Secret Legacy (9 page)

“This is all about you.” Richard stood, bending enough to keep his head from smacking the transport’s low roof. He helped her to her feet. “My men are trained to track psychic threats. They’ll have your back while you lead us to whatever’s connected to you here. Something spiked when you were lost in your dream. We have to know what.”

“Do we?” Sarah let him lift her to the ground. Her fingers clenched in the smooth fabric of his shirt while he adjusted the Kevlar vest he’d strapped on her when they arrived at the bunker’s flight bay. “This place feels like a grave. Digging around here is only going to make things worse.”

She’d never been more certain of anything in her life.

“Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.” Richard wrapped his arm around her, his mind, too, and led her toward the rusted-out screen door at the top of the back porch. “Something’s calling to you here. Something real I can sense. That gives us leverage with the council. It’s time to prove to the
Brotherhood that you can be trusted to align your personal search for Trinity with our strategic needs. Let’s get this done and get out of here.”

He nodded to Jeff, whose hand gesture sent the team fanning around the house’s perimeter. Sarah sensed more was being communicated among the men. But Richard was shielding her from the Watchers’ telepathic communications while he blocked the team from picking up on the growing sense of dread consuming her.

He led her up the rickety steps, guiding her around loose, splintering floorboards until they were at the dilapidated door. The frayed edges of the torn screen were razor sharp. Sarah’s fingers twitched, feeling again how the latch to her ocean dream’s door had sliced into her tender flesh.

“This is wrong,” she said.

“Yes.” Richard pulled against the weather-roughened frame. The door opened, its hinges protesting with an unholy screech of metal against metal. “But I’m going to help you see it through.”

It was a living nightmare, stepping back into what had been a sunny kitchen, seeing the cobwebs and layers of dust and rodent droppings covering everything. It was as if the darkness that had consumed her and Maddie’s legacy had cloaked this place, too.

“How did this happen?” She didn’t resist as Richard led her through the kitchen to the equally empty dining room, the tattered curtains there no match for the moon. Its light sought out each speck of decay. “My parents sold this house to another family after they moved. They had a little boy, Mom said. Lenox is the perfect place to
raise children. How could those people have abandoned everything like this?”

“Our research turned up police reports,” Richard said. “Five years ago, the family began reporting strange sounds. Unexplained damage and accidents. Voices racing through the house at all hours of the night. No perpetrators were ever caught. The father finally fell down the stairs one night after hearing a commotion below. He said he’d been pushed. There was no evidence of a break-in. The family moved away but has been unable to sell the property. It’s developed the reputation of being—”

“Haunted.” Sarah could feel a malevolent energy seeping through the place. It was the same consciousness that had been calling to her for a month. Richard could buffer his team’s thoughts from her mind, but there was a presence here stronger than even his powers to block, and it was glad she’d come.

“Help me
. . .
”
a child’s voice called from Sarah’s memories, and from—

“Upstairs.” She raced through what had been her family’s sitting room. She couldn’t stop herself, no matter how badly she wanted to run back to the he li cop ter instead.

Her foot caught on uneven floorboards that had warped from years of disuse. She lurched toward the ground, her balance still compromised from the dream’s aftereffects. Strong arms caught her, pulled her close, and wrapped her in the present, while the past screamed for her to give it control.

“I’m with you, remember?” Richard said into her
ear. It wasn’t a whisper, but she could barely hear him. “Every dream. Every memory. We’re doing this together.”

Sarah struggled to get away from him. She had to get away from him. The house was insisting. Her nails bit into the intimidating muscles of his arms. He calmly set her on her feet as something inside her, beyond her, kept building, hating, demanding that she make him pay. That she make all of them pay.

“Pay for what?” Richard’s grip tightened. “Why would she want to make us pay for anything?”

“She, who?” Sarah pressed her hand against the pressure throbbing behind her right temple and focused on his voice alone. It wasn’t real, she reminded herself—the other mind reaching for her wasn’t really here.

“Trinity,” Richard said.

Sarah’s knees buckled.

He caught her closer. “whatever’s plugged into your dream of her wants you here, upstairs, remembering your fears of this place. It wants you fighting me and the team of men outside who are protecting you.”

“No.” She refused to be losing control again. “It’s just being back in the house. This became a horrible place for me. No matter how perfect it looked or how hard my parents tried to make us into a happy American family, this place was a nightmare. I was their worst nightmare here, and I can’t go back to being that person. Don’t let me go upstairs. I told you not to bring me here. Something horrible is going to happen.”

Richard’s grip propelled her toward the steps instead. “We’re getting to the bottom of this.”

“I’m—” She stumbled on the bottom step, only righting herself because Richard’s mind and physical
strength were augmenting hers. “I’m not in control. I’m losing myself, I can feel it. Worse than in the dream ocean. I can’t stay in control here.”

“Exactly.” He all but dragged her to the top of the landing. “Someone wants you losing it. They wanted the other family long gone. They wanted this place looking like the raw end of a nuclear meltdown, so it would make coming back hurt you even more. Why is that? What would they hope to gain?”

“I . . .”

It wasn’t a “they.” Richard had been right. It was just one voice this time. One mind.

“Help me
. . .
”
Trinity called down the dark hallway that led to where Sarah and Maddie’s bedrooms had been.
“I’m here. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Sarah stumbled toward the lost child. Her bedroom door was closed. Its paint and condition had somehow remained pristine, the perfection of it a grotesque parody of the wasteland surrounding it.

“Is it real?” Her mind flashed to the image of the horrible door in her dream.

