Kitabı oku: «Raintree», sayfa 3

The casino was completely engaged. The flames were greedy tongues of red, great sheets of orange and black, transparent forks of gold, that danced and roared in their eagerness to consume everything within reach. Several of the elegant white columns had already ignited like huge torches, and the vast expanse of carpet was a sea of small fires, lit by the falling debris.

The columns were acting as candles, wicking the flames upward to the ceiling. He started there, pulling power from deep inside and using it to bend the fire to his will. Slowly, slowly, the flames licking up the columns began to die down, vanquished by a superior force.

Doing that much, while maintaining the bubble of protection around them, took every ounce of power he had. Something wasn’t right. He realized that even as he concentrated on the columns, feeling the strain deep inside. His head began to hurt; killing the flames shouldn’t take this much effort. They were slow in responding to his command, but he didn’t let up even as he wondered if the energy he’d used on the group mind compulsion had somehow drained him. He didn’t feel as if it had, but something was definitely wrong.

When only tendrils of smoke were coming from the columns, he switched his attention to the walls, pushing back, pushing back…

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the columns burst into flame again.

With a roar of fury and disbelief, he blasted his will at the flames, and they subsided once again.

What the hell?

Windows exploded, sending shards of glass flying in all directions. Brutal streams of water poured through from the front, courtesy of the Reno Fire Department, but the flames seemed to give a hoarse laugh before roaring back brighter and hotter than before. One of the two huge, glittering crystal chandeliers pulled loose from the fire-weakened ceiling and crashed to the floor, throwing up a glittering spray of lethal glass splinters. They were far enough away that few of the splinters reached them, but one of the lovely crystal hornets stung his cheek, sending a rivulet of blood running down his face. Maybe they should have ducked, he thought with distant humor.

He could feel Lorna pressed against him, shaking convulsively and making little keening sounds of terror, but she was helpless to break the mind compulsion he’d put on her. Had any of the glass hit her? No time to check. With a great whoosh, a huge tongue of fire rolled across the ceiling overhead, consuming everything in its path as well as what felt like most of the available oxygen; then it began eating its way down the wall behind them, sealing off any escape.

Mentally, he pushed at the flames, willing them to retreat, calling on all his reserves of strength and power. He was the Dranir of the Raintree; the fire would obey him.

Except it didn’t.

Instead it began crawling across the carpet, small fires combining into larger ones, and those joining with others until the floor was ablaze, getting closer, closer…

He couldn’t control it. He had never before met a flame he couldn’t bend to his will, but this was something beyond his power. Using the mind compulsion that way must have weakened him somehow; it wasn’t something he’d done before, so he didn’t know what the ramifications were. Well, yeah, he did; unless a miracle happened, the ramifications in this case were two deaths: his and Lorna’s.

He refused to accept that. He’d never given up, never let a fire beat him; he wouldn’t start with this one.

The bubble of protection wavered, letting smoke filter in. Lorna began coughing convulsively, struggling against his grip even though she wouldn’t be able to run unless he released her from the compulsion. There was nowhere to run to, anyway.

Grimly, he faced the flames. He needed more power. He had thrown everything he had left at the fire, and it wasn’t enough. If Gideon or Mercy were here, they could link with him, combine strengths, but that sort of partnership required close proximity, so he had only himself to rely on. There was no other source of power for him to tap—

—except for Lorna.

He didn’t ask; he didn’t take the time to warn her what he was going to do; he simply wrapped both arms around her from behind and blasted his way past her mental shields, ruthlessly taking what he needed. Relief poured through him at what he found. Yes, she had power, more than he’d expected. He didn’t stop to analyze what kind of power she had, because it didn’t matter; on this level, power was power, like electricity. Different machines could take the same power and do wildly different things, like vacuuming the floor or playing music. It was the same principle. She had power; he took it, and used it to bolster his own gift.

She gave a thin scream and bucked in his arms, then went rigid.

Furiously he attacked the flames, sending out a 360-degree mental blast that literally blew out the wall of fire behind him and took the physical wall with it, as well. The rush of renewed oxygen made the fire in front of him flare, so he gathered himself and did it again, pouring even more energy into the battle, feeling his own reserves well up, renewed, as he took every ounce of power and strength from Lorna and blended it with his own.

His entire body was tingling, his muscles burning with the effort it took to contain and focus. The invisible bubble of protection around them began to shimmer and took on a faint glow. Sweating, swearing, ignoring the pain in his head, he blasted the energy of his will at the fire again and again, beating it back even while he tried to calculate how long he’d been standing there, how much time he needed to give the people in the hotel to escape. There were multiple stairwells, and he was certain not all evacuations had been as orderly as the one he’d controlled. Was everyone out by now? What about disabled people? They would have to be helped down the flights of stairs. If he stopped, the fire would surge forward, engulfing the hotel—so he couldn’t stop. Until the fire was controlled, he couldn’t stop.

