by Linda Howard
The prosaic invitation/command had the blessed effect of snapping her out of the trap of panic. Somehow she managed to take a breath without audibly gasping, then another. Nothing was going to happen. She didn’t need to panic. Yes, this was mildly alarming and she probably wouldn’t be coming back to the Inferno to gamble, but she hadn’t broken any laws or casino rules. She was safe.
Those pinpricks of light flared again. What…? Puzzled, she turned her head and found herself staring at two huge pillar candles, each of them easily two and a half feet tall, one on the floor and the other perched on a slab of white marble that served as a hearth. Flames danced around the candles’ multiple wicks.
Candles. She hadn’t been about to faint. The flickers of light at the edge of her vision had come from those candles. She hadn’t noticed them when she’d been literally dragged into the room, but that was understandable.
The candlelights were dancing and swaying, as if they stood in a draft. That too was understandable. She didn’t feel any noticeable movement of air, but this was summertime in Reno, and the air-conditioning would be running full blast. She always wore long sleeves when she went to a casino anyway; otherwise she was too cold.
With a start she realized she was staring at the candles and had neither moved nor replied to the invitation to sit. She jerked her attention back to the man standing at the window, trying to recall what the gorilla had called him. “Who are you?” she demanded sharply. Once more she jerked her arm, but the gorilla merely sighed as he held her. “Let go!”
“You can let her go,” the man said, sounding faintly amused. “Thank you for bringing her here.”
The gorilla instantly released her, said, “I’ll be in the security center,” and quietly let himself out of the office.
Instantly Lorna began assessing her chance of making a run for it, but for now she stood her ground. She didn’t want to run; the casino had her name, her description. If she ran, she would be blacklisted—not just in the Inferno, but in every casino in Nevada.
“I’m Dante Raintree,” the man said, then waited a beat to see if she gave any reaction to the name. It meant nothing to her, so she merely gave a slight, questioning lift of her brows. “I own the Inferno.”
Crap! An owner carried serious weight with the gaming commission. She would have to tread very carefully, but she had the advantage. He couldn’t prove she’d been cheating, because the simple fact was, she hadn’t been.
“Dante. Inferno. I get it,” she replied with a little edge of so what? in her tone. He was probably so rich he thought everyone should be awed in his presence. If he wanted to awe her, he would have to find something other than his wealth to do the job. She appreciated money as much as anyone; it certainly made life easier. Now that she had a little financial cushion, she was amazed at how much better she slept—what a relief it was not to worry where her next bite was coming from, or when. At the same time, she despised people who thought their wealth entitled them to special treatment.
Not only that, his name was ridiculous. Maybe his last name really was Raintree, but he’d probably chosen his first name for the drama and to fit the name of the casino. His real first name was probably something like Melvin or Fred.
“Please have a seat,” he invited again, indicating the cream-colored leather sofa to her right. A jade coffee table sat between the sofa and two cushy-looking club chairs. She tried not to stare at the table as she took a seat in one of the chairs, which was just as cushy as it looked. Surely the table was just the color of jade and not actually made of the real stone, but it looked real, as if it were faintly translucent. Surely it was just glass. If so, the craftsmanship was superb.
Lorna didn’t have a lot of experience with luxury items, but she did have a sort of sixth sense about her surroundings. She began to feel overwhelmed by the things around her. No, not overwhelmed; that wasn’t the right word. She tried to nail down what she was feeling, but there was an alien, unknown quality to the very air around her that she couldn’t describe. This was unfamiliar, and it definitely carried the edge of danger that had so alarmed her when she’d first become aware of it.
As Dante Raintree strolled closer, she realized that everything she was sensing centered on him. She’d been right; he was the danger.
He moved with indolent grace, but there was nothing slow or lazy about him. He was a tall man, about eight or nine inches taller than her own five foot five, and though his excellently tailored clothing gave him a lean look, there was no tailor skilled enough to completely disguise the power of the muscles beneath the fabric. Not a cheetah, then, but a tiger.
