Dark Legacy (3 page)

“If dreams were that easy to manipulate, the Trinity Center wouldn’t have needed me so badly.” Richard stepped deeper into the cover of the woods that ringed the center’s property. It was dark, he hadn’t breached any of the facility’s perimeter sensors, and he was using the Brotherhood’s secure satellite link. But Richard couldn’t be too careful with his cover. Not now. “Sarah might not even be aware that someone besides me is guiding her Dream Weaver work.”

“A project you fought to spearhead, because you insisted you were the only Watcher who could control the outcome.”

“I was fighting for Sarah Temple and her legacy. I still am.”

“Not much longer. Not if you can’t control the risk the principle’s becoming to—”

“The
principle
’s risk to anyone but herself has been contained.”

“For now. The government won’t be allowed to perfect a direct-strike psychic weapon. That was your guarantee to the Brotherhood. Your only choice now is to—”

“Get Sarah out, I know.” Wind whipped the trees overhead, mimicking the sensory stimuli that had helped Richard map Sarah’s dreams and build her psychic strength. But had he gotten her strong enough to face what came next?

“Extract her and all your dream research from center control,” the voice spelled out unnecessarily. A mission didn’t get more covert than this. If Richard failed, he failed alone. “We’ll take the Temple woman in as long as you can control her. But if you can’t get her and the footprints of your work out, with no ties to the Brotherhood, we’ll be forced to contain the exposure. Everyone connected to Dream Weaver will be terminated, you included.”

Maddie’s breath misted in the frozen morning air. She’d been up for hours. It felt like she’d been standing there forever. Shivering in the hospital parking lot. Still not ready to go inside. Not ready to pretend for another day that her life wasn’t falling apart.

Anger bubbled beneath the calm that people expected from Dr. Madeline Temple, ER trauma specialist. Her twin’s anger and insanity had come only in the dreams at first. But echoes of Sarah owned more of Maddie’s waking mind every day. No matter how hard Maddie fought, her comatose sister’s demented memories kept taking more.

Or maybe it was Maddie’s own mind. Maybe it was simply her turn. Like Sarah and her mother, this was her destiny. Maybe that was the prophecy Phyllis had been so terrified of. Maddie had managed to do some good with her life. It was time for the darkness to take the rest. Could it really be that simple? That hopeless?

She squared her shoulders against the ridiculous thought.

She was a grown woman, not a scared teenage girl. She didn’t believe in curses and phantom prophecies. Besides, she had real problems to deal with. Problems like Dr. Jarred Keith, who’d become St. Christopher’s
chief of psychiatry less than a year ago. Notorious for keeping to himself, he’d surprised her by wanting to take their casual dates to a level she hadn’t been ready for. He’d found the calm, sweet Maddie she’d been too charming to resist. She’d told him she needed to stay focused on her career. Then she’d stopped returning his calls. Ignored his repeated voice mails. Until last night.

Last night, Jarred hadn’t left her a choice. He’d said he was sorry that it had come to this. He was
sorry
, but they’d find a way to clean up her mess of a life together.

Right.

Shrugging off a shiver, Maddie marched up the granite steps that led to the wall of windows fronting St. Christopher Memorial Hospital.
Focus on what’s important. Forget about everything else.
She had a residency to save. After scraping and fighting for years to get where she was, she refused to let everything slip through her fingers. She wasn’t losing herself now. She wasn’t weak like her sister.

Maddie would handle Jarred Keith. Then she’d handle her nightmares, the shadows from her past, and her family’s penchant for instability—alone. Whatever it took to not let the darkness win, the way it had with Sarah.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.” Jarred was staring at Maddie from his expensive chair, behind his expensive desk.

Maddie stared back, swallowing the instinct to trust him. To invite him deeper into her messed-up life. Into her mind.

Expensive suited the man. But not as well as the warm, inviting clutter that softened the periphery of his office. His reputation with hospital staff bordered on hard-ass. But Maddie had always known better. Even if she hadn’t,
the sight before her would have confirmed what she’d felt the first day they’d met. The walls of Keith’s office were covered with a hodgepodge of diplomas and civic awards. Small prints of impressionists’ work. Those of modern realists. There was even a sampling of what looked like children’s Crayola creations. His bookcases were filled floor to ceiling with volumes on varied topics. Fiction and nonfiction, aligned with less and less care the easier the titles were to reach.

