by Linda Howard
They reached another landing, and he peered through the smoke at the number on the door. Three. Just two more floors, thank God. The smoke was getting so thick that his lungs were burning. “We’re almost there,” he said, to keep the people behind him focused, and he heard people begin repeating the words to those stacked on the stairs above them.
He wrapped his arm around Lorna’s waist and clamped her to his side, lifting her off her feet as he descended the remaining floors two steps at a time. The door opened not to the outside but into a corridor lined with offices. He held the door open with his body, and as people stumbled into the corridor, he said, “Turn right. Go through the double doors at the end of the hall, turn right again, and the door just past the soda machines will open onto the ground level of the parking deck. Go, go, go!”
They went, propelled by his will—stumbling and coughing, but moving nevertheless. The air here was thick and hot, his vision down to only a few feet, and the people who scrambled past him looked like ghosts and disappeared in seconds. Only their coughing and the sound of their footsteps marked their progress.
He felt Lorna move, trying to break his grip, trying to obey not only his mental command but the commands of her own panic-stricken brain. He tightened his hold on her. Maybe he could fine-tune the compulsion enough to exclude her right now…. No, it wasn’t worth the risk. While he had them all under his control, he kept them there and kept them moving. All he had to do was hold Lorna to keep her from escaping.
He could feel the fire at his back. Not literally, but closer now, much closer. Everything in him yearned to turn and engage with the force of nature that was his to call and control, his to own. Not yet. Not yet…
Then no more smoke-shrouded figures were emerging from the stairwell, and with Lorna firmly in his grip he turned to the left—away from the parking deck and safety, and toward the roaring red demon.
“Noooo.”
The sound was little more than a moan, and she bucked like a wild thing in the circle of his arm. Hastily he gave one last mental shove at the stream of people headed toward the parking deck, then transferred the compulsion to a different command, this one directed solely at Lorna: “Stay with me.”
Immediately she stopped struggling, though he could hear the strangled, panicked sounds she was making as he strode through the smoke to another door, one that opened into the lobby.
He threw the door open and stepped into hell, dragging her with him.
The sprinkler system was making a valiant effort, spraying water down on the lobby, but the heat was a monster furnace that evaporated the spray before it reached the floor. It blasted them like a shock wave, a physical blow, but he muttered a curse and pushed back. Because they were produced by the fire, were parts of the fire, he owned the heat and smoke as surely as he owned the flames. Now that he could concentrate, he deflected them, creating a protective bubble, a force field, around Lorna and himself that sent the smoke swirling and held the heat at bay, protecting them.
The casino was completely engaged. The flames were greedy tongues of red, great sheets of orange and black, transparent forks of gold, that danced and roared in their eagerness to consume everything within reach. Several of the elegant white columns had already ignited like huge torches, and the vast expanse of carpet was a sea of small fires, lit by the falling debris.
The columns were acting as candles, wicking the flames upward to the ceiling. He started there, pulling power from deep inside and using it to bend the fire to his will. Slowly, slowly, the flames licking up the columns began to die down, vanquished by a superior force.
Doing that much, while maintaining the bubble of protection around them, took every ounce of power he had. Something wasn’t right. He realized that even as he concentrated on the columns, feeling the strain deep inside. His head began to hurt; killing the flames shouldn’t take this much effort. They were slow in responding to his command, but he didn’t let up even as he wondered if the energy he’d used on the group mind compulsion had somehow drained him. He didn’t feel as if it had, but something was definitely wrong.
When only tendrils of smoke were coming from the columns, he switched his attention to the walls, pushing back, pushing back….
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the columns burst into flame again.
With a roar of fury and disbelief, he blasted his will at the flames, and they subsided once again.
What the hell?
Windows exploded, sending shards of glass flying in all directions. Brutal streams of water poured through from the front, courtesy of the Reno Fire Department, but the flames seemed to give a hoarse laugh before roaring back brighter and hotter than before. One of the two huge, glittering crystal chandeliers pulled loose from the fire-weakened ceiling and crashed to the floor, throwing up a glittering spray of lethal glass splinters. They were far enough away that few of the splinters reached them, but one of the lovely crystal hornets stung his cheek, sending a rivulet of blood running down his face. Maybe they should have ducked, he thought with distant humor.
He could feel Lorna pressed against him, shaking convulsively and making little keening sounds of terror, but she was helpless to break the mind compulsion he’d put on her. Had any of the glass hit her? No time to check. With a great whoosh, a huge tongue of fire rolled across the ceiling overhead, consuming everything in its path as well as what felt like most of the available oxygen; then it began eating its way down the wall behind them, sealing off any escape.
Mentally, he pushed at the flames, willing them to retreat, calling on all his reserves of strength and power. He was the Dranir of the Raintree; the fire would obey him.
Except it didn’t.
Instead it began crawling across the carpet, small fires combining into larger ones, and those joining with others until the floor was ablaze, getting closer, closer….
