by Linda Howard
“There were a lot of people in the stairwell,” she said slowly, trying to get the memory to form. “I remember…a lot of people. We could go only a couple of floors before everyone got jammed up, because some of the people from the lower floors were trying to go up.” The smoke had been heavy, too, because visibility had been terrible, people passing by like ghosts…No. That had been later. There hadn’t been a lot of smoke in the stairs right then. Later—She wasn’t certain about later. The sequence of events was all jumbled up, and she couldn’t seem to sort everything out.
“Go on,” Detective Harvey prompted when she was silent for several moments.
“Mr. Raintree told them—the people coming up the stairs—they’d have to go back, there was no way out if they kept going up.”
“Did they argue?”
“No, they all turned around. No one panicked.” Except her. She’d barely been able to breathe, and it hadn’t been because of the smoke. The memory was becoming clearer, and she was amazed at how orderly the evacuation had been. No one had pushed; no one had been running. People had been hurrying, of course, but not being so reckless that they risked a nasty fall. In retrospect, their behavior had been damned unnatural. How could everyone have been so calm? Didn’t they know what fire did?
But she hadn’t run, either, she realized. She hadn’t pushed. She had gone at a steady pace, held to Raintree’s side by his arm.
Wait. Had he been holding her then? She didn’t think he had been. He’d touched her waist, sort of guiding her along, but she’d been free to run. So…why hadn’t she?
She had trooped along like everyone else, in an orderly line. Inside she’d been screaming, but outwardly she’d been controlled.
Controlled…Not self-controlled, but controlled like a puppet, as if she hadn’t had a will of her own. Her mind had been screaming at her to run, but her body simply hadn’t obeyed.
“Ms. Clay?”
Lorna felt her breath start coming faster as she relived those moments. Fire! Coming closer and closer, she didn’t want to go, she wanted to run, but she couldn’t. She was caught in one of those nightmares when you try to run but can’t, when you try to scream but can’t make a sound—
“Ms. Clay?”
“I—What?” Dazed, she stared up at him. From the mixture of impatience and concern on his face, she thought he must have called her name several times.
“What did you do when you got out?”
Shuddering, she gathered herself. “We didn’t. I mean, we got to the ground floor and Mr. Raintree sent the others to the right, toward the parking deck. Then he…we…” Her voice faltered. She had been fighting him, trying to follow the others; she remembered that. Then he’d said, “Stay with me,” and she had, with no will to do otherwise, even though she’d been half mad with terror.
Stay with me.
When he’d sat, she’d sat. When he’d stood, she’d stood. When he’d moved, that was when she had moved. Until then, she had been incapable of taking a single step away from him.
Just moments ago he’d said, “Don’t go far,” and she’d been able to leave his side then—but she hadn’t gone far before she’d stopped as if she’d hit a brick wall.
A horrible suspicion began to grow. He was controlling her somehow, maybe with some kind of posthypnotic suggestion, though when and how he’d hypnotized her, she had no idea. All sorts of weird things had been happening in his office. Maybe those damn candles had actually given off some kind of gas that had drugged her.
“Go on,” said Detective Harvey, breaking into her thoughts.
“We went to the left,” she said, beginning to shake. She wrapped her arms around herself, hugging the blanket close in an effort to control her wayward muscles, but in seconds, she was trembling from head to foot. “Into the lobby. The fire—” The fire had leaped at them like a maddened beast, roaring with delight. The heat had been searing for the tiniest fraction of a second. She’d been choking on the smoke. Then…no smoke, no heat. Both had just gone away. She and Raintree should have been overcome in seconds, but they hadn’t been. She’d been able to breathe. She hadn’t felt the heat, even though she’d watched the tongues of fire hungrily lapping across the carpet toward her. “The fire sort of w-whooshed across the ceiling and got behind us, and we were trapped.”
“Would you like to sit down?” he asked, interrupting his line of questioning, but considering how violently she was shaking, he probably thought sitting her down before she fell down was a good idea.