Jarred’s was an ordered but approachable mind. Intelligent but sensitive to subtlety and the value of indulging the imagination. Maddie had liked that about him—his logic and his no-bullshit approach to taking life as it came. The softness underneath the reserve he kept firmly in place for others. She’d liked it a lot. She’d felt drawn to him, first just a little. So little, she’d thought she was imagining the intensity of that instant connection. Just like she’d imagined all the other weird things that had started happening around the same time. But before she’d known it, Jarred had gotten inside. With each smile or his jokes or his gentle touch, and the way it all had eased the chaos brewing in her mind.

Not a good thing as it turned out. Not now that her job was on the line, and he had the final say. Not when she found herself wanting to reveal everything she didn’t understand herself to a man who held the keys to her professional future.

“According to you and your bosses”—Maddie willed away her blank stare, settling for a smile that was closer to
You’re imagining things
than
Help me!
—“there’s plenty I haven’t told Dr. Yates.”

“I’m not Dr. Yates. And I don’t like the hospital board putting me in the middle of this any more than you do.”

“But here you are.” And there his voice had been on
her machine last night, saying that her administration-mandated therapy sessions would be conducted in his office from now on. That accepting his help was her only shot at salvaging her future.

“You seem almost desperate to disengage this morning,” he said. “If I didn’t know you well enough to be worried, I’d be intrigued.”

“Intrigued?” Actually, he was a smug son of a bitch, just like everyone had said. “Is that what shrinks are calling it now, when you stare at someone as if they’re a juicy journal article you can’t wait to write up?”

Before Sarah’s nightmares began haunting Maddie, sparring with Jarred had been a guilty pleasure. First over a quick bite in the hospital cafeteria. Then when they ran into each other, grabbing coffee from one of the machines sprinkled about the building. Dr. Untouchable had finally admitted that he’d been inventing ways to accidentally hook up with her. They’d moved on to latenight or early-morning meals at a diner near her apartment, before or after one of Maddie’s grueling ER shifts. Out of sight of any St. Chris staff who might find it gossipworthy to catch them together. Because just six months ago, the male-dominated realm of emergency medicine had been Maddie’s playground. She’d finally made it. She was home free. No more worries.

Then Jarred had started to notice the bizarre things Maddie had hidden from everyone else. How she’d found herself eating food she hated but didn’t remember ordering. She’d say something out of character—something rude and hostile like Sarah used to say. But when Jarred commented on it, Maddie wouldn’t remember whatever had shocked him.

“So,” he said, “you made things difficult with Matt Yates because he was treating you like just another pa
tient. Well, you’re
not
just another patient to me, Maddie”—he leaned forward—“but you’re not giving me anything to work with, either.”

“Maybe I’m trying to keep you on your toes.” She took her own stab at smug. “We can’t have such an important doctor wasting his time.”

“Is that what I’ll be doing? Is that what I was doing every time I tried to get the most intriguing woman I’ve ever met to open up about what was bothering her?”

Jarred flashed his Harrison Ford, circa
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, smirk.

For a moment, Maddie forgot how to breathe.

“Do your bosses know how inappropriate this arrangement is?” she countered.

“Do you want me to remove myself from the situation? Because if Yates had had his way, that call last night would have been your termination notice. Not me sticking my neck out to give you one more chance.”

“Don’t tell me you’re pissed because I’m not thanking you for this!”

“Something’s changed”—Jarred did that head-cocking thing shrinks do when they think they have all the answers—“since the last time we spoke. When was that, three weeks ago? Things have gotten even worse, and I remember offering to admit you to psych back then.”

“I had a long night. Nothing new.”

“Yates said you haven’t been sleeping at all.”

“Like I said, nothing new.”

“Are the dreams that bad?”

“Who said anything about dreams?” Sarah’s rebellious, eat-shit smile spread across Maddie’s face. Maddie coughed, covering her twin’s sass with the back of her hand.

