Raintree: Raintree: Inferno / Raintree: Haunted / Raintree: Sanctuary

Chapter 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 as 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 long time, 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 twelvedollar 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 olivetoned 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 thing. 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.”

His explanations were going in circles, and so were her thoughts. Frustrated, frightened, she made a sharp motion with her hand and snapped, “Who in hell is Aunt Sarah?”

Tilting his head back, he burst out laughing, the sound quick and easy, as if he did it a lot. The pit of her stomach fluttered. Imagining sex with him had lowered defenses she usually kept raised high, and the distant acknowledgment of his attractiveness had become a full-fledged awareness. Against her will she noticed the muscular lines of his throat, the sculpted line of his jaw. He was…Handsome was, in an odd way, too feminine a word to describe him. He was striking, his features altogether too compelling to be merely handsome. Nor were his looks the first thing she’d noticed about him; by far her first impression had been one of power.

“Not ‘Aunt Sarah,’ ” he said, still laughing. “Ansara. A-N-S-A-R-A.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” she said warily, wondering if this was some type of mob thing he was talking about. She didn’t suffer from the delusion that organized crime was restricted to the old Italian families in New York and Chicago.

“Haven’t you?” He said it pleasantly enough, but with her nerve-endings stripped raw the way they were, she felt the doubt—and the inherent threat—as clearly as if he’d shouted at her.

She had to get her reactions under control. The weird stuff happening in this room had taken her by surprise, shocked her into a vulnerability she normally didn’t allow, but now that she’d had a moment without any new assault on her senses, she began to get her composure back. Mentally she reassembled her internal barriers; it was a struggle, because concentration was difficult, but grimly she persisted. She might not know what was going on, but she knew protecting herself was vitally important.

He was waiting for her to respond to his rhetorical question, but she ignored him and focused on her shields—

Shields?

Where had that word come from? She never thought of herself as having shields. She thought of herself as strong, her heart weathered and toughened by hard times; she thought of herself as unemotional.

She never thought of herself as having shields.

Until now.

She was the most unshielded sensitive he’d ever seen, Dante thought as he watched her struggle against the flow and surge of power. She reacted like a complete novice to both his thoughts and his affinity for fire. He had his gift under strict control now, but to test her, he’d sent tiny blasts of it into the room, making the candles dance. She’d latched on to the arms of the chair as if she needed to anchor herself, her alarmed gaze darting around as if searching for monsters.

When he’d picked up on her expectation of being blackmailed for sex—which hadn’t exactly been hard to guess—he’d allowed himself a brief, pleasant little fantasy, to which she’d responded as if he’d really had her naked in bed. Her mouth had gotten red and soft, her cheeks flushed, her eyes heavylidded, while beneath that cheap sweater her nipples had become so hard their shape had been visible even through her bra.

Damn. For a moment there, she’d been in real danger of the fantasy becoming fact.

She might be Ansara, but if she was, she was completely untutored. Either that or she was skilled enough to appear untutored. If she was Ansara, he would bet on the latter. Being Raintree had a lot of advantages and one big disadvantage: an implacable enemy. The hostility between the two clans had erupted into a huge pitched battle about two hundred years ago, and the Raintree had been victorious, the Ansara almost destroyed. The tattered remnants of the once-powerful clan were scattered around the world and had never recovered to the point that they could again make concerted war on the Raintree, but that didn’t mean that the occasional lone Ansara didn’t try to make trouble for them.

Like the Raintree, the Ansara had different gifts of varying degrees of strength. The ones Dante had infrequently crossed paths with had all been trained as well as any Raintree, which meant none of them were to be taken lightly. While they weren’t the threat they had been before, he was always aware that any one of them would love a chance to get at him in any way.

It would be just like an Ansara to get a kick out of stealing from him. There were bigger casinos in Reno, but stealing from the Inferno would be a huge feather in her cap—if she was Ansara.

He had some empathic ability—nothing in the same ballpark as his younger sister, Mercy, but enough that he could read most people as soon as he touched them. The exceptions, mainly, were the Ansara, because they had been trained to shield themselves in a way normal humans never were. Sensitives had to shield or be overwhelmed by the forces around them…much as Lorna Clay seemed to have been overwhelmed.

