to his side. She was in his arms still, on the carpeted floor of the reception area. “You have to fight this, damn it. Whatever it is…have to…with me…”

Maddie felt herself shaking. Her body, out of control. Her mind. Because Sarah was still there, deep inside. But she was leaving, too. Leaving Maddie to a world filled with fear and chaos, the way Maddie had abandoned her.

“Maddie?” Jarred eased her flailing body to the floor. “Maddie, stay with…Dammit…with me…! God, you’re…”

Seizing.

She was having seizures.

Like Sarah’s, when they were teenagers. When the emotions had raged. When there’d been nothing left of
Sarah’s mind for the feelings to feed on, so they’d ravaged her body instead. No one had been able to help her. Now, no one could help Maddie.

Sarah’s darkness was coming for her…

The nightmare…

The Raven…

“…the hell away from her!” Jarred’s touch was yanked away. “Maddie!”

Footsteps pounded around them, while Maddie fought for consciousness. There were uniforms. Guns. Anger. Fear. She was feeling it all. She couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t escape. Cold hands locked onto her trembling body. The relentless waves of emotion filling her became a blinding search for release. Because a part of her was outside the center now…

…stumbling and running, with the Raven’s blood dripping from her fingers.

She was looking back. She was Sarah, and she was free. Maddie was the one who was trapped. And that made Sarah smile and wave as she slowly shut her mind away and left Maddie to face the center alone.

“No!” Maddie’s world spiraled back in focus. She was staring up from the reception floor, into the unforgiving eyes of a uniformed guard.

“Get the hell away from her,” Jarred bellowed, still fighting to protect her. Two other men had him pinned to the wall. “Don’t you fucking touch her. I’m her doctor, and—”

A gut punch doubled him over.

“Leave him alone!” Maddie demanded in her twin’s nightmare voice.

She couldn’t move, but she didn’t have to. In the nightmares, Sarah had controlled people with her mind. And somehow Maddie could now, too. The receptionist. Jarred that morning. Maddie’s patient. She’d been able to
do things to all of them—through all of them—with her thoughts alone.

Jarred’s guards dropped to their knees in agony the second Maddie thought of choking them. Then the man holding her began clawing at his throat. She rose to her feet. A bed of dry, crumbling leaves crackled beneath her. Like the ones beneath her sister’s feet as Sarah stopped running to look back.

Maddie had never felt stronger. Freer. There was no weakness in her now. No fear. Only hate. Sarah’s hate for the Raven.

And Maddie’s, for the men trying to hurt Jarred. She wouldn’t let them take him away from her, the way the storm and the truck had taken her father…

Jarred’s guards were down. Maddie’s eyes had gone dark. Her expression was a numb kind of blank that terrified him. There were security officers collapsing all over the hallway because of whatever Maddie was doing. If he could just get to her, maybe he could stop this. But he couldn’t make his body move. She wouldn’t let anyone move.

“Stay with me, Maddie. Don’t do this. This isn’t you.”

“Of course it is.” Her smile was the saddest thing he’d ever seen. The men who’d been holding Jarred rolled to their backs, their eyes open and staring blind, their chests straining for oxygen. Maddie admired her handiwork. “I can’t let them take you away, too…I won’t let them…They have to—”

No, they don’t,
Jarred argued with his mind.
I’m here. No one’s taking me away from you.

There were tears in her eyes now. She’d heard him. Good girl.

Let me get you out of here,
he said,
before—

“Ah!” A sharp pain bloomed in his upper arm. Buzzing
roared through his ears. Then the ground was rushing toward him. He landed on his guards. A scream sliced through him. Maddie’s silent scream of rage as she clutched the dart sticking out from her neck. Their minds were still joined, and together their worlds misted to a vision of a bird soaring down the hallway, transforming into a flesh-and-blood man.

Raven!
Maddie said in the dream. Sarah’s Raven.

Jarred blinked the real world back into focus, only to see the same man standing over him, blood oozing from a gash in his forehead. He trained a very real semiautomatic on Jarred.

“Release my men, Ms. Temple,” he ordered. “Or your doctor friend dies.”

“No one inside this room but me,” Richard instructed the security team guarding the holding suite.

He wiped at the blood trickling down the side of his head, trying to piece together the various ways his and Sarah’s escape had gone completely to hell. Culminating with her bashing his head in with her gun and running on her own. Then he’d barely stopped Madeline Temple from either killing a center security team, or getting herself killed by them. Now Richard had her and her companion, both of them tranquilized, to deal with before he could disengage himself and his work from the center for good.

He applied his palm to the security scanner. Leaning in, he waited for the secondary system to verify his retinal imprint.

“But what if—” the security guard to his right muttered.

“No one!”

“But the directors—” The man was one of the guards Madeline had been strangling downstairs. He grabbed Richard’s arm. “They’ve ordered the center locked down and the intruders isolated. The directors want to interrogate them themselves.”

“Then by all means.” Richard ripped his arm away.
“Escort the directors here personally—after you show them how well you’ve secured every last inch of this facility. That should take at least a half hour once they arrive, wouldn’t you say? I’ll have completed my examination of our guests by then, and you’ll be free to personally introduce Madeline Temple to our illustrious board. She should be awake and thrilled to see you again.”

The guard swallowed. Hard.

Weak little shit.

