Dark.
Alone.
Maddie was dark and alone.
No. She was Sarah. Sarah was alone. Running through the night. Hitchhiking. Whatever it took.
The Wolf would be waiting. So would her mother. Sarah
had made sure of it. It was a trap. The Wolf would try to keep Sarah and Phyllis both. But Sarah had picked the perfect place. Easy to access. Easy to watch. In the woods. And she knew every inch of the path to get there. Just where to hide. She’d been there before. Many times. When hide-and-seek had been family fun. It was her favorite place. She’d wait through the darkness, then through the day for the next night. Death worked best at night.
The mountains loomed. Friendly. Welcome home. But not home anymore. Not welcome anywhere. The Raven was hunting. He had Maddie. Maddie would believe his lies. The way Sarah used to believe. Didn’t matter. Sarah had to beat the Wolf. That’s all she had to do now. And if she didn’t survive? All the better. It would be over. Death would finally be silenced.
But the Wolf would go first. Then the demons he brought with him. Sarah would watch. Listen. Feel. Each of them. Their greatest fears. Their nightmares. They’d all be hers. She’d make each one reality. Phyllis would finally see the monster she’d let the Raven create.
Sarah would tell Phyllis to run for the car. The one Sarah would steal. Give her the keys. Watch her run away, as one last nightmare consumed Sarah. Sarah would be good enough for the flames then. They would take the Wolf. Then they’d take her. She’d finally be free. Just like her father.
A raven’s wings would spread.
Ghostly tree limbs would sway, while mountains watched over their shoulders.
The explosion of her father’s car would rip through the night. Only this time Death would be with him. This time, Sarah would—
“No!” Maddie jerked awake, to find herself held safely in Jarred’s arms.
He was shaking as badly as she was.
“Sarah!” Maddie muttered. “She’s running…after my mother…She’s made some kind of deal with the Wolf, and she’s going after him herself. She won’t survive it…She’s seen that, and she doesn’t care…I don’t even think she wants to live.”
“Shhh.” Jarred brushed his forehead against hers. His fingers tangled in her hair. “We’ll find her. Metting will help you figure out where the hell you just went. What everything you saw means. We’ll find Sarah before it’s too late.”
“But…” Maddie’s head was spinning. Too many images. Too much of Sarah. Pounding. Her stomach was churning. She swallowed the reflex to vomit. “Sarah…She’s so alone…In the dark…She’s out there all alone…”
“Shhh.” Jarred rocked her, his anger and fear colored by something far stronger—love and determination to support whatever Maddie had to do. “Just let me hold you, sweetheart, until you’re ready to talk. You found her. Metting won’t let Sarah face the Wolf alone.”
“What does
home
mean?” Metting asked Maddie for the third time.
“How am I supposed to know! It was Sarah’s messedup mind. I don’t know what any of it means.”
“You’re her twin,” Jarred reasoned, still beside her. “You must have some feel for what
home
means.”
He winced when her next glared blasted him, but he didn’t back down. He and Metting were still with her in the conference room. A Watcher team somewhere in the bunker was preparing to leave. But no one could do anything
but
prepare, until Maddie figured out where the hell they were going.
“In her dream, she’s traveling.” Metting’s manner remained calm and patient. “Could she really be returning to your childhood home?”
“To Lenox?” Their small mountain hometown in the Berkshires, not far from the Massachusetts-New York border.
Everything Maddie knew about her sister now felt like Sarah despised looking back. Everything but—
“Our playhouse…It seemed so real…”
“Maybe because she was already fixated on returning to the area.” Metting typed into his laptop. “Then when you connected with her just now, her mind was on the move. Maddie, think. Was she traveling for real?”
“The mountains were there, outside the windshield of whatever she was riding in. But—” Sarah had been falling apart, emotionally and physically. Sick with her grandiose plans for proving to Phyllis that she was the good twin after all. “—nothing she was thinking was making sense…”
“Forget about sense,” Metting pressed. “Did it feel real?”
“I…” Maddie allowed the memories closer, while she tried to hold on to the present. To Jarred. “It was like she’d contacted the Wolf, somehow. He’d be waiting for her, except she’d get there first.”
