Raintree: Inferno (Raintree 1)

Tuesday morning, 7:30 a.m.

The man sitting concealed behind some scrub brush had been in place since before dawn, when he had relieved the unlucky fool who had been on surveillance duty all night. When he saw the garage door sliding up, he grabbed the binoculars hanging by a strap around his neck and trained them on the house. Red brake lights glowed in the dimness of the garage; then a sleek Jaguar began backing out.

He picked up a radio and keyed the microphone. “He’s leaving now.”

“Is he alone?”

“I can’t tell—no, the woman is with him.”

“Ten-four. I’ll be ready.”

His job done for the moment, he let the binoculars fall before the light glinting on the lenses gave him away. He could relax now. Following Raintree wasn’t his job.

“Has the fire marshal said yet how the fire started?” Lorna asked as they drove down the steep, winding road. The air was very clear, the sky a deep blue bowl. The shadows thrown by the morning sun sharply delineated every bush, every boulder.

“Only that it started around a utility closet.”

She settled the shoulder strap of the seat belt so the nylon wasn’t rubbing against her neck. “So have one of your mind readers take a peek and tell you what the fire marshal thinks.”

Dante had to laugh. “You seem to think there are a lot of us, that I have an army of gifted people I can call on.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Scattered around the world. Here in Reno, there are nine, including myself. None of them are gifted with telepathy.”

“You mean you can’t call your strongest telepath, tell him—” “Her.”

“—her the fire marshal’s name, and she could do it from wherever she is?” “The telepath is my sister, Mercy, and she could do it only if she already knew the fire marshal. If she were meeting him in person, she could do it. But a cold reading, at a distance of roughly twenty-five hundred miles, on a stranger? Doesn’t work that way.”

“I guess that’s good—well, unless you need a stranger’s mind read from a few thousand miles away. I suppose this means mind reading isn’t one of your talents.” She hoped not, anyway. If he’d read her mind that morning…

“I can communicate telepathically with Gideon and Mercy, if we deliberately lower our shields, but we’re more comfortable with the shields in place. Mercy was a nosy little kid. Then, when she got older, she wanted to make sure we couldn’t pop into her head without warning, so she armored up, too.”

“What all can you do? Other than play with fire and this mind-control thing.”

“Languages. I can understand any language, which comes in handy when I travel. That’s called xenoglossy. Um…you know I have a mild empathic gift. Something that’s fun is that I can make cold light, psycholuminescence. That’s usually called witch light.”

“Bet that comes in handy when the electricity goes off.”

“It has on occasion,” he admitted, smiling. “It was especially fun when I was a kid, and Mom made me turn out the light and go to bed.”

That sort of home life was as alien to her as if he’d grown up on Mars, and it made her feel vaguely uneasy. To get away from the subject, she asked, “Anything else?”

“Not to any great degree.”

She lapsed into silence, mulling over all that information. There was so much she didn’t know about th

is stuff. From the way Dante talked about himself and his family, their gifts had evolved with age, and their skills had grown like any other skill, through constant use. If she began learning more about what she could do, would she find more abilities within her power? She wasn’t certain she wanted that. In fact, she was almost certain she didn’t. Enough was enough.

Now that she was away from his house, she felt exposed and vulnerable. Though his autocratic way of keeping her there had been maddening, maybe he’d had the right idea. She had been insulated from the world there, able to more calmly think about being one of the gifted—albeit a lowly “stray” rather than a Raintree or Ansara, which she likened to being a Volkswagen as compared to, well, a Jaguar—because she hadn’t had to guard herself. With every minute they drew closer to Reno, and with every minute she grew more and more anxious. By the time he sent the Jaguar prowling up the on-ramp to the interstate and they joined with heavy traffic, she was almost in a panic.

Old habits and patterns were very hard to break. A lifetime of caution and secrecy couldn’t be easily changed. What was easy enough to contemplate while in seclusion seemed entirely different in the real world. Lorna’s mother hadn’t been the only person in her life to react so negatively to her ability. Dante could call it a gift all he wanted, but in her life it had been more of a curse.

She felt suddenly dizzy and sick at just the thought of getting deeper into this new world than she already was. Nothing would change. If she let anyone know, she would be leaving herself open for exploitation at the best, ridicule or persecution at the worst.

“What’s wrong?” Dante asked sharply, glancing over at her. “You’re almost hyperventilating.”

“I don’t want to do this,” she said, teeth chattering from sudden cold. “I don’t want to be part of this. I don’t want to learn how to do more.”