Dark Legacy (16 page)

“I want to use the back door.” He kept things conversational as he got her to her feet. “Once we’re sure it’s safe, we’ll go in through the kitchen and find your mom.”

Maddie nodded slowly. He guided her around the back of the house, neither of them seeing or sensing anything out of the ordinary. It was another quiet night in the suburbs. No sirens or police lights flashing because the neighbors had heard a commotion or, worse, a gunshot.

Maddie leaned into him.

I’m here…
her thoughts said. She hadn’t responded when he’d said he loved her. But she was starting to believe in him. To let herself need him.

He stopped beneath an overbright moon, shining through an enormous oak that took up half the backyard. He gazed down at her.

“I’m here,” she repeated out loud. “Me. Not Sarah.”

She kissed him…sweetness and fragile courage and need reaching for him. And he kissed her back, praying he would be worthy of the trust she was placing in him.

“Of course it’s you.” For him, it would always be her. “Whatever we find in there, you weren’t a part of it. Tell me you believe that. Thinking it’s your fault will only make it easier for Sarah to come back. It’s like she’s waiting to take advantage when you’re weakest. Don’t let her.”

Maddie was shaking in his arms, but her mind was calmer. She nodded her head, her lips clinging to his once more. She rested her head on his shoulder. The simple acceptance of it humbled him.

“You’re not alone,” he promised. “I’ll be here, no matter what.”

Madness. Insanity. Danger. Sinister government experiments. Nothing could tear Jarred away.

They watched Phyllis’s house. When several minutes passed and Maddie had stopped shaking and there’d been no sound or movement from inside, he said, “Let’s go.”

Maddie clung to him as far as the patio door, which was slightly ajar. An eat-in kitchen was visible just inside.

“Stay here,” she said to him.

Like hell.

Jarred threaded his fingers through hers. Then he stepped over the threshold first, placing his body between his fragile healer and whatever waited inside.

Maddie focused on Jarred’s strong back as he led the way.

Horrible sounds still scrambled for control of her mind. Her mother’s screams…The Raven’s screams…Sarah’s screams…Other people’s screams…Then Jarred’s voice saying he loved her, over and over again. Until she could hear him above all the rest.

Stay with me, Maddie…

And she had. Her mind was with him now, not with Sarah. And wherever Jarred was, was where Maddie wanted to stay.

The house was still around them. There was nothing to feel there. No one. She bumped into Jarred, only then realizing he’d stopped.

“You okay?” he asked.

Maddie’s nod mustn’t have been very convincing. He glanced at the death grip she had on his hand.

“Wait here.” He pulled out a kitchen chair.

She headed for the dining room instead. Jarred had said she was stronger than she thought. Strong enough to see this through.

“Mom?” she called in a voice she barely recognized.

Jarred stayed only a step behind her.

Careful…

His warning wrapped around her. Warming her where she’d been cold since…since losing the connection she’d had with her twin as a teenager. A decade of cold. Whatever she and Sarah had been as children was now a twisted darkness that everything would sink into, until—

“Maddie?” Jarred asked.

Stay with me, sweetheart…

She realized she’d stopped with her hand on the halfopen door to the dining room.

“I don’t think there’s anyone here,” he said.

“I know there isn’t. I can feel it.”

In her mind, Maddie turned to Jarred and curled her body into his as she let go of the hope of seeing her mother again alive.

“You don’t have to do this.” He reached for her in reality. “I could—”

“Yes, I do.” She inched away. “Whatever happened to Phyllis, I have to face it.”

Whatever Sarah had done. Whatever evil Maddie had unleashed when she’d participated in her sister escaping from the center. It was time to stop hiding.

Help me,
her mind begged Jarred’s.

All right
. His reassurance was rock solid.
Whatever you need.

With Jarred’s strength behind her, Maddie pushed open the door to the dining room. The hinge creaked. She tripped over the portable phone lying on the floor.
Jarred grabbed her, then picked up the unit, pressing several buttons and watching the display.

“What?” she asked. Something in his expression was scaring her.

“Don’t worry about it right now. Let’s see what else we can find.”

