Читать книгу Raintree: Raintree: Inferno / Raintree: Haunted / Raintree: Sanctuary - Линда Ховард, Линда Ховард - Страница 27

Dante put his arms around her, pulling her against the heat of his body. His body temperature was always high, she thought, as if he had a permanent fever. That heat felt wonderful now, warming her chilled skin.

“Focus,” he said, bending his head so no one else could hear him. “Think of building that shelter.”

“I don’t want to build a damn shelter,” she said fretfully. “This didn’t happen before I met you, and I want it to stop.”

He rubbed his cheek against her hair, and she felt his lips move as he smiled. “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, if you don’t want to build shelters, see if you can tell what’s causing the problem. Close your eyes, mentally search around us, and tell me if you’re picking up anything, like any changes in energy patterns from a particular area.”

That suggestion seemed a lot more practical to her than building imaginary shelters for imaginary mirrored crystals. She would rather be doing something to stop these sudden sick feelings instead of merely learning how to handle them. She did as he said, leaning into him and letting him support part of her weight while she closed her eyes and began mentally searching for something weird. She didn’t know what she was doing, or what she was “looking” for, but she felt better for doing it.

“Is this really supposed to work?” she asked against his shoulder. “Or are you just distracting me?”

“It should work. Everyone has a personal energy field, but some are stronger than others. A sensitive has a heightened awareness of these energy fields. You should be able to tell where a strong one is coming from, sort of like being able to tell from which direction the wind is blowing.”

That made sense to her, put it in terms she could understand. The thing was, if she was a sensitive, why didn’t she sense stuff like this on a regular basis? Other than the time in Chicago when she’d been suddenly terrified of what lurked in that alley, she’d never been aware of anything unusual.

Some are stronger than others, Dante had said. Maybe she had been around mostly normal people all her life. If so, these feelings must mean that there were now people near her who weren’t normal and had very strong energy fields.

The strongest of all was holding her in his arms. Concentrating like this, she decided to use him as a sort of standard, a pattern, against which she could measure anything else she detected. She could physically feel the energy of his gifts, almost like static electricity surrounding her entire body. The sensation was too strong to call pleasant, but it wasn’t un