Raintree: Oracle (Raintree 4)

You won’t have one.

“I don’t see anything,” Maria claimed.

“You’re lying!”

Maybe the girl actually had a gift—because Maria was a very good liar. Like reading the cards, she had learned at a very young age how to lie from her mother. “Raven...”

“You were looking at me, but you weren’t really looking at me. You saw something. Tell me what you saw!”

“Raven...”

“Oh, God, it’s bad.” The girl’s breath shuddered out, and tears welled in her eyes. “It’s really bad.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Maria assured her. “We can stop it from happening. I’ll make you an amulet of special herbs and crystals...” And maybe this time it would work.

The girl shook her head, and her tears spilled over, running down her face in black streaks of eyeliner. “Even you can’t change the future!” She jumped up with such force she knocked over her chair.

Maria jumped up, too, and grabbed the girl’s arms. “Don’t panic.” But she felt it—the fear that had her heart hammering in her chest and her breathing coming fast and shallow in her lungs.

“Stay here,” she implored the girl. “Stay with me, and I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”

Blind with terror, Raven clawed at Maria’s hands and jerked free of her grasp. Then she shoved Maria away from her, sending her stumbling back from the table.

“No. It’s you,” the girl said, her eyes reflecting horror. “I’ve seen it—the dark aura around you.”

That was what Maria had been trying to remove. But she had failed. As Raven had said, even she couldn’t change the future—no matter how hard she tried.

“It’s you!” Raven shouted, her voice rising as she continued her accusation. “You’re the moon!”

She hurled the table at Maria, knocking it over like t

he chair. The cards scattered across the old brick pavers of the barn.

Raven was right: even she, with all the knowledge of her witch ancestor, could not change what she had seen of the future. Like that witch ancestor, who had burned at the stake centuries ago, Maria was helpless to fight the evil that followed her no matter how far and how fast she had tried to outrun it.

The girl turned now and ran for the door, leaving it gaping open behind her as she fled. Just like Maria, Raven wouldn’t be able to escape her fate: death.

* * *

The night breeze drifted through the bedroom window and across the bed, cooling Seth Hughes’s naked skin and rousing him from sleep. He didn’t know how long he’d been out. But it couldn’t have been long, because his heart pounded hard yet, his chest rising and falling with harsh breaths. The breeze stirred a scent from his tangled sheets, of sandalwood and lavender, sweat and sex.

He splayed his hands, reaching across the bed. But she was gone even though he could still feel her in his arms and how he’d felt buried deep inside her body. He could taste her yet on his lips and on his tongue.

With a ragged sigh, he opened his eyes and peered around the room. Moonlight, slanting through the blinds at the window, streaked across the bed and across the naked woman sitting on the foot of it, turned away from him. She leaned forward, and her long black curls skimmed over her shoulders, leaving her back completely bare but for a silver chain and the trio of tattoos a few inches below the chain that circled her neck. There was a sun, a star and a crescent moon.

“I thought you’d left,” he murmured, his voice rough with sleep and the desire that surged through him again. She was so damned beautiful with that sexy gypsy hair and all that honey-toned skin.

“I couldn’t just leave,” she replied as she rose from the bed.

Not after what they’d done? His pulse leaped as the desire surged harder, making him hard. Making love with her had been the most powerful experience of his life. And even though he wasn’t certain he could survive it, it was an experience he wanted again. And again...

“I’m glad,” he said.

She shook her head. “You won’t be.”

“Maria?” he asked, wondering about her ominous tone.

“You’re going to be dead.” Finally, she turned toward him, and the moonlight glinted off the barrel of the gun she held. He glanced toward the bedside table, where the small holster he clamped to the back of his belt lay empty. She held his gun.