He couldn’t control it. He had never before met a flame he couldn’t bend to his will, but this was something beyond his power. Using the mind compulsion that way must have weakened him somehow; it wasn’t something he’d done before, so he didn’t know what the ramifications were. Well, yeah, he did; unless a miracle happened, the ramifications in this case were two deaths: his and Lorna’s.
He refused to accept that. He’d never given up, never let a fire beat him; he wouldn’t start with this one.
The bubble of protection wavered, letting smoke filter in. Lorna began coughing convulsively, struggling against his grip even though she wouldn’t be able to run unless he released her from the compulsion. There was nowhere to run to, anyway.
Grimly, he faced the flames. He needed more power. He had thrown everything he had left at the fire, and it wasn’t enough. If Gideon or Mercy were here, they could link with him, combine strengths, but that sort of partnership required close proximity, so he had only himself to rely on. There was no other source of power for him to tap—
—except for Lorna.
He didn’t ask; he didn’t take the time to warn her what he was going to do; he simply wrapped both arms around her from behind and blasted his way past her mental shields, ruthlessly taking what he needed. Relief poured through him at what he found. Yes, she had power, more than he’d expected. He didn’t stop to analyze what kind of power she had, because it didn’t matter; on this level, power was power, like electricity. Different machines could take the same power and do wildly different things, like vacuuming the floor or playing music. It was the same principle. She had power; he took it, and used it to bolster his own gift.
She gave a thin scream and bucked in his arms, then went rigid.
Furiously he attacked the flames, sending out a 360-degree mental blast that literally blew out the wall of fire behind him and took the physical wall with it, as well. The rush of renewed oxygen made the fire in front of him flare, so he gathered himself and did it again, pouring even more energy into the battle, feeling his own reserves well up, renewed, as he took every ounce of power and strength from L
orna and blended it with his own.
His entire body was tingling, his muscles burning with the effort it took to contain and focus. The invisible bubble of protection around them began to shimmer and took on a faint glow. Sweating, swearing, ignoring the pain in his head, he blasted the energy of his will at the fire again and again, beating it back even while he tried to calculate how long he’d been standing there, how much time he needed to give the people in the hotel to escape. There were multiple stairwells, and he was certain not all evacuations had been as orderly as the one he’d controlled. Was everyone out by now? What about disabled people? They would have to be helped down the flights of stairs. If he stopped, the fire would surge forward, engulfing the hotel—so he couldn’t stop. Until the fire was controlled, he couldn’t stop.
He couldn’t put it out, not completely. For whatever reason, whether he was depleted or distracted or the fire itself was somehow different, he couldn’t put it out. He accepted that now. All he could do was hold the flames at bay until the fire department had them under control.
That was what he concentrated on, controlling the fire instead of extinguishing it. That conserved his energy, and he needed every bit he had, because the fierceness of the fire never stopped pushing back, never stopped struggling for freedom. Time meant nothing, because no matter how long it took, no matter how his head hurt, he had to endure.
Somewhere along the way he lost the line of division between himself and the fire. It was an enemy, but it was beautiful in its destruction; it danced for him as always, magic in its movement and colors. He felt its beauty like molten lava running through his veins, felt his body respond with mindless lust until his erection strained painfully against his zipper. Lorna had to feel it, but there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to make it go away. The best he could do, under the circumstances, was not grind it against her.
Finally, hoarse shouts intruded through the diminished roar of the beast. Turning his head slightly, Dante saw teams of firefighters advancing with their hoses. Quickly he let the bubble of protection dissolve, leaving him and Lorna exposed to the smoke and heat.
With his first breath, the hot smoke seared all the way down to his lungs. He choked, coughed, tried to draw another breath. Lorna sagged to her knees, and he dropped down beside her as the first firefighters reached them.
FIVE
Lorna sat on the bumper of a fire-medic truck and clutched a scratchy blanket around her. The night was warm, but she was soaking wet, and she couldn’t seem to stop shivering. She’d heard the fire medic say she wasn’t in shock; though her blood pressure was a little high, which was understandable, her pulse rate was near normal. She was just chilled from being wet.
And, yet, everything around her seemed…muted, as if there were a glass wall between her and the rest of the world. Her mind felt numb, barely able to function. When the medic had asked her name, for the life of her, she hadn’t been able to remember, much less articulate it. But she had remembered that she never brought a purse to a casino because of thieves and that she kept her money in one pocket and her driver’s license in another, so she’d pulled out her license and showed it to him. It was a Missouri license, because she hadn’t gotten a license here. To get a Nevada license, you had to be a resident and gainfully employed. It was the “gainfully employed” part that tripped her up.
“Are you Lorna Clay?” the medic had asked, and she’d nodded.
“Does your throat hurt?” he’d asked then, and that seemed as reasonable an explanation for her continued silence as any other, so she’d nodded again. He’d looked at her throat, seemed briefly puzzled, then given her oxygen to breathe. She should be checked out at the hospital, he’d said.
Yeah, right. She had no intention of going to a hospital. The only place she wanted to go was away.
And, yet, she remained right where she was while Raintree was checked out. There was blood on his face, but the cut turned out to be small. She heard him tell the medics he was fine, that, no, he didn’t think he was burned anywhere, that they’d been very lucky.
