by Linda Howard
She took the bar stool farthest from him and spread cream cheese on one slice of bagel. “So let’s hear it,” she said curtly.
“There are a few other things I’d like to get cleared out of the way. First—” He reached into the front pocket of his jeans, pulled out a wad of bills and slid them in front of her.
Lorna looked down. Her license was tucked amid the bills. “My money!” she said, grabbing both and putting them in her own pockets.
“My money, don’t you mean?” he asked grimly, but he hadn’t insisted on keeping it. “And don’t tell me again that you didn’t cheat, because I know you did. I’m just not sure even you know you cheated, or how you’re doing it.”
She focused her attention on her bagel, her expression shutting down. He was going off into woo-woo land again, but she didn’t have to travel with him. “I didn’t cheat,” she said obstinately, because he’d told her not to.
“You don’t know—Hold on, my cell phone’s vibrating.” He pulled a small cell from his pocket, flipped it open and said, “Raintree…Yeah. I’ll ask her.” He looked at Lorna and said, “How much did you say your new shoes cost?”
“One twenty-eight ninety,” she replied automatically, and took a bite of the bagel.
He flipped the phone shut and slid it back into his pocket.
After a few seconds the silence in the room made her look up. His eyes were such a brilliant green, they looked as if they were glowing. “There wasn’t a call on my cell,” he said.
“Then why did you ask—” She stopped, abruptly realizing what she’d said when he’d asked about the shoes, and what little color she’d regained washed out of her face. She opened her mouth to tell him that he must have mentioned the price of the shoes to her, then shut it again, because she knew he hadn’t. She had a cold, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, almost the same feeling she had every morning when she woke up. “I’m not a weirdo,” she said in a thin, flat voice.
“The term is ‘gifted.’ You’re gifted. I just proved it to you. I didn’t need any proof, because I already knew. I’m even more gifted than you are.”
“You’re crazy, is what you are.”
“I’m mildly empathic, just enough that I can read people very well, especially if I touch them, which is why I always shake hands when I go into a business meeting,” he said, speaking over her as if she hadn’t interrupted. “As you know very well, using just my mind, I can compel people to do things against their wishes. That’s a new one on me, but what the hell. We are close to the summer solstice. That, added to the fire, probably triggered it. I can do a bunch of different things, but most of all, I’m a Class A Number One Fire-Master.”
“Which means what?” she asked sarcastically, to cover the fact that she was shaken to the core. “That you moonlight at the circus as a fire-eater?”
He held out his hand, palm up, and a lovely little blue flame burst to life in the middle of his hand. He casually blew it out. “Can’t do that for very long,” he said, “or it burns.”
“That’s just a trick. Stunt people do that in movies all—”
Her bagel caught on fire.
She stared at it, frozen, as the thick bread burned and smoked. He picked up the plate and flicked the burning bagel into the sink, then ran water on it. “Don’t want the fire alarm to go off,” he explained, and slid the plate, with the other half of bagel on it, back in front of her.
Behind him, a candle flared to life. “I keep a lot of candles around,” he said. “They’re my equivalent of a canary in a coal mine.”
A thought grew and grew until she couldn’t hold it back. “You set the casino on fire!” she said in horror.
He shook his head as he slid back onto his stool and picked up his coffee. “My control is better than that, even this close to the solstice. It wasn’t my fire.”
“So you say. If you’re a Class A Number One hotshot Fire-Master, why didn’t you put it out?”
“That’s the same question I’ve been asking myself.”
“And the answer is…?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wow, that’s enlightening.”
His brilliant grin flashed across his face. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a smart-ass?”
She barely kept herself from flinching back in automatic response. Yeah, she’d heard the comment before—many times, and always accompanied by, or even preceded by, a slap.
She didn’t look up to see if he’d noted anything strange about her response, but concentrated on putting cream cheese on the remaining half of her bagel.
