And Maddie could. Sarah could feel her twin’s strength growing with these two men helping her. No one had helped Sarah. Maddie would win, and then she’d leave Sarah alone in the darkness forever.
“No!” Sarah ranted at her twin. “I’m not going to let you—”
“Come back to me.” Jarred’s finger drew Maddie’s face toward his. Their connection became a healing light that Sarah couldn’t fight. “I love you, Maddie. Come back to me.”
“No!” Maddie screamed again. But her arms were
dropping. Her body, her heart, were falling into a place so safe, Sarah couldn’t reach her.
“Damn it, do something!” Maddie’s lover was yelling at the Raven. “Get up and help her, you bastard, or so help me God, I’ll…”
Sarah was floating above them now, insanity returning in a welcome rush as she left Maddie’s mind behind. She watched her twin’s body shake. Maddie’s doctor-love wiped at the blood running from her nose. From the corner of her mouth. He was frantic. Terrified. And there the Raven was, fighting to save Maddie, too.
The way he’d promised to save Sarah…
Maddie was dreaming. She couldn’t stop, but she didn’t care.
She was running again, through the woods. But she was searching this time, not fleeing. She was herself in the gray of Sarah’s dream world. And she wasn’t just looking for her sister. She was digging for answers. The truth was there in the storm swirling around her. Maddie was going to finally understand what the hell her sister really wanted.
Jarred would be waiting for her when she woke. The Raven would be there, too. This time, she was going to have the answers she needed to deal with them. She’d know why her sister was so certain they were destined to be Death. She’d know how to stop her. Maddie was going to take her life back. Screw the curses and the government weapons programs and the mad scientists and demented dreams she couldn’t stop.
Sarah was the one running blind now. And Maddie was locked into the madness with her. Again. It was time for the insanity to end, whatever Maddie had to face once she got her hands on her sister.
“If you don’t take this fucking blindfold off me—” Jarred growled as he was led through yet another door, into yet another room in some mystery complex that might be
the center. It might not be. No one was telling him a damn thing. “If I don’t see Maddie in the next five minutes,
I’m
going to become a deranged killing machine!”
“Relax,” Metting responded, speaking for the first time since giving orders in whatever forest the rendezvous had been in, to have Maddie sedated and Jarred blindfolded and carted along for the ride. “Your patient is safe, and my job is to keep her that way. Including making sure you can’t tell anyone how to find this facility, if you were to escape and subsequently be captured.”
The tightly wound cloth over Jarred’s face was ripped away. Bright light assaulted his closed eyes. He held up a hand and blinked until he could see. The room was a sphere of white on white. Even the exam tables and cabinetry. The only relief was the color of his clothing and Metting’s. Black.
“Your anger will make what Madeline is going through harder.” Metting’s tone was mild. Detached. “I’d recommend pulling yourself together.”
In the woods, Jarred had seen the man’s anxiety. Streaks of panic while he fought to regain Sarah’s trust. Both were gone now. The only evidence that this was the same person who’d begged Sarah to believe him were the bruises on his neck. Metting turned his back while he studied something scrolling across the screen of a laptop docked on one of the high counters.
“Everything you’re feeling,” he said, “Maddie’s feeling it, too. Interesting. She’s—”
“She’s dying,” Jarred raged as Metting’s men left the room. “Because of whatever you’ve done to her.”
“On the contrary.” Metting didn’t look up as Jarred stalked closer. “I have nothing to do with what’s happening to Madeline at the moment. It wasn’t my programming that targeted her for dream projections. It’s not my
emotions ripping her apart through whatever connection you two have built.”
“Programming?” Maddie’s dissociative states and every nightmare Jarred had shared with her replayed in his mind. “What the hell are dream projections?”
“They’re how Sarah’s reached out to her sister.” Metting dragged his laptop to the edge of the counter and beckoned Jarred closer. “They’re the focus of the government’s latest covert weapons testing.”
“But…” Jarred started.
Then he realized he didn’t know enough to even begin to know what to ask.
The laptop displayed something that looked like an EKG. But Jarred’s familiarity with heart-monitoring technology told him that’s not what he was watching.