She might have thought so, too, if sitting down hadn’t meant sitting on asphalt littered with the debris of a fire and running with streams of sooty water. He probably meant sit down somewhere else, which she would have liked, if she’d felt capable of moving a single step beyond where she was right now. She shook her head. “I’m okay, just wet and cold and shaken up some.” If there was an award given out for massive understatement, she’d just won it.
He eyed her for a moment, then evidently decided she knew whether or not she needed to sit down. He’d tried, anyway, which relieved him of any obligation. “What did you do?”
Better not to tell him she’d felt surrounded by some sort of force field; this wasn’t Star Wars, so he might not understand. Better not to tell him she’d felt a cool breeze in her hair. She must have been drugged; there was no other explanation.
“There wasn’t anything we could do. We were trapped. I remember Mr. Raintree swearing a blue streak. I remember choking and being on the floor. Then the firefighters got to us and brought us out.” In the interest of believability, she had heavily condensed the night’s events as she remembered them, but, surely, they couldn’t have been in the lobby for very long, no more than thirty seconds. An imaginary force field couldn’t have held off real heat and smoke. The firefighters must have been close to them all along, but she’d been too panic-stricken to notice.
There was something else, probably that worrisome niggle of memory, that she couldn’t quite grasp. Something else had happened. She knew it; she just couldn’t think what it was. Maybe after she showered and washed her hair—several times—and got twenty or thirty hours of sleep, she might remember.
Detective Harvey glanced over her shoulder then flipped his little notebook shut. “You’re lucky to be alive. Have you been checked for smoke inhalation?”
“Yes, I’m okay.” The medic had been puzzled by her good condition, but she didn’t tell the detective that.
“I imagine Mr. Raintree will be tied up here for quite a while, but you’re free to go. Do you have a number where you can be reached if we have any further questions for you?”
She started to ask, Like what? but instead said, “Sure,” and gave him her cell-phone number.
“That local?”
“It’s my cell.” Now that cell numbers could be transferred, she no longer bothered with a landline so long as she had cell-phone service wherever she temporarily settled.
“Got a local number?”
“No, that’s it. Sorry. I didn’t see any point in getting a landline unless I decided to stay.”
“No problem. Thanks for your cooperation.” He nodded a brief acknowledgment at her.
Because it seemed the thing to do, Lorna managed a faint smile for him as he strolled back to the other detective, but it quickly faded. She was exhausted and filthy. Her head hurt. Now that Detective Harvey had finished interviewing her, she was going home.
She tried. She made several attempts to walk away, but for some reason she couldn’t make her feet move. Frustration grew in her. She had walked over here a few minutes ago, so there was no reason why she shouldn’t be able to walk now. Just to see if she could move at all, without turning around, she stepped back, moving closer to Raintree. No problem. All her parts worked just as they should.
Experimentally, she took a step forward, and heaved a sigh of relief when her feet and legs actually obeyed. She was beyond exhausted if the simple act of walking had become so complicated. Sig
hing, she started to take another step.
And couldn’t.
She couldn’t go any farther. It was as if she’d reached the end of an invisible leash.
She went cold with disbelief. This was infuriating. He must have hypnotized her, but how? When? She couldn’t remember him saying, “You are getting sleepy,” and she was pretty certain hypnosis didn’t work that way, anyway. It was supposed to be a deep relaxation, not a do-things-against-your-will type of thing, regardless of how stage shows and movies portrayed it.
She wished she’d worn a watch, so she could have noticed any time discrepancy from when she’d gone into Raintree’s office and when the fire alarm had sounded. She had to find out what time that had been, because she knew roughly what time sunset was. She’d been in his office for maybe half an hour…she thought. She couldn’t be certain. Those disconcerting fantasies could have taken more time than she estimated.
Regardless of how he’d done it, he was controlling her movements. She knew it. When he said, “Stay with me,” she’d stayed, even when faced with an inferno. When he said, “Don’t go far,” she had been able to go only so far and not a step farther.
