Secret Legacy Read Free

the bed and hold the woman whose mind was shredding itself or shake her senseless.
    “Why did you wait so long to call me?”
    His muscles clenched against the compulsion to force Sarah’s mind back to her sleeping quarters. He’d have risked it if they’d been dream linked. But interfering in whatever was happening behind her flickering eyelids when he wasn’t fully integrated into her dreaming reality would risk splitting her consciousness. He might permanently strand her identity in whatever vision controlled her mind.
    His fingers wrapped around her delicate wrist to track her racing pulse.
    He winced.
    He’d become Dream Weaver’s lead researcher to block the center’s attempt to harness the twins’ gifts. The center’s goal: to develop a weapon that allowed psychics to embed undetected dream programming into an innocent’s mind, then to control waking behavior bytriggering daydreams the subject was powerless to stop. He’d coordinated years of psychic projection research for the Brotherhood before he’d been chosen for the mission. Now, thanks to his Dream Weaver study, the Watchers knew more than ever about how Maddie and Sarah’s gifts worked. Knowledge that wouldn’t do Sarah a damn bit of good if she kept self-destructing.
    She refused to regress her consciousness back to the past, to the memories of when her gifts had first begun to unravel. She refused to work on healing what was broken inside her—the damage the center had preyed on. She insisted on pushing further into the dream instead, and her dreaming mind was destroying itself.
    A REM state could turn lethal. If the mind lost control to a dream, the body’s reaction to the stress could stop the heart. Blood pressure could escalate beyond the circulatory system’s tolerance. Injuries inside a dream’s matrix wouldn’t correspond to identical damage in the real world, but the brain could literally attack itself if a vision was intense enough, causing bleeds and scarring visible only through ultrasounds and scans.
    “Sarah . . .” he whispered. “Let me in. Let me see what’s going on.”
    Her arm twitched. Her mind flashed the image of his raven soaring above a seething ocean. He caught a glimpse of the murky depths Sarah was sinking to while the nightmare hounded her, wanting to subdue, control, consume her mind. He sensed nothing connected with the Brotherhood’s security breach. Instead, he could feel a malevolent impulse within the dream itself, driving Sarah’s growing obsession to find a child she insisted was six years old. A little girl she called Trinity.
    Sarah was drowning in her nightmare, and help from him or any Watcher was the last thing she wanted. Which left Richard only one option to reach her besides alerting his elders. He fumbled with the communications unit installed beside the bed. The line opened, intercom on. He speed-dialed a two-digit number. The connection rattled to life.
    “What . . . Sarah?” a female voice stuttered, ragged with sleep. “It’s one in the morning. Why—”
    “Get down to your sister’s quarters.” Richard felt Sarah’s lungs starving for oxygen, straining to inhale, failing. “Your sister’s dreaming.”
    He disconnected. Madeline had been unaware of her sister’s crisis. Sarah was blocking wherever her mind had gone from her twin, too.
    The council’s orders had been clear. Sarah either gained control of her gifts, or the danger posed by the twins’ ability to project emotion and behavior into others’ reality would be silenced. The Brotherhood’s role in monitoring the line between a psychic’s potential benefit to society and the harm that could be caused had evolved into a policing presence over the last de cade. The time when their activities were limited to surveillance and guidance was fast disappearing. Entities like the center were maneuvering the Watchers into a war, and the Temples’ legacy was a prime target.
    “What are you doing?” Richard curled his