Raintree: Inferno (Raintree 1)

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?”