“Since I had never done mind control before last night, it’s possible I drained myself of energy,” he continued after a moment. She still refused to look up, but she could feel the intensity of his gaze on her face. “I didn’t feel tired. Everything felt normal, but until I explore the parameters, I won’t know what the effects of mind control are. Maybe I wasn’t concentrating as much as I should have been. Maybe my attention was splintered. Hell, I know it was splintered. There were a lot of unusual factors last night.”
“You honestly think you could have put out that fire?”
“I know I could have—normally. The fire marshal would have thought the sprinkler system did a great job. Instead—”
“Instead, you dragged me into the middle of a four-alarm fire and nearly killed both of us!”
“Are you burned?” he asked, sipping his coffee.
“No,” she said grudgingly.
“Suffering from smoke inhalation?”
“No, damn it!”
“Don’t you think you should have at least a few singed strands of hair?”
He was only saying everything she’d thought herself. She didn’t understand what had happened during the fire, and she didn’t understand anything that had happened since then. Desperately, she wanted to skate over the surface of everything, pretend nothing weird was going on, and leave this house with the pretense still intact, but he wasn’t going to let that happen. She could feel his determination, like a force field emanating from him.
No! she told herself in despair. No force field, no emanating. Nothing like that.
“I threw a shield of protection around us. Then at the end, when I was using all your power combined with mine to beat back the fire, the shield solidified a bit. You saw it. I saw it. It shimmered, like a—”
“Soap bubble,” she whispered.
“Ah,” he said softly, after a moment of thought. “So that’s what triggered your memory.”
“Do you have any idea how much that hurt, what you did?”
“Taking over your power? No, I don’t know, but I can imagine.”
“No,” she said flatly. “You can’t.” The pain had been beyond any true description. If she said it had felt as if an anvil had fallen on her head, that would be an understatement.
“Again, I’m sorry. I had no choice. It was either that, or we were both going to die, along with the people still evacuating the hotel.”
“You have a way of apologizing that says you’d do the same thing again if the situation arose, so it’s really hard to believe the ‘sorry’ part.”
“That’s because you’re not only a precog, though an untrained one, you’re also very sensitive to the paranormal energy around you.”
Meaning he would do the same thing again, in the same circumstances. At least he wasn’t a hypocrite.
“Yesterday, in my office,” he continued, “you were reacting to energies you wouldn’t have sensed at all if you weren’t gifted.”
“I thought you were evil,” she said, and savagely bit into the bagel. “Nothing you’ve done since has changed my mind.”
“Because you turned me on?” he asked softly. “I took one look at you, and every candle in the room lit up. I’m not usually that out of control, but I had to concentrate to rein everything in. Then I kept looking at you and thinking about having sex, and damned if you didn’t hook into the fantasy.”
Oh, God,
he’d known that? She felt her face burn, and she turned her embarrassment into anger. “Are you coming on to me?” she asked incredulously. “Do you actually have the nerve to think I’d let you touch me with a ten-foot pole after what you did to me last night?”
“It isn’t that long,” he said, smiling a little.
Well, she’d walked into that one. She slapped the bagel onto the plate and slid off the stool. “I don’t want to be in the same room with you. After I leave here, I never want to see your face again. You can take your tacky little fantasy and shove it, Raintree!”
“Dante,” he corrected, as if she hadn’t all but told him to drop dead. “And that brings us to the Ansara. I was looking for a birthmark. All Ansara have a blue crescent moon somewhere on their backs.”
She was so angry that a red mist fogged her vision. “And while you were looking for this birthmark on my back you decided to check out my ass, too, huh?”
“It’s a fine ass, well worth checking out. But, no, I always intended to check it out. ‘Back’ is imprecise. Technically, ‘back’ could go from the top of your head all the way down to your heels. I’ve seen it below the waist before, and in the histories there are reports of, in rare cases, the birthmark being on the ass cheek. Given the seriousness of the fire, and the fact that I couldn’t put it out, I had to make sure you hadn’t been hindering me.”
