Raintree: Inferno (Raintree 1)

“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 overk

ill.”

“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.