Free Secret Legacy by Anna DeStefano Page A

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 physicalstrength 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