“Hindering you how?” she cried, not at all mollified by his explanation.
“If you had also been a fire-master, you could have been feeding the fire while I was trying to put it out. I’ve never seen a fire I couldn’t control—until last night.”
“But you said yourself you’d never used mind control before, so you don’t know how it affected you! Why automatically assume I had to be one of these Ansara?”
“I didn’t. I’m well aware of all the variables. I still had to eliminate the possibility that you might be Ansara.”
“If you’re so good at reading people when you touch them, then you should have known I wasn’t,” she charged.
“Very good,” he acknowledged, as if he were a teacher and she his star pupil. “But Ansara are trained from birth to manage their gifts and to protect themselves, just as Raintree are. A powerful Ansara could conceivably have constructed a shield that I wouldn’t be able to detect. Like I said, my empath abilities are mild.”
She felt as if she were about to explode with frustration. “If I’d had one of these shields, you idiot, you wouldn’t have been able to brain-rape me!”
He drummed his fingers lightly on top of the bar, studying her with narrowed eyes. “I really, really don’t like that term.”
“Tough. I really, really didn’t like the brain-rape itself.” She threw the words at him like knives and hoped they buried themselves deep in his flesh.
He considered that, then nodded. “Fair enough. Back to the subject of shields. You have them, but not the kind I’m talking about. The kind you have develop naturally, from life. You shield your emotions. I’m talking about a mental shield that’s deliberately constructed to hide a part of your brain’s energy. As for keeping me out—honey, there’s only one other person, at least that I know of, who could possibly have blocked me from taking over his mind, and you aren’t him.”
“Ooooh, you’re so scary-powerful then, huh?”
Slowly he nodded. “Yep.”
“Then why aren’t you, like, King of the World or something?”
“I’m king of the Raintree,” he said, getting up and putting his plate in the dishwasher. “That’s good enough for me.”
Strange, but of all the really weird things he’d said to her, this struck her as the most unbelievable. She buried her head in her hands, wishing this day was over. She wanted to forget she’d ever met him. He was obviously a lunatic. No—she couldn’t comfort herself with that delusion. She had been through fire with him, quite literally. He could do things she hadn’t thought were possible. So maybe—just maybe—he really was some sort of leader, though “king” was stretching things a bit far.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said wearily. “Who are the Raintree, and who are the Ansara? Is this like two different countries but inhabited only by weirdos?”
His lips twitched as if he wanted to laugh. “Gifted. Gifted. We’re two different clans—warring clans, if you want the bottom line. The enmity goes back thousands of years.”
“You’re the weirdo equivalent of the Hatfields and the McCoys?”
He did laugh then, white teeth flashing. “I’ve never thought of it that way, but…yeah. In a way. Except what’s between the Raintree and the Ansara isn’t a feud, it’s a war. There’s a difference.”
“Between a war and a feud, yeah. But what’s the difference between the Raintree clan and the Ansara clan?”
“An entire way of looking at life, I guess. They use their gifts to cheat, to do harm, for their personal gain. Raintree look at their abilities as true gifts and try to use them accordingly.”
“You’re the guys with the white hats.”
“Within the spectrum of human nature—yes. Common sense tells me some Raintree aren’t that far separated from some Ansara when it comes to their attitudes. But if they want to remain in the Raintree clan, they’ll do as I order.”
“So all the Ansara might not be totally bad, but if they want to stay in their clan, with their friends and families, they have to do as the Ansara king orders.”
He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “That’s about it.”
“You admit you might be more alike than you’re different.”
“In some ways. In one big way, we’re poles apart.”
“Which is?”
“From the very beginning, if a Raintree and an Ansara crossbred, the Ansara killed the child. No exceptions.”