She turned her head to look at him over her shoulder and found him standing more or less alone, evidently having finished answering whatever questions the other detective had asked. He was watching her, his expression grim. His lips moved. With all the background noise she couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she read his lips plainly enough.
He said, “Come here.”
Chapter 6
She went. She couldn’t stop herself. Her scalp prickled, and chills ran over her, but she went, her feet moving automatically. Her eyes were wide with alarm. How was he doing this? Not that the “how” mattered; what mattered was that he was doing it. Being unable to control herself, to have him in control, could lead to some nasty situations.
She couldn’t even ask for help, because no one would believe her. At best, people would think she was on drugs or was mentally unstable. All sympathy would be with him, because he’d just lost his casino, his livelihood; the last thing he needed was a nutcase accusing him of somehow controlling her movements. She could just see herself yelling, “Help! I’m walking, and I can’t stop! He’s making me do it!”
Yeah, right. That would work—not.
He gave her a grim, self-satisfied little smile as she neared, and that pissed her off. Being angry felt good; she didn’t like being helpless in any way. Too street-savvy to telegraph her intentions, she kept her eyes wide, her expression alarmed, though how much of her face he could see through all the soot and grime was anyone’s guess. She kept her right arm close to her side, her elbow bent a little, and tensed the muscles in her back and shoulder. When she was close, so close she could almost kiss him, she launched an uppercut toward his chin.
He never saw it coming, and her fist connected from below with a force that made his teeth snap together. Pain shot through her knuckles, but the satisfaction of punching him made it more than worthwhile. He staggered back half a step, then regained his balance with athletic grace, snaking out his hand to shackle her wrist with long fingers before she could hit him again. He used the grip to pull her against him.
“I deserved one punch,” he said, holding her close as he bent his head to speak just loud enough for her to hear. “I won’t take a second one.”
“Let me go,” she snapped. “And I don’t mean just with your hand!”
“You’ve figured it out, then,” he said coolly.
“I was a little slow on the uptake, but being shoved into the middle of a freaking, big-ass fire was distracting.” She laid on the sarcasm as thickly as possible.
“I don’t know how you’re doing it, or why—”
“The ‘why,’ at least, should be obvious.”
“Then I must be oxygen-deprived from inhaling smoke—gee, I wonder whose fault that is—because it isn’t obvious to me!”
“The little matter of your cheating me. Or did you think I’d forget about that in the excitement of watching my casino burn to the ground?”
“I haven’t been—Wait a minute. Wait just a damn minute. You couldn’t have hypnotized me while we were going down nineteen stories’ worth of stairs, and if you did it while we were in your office, then that was before the fire even started. ’Splain that, Lucy!”
He grinned, his teeth flashing whitely in his soot-blackened face. “Am I supposed to say ‘Oh, Ricky!’?”
“I don’t care what you say. Just undo the voodoo, or the spell, or the hypnotism, or whatever it is you did. You can’t hold me here like this.”
“That’s a ridiculous statement, when I obviously am holding you here like this.”
Lorna thought steam might be coming out of her ears. She’d been angry many times in her life—she’d even been enraged a couple of times—but this was the most infuriated she’d ever felt. Until tonight, she would have said that the three terms meant the same thing, but now she knew that being infuriated carried a rich measure of frustration with it. She was helpless, and she hated being helpless. Her entire life was built around the premise of not being helpless, not being a victim ever again.
“Let. Me. Go.” Her teeth were clenched, her tone almost guttural. She was holding on to her self-control by a gossamer thread, but only because she knew screaming would get her exactly nowhere with him and would make her look like an idiot.
“Not yet. We still have a few issues to discuss.” Completely indifferent to her temper, he lifted his head to look around at the scene of destruction. The stench of smoke permeated everything, and the flashing red and blue lights of many different emergency vehicles created a strobe effect that felt like a spike being pounded into her forehead. Hot spots still flared to crimson life in the smoldering ruins, until the vigilant firefighters targeted them with their hoses. A milling crowd pressed against the tape the police had strung up to cordon off the area.