“And then what will she do?” Metting stopped typing.
“She’ll…wait…all day. She wants it to happen at night.
Death works best at night…
She has to be the good daughter now…”
“By getting herself killed?” Jarred held Maddie tighter.
“She wants it to happen where?” Metting was beside Maddie now. He took her hand. “Stay with the memory, Madeline. Believe what your feelings are telling you. Tell us where she’s forcing the Wolf to meet her, before she destroys herself in a single act of stupidity!”
“She’s as smart as I am!” Maddie slapped her sister’s Raven across the cheek. “Smarter. She just can’t handle the feelings…the constant barrage of everyone and everything, closing in on her until…”
“Until she’s let it destroy her mind,” Jarred reminded her. “Don’t let these bastards do the same thing to you.”
“Sarah never said where they were meeting,” Maddie insisted.
Jarred kissed the top of her head and curled her closer in his lap. “Try, sweetheart. She’s left her mind open to yours because she needs you there. She needs you to figure this out and stop her.”
But what if
Maddie
didn’t want to figure it out? She stared at the imprint of her fingers on Metting’s face. What if she couldn’t face what her sister had become—what she herself might very well become? Alone. Cold. Insane, with no hope of escape. Craving a violent death she was determined to control, when she could no longer control anything else.
But Maddie closed her eyes anyway. She held tight to Jarred. She wasn’t abandoning her sister again.
You’ll never be alone,
Jarred’s mind whispered.
We’ll take care of Sarah and your mother together.
And on the heels of his promise, came the images from Sarah’s last vision. A disjointed rush…
The mountains and the Wolf. The car and the road. Symbols that Metting had said could mean almost anything. Symbols of a place and a trip to the place, but none of them necessarily representative of what Sarah was really doing. Except that Sarah was also thinking about…
“Hiding,” Maddie said out loud. “She’s thinking about hide-and-seek. Maybe that’s where the mountains came from, because she and my dad and I used to…”
The images swirled again, drawing Maddie back in, beguiling her to really look. To dig. Because there was something Sarah had said. Something she’d thought about that had felt so real, because part of it was Maddie’s memory, too…
“Hide-and-seek,” she repeated, her eyes closed tight. “Sarah’s playing hide-and-seek. Waiting for them. She’s good at hiding. Our father always said she was the best. I always got caught. We’d go play in the park near our house, in one of the open fields people used for picnics. Sarah had the best hiding places. She’d sit forever and wait for us to give up, and she’d never tell us where she’d been. She’d come running into the field, laughing and
smiling and squealing when our father scooped her up and told her how smart she was, and…”
Maddie could see the past now, the way Sarah was remembering it. The feeling of it was so real, there were tears in Maddie’s eyes. Running down her cheeks. It had been so long since she’d been able to see her father this clearly, as if he were right there. Close enough to touch and hold on to, so he’d never leave again.
She didn’t dare open her eyes, because then the memory would be gone. She could almost smell his aftershave. Hear the way he used to chuckle while he watched them play. See Sarah smile as he swung her around in that sunny field they’d always gone to…
“Our field!” Reality yanked Maddie back with a jerk. No warning. No chance to say good-bye. Her eyes snapped open. Her heart thundered to a halt. She scrubbed tears away with the back of her hand. “She’s meeting the Wolf in our field. It’s real. It really is real.”
“What’s real?” Metting urged. “What were you feeling?”
“Home…It feels like home. Like I was really there, except Sarah wanted to be there alone. She’s desperate to do this alone. She’s not just drawing the Wolf out. She’s taking our mother home, so Phyllis can see Sarah the way our father did—the good little girl he was so proud of in the park. She’s not going to let me win. I never win when we play hide-and-seek, and this time I’m not even going to get to play.”
“But why go all the way across the state?” Jarred rubbed a soothing hand down Maddie’s arm.
But comfort no longer came with his touch. The reality of what Maddie had felt in Sarah’s mind wouldn’t allow it. The depth of her twin’s insanity was the legacy waiting for them both. Even if they stopped this showdown with the Wolf, the darkness would still be waiting for Maddie.