Lorna rubbed her forehead, which was beginning to ache again. Yeah, that was bad. Killing innocent children because of their heritage wasn’t just an opportunistic outlook, it was bad with a capital B. Part of her own life philosophy was that there were some people who didn’t deserve to live, and people who hurt children belonged in that group.
“I don’t suppose there has been much intermarriage between the clans, has there?”
“Not in centuries. What Raintree would take the chance? Are you finished with that bagel?”
Thrown off track by the prosaic question, Lorna stared down at her bagel. She had eaten maybe half of it. Even though she’d been starving before, the breakfast conversation had effectively killed her appetite. “I guess,” she said without interest, passing the plate to him.
He dumped the bagel remnants and put that plate in the dishwasher, too. “You need training,” he said. “Your gifts are too strong for you to go around unprotected. An Ansara could use you—”
“Just the way you did?” She didn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of her tone.
“Just the way I did,” he agreed. “Only they would be feeding the fire instead of fighting it.”
As she stood there debating the merits of what he’d said, she realized that gradually she had become more at ease with discussing these “gifts” and that somewhere during the course of the conversation she had been moved from denial to acceptance. Now she saw where he was going with all this, and her old deep-rooted panic bloomed again.
“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head as she backed a few steps away. “I’m not going to let you ‘train’ me in anything. Do I have ‘stupid’ engraved on my forehead or something?”
“You’re asking for trouble if you don’t get some training, and fast.”
“Then I’ll handle it, just like I always have. Besides, you have your own trouble to handle, don’t you?”
“The next few weeks will be tough, but not as tough for me as they will be for the people who lost someone. Another body was pulled out just after dawn. That makes two fatalities.” His expression went grim.
“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the cops. Something hinky is going on
there, because otherwise, why would two detectives be interviewing people before the fire marshal had determined if the fire was arson or accidental?”
The expression in his eyes grew distant as he stared at her. That little detail had escaped his all-knowing, all-seeing gifts, she realized, but if there was one thing a hard life had taught her, it was how the law worked. The detectives shouldn’t have been there until it was clear there was something for them to detect, and the fire marshal wouldn’t make that determination until sometime today, probably.
“Damn it,” he said very softly, and pulled out his phone. “Don’t go anywhere. I have some calls to make.”
He’d meant that very literally, Lorna discovered when she tried to leave the kitchen. Her feet stopped working at the threshold.
“Damn you, Raintree!” she snarled, whirling on him.
“Dante,” he corrected.
“Damn you, Dante!”
“Much better,” he said, and winked at her.
TWELVE
Dante began making calls, starting with Al Rayburn. Lorna was right: something hinky was going on, and he was pissed that she’d had to point it out to him. He should have thought of that detail himself. Instead of answering the detectives’ questions, he should have been asking them his own, such as: What were they doing there? A fire scene wasn’t a crime scene unless and until the cause was determined to be arson or at the very least suspicious. Uniformed officers should have been there for crowd control, traffic control, security—a lot of reasons—but not detectives.
He didn’t come up with any answers to his questions, but he hadn’t expected to. What he was doing now was reversing the flow of information, and that would take time. Now that questions were being asked—by Al, by a friend Dante had at city hall, by one of his own Raintree clan members who liked life a little on the rough side and thus had some interesting contacts—a lot of things would be viewed in a different light.
Whatever was going on, however those two detectives were involved, Dante intended to find out, even if he had to bring in Mercy, whose gift of telepathy was so strong that she had once, when she was ten and he was sixteen, jumped into his head at a very inopportune moment—he’d been with his current girlfriend—and said, “Eww! Gross!” which had so startled him he’d lost his concentration, his erection and his girlfriend. Sixteen-year-old girls, he’d learned, didn’t deal well with anything they saw as an insult to their general desirability. That was the day when he’d started blocking Mercy from his head, which had infuriated her at the time. She’d even told their parents what he’d been doing, which had resulted in a very long, very serious talk with his father about the importance of being smart, using birth control and taking responsibility for his actions.