She realized she had avoided looking him full in the face, as if not having that knowledge would give her a small measure of safety. She knew better; ignorance was never a good defense, and Lorna had learned a long time ago not to hide her head in the sand and hope for the best.
He sat down across from her, and with an inward bracing she met his gaze full-on.
The bottom dropped out of her stomach.
She had a faint, dizzying sensation of falling; she barely restrained herself from gripping the arms of the chair to steady herself.
His hair was black. His eyes were green. Common colors, and yet nothing about him was common. His hair was sleek and glossy, falling to his shoulders. She didn’t like long hair on men, but his looked clean and soft, and she wanted to bury her hands in it. She shoved that idea away and promptly became snagged by his gaze. His eyes weren’t just green, they were green, so remarkably green that her first thought was that he was wearing colored contacts. A color that darkly rich and pure couldn’t be real. They were just very realistic contacts, with tiny black striations in them like real eyes. She had seen ads for those in magazines. The only thing was, when the candles flared and his pupils briefly contracted, the color of his irises seemed to expand. Could contacts give that appearance?
He wasn’t wearing contacts. Instinctively she knew that everything she saw, from the sleek blackness of his hair to that intense eye color, was real.
He was drawing her in. Some power she couldn’t understand was tugging at her with an almost physical sensation. The candle flames were dancing wildly, brighter now that the sun had set and twilight was deepening outside the window. The candles were the only light in the now gloomy office, sending shadows slashing across the hard angles of his face, and yet his eyes seemed to glow brighter with color than they had only a few moments before.
They hadn’t said a word since he’d sat down, yet she felt as if she were in a battle for her will, her force, her independent life. Deep inside, panic flared to candlelight life, dancing and leaping. He knows, she thought, and tensed herself to run. Forget the casinos, forget the very nice money she’d been reaping, forget everything except survival. Run!
Her body didn’t obey. She continued to sit there, frozen…mesmerized.
“How are you doing it?” he finally asked, his tone still as calm and unruffled as if he were oblivious to the swirls and surges of power that were buffeting her.
Once again, his voice seemed to break through her inner turmoil and bring her back to reality. Bewildered, she stared at him. He thought she was doing all this weird stuff?
“I’m not,” she blurted. “I thought you were.”
She might have been mistaken, because in the dancing candlelight, reading an expression was tricky, but she thought he looked slightly stunned.
“Cheating,” he said in clarification. “How are you stealing from me?”
THREE
Maybe he didn’t know.
His bluntness was a perverse relief. Lorna took a deep breath. At least now she was dealing with something she understood. Ignoring the strange undercurrents in the room, the almost physical sensation of being surrounded by…something…she lifted her chin, narrowed her eyes and gave him stare for stare. “I’m not cheating!” That was true—as far as it went, and in the normal understanding of the word.
“Of course you are. No one is a
s lucky as you seem to be unless he—excuse me, she—is cheating.” His eyes were glittering now, but in her book glittering was way better than that weird glowing. Eyes didn’t glow anyway. What was wrong with her? Had someone slipped a drug into her drink while her head was turned? She never drank alcohol while she was gambling, sticking to coffee or soft drinks, but that last cup of coffee had tasted bitter. At the time she’d thought she’d been unlucky enough to get the last cup in the pot, but now she wondered if it hadn’t been pharmaceutically enhanced.
“I repeat. I’m not cheating.” Lorna bit off the words, her jaw set.
“You’ve been coming here for a while. You walk away with about five grand every week. That’s a cool quarter of a million a year—and that’s just from my casino. How many others are you hitting?” His cool gaze raked her from head to foot, as if he wondered why she didn’t dress better, taking in that kind of money.