Maybe she was just a good actress.

The candlelight was magic on her skin, in her hair. She was a pretty woman, with finely molded bone structure, if a tad brittle and hostile in her attitude, but what the hell—if he’d been caught cheating, he would probably be hostile, too.

He wanted to touch her, to see if he could read anything.

She would probably run screaming from the room if he laid a hand on her, though. She was so tightly wound that she might throw herself backward in the chair if he said “Boo!” He thought about doing it, just for the amusement value.

He would have, if not for the very serious matter of cheating.

He leaned forward to hammer home a point, and—

A loud but not unpleasant tone sounded, followed by another, then another. A burst of adrenaline shot through his system, and he was on his feet, grabbing her arm and hauling her out of the chair before the recorded announcement could begin.

“What is it?” she cried, her face going white, but she didn’t try to pull away from him.

“Fire,” he said briefly, all but dragging her to the door. Once the fire alarm sounded all the elevators stopped responding to calls—and they were on the nineteenth floor.

Chapter Four

Lorna stumbled and almost went down on one knee as he dragged her through the doorway. Her hip banged painfully into the door frame; then she regained her balance, lurched upward and hurtled through so fast that she immediately crashed into the wall on the other side. Her arm, held tight in his iron grip, was wrenched as he ruthlessly pulled her onward. She didn’t say a word, didn’t cry out, almost didn’t even notice the pain, because the living nightmare she was in crowded out everything else.

Fire!

She saw him give her a searing, comprehensive look; then he released her arm and instead clamped his left arm around her waist, locking her to his side and holding her up as he ran toward the stairs. They were alone in the hallway, but as soon as he opened the door marked Exit, she could hear the thunder of footsteps below them as people stampeded down the stairs.

The air in the hallway had been clear, but as the door clanged shut behind them, she smelled it: the throat-burning stench of smoke. Her heartbeat stuttered. She was afraid of fire, always had been, and it wasn’t just the caution of an intelligent person. If she had to pick the worst way on earth to die, it would be by fire. She had nightmares about being trapped behind a wall of flame, unable to get to someone—a child, maybe?—who was more important to her than her own life, or even to save herself. Just as the flames reached her and she felt her flesh begin to sear, she would wake, trembling and in tears from the horror.

She didn’t like any open flame—candles, fireplaces, or even gas cooktops. Now Dante Raintree was carrying her down into the heart of the beast, when every instinct she had screamed for her to go up, up into fresh air, as far away from fire as she could get.

As they made the turn at the first landing, the mental chaos of panic began to strengthen and grab at her, and she fought it back. Logically she knew they had to go down, that jumping off the roof wasn’t a viable option. Clenching her teeth together to keep them from chattering, she concentrated on keeping her balance, making sure her feet hit each step squarely, though the way he was holding her, she doubted she could stumble. She didn’t want to impede him or, God forbid, cause both of them to fall.

They caught up with a knot of people also going down the stairs, but the passage was clogged, and people were shouting at others to move out of the way. The uproar was confusing; no one could make themselves understood, and some were coughing now as the smoke thickened.

“You can’t go up!” Raintree thundered, his voice booming over the pushing, yelling human logjam, and only then did Lorna realize that the uproar was caused by people trying to push their way up the stairs while others were just as focused on going down.

“Who the hell are you?” someone bellowed from below.

“The owner of the Inferno, that’s who the hell I am,” Raintree snapped. “I built this casino, and I know where I’m going. Now turn your ass around and go all the way down to the ground floor, that’s the only way out.”

“The smoke’s worse that way!”

“Then take off your shirt and tie it over your nose and mouth. Everyone do that,” he ordered, booming out the words again so all could hear him. He suited action to words, releasing Lorna to strip out of his expensive suit jacket. She stood numbly beside him, watching as he swiftly removed a knife from his pocket, flicked it open, and sliced the gray silk lining from the jacket. Then he just as swiftly ripped the lining into two oblong panels. Handing one panel to her, he said, “Use this,” as he closed the knife and slipped it back into his pocket.