“It’s a mess,” Richard said, clearly not seeing the same thing she did. “But it’s real enough.”

He reached for the doorknob. Turned it so he could push the door inward.

“No!” She grabbed his arm, their psychic connection firing deeper until she could see the scarred, mottled reality of the door he was touching. “I can’t go in there. I won’t be able to stop whatever’s on the other side.”

“I’ll be with you.” He shook off her hold.

“No, you won’t.” She felt her identity slip even further away.

The door swung open . . .

. . . to a vision of the bedroom of her childhood.

Richard’s grip disappeared from her arm. He was no longer standing beside her. The rest of the Watcher team was no longer circling the house and investigating the shadows and cobwebs downstairs. Sarah’s senses narrowed to her daydream of standing in the doorway of her little-girl room, staring at an image of herself sitting cross-legged in the center of her bed, facing the empty wall above her headboard.

The child looked over her shoulder toward the door, her eyes a crystalline blue instead of Sarah’s gray.

“You can’t stay.” Her voice was soft, drawing Sarah across her pink carpet toward the bed and its bright pink spread. “They don’t want you here. But I had to
. . .
I’ve been waiting for so long. I knew you couldn’t stay away forever. And I had to see if you were really real.”

The childlike sentiment “really real” was something Sarah and her twin had said to each other during the dark nights they shared their hopes and dreams and the bizarre things that kept happening to them. Things their parents refused to accept.

“The Watchers only gave me ten minutes.” Sarah reached her hand toward the child’s soft hair. She pulled back before touching, afraid to break the spell.

“They made you come.” The child glanced over Sarah’s shoulder. “He made you.”

“I
. . .
I was afraid.”

“
Of me.”

“
No, sweetie.” Sarah closed her eyes against the sentiment. She had to remember that whatever consciousness was driving this vision was dangerous. But it felt so real. She’d been searching for Trinity for so long. It was impossible not to believe just a little. “I’ve been fighting to find you.”

“They don’t want you here.” The child turned back to the wall she’d been staring at. “They’ll find out, and they’ll come for me.”

“The Watchers brought me.” Sarah inched closer, sensing the little girl’s growing distress and the resentment simmering beneath her soft words. “They want to help you.”

“Not them
. . .
” Images began to form on the wall. Black-and-white, hazy reflections of an unforgiving ocean
.
“
Them.
The people telling me to dream.”

“The
. . .
The center doesn’t know you’re here? They didn’t send you?”

“I had to know. For me.”

“
Know what?”

“
If it was true, what he said. How much you’d hate me.”

Cries began to call to Sarah from the pictures on the wall. There was no color there, no clear form to the images. But something about them, something about the whole vision, seemed alarmingly familiar.

“Who said I’d hate you?” she asked. The scene on the wall began to shimmer. The bed and floor beneath her began to quake.

“He told me you wouldn’t ever believe,” the child said. The distorted image of a wolf appeared in the picture’s corner nearest her. “That you’d never want to.”

“Sarah?” Richard called from the other side of the daydream. “What are you seeing? Who are you talking to? The room’s empty.”

“He said you’d want them more.” The little girl pouted. The wolf in her picture snarled. “He said if you found me, all you’d do is run. From me. And he was right. You’re finally here, but you hate me just like he said.”

“Ruebens?” Sarah’s heart kicked against her ribs as the beast in the image grew clearer.

She did want to run.

She didn’t want to believe any of this.

“
Ruebens is dead,” she insisted to the child on the bed.

“
So are you,” the little girl responded in a deeper voice. It was the ocean’s voice from Sarah’s nightmare. “All of you are dead if I want you to be.”

Pain seared through Sarah’s body. She dropped her knees, her head screaming.

“Stop!” She could feel Richard’s agony beyond her vision.

He was stumbling closer, hitting his knees beside where she’d collapsed in the dilapidated bedroom.

“So easy,” the wolf hissed from the wall scene in the ocean nightmare’s voice. “Your fear makes it so easy.”

“Stop it.” Sarah’s lungs were filling with water. She fought to be free of the daydream she’d been sucked into, to find her way back. Every muscle in her body clenched in spasms of pain.

“Break the dream’s hold.” Richard gripped her arm. “The team’s on its way up. They’ll stop you if you don’t end the attack on your own.”

“They’re coming,” said the little girl on the bed. The angelic-looking, psychotic child Sarah refused to believe was Trinity. “They’ll take you away from me forever, just like he said. And you’ll let them. You’ll do anything not to believe in me.”

There was pain, fear, hatred in the words. And it made no sense. None of it. Why the hell couldn’t anything make sense anymore?

Sarah slammed her hands to the floor, feeling the last of her control shred. “You’re not real, little girl. None of this is real. Why am I here? What the hell to do you want from me? All of you, why won’t you leave me alone?”

They weren’t her words, she realized. The dream’s demands
were flowing through her, owning her, directing her to make the world pay for her loneliness and pain as the child and the bed disappeared, replaced by a menacing raven standing beside Sarah in her otherwise-empty bedroom, reaching for her, poised to destroy her
. . .

Richard felt Sarah’s mind return from wherever she’d gone, but her consciousness hadn’t come back alone. The presence he’d sensed in the ocean dream, then again when she’d stared transfixed at the empty room they’d walked into, was still controlling Sarah and blocking him from getting through to her consciousness.

“Come back to me.” He knelt beside where she’d crumpled to the ground, shaking off the pain that had sizzled through both of them. He was holding her, clutching her close. “Release whatever you saw.”