Secret Legacy (27 page)

“Mother
. . .”

“You’re . . .” Sarah couldn’t say it. Tears were streaming down her face. She refused to believe it. “You’re not . . .”

“Your daughter?” Trinity’s sweet smile faded. “Like I wasn’t waiting for you at that house? Like you haven’t dreamed of me since you were my age? Like you didn’t already know the name my father gave me on the day I was born?”

Sarah struggled for clarity. About the past. About all the screams only she’d been able to hear for so long, and all the years that she’d ignored them. It wasn’t possible, except—

“You’ve been with me all my life. You’ve been—”

“What you painted on your bedroom walls. What’s terrified you since my father told you I was alive. What you hated so much, you needed your hit team for backup before you’d find me. I’m you’re truth, and you’re still not ready to believe.”

The words were too mature, Trinity’s logic too cynical to belong to a little girl. It was like listening to a
brilliant child recite a script. This couldn’t be Trinity. It had to be more of Ruebens’s programming.

“What hit team?” Sarah asked. “What truth? What did you bring me here to believe?”

Richard and Maddie and the Watcher team were coming. They’d help her reach the real Trinity, whose energy Sarah could still feel beyond the dream’s toxic consciousness. The Brotherhood would help her find the little girl outside the nightmare. So—

“So you can kill me?” the child’s dream image accused, following Sarah’s thoughts.

“No.” Sarah had to stay calm and see what was really there. She had to keep the dream under control without Richard and Maddie to balance her. “No one’s trying to kill anyone.”

“You’re so stupid,” Trinity’s image spat, finally sounding like the child she appeared to be.

Sarah glanced around the room that looked so much like the lab where Ruebens had experimented on her own powers. Trinity’s image seemed so at home here. Safe. Calm. A little girl ruled by the logic of a cold-hearted adult.

“This is wrong,” Sarah said. “Whatever the center has taught you, however they’re manipulating you into doing these things, thinking this way, don’t trust them.”

“And I should trust you?” Tiny hands clenched in the wolf’s fur. “My loving mother?”

“Don’t call me that.” Bile burned Sarah’s throat. Dark waves of it. Memories swelled that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe were true. “I don’t know who you are or how you’re part of my family. But I’m not your mother. I’ve never had children.”

“That’s not what our legacy says.”

“ ‘Twins will be born to the line,’ ”
the wolf quoted in Ruebens’s voice.
“ ‘And with them, great good to commence. Or great evil, should darkness descend. Through them, another will come, to spread light far and wide. Or to cast the ultimate shadow on a lost mankind.’ ”

“Yes.” Sarah closed her eyes. The prophecy echoed through her mind. “You’re the missing piece of what our line was prophesied to be. I’m here to free you from the center’s experiments. So I can help you understand that—”

“Understand? Or forget, because you can’t face what we’ve become?”

“I am not—”

“A mother who couldn’t accept the abomination she created?” Trinity’s stilted accusations were accompanied by an equally adult twist of her lips. “That’s precisely what you are.”

The wolf rose. He was smiling now, too. It was the same evil expression marring Trinity’s beautiful face. Sarah had no doubt it was his words the child kept parroting.

“But my father has always loved me.” Trinity’s bottom lip quivered as she petted the malicious animal, a little girl’s hurt welling in her eyes. She lifted her chin, daring Sarah to contradict her.

My father has always loved me
. . .

Sarah saw the wolf’s protective posture in a devastating new light.

“Tad Ruebens?” She was going to be sick. “Tad Ruebens was your father?”

“Not by blood. But he loved me from the very start. He
wanted
me, unlike you.”

The past flashed through the dream, dizzying Sarah’s already-reeling thoughts with images that didn’t belong to her . . .

She was lying emotionless on an exam table, in a lab at the center that had nothing yet to do with nightmares or dream programming. Dispassionate hands were manipulating her lower body into stirrups beneath a crisp white sheet. She was asleep. No. She was still in the coma she never would have escaped if Richard’s mind hadn’t rescued her.