Richard pushed into the room. Recessed lighting blinked from dim to full, triggered by motion sensors. Dr. Keith and his
patient
were laid out on side-by-side, stainless steel tables. A fast-acting sedative had taken care of Keith downstairs. Richard hadn’t been nearly as accommodating with Madeline. He’d custom designed her tranquilizer for her sister almost a year ago. For the weeks just after she’d emerged from her coma. Richard had later perfected his mind-control matrix to keep Sarah’s psychic abilities muted when his mind wasn’t there to guide hers. But a dose of the tranquilizer had always been available, just in case.

Richard ignored the center’s unconscious guests and logged into the computer console on the opposite wall. Two minutes was all he needed to shut down the suite’s video and audio recorders. Next, he reverted the unit to a discrete workstation that could no longer be accessed via the central network.

He needed time to think. To assess. To regroup and figure out how to convince the Brotherhood not to issue a termination order for Sarah or himself. Or her twin now.

He’d bluffed his way out of cooling his heels in his own holding cell. Barely. If Sarah hadn’t attacked him, giving him grounds to say she’d been using him as cover all
along, he wouldn’t have made it this far. As it was, he was treading very precarious waters. And he was doing it with a concussion—blustering and ordering around the few center security guards not out tracking Sarah. He’d controlled where the intruders were secured. Now he needed a Plan B—since Madeline Temple’s arrival had torched his A Game.

But why had Sarah’s twin been there at all? The better question was,
who
had gotten her there. Her presence had helped Sarah find the psychic wherewithal to escape not just half the center’s security, but Richard, too. Sarah had fallen into her twin’s mind and harnessed the power of their connection as if she’d done it countless times before.

Damn it!

Someone else’s dream programming had reconnected the Temple twins’ minds. The same programming that had disrupted Sarah’s recent dream simulations and triggered Kayla Lawrence’s death.

He felt with his mind for increased activity in the hallway. So far, nothing. But his reprieve wouldn’t last a second longer than it took the center’s directors to review the surveillance tapes of Sarah’s escape and the sketchy story he’d given security. Richard pulled a syringe from the lab coat the guard hadn’t bothered patting down and administered a stimulant directly into a vein in Jarred Keith’s arm. The Temple woman was on her own. Her mind would be in disarray once she was fully conscious. Lord knew what damage her link with Sarah was still doing. But Richard’s primary concern at the moment was keeping the three of them alive.

A groan drew his attention to Keith’s exam table. The other man’s eyes were blinking.

“Rise and shine, Doctor.”

Richard helped him sit.

“There’s very little time for me to explain what’s going on.” Even if he could explain what he didn’t fully understand himself. “Twenty minutes on the outside. There are forces working here that are beyond my control. It’s crucial that you know our lives are in danger, and that—”

A low growl was Richard’s only warning before Keith launched himself off the table. Richard sidestepped and stared with clinical fascination at the rumpled, moaning heap the other man had made on the floor.

“Admirable, Dr. Keith, considering the narcotic swamp I’ve made out of your nervous system. But save your strength for getting your patient out of here. Is anything I’m saying making a dent? Cough twice if you understand. Once if you don’t.”

The other doctor’s hate-filled glare was a positive sign.

“Good.” Richard waited for Keith to collect his thoughts.

“Who are you?” the man rasped. “Where are we?”

“I’m Richard Metting, Sarah Temple’s doctor. And you’re in the bowels of an underground, governmentfunded research facility that’s doesn’t exist on any blueprint ever drawn. Even though Trinity Center is the toast of Boston’s nonprofit fundraising circles, you and your Ms. Temple have obviously already discerned that more goes on here than the pedestrian study of ailments of the mind.”

“You mean like—” Keith tried to struggle to his feet, lost his balance, and landed back on his ass. He stayed there, still glaring. “—like the psychic testing of patients without the consent of family, like you’ve been doing to Sarah Temple?”

“Your instincts are good, Doctor, and to the point. But explaining what I’ve been doing here would take too long. You’re just going to have to trust me to—”

“Trust you?”

“To give you the high points, yes.” Metting sighed. “For instance, during my tenure here, I’ve discovered several features of this facility that few others know about. There’s a labyrinth of hidden corridors leading from each of my research theaters, including this one. And the one behind that panel”—he pointed to the wall Keith had propped himself against—“will take us beyond the center’s perimeter sensors. I would suggest we get as far away from here as we can, before Madeline regains full cognition.”

“We?” Jarred shook his head, certain he’d heard the other man wrong. “And when exactly will Maddie be awake, after
you
shot her full of God knows what?”

He made it to his feet this time. Then, a more difficult challenge, stumbled to Maddie’s side so he could examine the puncture wound in her neck.

“Assuming she’s as resilient as her sister,” Metting said, “taking into account the adverse effects of whatever lucid dream she and Sarah were cycling through when Sarah escaped—”

“Lucid what?” Jarred’s already-pounding head cramped a little tighter.

“—and given her tranquilizer’s typical half-life, I’d say she’ll be able to move in under an hour, but she’ll be disoriented. You should expect some short-term memory loss, from the seizure more than my drug protocol.”

“And exactly how did you know she had a seizure?”

“It’s an expected side effect of a link as powerful as I suspect Madeline and Sarah share. Especially since Madeline’s psychic endurance hasn’t been strengthened to cope with separation.” The other man checked his watch. “Her connection with her twin is going to be unstable until—”

“You mean the bipolar twin whose mind you’ve been exploiting?” Jarred felt like a damn idiot for hanging on the bastard’s every word. But these were the answers that
Maddie needed, and he was getting them for her. Then he’d happily take Metting’s head the rest of the way off.