He couldn’t put it out, not completely. For whatever reason, whether he was depleted or distracted or the fire itself was somehow different, he couldn’t put it out. He accepted that now. All he could do was hold the flames at bay until the fire department had them under control.

That was what he concentrated on, controlling the fire instead of extinguishing it. That conserved his energy, and he needed every bit he had, because the fierceness of the fire never stopped pushing back, never stopped struggling for freedom. Time meant nothing, because no matter how long it took, no matter how his head hurt, he had to endure.

Somewhere along the way he lost the line of division between himself and the fire. It was an enemy, but it was beautiful in its destruction; it danced for him as always, magic in its movement and colors. He felt its beauty like molten lava running through his veins, felt his body respond with mindless lust until his erection strained painfully against his zipper. Lorna had to feel it, but there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to make it go away. The best he could do, under the circumstances, was not grind it against her.

Finally, hoarse shouts intruded through the diminished roar of the beast. Turning his head slightly, Dante saw teams of firefighters advancing with their hoses. Quickly he let the bubble of protection dissolve, leaving him and Lorna exposed to the smoke and heat.

With his first breath, the hot smoke seared all the way down to his lungs. He choked, coughed, tried to draw another breath. Lorna sagged to her knees, and he dropped down beside her as the first firefighters reached them.

Chapter Five

Lorna sat on the bumper of a fire-medic truck and clutched a scratchy blanket around her. The night was warm, but she was soaking wet, and she couldn’t seem to stop shivering. She’d heard the fire medic say she wasn’t in shock; though her blood pressure was a little high, which was understandable, her pulse rate was near normal. She was just chilled from being wet.

And, yet, everything around her seemed…muted, as if there were a glass wall between her and the rest of the world. Her mind felt numb, barely able to function. When the medic had asked her name, for the life of her, she hadn’t been able to remember, much less articulate it. But she had remembered that she never brought a purse to a casino because of thieves and that she kept her money in one pocket and her driver’s license in another, so she’d pulled out her license and showed it to him. It was a Missouri license, because she hadn’t gotten a license here. To get a Nevada license, you had to be a resident and gainfully employed. It was the “gainfully employed” part that tripped her up.

“Are you Lorna Clay?” the medic had asked, and she’d nodded.

“Does your throat hurt?” he’d asked then, and that seemed as reasonable an explanation for her continued silence as any other, so she’d nodded again. He’d looked at her throat, seemed briefly puzzled, then given her oxygen to breathe. She should be checked out at the hospital, he’d said.

Yeah, right. She had no intention of going to a hospital. The only place she wanted to go was away.

And, yet, she remained right where she was while Raintree was checked out. There was blood on his face, but the cut turned out to be small. She heard him tell the medics he was fine, that, no, he didn’t think he was burned anywhere, that they’d been very lucky.

Lucky, her ass. The thought was as clear as a bell, rising from the sluggish morass that was her brain. He’d held her there in the middle of that roaring hell for what felt like an eternity. They should be crispy critters. They should, at least, be gasping for breath through damaged airways, instead of being fine. She knew what fire did. She’d seen it, she’d smelled it, and it was ugly. It destroyed everything in its path. What it didn’t do was dance all around and leave you unscathed.

Yet, here she was—unscathed. Relatively, anyway. She felt as if she’d been run over by a truck, but at least she wasn’t burned.

She should have been burned. She should have been dead. Whenever she contemplated the fact that she not only wasn’t dead, she wasn’t even injured, her head ached so much she could barely stand to breathe, and the glass wall between her and reality got a little bit thicker. So she didn’t think about being alive, or dead or anything else. She just sat there while the nightmarish scene revolved around her, lights flashing, crowds of people milling about, the firefighters still busy with their hoses putting out the remaining flames and making certain they didn’t flare again. The fire engines rumbled so loudly that the noise wore on her, made her want to cover her ears, but she didn’t do that, either. She just waited.

For what, she wasn’t certain. She should leave. She thought a hundred times about just walking away into the night, but putting thought into action proved impossible. No matter how much she wanted to leave, she was bound by an inertia she couldn’t seem to fight. All she could do was…sit.

Then Raintree stood, and, abruptly, she found herself standing, too, levered upward by some impulse she didn’t understand. She just knew that if he was standing, she would stand. She was too mentally exhausted to come up with any reason that made more sense.