The memory belonged to the man positioned at the foot of the bed, functioning with clinical detachment.

“It’s time,” Ruebens said in her dream wolf’s voice. “The hormone regimen was successful. She’s ovulating. Ultrasound indicates multiple eggs, ready for extraction. Let’s begin
. . .
”

The vision swirled to a scene of excruciating pain and innocent beginning.

A faceless woman was bleeding out after giving birth, left to die while Ruebens raised a tiny child to his chest, cradling her as he crooned and calmed her lonely cries.

“I’ll protect you, Trinity,” he promised the baby. “They will come to take you away from me. They won’t understand your destiny. They won’t want you, once they realize what you were born to be. But I’ll protect you. I’ll learn everything I have to, to make sure you’re ready. You were born for more than they’ll ever understand, even your mother. Especially your mother. She’ll be useful, but she’s too weak to own the future your mind will rule. You are the Temple Legacy, Trinity, and you’re all mine
. . .
”

Men draped in surgical garb, hidden by masks, pulled a blinding white sheet over the body on the table. The baby continued to cry. Haunting whimpers filled the vision, and Sarah’s
mind, and the ocean nightmare beyond, then every nightmare she’d ever had.

Ruebens looked up at Sarah—across the damage and death he’d caused during the years that stretched between then and now. He smiled at Sarah and laughed his wolf’s laugh, and the vision ripped itself to shreds, taking her sanity along with it
. . .

. . . dumping Sarah back into Trinity’s lab, where Sarah lay in a boneless heap on the floor, staring into the eyes of the wolf who was no longer by the child’s side.

“Congratulations,” Ruebens’s voice said from the creature’s lips. “It’s a girl.”

Sarah screamed into his laughing face.

It was Ruebens’s memories of Trinity’s birth she’d seen. She was feeling the demented plea sure he’d taken in manipulating her legacy and an innocent newborn life. Memories he’d programmed within Sarah and Trinity, anticipating a showdown exactly like this one, where the revelation of what he’d done could do the most damage.

“You . . .” She pointed a shaking finger at Ruebens’s dream image. “I was defenseless. In a coma. And you . . . stole my child and grew her in another woman’s body? All so . . .” Sarah swallowed. “. . . so you could play God with my legacy and create a . . .”

“Monster?” Trinity ripped the words from Sarah’s mind. “And now it’s time to destroy the monster you never wanted?”

Sarah stared into the darkness, the madness, of her child’s anger and accepted that this wasn’t merely a dream projection. The six-year-old sitting before her really
was Trinity—her consciousness, her energy, her eyes filled with death, all of it programmed by a man who’d stop at nothing to control their powers. Pain stared back at Sarah from her daughter’s angelic face. Betrayal that ran so deep, how could Sarah ever break through?

Ruebens had been creating the perfect killing machine all along, only his ultimate focus had never been on Sarah and Maddie. They’d only been test runs on his way to securing Trinity’s devotion to his plans.

“Don’t trust him,” Sarah begged her daughter. “Whatever Ruebens told you about me, whatever he said to drive you to do this, don’t believe any of it.”

“He said you’d never come,” the child said, spouting a dead man’s logic, “and you never did. He showed me how you’d kill him, and you did. How you’d hate me, if I came to you like I did at the house. How you’d run the way you did. How you’d bring your Watchers with you into the dream. Like your team’s here now, right where he said they’d be. He said to let you think you were losing, then winning, then losing. That you’d keep trying no matter what. That you’d side with them and hate me and keep coming until you helped them kill me.”

“No one wants to kill you. I’ve been trying to find you so I could keep you safe. I’m not running anymore.”

But the Watchers did want to take down the mind behind the demanding currents and screams and psychotic ocean’s voice and the death and destruction that had been controlling Sarah. They wanted whoever at the center had planted a spy within the Brotherhood. Only, they’d expected it to be another scientist, a replacement for Ruebens. Not an innocent, powerful mind that had been born and bred for darkness.