Jarred glanced around the dining room, and only then did she have the courage to look more closely herself. At nothing, it turned out. There was nothing to see. No Phyllis. No sign of a struggle, except maybe the phone Jarred was still holding. But it could have simply fallen onto the floor.

Maddie slapped her palms to the dining room table.

Had she imagined the entire thing?

“Phyllis was here when I called,” Jarred assured her. “I spoke with her first, remember? And she didn’t just disappear into thin air.”

“Mom!” Maddie ran into the family room. Silence welcomed her. Emptiness.

Sensing Jarred’s strong presence behind her, she stumbled up the stairs and ran down the hall.

“Mom, it’s Maddie. I need to talk to you. I need to know more about the center…”

She careened into her mother’s bedroom, desperate to find the woman she’d sworn just hours before to hate forever. But Phyllis wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere upstairs. Maddie turned on every light in every room and checked each closet. Each bathroom. By the time she dragged herself back downstairs, she was exhausted and pissed again and more terrified than ever.

“I didn’t imagine it,” Maddie insisted. “I didn’t!”

They made their way back to the dining room. Maddie wandered into the kitchen, feeling Jarred close behind her. She almost wished he hadn’t come now.

Chickenshit!
her twin’s insanity shrieked.
If you don’t want the asshole there, make him leave.

Maddie’s fingers grazed her mother’s gourmet knife set, displayed in its fancy chopping block. Her hand clenched on the knife with the wicked serrated edge that Phyllis preferred above the others. It wasn’t the largest in the bunch, but it could slice through anything, including Maddie’s fingers on several occasions.

“You okay?” Jarred asked behind her.

Feeling separated from her body, Maddie slid the lethal blade from its home.

Die!
the voice insisted.

Jarred’s hands cupped her shoulders. His closeness surrounded her with a sense of peace. Of belonging. “You’re not alone. I’m here.”

Maddie blinked the knife and her twin’s deadly intentions into focus. She spun toward Jarred and away from the counter. Took his hand and dragged him back to the dining room.

She tried to piece together which parts of the phone conversation with Phyllis had been real.

“You called my mother,” she insisted.

“Yes,” Jarred confirmed.

“And I talked to her after you did.”

“Yes.”

“And…”
And what?
she begged him with her eyes.

“You said you heard a gunshot?”

“I…” There was no evidence of a shooting anywhere. No blood or a stray hole in the wall or anything. “I…I don’t know. I thought I did…I know I heard Phyllis scream…”

And Sarah had been laughing. But had Sarah been at the house, trying to kill their mother? Or had she been in Maddie’s mind, preying on Maddie’s and Phyllis’s
drama. Dreaming of haunted trees and birds of prey and that damn gun.

“She screamed,” Maddie scraped out. “I know I heard my mother yell at someone who was in the house…Someone who surprised her. She told them to get out. They had a gun. She told them to put it down. And then she screamed…”

“But?” Jarred asked.

“How do I know what happened next was real?” Her mother had been terrified, but—“How could the gunshot
not
have been real, if the rest of it was?”

Jarred took another look around the room. He walked to the other side of the table where the folder that she’d found in her mother’s files had been left. A piece of paper lay on top of it. A handwritten note. Joining him, Maddie picked up the paper with a shaking hand. Her vision refused to unblur long enough to process it.

Jarred didn’t have the same problem. His expression grew murderous as he read.

“Whoever surprised your mother,” he snapped, “I’d say your sister’s off the hook.”

Maddie sank into a dining room chair in relief. Jarred set the paper down before opening the folder. Maddie concentrated until the note shimmered into focus.

Find Sarah. Bring her back to Trinity. Or Phyllis Temple dies.

Maddie’s entire body began to shake.

Find Sarah…

…back to Trinity…

“I…I can’t.” Debilitating fear took over, laughing at Jarred’s assurances that she was strong. Maddie was going to be the twin who killed Phyllis after all, because—“I
can’t go back there. I can’t…I can’t find Sarah…I won’t. It’s…it’s that doctor. Metting? He did this. You said me bringing Sarah to him was exactly what he wanted. He wants us both back. Because he—”

“It wasn’t Metting. If he was here, it’s because your mother asked him to come. Which means she wouldn’t have been surprised to see him. She wouldn’t have screamed at him to leave.”