Lorna felt her face getting hot, and that made her angry. She hadn’t been embarrassed about anything in a very longtime, embarrassment being a luxury she couldn’t afford, but something about his assessment made her want to squirm. Okay, so she wasn’t the best dresser in the world, but she was neat and clean, and that was what mattered. So what if she’d gotten her pants and short-sleeve blouse at Wal-Mart? She simply couldn’t make herself spend a hundred dollars on a pair of shoes when a twelve-dollar pair fit her just as well. The eighty-eight dollar difference would buy a lot of food. And silk not only cost a lot, but it was difficult to care for; she would take a nice cotton/polyester blend, which didn’t have to be ironed, over silk any day of the week.
“I said, how many other casinos are you hitting each week?”
“What I do isn’t your business.” She glared at him, glad for the anger and the surge of energy it gave her. Feeling angry was much better than feeling hurt. She wouldn’t let this man’s opinion matter enough to her that he could hurt her. Her clothes might be cheap, but they weren’t ragged; she was clean, and she refused to be ashamed of them.
“On the contrary. I caught you. Therefore I should have Al warn the other security chiefs.”
“You haven’t caught me doing anything!” She was absolutely certain of that, because she hadn’t done anything he could catch.
“You’re lucky I’m the one in the driver’s seat,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken a word. “There’s a certain element in Reno that thinks cheating is a crime deserving of capital punishment.”
Her heartbeat stuttered. He was right, and she knew it. There were whispers on the street, tales of people who tried to tilt the odds their way—and who either disappeared completely or had assumed room temperature by the time they were found. She didn’t have the blissful ignorance that would let her think he was merely exaggerating, because she had lived in the world where those things happened. She knew that world, knew the people who inhabited it. She had been careful to stay as invisible as possible, and she never used the ubiquitous players’ cards that allowed the casinos to keep track of who was winning and who wasn’t, but still she had done something wrong, something that called attention to herself. Her innocence wouldn’t matter to some people; a word to the wrong person, and she was a dead woman.
Was he saying he didn’t intend to turn her in, that he would keep the matter Inferno’s private business?
Why would he do that? Only two possible reasons came to mind. One was the old sex-for-a-favor play: “Be nice to me, little girl, and I won’t tell what I know.” The other was that he might suspect her of cheating but had no evidence, and all he intended to do was maybe trick her into confessing or at the least bar her from the Inferno. If his reason was the former one, then he was a sleaze, and she knew how to deal with sleazes. If his reason was the latter, well, then he was a nice guy.
Which would be his tough luck.
He was watching her, really watching her, his complete attention focused on reading every flicker of emotion on her face. Lorna fought the urge to fidget, but being the center of that sort of concentration made her very uneasy. She preferred to blend in with the crowd, to stay in the background; anonymity meant safety.
“Relax. I’m not going to blackmail you into having sex with me—not that I’m not interested,” he said, “but I don’t need coercion to get sex when I want it.”
She almost jumped. Either he’d read her mind, or she was getting really sloppy about guarding her expression. She knew she wasn’t sloppy; for too long, her life had depended on staying sharp; the defensive habits of a lifetime were deeply ingrained. He’d read her mind. Oh, God, he’d read her mind!
Full-blown panic began to fog her mind; then it immediately dissipated, forced out by a sharply detailed image of the two of them having sex. For a disorienting moment she felt as if she were standing outside her own body, watching the two of them in bed—naked, their bodies sweaty from exertion, straining together. His muscled body bore her down, crushing her into the tangled sheets. Her arms and legs, pale against his olive-toned skin, were wrapped around him. She smelled the scents of sex and skin, felt the heat and weight of him on top of her as he pushed slickly inside, heard her own quick gasp as she lifted into his slow, controlled thrusts. She was about to climax, and so was he, his thrusts coming harder and faster—
She jerked herself away from the scenario, suddenly, horribly sure that if she let it carry on to the end she would humiliate herself by climaxing for real, right in front of him. She could barely keep herself in the present; the lure of even imagined pleasure was so strong that she wanted to go back, to lose herself in the dream, or hallucination, or whatever the hell it was.