“This is Maddie?” he guessed.
Metting nodded. “I tracked her sister’s sleep states the same way, when—”
“Sleep states?”
“Brain activity is different, depending on the phase of sleep the mind is in. Maddie’s mind will cycle in and out of the REM stage, six or seven times during an eight-hour period. She should be—”
Jarred grabbed the man by the shoulders and spun him around until Metting’s back was pressed against the counter.
“Where is she? Stay the hell out of her brain and tell me where she is. Now!”
“That would be inadvisable, given your current emotional distress.” The man sounded like a goddamned robot. “If Madeline’s going to have any chance of surviving this, you need to pull yourself together.”
“Surviving what?”
“What you came to me to protect her from—the cen
ter’s plans. Which we know now means this Wolf’s shadow programming, which he’s had Sarah embed into Madeline’s mind.”
“The…what wolf?”
Richard studied him, then the laptop, before answering. “Does this mean you’re ready to listen like a brilliant scientist, instead of a panicked lover?”
Jarred scowled at the wicked spikes on Richard’s monitor.
“What wolf?” he asked with more control.
“A wolf is the dream symbol Sarah chose to represent the person controlling her shadow programming.”
“Like you’re a raven…” Jarred added this new bit of information to the rest.
“Except that I was never supposed to become an active participant in Sarah’s dream projections. A control can’t risk becoming the target of a simulation gone awry. He has to remain separate, so he can bring the dreamer back when needed. So she’ll still trust him when everything in the dream is telling her not to. Given the fresh scars on your chest, Dr. Keith, I’d venture to say that you’ve already had some experience overidentifying with a dream projector. Now that you’re immersed into Madeline’s dreamscape, you can’t afford to let your guard down. Not until her mind is trained well enough to tell the difference between dream and reality.”
Jarred scowled. “You’re talking like I’m—”
“A control? Yes. Madeline turned to you when Sarah’s dream work began to split her from reality. Which makes you the only thing standing between your patient, and her absorbtion into the center’s plans.”
“
You
were with the center.” Jarred glanced back at the laptop, at the ugly spikes and chaotic drops in Maddie’s brainwaves—pain that this man had a part in causing.
He suddenly wanted to be the one throttling Sarah’s Raven. “Because of you, Maddie’s sister’s out there alone, spiraling out of control, and she’s taking Maddie’s mind with her.”
“Yes.” Metting’s clinical facade slipped, for no more than a second; then it fell back into place. “And no. I was there to protect Sarah, and I failed.”
“Right. This government defense program you said you infiltrated. And you were there to do what, exactly?”
“To strengthen Sara’s mind so she could resist the center’s plans for Dream Weaver.”
“And now you want me to believe that a wolf, not you, is the real threat to Maddie and her sister.”
“The Wolf’s simulations piggybacked my progress with Sarah, but they were kept secret from me. Which can only mean one thing.”
It didn’t take Jarred long to guess what. “The center suspected you weren’t there to give them a weapon. So they hedged their bets with the Wolf.”
“So it would seem.” Richard nodded, as if to welcome Jarred on board his sinking ship.
“Okay,” Jarred said into the silence that followed. “I’ll grant that it’s highly unlikely you’re working with the center, if they’re gunning for your operatives with tear gas and automatic weapons. So who’s behind this mission of yours to stop them?” He gestured around the lab. “Who’s so concerned about Sarah Temple they sent you on a suicide mission to stop what was being done to her?”
Jarred was battered and bruised and felt like he’d tangled with a freight train and lost. But Maddie’s life depended on him seeing things as clearly as possible. He took his first close look at the man beside him. At Met
ting’s rigid posture and the violent way his fingers snapped against the keyboard as he typed. Jarred saw controlled rage and a scientist’s desperation to find answers. But there was no malice. No careless drive to hurt. This was a man on a mission to protect a patient who was now beyond his reach, the same as Maddie was beyond Jarred.
“We’re a centuries-old secret society,” Metting finally answered, his tone as ragged as Jarred felt. “Committed to watching psychically powerful family lines like the Temples’. We’re charged with maintaining balance, tracking, and remaining uninvolved unless it becomes clear intervention is required.”