“Okay.” Jarred steepled his fingers in front of him, el
bows resting on his desk. “Nightmares, then. Fantasies. Whatever’s going on in your head while you’re staring at the ceiling all night. Can the bullshit, Temple. I’ve read Yates’s files. Not that I needed to. When we met, you were the most professional, best-liked resident on staff. What’s been messing with you so badly the last few months that you have to be supervised when you see patients? Why wouldn’t you talk to me about it back when I would have helped you prevent all of this?”

It wasn’t the question that jerked Maddie straighter in her chair. It was the way the warmth in Jarred’s voice washed over her. How the worry in his gaze felt too good, deep inside where she secretly needed him. Craved him, like an addict who couldn’t resist the seductive pull of something she knew would destroy her. The man saw her—really saw her. And his undivided attention was as dangerous as it was warm…comforting…flooding her mind…

Making her skin crawl!

Because sometimes, it was like she could read Jarred back—the way Sarah had been able to feel people toward the end. Not just with intuition or empathy or a little brush of minds. But all out becoming the person’s feelings. Taking them in. Making them herself, and her them. Sometimes it had felt like Jarred was in Maddie’s mind, sharing his secrets while he dug for hers.

These days, everyone at St. Chris was happy to keep her freak show at a distance. But Super Shrink wanted in. So much for bluffing her way through this session the way she had with Yates.

“If my career is over,” she challenged, “just man up and say it, then leave me the hell alone.”

Eight years of college packed into six, most of it while Maddie was still a teenager. Her internship. Two years of
residency. The only identity that would ever fit. It couldn’t

really be gone.

Jarred smoothed the rumpled end of his tie.

“It doesn’t have to be.” He flipped open a file—a red one. Yates’s had always been blue. “Tell me about your twin.”

Maddie was out of her chair and halfway to the door before she realized she’d moved. She reached for the doorknob.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Jarred’s warning and a flash of last night’s nightmare froze her in place. “The people who pay my salary want my diagnosis to jive with Yates’s. And they want it soon. I’ve stalled them by not letting on how much I already know about what’s happening to you. I argued that you were at the top of your med-school class. You aced your boards, years before most doctors finish their coursework. You’re a diagnostic prodigy. Innately gifted beyond your colleagues’ ability to comprehend. You deserve one final chance. But you’re falling apart emotionally, Dr. Temple. You’ve become a threat to your patients. You’ve lost all ability to focus in the ER. So, you can drown in denial and keep fighting alone and fail. Or, you can accept my help figuring out what’s really going on. Which is it going to be?”

Maddie saw a malevolent raven in her mind. Her father’s car exploding. An evil tree swaying. She imagined her fingers around the raven’s throat, squeezing until she was free of the darkness. Really free.

Die!
Sarah’s voice demanded.
He has to die!

Jarred wheezed.

Maddie spun back as he fought to inhale. He stared at her, as if he didn’t want to believe what was happening, or that she had anything to do with it. Through the shadows fogging her mind, she reached for what was left of
who she’d dreamed she could be. She forced herself to focus on Jarred’s warmth, not the bitter cold of Sarah’s insanity.

White light, instead of darkness,
had become Maddie’s mantra the last few months.

Calm.

Healing.

Maddie was a healer.

“You have no business digging up information about my sister.” Maddie shoved the last of Sarah’s fury away.

“On the contrary.” Jarred swallowed. Inhaled. Shook the confusion from his eyes. Cleared the rasp from his voice. “It is now officially my business. All of it. Whatever it takes to put your mind back together, even if it means ignoring my personal feelings for you. You’re splitting from reality with increasing frequency, Maddie, and you’re refusing to deal with it.”

“So you’re going to deal with it for me?”

“I wondered if there was a family history of dissociative behavior,” he said. “Imagine my surprise to find you aren’t the only child that your personnel records say you are. Your twin was involved in an accident as a teenager. Your father was killed as a result? There are records of her previous arrests for drug possession. Increasingly altered behavior. If Sarah was having psychological difficulties similar to—”