His face was so black with soot that only the whites of his eyes showed, so she figured she must look pretty much the same. Great. That meant she didn’t have much chance of being able to slip away unnoticed. He took a cloth someone offered him and swiped it over his sooty face, which didn’t do much good. Soot was oily; anything other than soap just sort of moved it around.

Determination in his stride, he moved toward a small clump of policemen, three uniforms and two plainclothes. Vague alarm rose in Lorna. Was he going to turn her in? Without any proof? She desperately wanted to hang back, but, instead, she found herself docilely following him.

Why was she doing this? Why wasn’t she leaving? She struggled with the questions, trying to get her brain to function. He hadn’t even glanced in her direction; he wouldn’t have any idea where she’d gone if she dropped back now and sort of blended in with the crowd—as much as she could blend in anywhere, covered with soot the way she was. But others also showed the effects of the smoke; some of the casino employees, for instance, and the players. She probably could have slipped away, if she felt capable of making the effort.

Why was her brain so sluggish? On a very superficial level, her thought processes seemed to be normal, but below that was nothing but sludge. There was something important she should remember, something that briefly surfaced just long enough to cause a niggle of worry, then disappeared like a wisp of smoke. She frowned, trying to pull the memory out, but the effort only intensified the pain in her head, and she stopped.

Raintree approached the two plainclothes cops and introduced himself. Lorna tried to make herself inconspicuous, which might be a losing cause considering how she looked, plus the fact that she was standing only a few feet away. They all eyed her with the mixture of suspicion and curiosity cops just seemed to have. Her heart started pounding. What would she do if Raintree accused her of cheating? Run? Look at him as if he were an idiot? Maybe she was the idiot, standing there like a sacrificial lamb.

The image galvanized her as nothing else had. She would not be a willing victim. She tried to take a step away, but for some reason the action seemed beyond her. All she wanted to do was stay with him.

Stay with me.

The words resonated through her tired brain, making her head ache. Wearily, she rubbed her forehead, wondering where she’d heard the words and why they mattered.

“Where were you when the fire started, Mr. Raintree?” one of the detectives asked. He and the other detective had introduced themselves, but their names had flown out of Lorna’s head as soon as she’d heard them.

“In my office, talking to Ms. Clay.” He indicated Lorna without really looking in her direction, as if he knew just where she was standing.

They looked at her more sharply now; then the detective who had been talking to Raintree said, “My partner will take her statement while I’m taking yours, so we can save time.”

Sure, Lorna thought sarcastically. She had some beachfront property here in Reno she wanted to sell, too. The detectives wanted to separate her from Raintree so she couldn’t hear what he said and they couldn’t coordinate their statements. If a business was going down the tubes, sometimes the owner tried to minimize losses by burning it down and collecting on the insurance policy.

The other detective stepped to her side. Raintree glanced at her over his shoulder. “Don’t go far. I don’t want to lose you in this crowd.”

What was he up to? she wondered. He’d made it sound as if they were in a relationship or something. But when the detective said, “Let’s walk over here,” Lorna obediently walked beside him for about twenty feet, then abruptly stopped as if she couldn’t take one step more.

“Here,” she said, surprised at how raspy and weak her voice was. She had coughed some, sure, but her voice sounded as if she’d been hacking for days. She was barely audible over all the noise from the fire engines.

“Sure.” The detective looked around, casually positioning himself so that Lorna had to stand with her back to Raintree. “I’m Detective Harvey. Your name is…’

“Lorna Clay.” At least she remembered her name this time, though for a horrible split second she hadn’t been certain. She rubbed her forehead again, wishing this confounded headache would go away.

“Do you live here?”

“For the moment. I haven’t decided if I’ll stay.” She knew she wouldn’t. She never stayed in one place for very long. A few months, six at the most, and she moved on. He asked for her address, and she rattled it off. If he ran a check on her, he would find the most grievous thing against her was a speeding ticket she’d received three years ago. She’d paid the fine without argument; no problem there. So long as Raintree didn’t bring a charge of cheating against her, she was fine. She wanted to look over her shoulder at him but knew better than to appear nervous or, even worse, as if she were checking with him on what answers to give.

“Where were you when the fire started?”

He’d just heard Raintree, when asked the identical question, say he’d been with her, but that was how cops operated. “I don’t know when the fire started,” she said, a tad irritably. “I was in Mr. Raintree’s office when the alarm sounded.”

“What time was that?”

“I don’t have a watch on. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought to check the time, anyway. Fire scares the bejesus out of me.”

One corner of his mouth twitched a little, but he disciplined it. He had a nice, lived-in sort of face, a little droopy at the jowls, wrinkly around the eyes. “That’s okay. We can get the time from the security system. How long had you been with Mr. Raintree when the alarm sounded?”

