Raintree: Raintree: Inferno / Raintree: Haunted / Raintree: Sanctuary

“That’s a longer explanation. But after last night, you’re entitled to hear it.” A little ding sounded, and the toaster spat up the bagel. Using the knife he’d got to spread the cream cheese, he flipped the two bagel halves out of the toaster slot and onto a small plate, then passed knife, plate and cream cheese to her.

She took the bar stool farthest from him and spread cream cheese on one slice of bagel. “So let’s hear it,” she said curtly.

“There are a few other things I’d like to get cleared out of the way. First—” He reached into the front pocket of his jeans, pulled out a wad of bills and slid them in front of her.

Lorna looked down. Her license was tucked amid the bills. “My money!” she said, grabbing both and putting them in her own pockets.

“My money, don’t you mean?” he asked grimly, but he hadn’t insisted on keeping it. “And don’t tell me again that you didn’t cheat, because I know you did. I’m just not sure even you know you cheated, or how you’re doing it.”

She focused her attention on her bagel, her expression shutting down. He was going off into woo-woo land again, but she didn’t have to travel with him. “I didn’t cheat,” she said obstinately, because he’d told her not to.

“You don’t know—Hold on, my cell phone’s vibrating.” He pulled a small cell from his pocket, flipped it open and said, “Raintree…Yeah. I’ll ask her.” He looked at Lorna and said, “How much did you say your new shoes cost?”

“One twenty-eight ninety,” she replied automatically, and took a bite of the bagel.

He flipped the phone shut and slid it back into his pocket.

After a few seconds the silence in the room made her look up. His eyes were such a brilliant green, they looked as if they were glowing. “There wasn’t a call on my cell,” he said.

“Then why did you ask—” She stopped, abruptly realizing what she’d said when he’d asked about the shoes, and what little color she’d regained washed out of her face. She opened her mouth to tell him that he must have mentioned the price of the shoes to her, then shut it again, because she knew he hadn’t. She had a cold, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, almost the same feeling she had every morning when she woke up. “I’m not a weirdo,” she said in a thin, flat voice.

“The term is ‘gifted.’ You’re gifted. I just proved it to you. I didn’t need any proof, because I already knew. I’m even more gifted than you are.”

“You’re crazy, is what you are.”

“I’m mildly empathic, just enough that I can read people very well, especially if I touch them, which is why I always shake hands when I go into a business meeting,” he said, speaking over her as if she hadn’t interrupted. “As you know very well, using just my mind, I can compel people to do things against their wishes. That’s a new one on me, but what the hell. We are close to the summer solstice. That, added to the fire, probably triggered it. I can do a bunch of different things, but most of all, I’m a Class A Number One Fire-Master.”

“Which means what?” she asked sarcastically, to cover the fact that she was shaken to the core. “That you moonlight at the circus as a fire-eater?”

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?”

“Taking over your power? No, I don’t know, but I can imagine.”

“No,” she said flatly. “You can’t.” The pain had been beyond any true description. If she said it had felt as if an anvil had fallen on her head, that would be an understatement.

“Again, I’m sorry. I had no choice. It was either that, or we were both going to die, along with the people still evacuating the hotel.”

“You have a way of apologizing that says you’d do the same thing again if the situation arose, so it’s really hard to believe the ‘sorry’ part.”

“That’s because you’re not only a precog, though an untrained one, you’re also very sensitive to the paranormal energy around you.”