Secret Legacy Read online

  “I won’t let them you hurt you anymore,” Sarah promised the child. “I’ll protect you.”

  Laughter shrieked through the room, the sound harsher than the screams. The walls, the floor, began to quake. Sarah sprawled to her knees.

  “Protect me?” Trinity asked, speaking for the first time. “You hate me. You never wanted me. You never wanted to find me.”

  She sounded exactly the same as in their vision at the house, but there was something off, as if Sarah wasn’t listening to a child at all.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re too afraid to,” Trinity said with her overly mature reasoning. “So you left me with nothing. Now I’m returning the favor.”

  Trinity held out her hand to a shadow shifting in the corner. The creature lurking there joined her, sitting obediently on the ground at her feet. The little girl threaded her fingers through the gray wolf’s coarse hair, taking obvious plea sure from stroking evil. Comforting it. Controlling it.

  “Welcome to our nightmare, Mother.” Trinity’s sunshine-bright smile turned Sarah’s stomach. “I thought you’d never come.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  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.

  “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.