Excerpt: Secret Legacy

Chapter One

There was beauty in the ocean’s violet blue quiet. A sense of elicit belonging to the darkness waiting for her below.

Cool channels of nothing wrapped Sarah Temple in the dream’s velvet. The promise of freedom lured her deeper into the still-clear water, beckoning her when she would have given into the fear.

Current caressed her as it charmed, beguiled, seduced her into believing that this could finally end. It was the believing that propelled Sarah forward. Need pulled her deeper than ever before. So deep, the others who fought to control this, to “save” her, meant less than nothing now.

She’d sworn not to come this way alone. But they didn’t understand. They didn’t believe this was her only chance. They’d believed keeping her safe was more important than finding the truth that would end the torment the dreams had become.

A rush of anger shimmered around her, slipped inside her, propelled her through the dream’s ocean. The tempting taste darkness, of death, slid across her tongue. She drank the dream’s venom with greedy gulps. Heat consumed everything with a hopelessness, dripping from her body like tears.

She fought back panic. This was the only way. This is why she’d come alone. The others would have dragged her back to safer water, because this place in the nightmare meant death. They all knew it. But she’d had to come. She had to endure. Light waited for her beyond.

Streaks of red waited for her in the deeper water. Bloody ribbons of it, forming a trail for her to fllow. She would get there this time. She would silence of the soul-deep cry that always dragged her back.

The cries were an awful sound she could no longer block, even when she was awake. They were clearer in the dream, always beginning as a whisper as she waded into the waves. Then as she swam, they built into a cry that threatened to rip her heart apart. Now, in the deeper water, the loneliness of them was an impossible weight, dragging Sarah closer to the nightmare’s black heart.

It was baby’s cry, she realized for the first time. No, it was the whimper of a little girl’s pain. No! It was the shriek of a woman full grown, betrayed by every indecent thing that had been done to Sarah. By Sarah herself.

It demanded that she hear. That she understand. That she conquer the water’s quickening darkness as the last of the ribbons of violet and blue and red that had protected her, guided her, disappeared, collapsing into an absence of light, then an absence of water.

Hate welcomed her as her feet found solid ground. Hate that wanted to consume her and the light she sought. Her legs weak, her head pounding, she staggered down an endless, twisting tunnel. The never-ending cries that owned her every waking and dreaming moment grew louder, taunting her. Calling her.

Doors were closed on every side. Locked doors, refusing her entry. Exhausted, Sarah collapsed, but the dream wasn’t done with her. It shifted, and she was floating once more. Through the endless tunnel that was really a house that was really a maze. Each turn lead her back to where she’d begun. Never forward. The screaming grew louder.

No way out. Only terror ahead. Until the shrill cry was suddenly coming from Sarah herself.

It had been hers all along…