Lucky, her ass. The thought was as clear as a bell, rising from the sluggish morass that was her brain. He’d held her there in the middle of that roaring hell for what felt like an eternity. They should be crispy critters. They should, at least, be gasping for breath through damaged airways, instead of being fine. She knew what fire did. She’d seen it, she’d smelled it, and it was ugly. It destroyed everything in its path. What it didn’t do was dance all around and leave you unscathed.
Yet, here she was—unscathed. Relatively, anyway. She felt as if she’d been run over by a truck, but at least she wasn’t burned.
She should have been burned. She should have been dead. Whenever she contemplated the fact that she not only wasn’t dead, she wasn’t even injured, her head ached so much she could barely stand to breathe, and the glass wall between her and reality got a little bit thicker. So she didn’t think about being alive, or dead or anything else. She just sat there while the nightmarish scene revolved around her, lights flashing, crowds of people milling about, the firefighters still busy with their hoses putting out the remaining flames and making certain they didn’t flare again. The fire engines rumbled so loudly that the noise wore on her, made her want to cover her ears, but she didn’t do that, either. She just waited.
For what, she wasn’t certain. She should leave. She thought a hundred times about just walking away into the night, but putting thought into action proved impossible. No matter how much she wanted to leave, she was bound by an inertia she couldn’t seem to fight. All she could do was…sit.
Then Raintree stood, and, abruptly, she found herself standing, too, levered upward by some impulse she didn’t understand. She just knew that if he was standing, she would stand. She was too mentally exhausted to come up with any reason that made more sense.
His face was so black with soot that only the whites of his eyes showed, so she figured she must look pretty much the same. Great. That meant she didn’t have much chance of being able to slip away unnoticed. He took a cloth someone offered him and swiped it over his sooty face, which didn’t do much good. Soot was oily; anything other than soap just sort of moved it around.
Determination in his stride, he moved toward a small clump of policemen, three uniforms and two plainclothes. Vague alarm rose in Lorna. Was he going to turn her in? Without any proof? She desperately wanted to hang back, but, instead, she found herself docilely following him.
Why was she doing this? Why wasn’t she leaving? She struggled with the questions, trying to get her brain to function. He hadn’t even glanced in her direction; he wouldn’t have any idea where she’d gone if she dropped back now and sort of blended in with the crowd—as much as she could blend in anywhere, covered with soot the way she was. But others also showed the effects of the smoke; some of the casino employees, for instance, and the players. She probably could have slipped away, if she felt capable of making the effort.
Why was her brain so sluggish? On a very superficial level, her thought processes seemed to be normal, but below that was nothing but sludge. There was something important she should remember, something that briefly surfaced just long enough to cause a niggle of worry, then disappeared like a wisp of smoke. She frowned, trying to pull the memory out, but the effort only intensified the pain in her head, and she stopped.
Raintree approached the two plainclothes cops and introduced himself. Lorna tried to make herself inconspicuous, which might be a losing cause considering how she looked, plus the fact that she was standing only a few feet away. They all eyed her with the mixture of suspicion and curiosity cops just seemed to have. Her heart started pounding. What would she do if Raintree accused her of cheating? Run? Look at him as if he were an idiot? Maybe she was the idiot, standing there like a sacrificial lamb.
The image galvanized her as nothing else had. She would not be a willing victim. She tried to take a step away, but for some reason the action seemed beyond her. All
she wanted to do was stay with him.
Stay with me.
The words resonated through her tired brain, making her head ache. Wearily, she rubbed her forehead, wondering where she’d heard the words and why they mattered.
“Where were you when the fire started, Mr. Raintree?” one of the detectives asked. He and the other detective had introduced themselves, but their names had flown out of Lorna’s head as soon as she’d heard them.
“In my office, talking to Ms. Clay.” He indicated Lorna without really looking in her direction, as if he knew just where she was standing.
They looked at her more sharply now; then the detective who had been talking to Raintree said, “My partner will take her statement while I’m taking yours, so we can save time.”
Sure, Lorna thought sarcastically. She had some beachfront property here in Reno she wanted to sell, too. The detectives wanted to separate her from Raintree so she couldn’t hear what he said and they couldn’t coordinate their statements. If a business was going down the tubes, sometimes the owner tried to minimize losses by burning it down and collecting on the insurance policy.
The other detective stepped to her side. Raintree glanced at her over his shoulder. “Don’t go far. I don’t want to lose you in this crowd.”
What was he up to? she wondered. He’d made it sound as if they were in a relationship or something. But when the detective said, “Let’s walk over here,” Lorna obediently walked beside him for about twenty feet, then abruptly stopped as if she couldn’t take one step more.
“Here,” she said, surprised at how raspy and weak her voice was. She had coughed some, sure, but her voice sounded as if she’d been hacking for days. She was barely audible over all the noise from the fire engines.
“Sure.” The detective looked around, casually positioning himself so that Lorna had to stand with her back to Raintree. “I’m Detective Harvey. Your name is…”