Now, there was a question. Lorna thought back to the episodes of panic she’d experienced in that office, to the confusing hallucinations, or whatever the disconcerting sexual fantasy was. Nothing in that room had been normal, and though she usually had a good grasp of time, she found herself unable to even estimate. “I don’t know. It was sunset when I went in. That’s all I can tell you.”

He made a note of her answer. God only knew what he thought they’d been doing, she thought wearily, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

“What did you do when the fire alarm sounded?”

“We ran for the stairs.”

“What floor were you on?”

Now, that, she knew, because she’d watched the numbers on the ride up in the elevator. “The nineteenth.”

He made a note of that, too. Lorna thought to herself that if she intended to burn a building down she wouldn’t go to the nineteenth floor to wait for the alarm. Raintree hadn’t had anything to do with whatever had caused the fire, but the cops had to check out everything or they wouldn’t be doing their jobs. Though…did detectives normally go to the scene of a fire? A fire inspector or fire marshal, whichever Reno had, would have to determine that a fire was caused by arson before they treated it as a crime.

“What happened then?”

“There were a lot of people in the stairwell,” she said slowly, trying to get the memory to form. “I remember…a lot of people. We could go only a couple of floors before everyone got jammed up, because some of the people from the lower floors were trying to go up.” The smoke had been heavy, too, because visibility had been terrible, people passing by like ghosts…No. That had been later. There hadn’t been a lot of smoke in the stairs right then. Later—She wasn’t certain about later. The sequence of events was all jumbled up, and she couldn’t seem to sort everything out.

“Go on,” Detective Harvey prompted when she was silent for several moments.

“Mr. Raintree told them—the people coming up the stairs—they’d have to go back, there was no way out if they kept going up.”

“Did they argue?”

“No, they all turned around. No one panicked.” Except her. She’d barely been able to breathe, and it hadn’t been because of the smoke. The memory was becoming clearer, and she was amazed at how orderly the evacuation had been. No one had pushed; no one had been running. People had been hurrying, of course, but not being so reckless that they risked a nasty fall. In retrospect, their behavior had been damned unnatural. How could everyone have been so calm? Didn’t they know what fire did?

But she hadn’t run, either, she realized. She hadn’t pushed. She had gone at a steady pace, held to Raintree’s side by his arm.

Wait. Had he been holding her then? She didn’t think he had been. He’d touched her waist, sort of guiding her along, but she’d been free to run. So…why hadn’t she?

She had trooped along like everyone else, in an orderly line. Inside she’d been screaming, but outwardly she’d been controlled.

Controlled…Not self-controlled, but controlled like a puppet, as if she hadn’t had a will of her own. Her mind had been screaming at her to run, but her body simply hadn’t obeyed.

“Ms. Clay?”

Lorna felt her breath start coming faster as she relived those moments. Fire! Coming closer and closer, she didn’t want to go, she wanted to run, but she couldn’t. She was caught in one of those nightmares when you try to run but can’t, when you try to scream but can’t make a sound—

“Ms. Clay?”

“I—What?” Dazed, she stared up at him. From the mixture of impatience and concern on his face, she thought he must have called her name several times.

“What did you do when you got out?”

Shuddering, she gathered herself. “We didn’t. I mean, we got to the ground floor and Mr. Raintree sent the others to the right, toward the parking deck. Then he…we…” Her voice faltered. She had been fighting him, trying to follow the others; she remembered that. Then he’d said, “Stay with me,” and she had, with no will to do otherwise, even though she’d been half mad with terror.

Stay with me.

When he’d sat, she’d sat. When he’d stood, she’d stood. When he’d moved, that was when she had moved. Until then, she had been incapable of taking a single step away from him.

Just moments ago he’d said, “Don’t go far,” and she’d been able to leave his side then—but she hadn’t gone far before she’d stopped as if she’d hit a brick wall.

A horrible suspicion began to grow. He was controlling her somehow, maybe with some kind of posthypnotic suggestion, though when and how he’d hypnotized her, she had no idea. All sorts of weird things had been happening in his office. Maybe those damn candles had actually given off some kind of gas that had drugged her.

“Go on,” said Detective Harvey, breaking into her thoughts.

“We went to the left,” she said, beginning to shake. She wrapped her arms around herself, hugging the blanket close in an effort to control her wayward muscles, but in seconds, she was trembling from head to foot. “Into the lobby. The fire—” The fire had leaped at them like a maddened beast, roaring with delight. The heat had been searing for the tiniest fraction of a second. She’d been choking on the smoke. Then…no smoke, no heat. Both had just gone away. She and Raintree should have been overcome in seconds, but they hadn’t been. She’d been able to breathe. She hadn’t felt the heat, even though she’d watched the tongues of fire hungrily lapping across the carpet toward her. “The fire sort of w-whooshed across the ceiling and got behind us, and we were trapped.”

