Secret Legacy (28 page)

“It’s the nightmare,” Sarah insisted. “It’s in control. The center wants us eliminated—that’s all this ocean dream has been about. Luring Maddie and me here so they can destroy our part of the Temple Legacy. So there’s no one left to stop her from doing whatever they want next.”

“Stop who?” Jeff asked.

“Trinity . . .” Blood dripped from the corner of Maddie’s mouth. “Did you find her?”

“She shot you.” Sarah stared at the silent child who was watching the damage she’d caused with sinister fascination. “She opened the window to bring you through the door. She’s controlling the matrix. I think . . . I think she wants me to watch you die.”

“You really do love her,” Trinity said, the catch in her voice pulling at Sarah no matter how many horrible things the little girl had done.

“A child is doing all this?” Jeff’s energy flowed closer. “You want us to believe a child has manipulated your powers, and the Brotherhood, and this dream, all for the chance to torture you with your sister’s death? That’s the best you can come up with when you’re the only one who’s holding a weapon?”

“Is she?” Trinity asked.

Jeff’s aura shimmered to solid form, his injured leg now whole within the matrix—a powerful man whose furious expression was the opposite of the reassuring Watcher who’d asked for her trust when they planned for this mission. He looked down at the assault rifle in his hands, his expression wary. Then his grip tightened and he pointed the rifle at Sarah.

“He wants you dead, too,” Trinity said. “He came for me. But why not kill my mother, too?”

“You’re . . .” Jeff stared at Trinity, then Sarah. “You’re her mother?”

“Trinity’s your daughter?” Richard asked.

“You came to kill her?” Sarah demanded of Jeff. Her arm shook as her mind rejected the dream’s newest bombshell. The gun she was pointing at her sister shook. The entire room shook. “You promised—”

“To help me?” Trinity’s voice was a clipped, feminine
reflection of Ruebens. “And you believed him. My father said you’d believe all of them. You’d believe anyone but me. Even this one”—her glare shifted to Jeff—“who only cares about finishing the personal
mission
he’s been secretly executing for a month.”

Jeff swung his rifle toward Trinity, confirming that everything Trinity had said was true. Jeff Coleridge, who’d taken a bullet protecting Sarah in Lenox, who’d always had Richard’s back, had been betraying Sarah and his brotherhood since Richard brought Sarah and Maddie to the bunker. Maybe even before that.

“No!” Sarah begged as Jeff refocused his hate-filled stare on Trinity. She still couldn’t move. “Don’t shoot her. She’s a confused little girl. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

“Your
little girl
is the darkest part of your legacy’s prophecy,” Jeff said. “She has to be stopped. You all do.”

“Drop your weapon, Lieutenant,” Richard warned.

Jeff didn’t budge.

“So you can cover for Sarah some more?” he asked Richard. “So you can put protecting this godforsaken legacy before what you know is right? You shouldn’t be here, Richard. You weren’t supposed to be here for this. But you betrayed your oath. Again. Disobeyed a direct order from the council. Destroyed your career. And for what? To help these people leak classified information that’s put every other family we’re watching at risk?”

“I did it to ensure this mission’s success,” Richard said. “To keep the Brotherhood from making a mistake with the Temple Legacy that we can’t afford to make.”

“Oh, there have been many mistakes,” Trinity said. “Haven’t there, Lieutenant Coleridge?”

Trinity stepped down from the exam table, the tapes and wires that had been attached to her falling free, then dissolving from sight along with the rest of the equipment in the projection’s lab. Until the walls, too, disappeared. Everything was gone but the images of the people she’d maneuvered into the dream. The little girl walked toward Jeff, through the nightmare’s nothingness, until the muzzle of his weapon pressed into her forehead.

“Put the gun away.” The arm holding Sarah’s own weapon swung until it was pointed at Jeff.

Every Watcher on the team materialized into their human reflections, all of them holding automatic rifles trained on Sarah.

“Stand down,” Richard ordered from where he was still holding Maddie. “Lower your weapons.”