“Why would you do this?” Sarah asked.

Trinity’s gaze lifted, staring over Sarah’s shoulder.

Her smile returned.

Her consciousness connected with Sarah’s, and together they saw a window form in the horrible door Sarah had confronted, with Maddie and Richard waiting anxiously beyond. It was the window Jeff had said to use to access her team. The vision of it was so vivid. More powerful than anything Sarah had ever experienced in the ocean matrix on her own. She could feel her twin’s exhaustion, the Watchers’ determination and commitment to complete their mission, Richard’s worry for her. His love.

And Trinity was accessing it all so effortlessly.

She was eager for their arrival.

“It’s a trap!”
Sarah tried to call to them.
“Don’t follow me.”

Amusement flickered across Trinity’s expression, telling Sarah no one would hear her unless her daughter allowed them to. The child was already more powerful than Maddie and Sarah ever would be.

“Why are you helping them do this?” Sarah demanded. “What did Ruebens promise you?”

Through Trinity’s consciousness, Sarah saw Maddie and Richard step toward the window. The lab shimmered within the dream’s matrix as Sarah’s mind slipped deeper into nightmare.

“You love them.” Trinity stroked the fur of Ruebens’s dream image. “Not me. And once you’re all gone, I’ll be free.”

“Free from what?”

“My loving family,” Trinity said in her creepy adult
cadence. “The only minds strong enough to stand between me and what my father created me to be.”

Then she opened her mouth and screamed.

Trinity’s scream.

Sarah’s scream.

Their pain spilled into the child’s hate-filled dream. It was a pitiful, lost sound that tore at Sarah’s heart and rushed the minds who’d come to protect her through the nightmare’s door.

Sarah felt her team’s arrival an instant before Richard and Maddie appeared inside Trinity’s lab.

“It’s a trap!” she yelled over the sound of a gunshot blasting through the nightmare.

Maddie’s hand flew to her chest. Richard caught her, lowering her to the ground. Sarah tried to run to her twin. But she still couldn’t move, except for turning to see Trinity holding a pistol.

“You shot her!” Sarah screamed.

“Did I?” In a blink, Trinity’s hands were empty.

Sarah stared down at the weapon clutched in her own fist now. The dream forced her to turn back as clouds of color, gray and brown, shimmered to life within the room. Her arm lifted. She sobbed. She couldn’t stop herself from aiming the gun at her twin.

“I . . .” She couldn’t force her arm down. “God, Maddie, I wouldn’t . . . She’s drawn us all here. She wanted you to come so she could attack the team. She shot you, not me.”

“Lower the weapon,” the gray aura demanded. It was Jeff Coleridge. “Lower the pistol, Ms. Temple, before my men are forced to take it from you.”

“It’s not me.” Sarah stared down at her worst nightmare—her sister was dying from the danger that Sarah’s mind had lured them into.

The lab shuddered. The nightmare’s insanity ripped at the dream’s matrix.

“I didn’t shoot my sister,” she said to Richard. “It’s the dream. It’s Trinity. She’s been controlling this all along. Ruebens taught her to hate me and draw us all in so she could make me pay for abandoning her. The center’s using that somehow. They’re—”

“They’re making a move on the Brotherhood.” Richard pressed his hand over Maddie’s chest. Her blood seeped through his fingers. “Two more legacies have been exposed. We’re under attack—”

“Because of information you’ve given the center through your dreams,” Jeff finished.

“I haven’t given anyone anything.” Sarah tried to connect with Richard’s consciousness. She couldn’t project to him, or Maddie, or anyone else.

But Trinity was letting her feel Maddie’s very real pain—beyond the dream, where Maddie’s chest was ripped open and bleeding in the dream lab.

“Like you didn’t just shoot your sister?” Jeff demanded.