She eased away and stood. She couldn’t look at either man now. Metting, because she might finally kill him for ripping away her blinders and showing her what she really was. What she couldn’t have. And Jarred, because his love and concern wanted her to believe in happy endings. In the future and things like always being there for each other. But her future was a demented place. A place she wouldn’t drag him into, only to hurt him and lose him and learn to hate him the way Sarah had her Raven.
“In the dream,” she explained, because saying it out loud might finally make her accept just how hopelessly fucked up she and Sarah were. “The nightmare the Wolf made her send me. Our father’s accident, over and over again. Sarah kept trying to reach our father. To prove that she was still good, by saving him. But every dream she’d fail. In her mind she thinks she killed him, because she couldn’t save him. She’s Death. But if she saves our mother, she finally wins. She gets to be the good twin before she dies.”
“What are you saying?” Metting asked.
“Sarah’s not bravely confronting the chance of losing her life, she’s running toward it. She’s drawing the Wolf across the state because I’m here and she’ll be there, and she thinks there’s no way I can stop her. She doesn’t want my help. She’s playing into that maniac’s hands. Because in her twisted version of the dream, dying is the way out of what we are. She’s going to fix this legacy of ours—by dying while she saves our mother!”
Maddie turned toward the Raven, careful not to look at Jarred. The love shining in his eyes would only make the truth harder to face.
“My sister’s going to get herself and my mother killed tomorrow night, in the place where we played games with our father as children. Because Sarah’s insane need to get rid of these
gifts
everyone wants to get their hands
on is telling her this is the only way she’ll be free. And I’m suddenly very afraid she’s right.”
Jarred paced across his and Maddie’s bedroom at the bunker, ready to rip his way through the locked door and the security outside.
“Get away from me,” Maddie had said, when he’d reached for her after their meeting with Metting. “My entire family is poison. This is going to end bloody, and you can’t stop it. And if you’re there, I’ll have your death on my conscience for real this time. I don’t want you involved when this blows up. And if I can’t stop what this is turning into, you don’t want me, period.”
Stay away from her?
Maddie hadn’t looked at him when they’d left the conference room. Or when Metting had led her in a different direction while one of his men dragged Jarred away. Jarred had fought every step, until he’d been ushered into the bedroom and told to cool off. Four hours ago.
He couldn’t feel Maddie now. He had no idea where she was or what she was planning to do. The lock cleared on the door. He stepped beside it. Metting was the first person to come inside.
Excellent.
Jarred went for the jaw. Metting went down. Two of his men yanked Jarred’s hands behind his back and pulled him away, while Metting got to his feet and swiped at his bruised lip.
“Where’s Maddie?” Jarred demanded.
“She’ll be on her way momentarily.” It was the Raven looking back at Jarred now. Deathly serious. Totally unimpressed with Jarred’s explosion.
“To catch her sister?” Jarred asked.
“Yes.”
“Alone.”
“With a dozen of the Brotherhood’s best snipers. And myself.”
“But without me!” Jarred surged against the arms restraining him.
“You were a distraction, Dr. Keith. Madeline has one chance to stop her sister. One chance to stop the Wolf’s plans for her family. We had to map the quickest route to this Kennedy Park she remembered. And I needed her listening to me when I explained my men’s tactical plans for when we get there. Distraction, because she’s convinced that her legacy is a death sentence for you, wasn’t an option.”
Jarred actually bared his teeth. “There’s no way you’re keeping me from following her. If I have to tear this place down, I’ll be at Lenox by tonight.”
“Of course you will.” Metting motioned for Jarred to be released. “You’ll ride in a second van, leaving ten minutes behind me, Ms. Temple, and my lead strike team.”
Jarred rubbed circulation back into his forearms instead of attacking. For now. “What the hell is going on? Why the cloak-and-dagger? Why lock me up in here and hide me in a chase car, if you want me at the clearing when everything goes down?”
“I
need
you at that clearing. Madeline needs you there. I suspect that when it’s all said and done, you’ll be our best hope of saving the Temple legacy from whatever the Wolf has planned. And, trust me, he has a plan of his own. This is all happening too easily, otherwise.