The Watchers obeyed their Colonel, all of them but Jeff.

“Now’s your chance,” Trinity said to him in Tad Ruebens’s voice. “The question is, do you have the balls to see your plan through?”

“Shut up.” Jeff’s gun pressed deeper into Trinity’s tender skin. “Shut the hell up. That voice . . . It’s—”

“The voice of your contact at the center?” Ruebens’s sarcasm dripped from Trinity’s rosebud mouth. “The voice of the man you passed key information to about the legacy that was tainting your brotherhood?”

“You were . . .” Jeff shook his head. “I was—”

“Feeding the center information about my work with Sarah?” Richard eased Maddie to the ground and stood. Shock hardened his features into a dangerous, feral mask. “You gave away tracking coordinates for our other legacies?”

“No.” Jeff glanced at Richard, then back to Trinity. “I only gave up the Temples.”

“Information we never needed.” Trinity laughed, her voice filled with the sound of a carefree child’s innocence, while her words reeked of the kind of evil it took a lifetime to cultivate. “Regular contact was what we required, regular access to Brotherhood logistics. So we let you think your role was vital to bringing about this dream’s resolution. We needed your council to believe that Sarah and Madeline and Colonel Metting could never be trusted again—say, at the exact moment that your Watchers were under imminent attack.
That
my handlers needed inside help to arrange. And we’ve managed just fine, you and I, haven’t we?”

“Shut up!” Sweat ran down Jeff’s face. “Who the hell are you? I didn’t betray any tactics about other legacies. All I gave my contact were details about Sarah’s dream work.”

“And it’s supposed to be okay that the only people you betrayed were my family?” Sarah said, feeling everything she’d fought so hard to believe about the Brotherhood and her legacy’s place in it disintegrate before her eyes. “You badgered me into trusting you. You’re supposed to take us home. That’s what you said in the lab. You gave us your word as a Watcher.”

“Like you were supposed to be learning to control your psychic powers and using them to protect others?” Jeff said. “Meanwhile, you were growing stronger and more out of control and the council did nothing to stop it. And you”—Jeff thrust an almost deranged rush of hatred at Trinity—“You’re the most dangerous threat of all.”

“You bastard.” Richard stepped closer. “Our job is to—”

“
Watch. Defend. Preserve.
I know.” Jeff turned his gun on his friend, stopping Richard from advancing. “Just like I knew I’d never make it back from this mission alive. But I betrayed my creed and you, and I came here to protect the Brotherhood anyway. I initiated contact over a scrambled comm link in my quarters, on a dedicated workstation. Nowhere else. I never would have put the viability of other legacies—”

“What contact?” Trinity asked.

Her hands behind her back, she toed the ground with her bare foot, the gesture so coy, so childlike, Sarah closed her eyes. There was so much anger, so much evil, inside her child. How could everything have gone so wrong?

“My communications with my center contact,” Jeff said. “I was given an algorithm to use to cloak our connection, but I have every conversation recorded for the council to review once I’m gone.”

“Or were those exchanges just a dream?” Trinity’s smile held no sympathy for the man she’d helped destroy. “A harmless daydream, except for the secrets our link allowed the center to extract from your mind and your bunker’s sophisticated computer network.”

Jeff spun back to Trinity, fear twisting his handsome features even worse than his rage had. “I’m going to—”

“Kill me?” Trinity asked. “Imagine my surprise. Except, this is my father’s dream projection, and he gave it to me to bring to life any way I chose. Watch closely. You don’t want to miss my big finish.”

Light shot from Trinity’s eyes, striking one Watcher, who dropped to the ground. Then a second. Both mortal wounds that Sarah could feel ripping through the men’s bodies back in the lab.

“Stop!” Sarah screamed, the dream’s hold on her senses lifting.

The men’s agony. Maddie’s pain. Trinity’s warped drive for revenge. Jeff’s shock and regret and hatred. It all sizzled through Sarah, distorting the web of consciousness holding the dream together.

Bodies were writhing.

Hearts were shuddering.