Jarred was staring into the folder labeled trinity. The one with Maddie’s blood smeared over the edge. He’d moved aside what looked like a standard hospital admission form—filled out and dated ten years ago. There was only one other thing in the folder, a single slip of paper with numbers scribbled on it in masculine, block handwriting. And in the same hand, the name
Dr. Richard Raventhall Metting
.

“What?” she asked.

Jarred looked closer, as if to be sure. He grabbed her mother’s phone from the table and checked the display. Then he pulled the cell they’d been using from his pocket and pressed several buttons.

“What!” Maddie demanded.

“This is the last call Phyllis made.” He showed Maddie the number he’d accessed on the portable. “And this is the number Metting put into his cell before giving it to me.”

They matched.

“How did my mother know Sarah’s doctor’s private number?”

Jarred handed her the paper that had been inside the folder. It wasn’t yellowed with age like the admissions form. It was newer. Much newer. And the same phone number—beside Metting’s name—had been recorded on it.

“When he started working with your sister, he must have given Phyllis his contact information,” Jarred said, “just in case.”

“In case of what?” In case Phyllis’s other daughter started losing her marbles, too? In case Sarah ever got away from him? In case he needed Phyllis to betray both of her twins one day, instead of settling for sacrificing only one of their lives? “Why would she have called him?”

“When Metting gave me the phone,” Jarred bit out, the world around them fading from light to gray as Maddie’s thoughts spiraled into confusion, “he said to call him when I was ready for help. When—” He gazed down at her, at the way she was scratching at her already-raw wrists. “—when I’d realized he was my only hope of saving you.”

Richard sat in the darkened car beside a darkened curb, beneath a gas lamp that would never again illuminate its quaint, suburban street.

Dr. Keith and his charge were being careful, euphemistically speaking. They’d used the backyard to enter the Temple home. But Richard had seen them approach, and he doubted he was the only one on their tail. He’d had a head start. He’d been tracking the GPS chip in the cell he’d given Keith from the moment Richard had reconnected with the Brotherhood. But every light in the house was on now. If the center didn’t have the pair in their sights yet, it was only a matter of time. And Keith and Temple were just sitting there, waiting to be picked off.

They’d been inside for quite a while. Too long a while. Richard checked the digital display on his dash. One hour ago on the nose, Phyllis Temple had phoned him. Her call had clinched Richard’s go-ahead from his elders to stay on the Temples’ trails, with a sizable recon team supporting him. He had twenty-four hours to bring both twins under Brotherhood control, or the Temples’ psychic legacy would go the way of others over the centuries. Other exceptionally gifted families with powers that could have insured the safety of generations to come, if
they’d been brought under the Watchers’ guidance. But they’d become too volatile. Perverted until they became a danger to the world around them. So they’d been forever silenced.

Richard had arrived at the Temple home in time to watch Phyllis be carried away, unresponsive, by three masked men. Richard’s team had tracked the unmarked SUV she’d been tossed into as far as the interstate, before losing the vehicle after it caused a multicar pileup. Richard had stayed behind, sensing more visitors were en route. He’d hoped to isolate Sarah by staking out the empty house. Still, Madeline would do nicely. Assuming her psychiatrist watchdog was ready to accept the inevitable and invite Richard into his confidence.

So far, no joy. And they were running out of time. By Richard’s estimate, given how long Sarah had been without the pharmaceutical cocktail that had masked the more homicidal aspects of her splintered personality, they had only hours before Sarah suffered a complete meltdown. Unmonitored and on her own, she’d self-destruct. And she’d take her twin and whoever else got in their way with her. Richard couldn’t let that happen. The Brotherhood wouldn’t let that happen.

But he still had a chance. The dream symbol Sarah had chosen for him had been a raven. And that meant everything. Most people saw the menacing black bird as an omen of death or evil. But in dream symbolism, a raven was also a bearer of magic. A messenger of change. A trickster that exposed the truth behind secrets and returned the dreamer to a state of healing and harmony—the very things Richard had first worked with Sarah to bring about. That’s how she’d invited Richard into her nightmares.