“You’re…” Jarred’s first instinct was to laugh. But something in the solemnity of Metting’s explanation stopped him. “So that makes you…”
“A Watcher.” Metting pointed at the fluctuating patterns scrolling across the monitor. “A noninvolved protector. At least I was until a year ago. We’d known about the government’s interest in Sarah for a while. Ever since she was transferred to the center. But a year ago, funding was approved for a black-ops testing program, with the ultimate goal of projecting Sarah’s psychic abilities into other people’s dreams. And through those dream hosts, into the world as untraceable daydreams.”
“Daydreams?”
“Lucid dream states a host would have no control over, that a powerful psychic like Sarah could program, then trigger at will as—”
“Right. Daydreams.” Jarred’s head was going to explode. “You expect me to believe the government would bankroll something that—”
“Consider if the dreamer were to walk into an unsuspecting crowd with a bomb hidden in her purse. A bomb
she doesn’t remember building or testing, because each time she worked on it, she was dreaming. But she finally has access to a target the government needs eliminated. Maybe years after her programming was embedded. And since she’s an everyday person with access to the mark, and she’s on no agency’s radar as a threat, she’s become the perfect direct-strike weapon that can be remotely triggered from anywhere in the world.
“She’s an innocent. She doesn’t remember the dreams, or what they’ve trained her to do—because the mind is predisposed to forget troubling dream behavior. In her everyday life she wouldn’t be able to build a bomb. But fueled by countless untraceable REM simulations, she can be trained to do anything. And the fuse for Dream Weaver? That’s the kicker. It’s simple human emotion—the conduit through which human dreams connect with real-world experiences. Heightened by the collective unconscious that exists all around us—a vast repository of the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual experiences of every living being, and those who lived before us. All a psychic projector like Sarah has to do is isolate the specific emotion that will trigger a desired action, and a walking time bomb has been created.”
“How…close are they to getting this done?” Jarred asked.
“They’re there, except for execution of a weaponsgrade field test. For that, they needed a scientist with psychic abilities to complement Sarah’s. The Brotherhood made sure they got exactly what they needed—me.”
Jarred tried to speak. Then tried again. No luck. The image of Maddie holding a gun to her head kept replaying in his mind. Her slicing him open with her mother’s paring knife.
“So…” He cleared his throat and glanced toward Metting’s monitor. “When Maddie isn’t in control of things she’s doing?”
“It’s most likely because Sarah has embedded programming directing her to—”
“To try to kill me? You? To kill herself? Why would Sarah do that if she really thought she needed her sister to break free of you and the center?”
“Most likely the shadow programming intended the command to kill to be for Sarah’s other host. But once Sarah was linked with Maddie—”
“Most likely! You’re the expert in all this. You’re the center’s go-to guy. And the best you can give me is
your guess is as good as mine?
”
“I’m Sarah’s Watcher, not her shadow control. I wasn’t involved in—”
“Well it doesn’t sound like
watching
for a year has helped you figure out jack about what’s going on!”
Metting actually smiled.
It wasn’t reassuring.
“I’m learning more by the second, Dr. Keith. Such as how strongly you’re linked, emotionally, with Madeline’s dreams.”
“And you know that, how?”
Metting nodded toward his laptop.
“Madeline’s brain activity spikes each time your agitation increases. Her emotional state tracks yours, even though she’s unconscious and two rooms away.”
“So, I’m affecting her rest? What does that—”
“Her dreams, actually.” Metting’s gaze registered regret, then resignation. “It’s clear after what happened in the motel and at the rendezvous that her shared dream states with her twin are out of control. She’s been without the pharmacological cocktail I designed for Sarah,
to sustain the nonactive sleep periods required to recover after dream simulations. And so is Sarah now. Which means both sisters are degenerating into continuous dream cycles.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Sarah and Madeline Temple’s psychic abilities originate in their emotions, more strongly than any other projectors I’ve studied. Watchers have tracked their family line for generations. Back to a distant aunt who was burned at the stake for supposedly holding half a village in thrall.”