She saw the same details he saw, and the flashing lights reminded her of a ball of flame…no, not of flame…something else. She gasped as her head gave a violent throb.
“Then discuss them, already,” she snapped, putting her hand to her head in an instinctive gesture to contain the pain.
“Not here.” He glanced down at her again.
“Are you okay?”
“I have a splitting headache. I could go home and lie down, if you weren’t being such a jerk.”
He gave her a considering look. “But I am being a jerk, so sue me. Now be quiet and stay here like a good girl. I’ll be busy for a while. When I’m finished, we’ll go to my house and have that talk.”
Lorna fell silent, and when he walked off she remained rooted to the spot. Damn him, she thought as furious tears welled in her eyes and streaked down her filthy cheeks. She raised her hands and wiped the tears away. At least he’d left her with the use of her hands. She couldn’t walk and she couldn’t talk, but she could dry her face, and if God was really kind to her, she could punch Raintree again the next time he got within punching distance.
Then she went cold, goose bumps rising on her entire body. The brief heat of anger died away, destroyed by a sudden, mind-numbing fear.
What was he?
A man and a woman who had been standing behind the police cordon, watching the massive fire, finally turned and began trudging toward their car. “Crap,” the woman said glumly. Her name was Elyn Campbell, and she was the most powerful fire-master in the Ansara clan, except for the Dranir. Everything they knew about Dante Raintree, and everything she knew about fire—aided by some very powerful spells—had been added together to form a plan that should have resulted in the Raintree Dranir’s death and instead had accomplished nothing of their mission.
“Yeah.” Ruben McWilliams shook his head. All their careful planning, their calculations, up in smoke—literally. “Why didn’t it work?”
“I don’t know. It should have worked. He isn’t that strong. No one is, not even a Dranir. It was overki
ll.”
“Then evidently he’s the strongest Dranir anyone’s ever seen—either that or the luckiest.”
“Or he quit sooner than we anticipated. Maybe he chickened out and ran for cover instead of trying to control it.”
Ruben heaved a sigh. “Maybe. I didn’t see when they brought him out, so maybe he’d been standing somewhere out of sight for a while before I finally spotted him. All that damn equipment was in the way.”
She looked up at the starry sky. “So we have two possible scenarios. The first is that he chickened out and ran. The second, and unfortunately the most likely, is that he’s stronger than we expected. Cael won’t be happy.”
Ruben sighed again and faced the inevitable. “I guess we’ve put it off long enough. We have to call in.” He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, but the woman put her hand on his sleeve.
“Don’t use your cell phone, it isn’t encrypted. Wait until we get back to the hotel, and use a land line.”
“Good idea.” Anything that delayed placing this call to Cael Ansara was a good idea. Cael was his cousin on his mother’s side, but kinship wouldn’t cut any ice with the bastard—and he meant “bastard” both figuratively and literally. Maybe this secret alignment with Cael against the current Dranir, Judah, wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done. Even though he’d agreed with Cael that the Ansara were now strong enough, after two hundred years of rebuilding, to take on the Raintree and destroy them, maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe Cael was wrong.
He knew Cael would automatically go for the first scenario, that Dante Raintree had chickened out and run instead of trying to contain the fire, and completely dismiss the possibility that Raintree was stronger than any of them had imagined. But what if Raintree really was that powerful? The attempted coup Cael had planned would be a disaster, and the Ansara would be lucky to survive as a clan. It had taken two centuries to rebuild to their present strength after their last pitched battle with the Raintree.
Cael wouldn’t be able to conceive of being wrong. If the plan failed—which it had—Cael would see only two possibilities: either Ruben and Elyn hadn’t executed the plan correctly, or Raintree had revealed a cowardly streak. Ruben knew they hadn’t made any mistakes. Everything had gone like clockwork—except for the outcome. Raintree was supposed to be consumed by a fire he couldn’t control, a delicious irony, because fire-masters all had a strange love/hate relationship with the force that danced to their tune. Instead, he had emerged unscathed. Filthy, sooty, maybe singed a little, but essentially unhurt.