Systems were breaking down both inside and beyond the dream.

Sarah should be able to—she had to—stop this. But she was too weak, her mind too fractured, to even reach for Richard. His consciousness was the only one she couldn’t sense now. Just as she couldn’t sense her own existence beyond the nightmare’s surface.

She was trapped once again, unable to release the dream, with darkness closing in and no way to stop it.

“You bitch!” Jeff spat at Trinity, his face contorted with madness. “This isn’t how it was supposed to happen.”

“She’s just a child,” Sarah begged.

A child whose insanity had been hardwired into her mind the same way Ruebens had programmed Sarah.

Sarah’s grip tightened on her own weapon. The primal need to protect the daughter she hadn’t been able to accept before was obliterating her ties to everything else, including her vow to never again kill because of one of Ruebens’s dreams.

“You’re dead,” Jeff said, his impulse to shoot Trinity slamming into Sarah, giving her only a instant’s warning.

She fired the gun, the bullet flying—

—into thin air.

Jeff’s body had already dropped to the nightmare’s floor.

Richard gazed up from Jeff’s dead image, while Sarah felt the lieutenant’s heart strike its last beat beyond the nightmare. The rifle Richard had used to kill his friend hung limply at his side. His horrified expression told Sarah exactly how badly she’d failed—how empty their dreams for the future had become.

“See,” her daughter said as the projection began to fade, along with the last of Sarah’s sanity as she listened to the desolation, the loneliness, in her child’s voice. “You’re just like me. You’ve always been just like me. Death follows us everywhere. It’s who we were born to be. Can you see it now? Can you see what we’ve become?”

“Maddie!” Jarred was screaming as Richard emerged from the nightmare.

The doctor was trying to stabilize Madeline’s blood loss, while Richard’s lab techs worked furiously to save the lives of the two Watchers Trinity had attacked. All three had gaping chest wounds, physical injuries that a dream reality shouldn’t have been capable of projecting beyond its matrix.

Richard stood amid the chaos, listening to the unbroken beep signifying the flat line on Jeff’s heart monitor. His second, his friend, had been the center’s spy from the start, while he’d baited Richard and war gamed with him and maneuvered the Brotherhood into the exact position the center had wanted them in. Richard shook off his shock and sadness and fury at his friend’s betrayal while he tried to regain enough of his own senses to search Sarah’s mind for a flicker of consciousness.

Her energy was gone, both within and beyond the matrix. Lost to him. She wasn’t releasing the dream, even though the rest of the Watchers were slowly coming around. He could sense Madeline’s consciousness returning to her body. But Sarah’s mind had disappeared
into a darkness he couldn’t reach, while her stats on the machines tracking her condition were maxed to the red zone.

“Come back to me,” Richard begged.

She’d trusted him. She’d done everything he’d asked her to do. She’d given herself to her dream, to her team. She’d even trusted Jeff, just as Richard had taught her to. And none of it had protected her from Ruebens’s destruction. The bastard had created the third volatile component of the Temple Legacy and trained her in secret. He’d cultivated and programmed Trinity’s gifts into a sociopathic super weapon. Sarah had a child, and her daughter had been the danger barreling toward all of them from her nightmares.

Richard bent over her table, somehow managing to keep himself on his feet as he used the last of his energy to sustain his presence in the lab as well as her projection.

“Sarah
. . .
”
His mind said as he swam through the dream’s empty, churning sea.
“Let me see you. Wherever you’ve gone, you have to come back. I need you here to fix this. The Brotherhood needs you, and so does Trinity.”

Maddie’s healing touch wasn’t there to help him reach her twin. No recovery team was rushing to Sarah’s side. There were too many other critical injuries to contend with. Jeff would never again be at Richard’s back, supporting him as brother, as a sworn warrior. Richard’s mind alone clung to his faith in Sarah.

“You have to be Trinity’s Watcher now,” he said. “We have to make the elders see that—”

“Step away, Colonel,” a voice said. Mike Donovan stood beside Jacob’s hologram. “I have orders to take you both into custody.”