“Would you like to sit down?” he asked, interrupting his line of questioning, but considering how violently she was shaking, he probably thought sitting her down before she fell down was a good idea.

She might have thought so, too, if sitting down hadn’t meant sitting on asphalt littered with the debris of a fire and running with streams of sooty water. He probably meant sit down somewhere else, which she would have liked, if she’d felt capable of moving a single step beyond where she was right now. She shook her head. “I’m okay, just wet and cold and shaken up some.” If there was an award given out for massive understatement, she’d just won it.

He eyed her for a moment, then evidently decided she knew whether or not she needed to sit down. He’d tried, anyway, which relieved him of any obligation. “What did you do?”

Better not to tell him she’d felt surrounded by some sort of force field; this wasn’t StarWars, so he might not understand. Better not to tell him she’d felt a cool breeze in her hair. She must have been drugged; there was no other explanation.

“There wasn’t anything we could do. We were trapped. I remember Mr. Raintree swearing a blue streak. I remember choking and being on the floor. Then the firefighters got to us and brought us out.” In the interest of believability, she had heavily condensed the night’s events as she remembered them, but, surely, they couldn’t have been in the lobby for very long, no more than thirty seconds. An imaginary force field couldn’t have held off real heat and smoke. The firefighters must have been close to them all along, but she’d been too panic-stricken to notice.

There was something else, probably that worrisome niggle of memory, that she couldn’t quite grasp. Something else had happened. She knew it; she just couldn’t think what it was. Maybe after she showered and washed her hair—several times—and got twenty or thirty hours of sleep, she might remember.

Detective Harvey glanced over her shoulder then flipped his little notebook shut. “You’re lucky to be alive. Have you been checked for smoke inhalation?”

“Yes, I’m okay.” The medic had been puzzled by her good condition, but she didn’t tell the detective that.

“I imagine Mr. Raintree will be tied up here for quite a while, but you’re free to go. Do you have a number where you can be reached if we have any further questions for you?”

She started to ask, Like what? but instead said, “Sure,”and gave him her cell-phone number.

“That local?”

“It’s my cell.” Now that cell numbers could be transferred, she no longer bothered with a landline so long as she had cell-phone service wherever she temporarily settled.

“Got a local number?”

“No, that’s it. Sorry. I didn’t see any point in getting a landline unless I decided to stay.”

“No problem. Thanks for your cooperation.” He nodded a brief acknowledgment at her.

Because it seemed the thing to do, Lorna managed a faint smile for him as he strolled back to the other detective, but it quickly faded. She was exhausted and filthy. Her head hurt. Now that Detective Harvey had finished interviewing her, she was going home.

She tried. She made several attempts to walk away, but for some reason she couldn’t make her feet move. Frustration grew in her. She had walked over here a few minutes ago, so there was no reason why she shouldn’t be able to walk now. Just to see if she could move at all, without turning around, she stepped back, moving closer to Raintree. No problem. All her parts worked just as they should.

Experimentally, she took a step forward, and heaved a sigh of relief when her feet and legs actually obeyed. She was beyond exhausted if the simple act of walking had become so complicated. Sighing, she started to take another step.

And couldn’t.

She couldn’t go any farther. It was as if she’d reached the end of an invisible leash.

She went cold with disbelief. This was infuriating. He must have hypnotized her, but how? When? She couldn’t remember him saying, “You are getting sleepy,” and she was pretty certain hypnosis didn’t work that way, anyway. It was supposed to be a deep relaxation, not a do-things-against-your-will type of thing, regardless of how stage shows and movies portrayed it.

She wished she’d worn a watch, so she could have noticed any time discrepancy from when she’d gone into Raintree’s office and when the fire alarm had sounded. She had to find out what time that had been, because she knew roughly what time sunset was. She’d been in his office for maybe half an hour…she thought. She couldn’t be certain. Those disconcerting fantasies could have taken more time than she estimated.

Regardless of how he’d done it, he was controlling her movements. She knew it. When he said, “Stay with me,” she’d stayed, even when faced with an inferno. When he said, “Don’t go far,” she had been able to go only so far and not a step farther.

She turned her head to look at him over her shoulder and found him standing more or less alone, evidently having finished answering whatever questions the other detective had asked. He was watching her, his expression grim. His lips moved. With all the background noise she couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she read his lips plainly enough.

He said, “Come here.”