Something was wrong. She wasn’t in control of herself but instead was being tossed about by the weird eddies of power surging and retreating through the room. Neither could she get a handle on anything long enough to examine it; just when she thought she was grounded, she would get tossed into another reaction, another wild emotion bubbling to the surface.
He spoke again, seemingly oblivious to everything but his own thoughts. How could he not feel everything that was going on? Was she imagining everything? She clutched the arms of the chair, wondering if she was having some sort of mental breakdown.
“You’re precognitive.” He tilted his head as if he were studying an interesting specimen, a slight smile on his lips. “You’re also a sensitive, and maybe there’s a little bit of telekinesis thrown in. Interesting.”
“Are you crazy?” she blurted, horrified, and still struggling to concentrate. Interesting? He was either on the verge of destroying her life or she was going crazy, and he thought it was interesting?
“I don’t believe so. No, I’m fairly certain I’m sane.” Amusement flickered in his eyes, warming them. “Go ahead, Lorna, make the leap. The only way I could know if you were a precog is…?” His voice trailed away on a questioning lilt, inviting her to finish the sentence.
She sat as if frozen, staring fixedly at him. Was he saying he really could read minds, or was he setting some trap she couldn’t yet see?
A sudden, freezing cold swept through the room, so cold she ached down to the bone, and with it came that same overwhelming sense of dread she’d felt when she’d first entered the room and seen him. Lorna hugged herself and set her teeth to keep them from chattering. She wanted to run and couldn’t; her muscles simply wouldn’t obey the instinct to flee.
Was he the source of this…this turmoil in the room? She couldn’t put a better description to it than that, because she’d never felt quite this way before, as if reality had become layered with hallucinations.
“You can relax. There’s no way I can prove it, so I can’t charge you with cheating. But I knew what you are as soon as you said you thought I was ‘doing it.’ Doing what? You didn’t say, but the statement was an intriguing one, because it meant you’re sensitive to the currents in the room.” He steepled his fingers and tapped them against his lips, regarding her over them with an unwavering gaze. “Normal people would never have felt a thin
g. A lot of times, one form of psi ability goes hand in hand with other forms, so it’s obvious, now, how you win so consistently. You know what card will turn up, don’t you? You know which slot machines will pay off. Maybe you can even manipulate the computer to give you three in a row.”
The cold left the room as abruptly as it had entered. She had been tensed to resist it, and the sudden lessening of pressure made her feel as if she might fall out of the chair. Lorna clenched her jaw tight, afraid to say anything. She couldn’t let herself be drawn into a discussion about paranormal abilities. For all she knew, he had this room wired for both video and audio and was recording everything. What if one of those weird hallucinations seized control of her again? She might say whatever he wanted her to say, admit to any wild charge. Heck—everything she was feeling might be the result of some weird special effects he’d installed.
“I know you aren’t Raintree,” he continued softly. “I know my own. So the big question is…are you Ansara, or are you just a stray?”
Shock rescued her once again. “A stray?” she echoed, jerking back into a world that felt real. There was still an underlying sense of disorientation, but at least that sexually disturbing image was gone, the cold was gone, the dread was gone.
She took a deep breath and fought down the hot rush of anger. He’d just compared her to an unwanted mongrel. Beneath the anger, though, was the corrosive edge of old, bitter despair. Unwanted. She’d always been that. For a while, a wondrously sweet moment, she had thought that would change, but then even that last hope had been taken from her, and she didn’t have the heart, the will, to try again. Something inside her had given up, but the pain hadn’t dulled.
He made a dismissive gesture. “Not that kind of stray. We use it to describe a person of ability who is unaffiliated.”
“Unaffiliated with what? What are you talking about?” Her bewilderment on this point, at least, was real.
“Someone who is neither Raintree nor Ansara.”