Читать книгу Raintree - Linda Winstead Jones - Страница 15

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 overkill.”

“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 landline.”

“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.

A bullet to the head would have been more efficient, but Cael didn’t want to do anything that would alert the Raintree clan, which an overt murder would certainly do. Everything had to be made to look accidental, which of course made guaranteeing the outcome more problematic. The royal family, the most powerful Raintrees, had to be taken out in such a way that no one suspected murder. A fire—they would think losing their Dranir in a fire was tragic and a bitter finale, but they would completely understand that he would fight to the end to save his casino and hotel, especially the hotel, with all the guests in residence there.

Cael, of course, wouldn’t allow for the fact that setting up incidents that didn’t point to the Ansara wasn’t an exact science. Things could go wrong. Tonight, something had definitely gone wrong.

Dante Raintree was still alive. That was about as wrong as things could get.

The big assault on the Raintree homeplace, Sanctuary, was planned for the summer solstice, which was a week away. He and Elyn had a week to kill Dante Raintree—or Cael would kill them.