Линда Ховард – Raintree: Raintree: Inferno / Raintree: Haunted / Raintree: Sanctuary (страница 1)
Praise for New York Times bestselling author
LINDA HOWARD
“You can’t read just one Linda Howard!”
—Catherine Coulter
“This master storyteller takes our breath away.”
—
Praise for RITA® Award-winning author
LINDA WINSTEAD JONES
“Linda Winstead Jones has a magic touch with paranormal!”
—Linda Howard,
“Non-stop action from start to finish. Jones’ characters are compelling, and her story is both exciting and original. Readers won’t want to put it down!”
—
Praise for
BEVERLY BARTON
“Page-turning suspense and an evolving romance make for a satisfying read.”
—
“Smart, sexy and scary as hell. Beverly Barton just keeps getting better and better.”
—No. 1
Lisa Jackson on
Raintree
Linda Howard
Beverly Barton
Linda Winstead Jones
LINDA HOWARD says that whether she’s reading them or writing them, books have long played a profound role in her life. After twenty-one years of penning stories for her own enjoyment, Ms Howard finally worked up the courage to submit a novel for publication—and met with success. This Alabama native in now a multi-
BEVERLY BARTON has been an avid reader since childhood, writing her first book at the age of nine. After marriage to her own hero and the births of her daughter and son, Beverly chose to be a full-time homemaker, aka wife, mother, friend and volunteer. An author of more than fifty books, Beverly is a member of Romance Writers of America, and helped found the Heart of Dixie chapter in Alabama.
LINDA WINSTEAD JONES has written more than fifty romance books. She’s won the Colorado Romance Writers Award of Excellence twice, and she’s a three-time RITA® Award finalist and (writing as Linda Fallon) winner of the 2004 RITA® for paranormal romance. Linda lives in north Alabama with her husband of thirty-four years. To learn more, visit her website at: wwwlindawinsteadjones.com.
To Beverly Barton and Linda Winstead Jones, for the years of friendship and all the fun we had planning these books, and to Leslie Wainger, for being everything an editor should be, as well as a friend.
Dear Reader,
My friends Beverly and Linda and I have worked on the concept for these books for about four years. We’ve spent hours and hours discussing them, playing with ideas and laughing our heads off. Not that these books are funny, but after a while we’d get sort of punch-drunk and go off on tangents. One such tangent was limericks
We loved working out the mythology behind the Raintree, extraordinary people trying to live in the ordinary world without being found out. We loved the characters. They are all very human and at the same time they are…more than human. I hope you enjoy them, too.
Prologue
There have always been those among us who are more than human. At first they were few, but like always calls to like, and so it was from the beginning, when mankind was new and clumped together in fire-lit caves. Sometimes they were driven out by fear and fists wielding clubs. Sometimes they simply left, seeking others like them. And though they were few and the earth was large, they found each other, drawn by the very instinct and power and knowledge that set them apart from the very beginning—and by the will to survive, for only in numbers was there safety.
In time those numbers grew large, and there was strife between those who wanted to use their powers, their
The two kingdoms then locked into eternal war, and earth in all her dimensions became the battleground.
So it was, and so it is.
Chapter One
Dante Raintree stood with his arms crossed as he watched the woman on the monitor. The image was in black and white, to better show details; color distracted the brain. He focused on her hands, watching every move she made, but what struck him most was how uncommonly
“What’s her name?” he asked.
“Lorna Clay,” replied his chief of security, Al Rayburn.
“Is that her real name?”
“It checks out.”
If Al hadn’t already investigated her, Dante would have been disappointed. He paid Al a lot of money to be efficient and thorough.
“At first I thought she was counting,” said Al. “But she doesn’t pay enough attention.”
“She’s paying attention, all right,” Dante murmured. “You just don’t see her doing it.” A card counter had to remember every card played. Supposedly counting cards was impossible with the number of decks used by the casinos, but no casino wanted a card counter at its tables. There
“I thought that, too,” said Al. “But look at this piece of tape coming up. Someone she knows comes up to her and speaks, she looks around and starts chatting, completely misses the play of the people to her left—and doesn’t look around even when the deal comes back to her, she just taps that finger. And damned if she didn’t win. Again.”
Dante watched the tape, rewound it, watched it again. Then he watched it a third time. There had to be something he was missing, because he couldn’t pick out a single giveaway.
“If she’s cheating,” Al said with something like respect, “she’s the best I’ve ever seen.”
“What does your gut say?” Dante trusted his chief of security. Al had spent thirty years in the casino business, and some people swore he could spot cheats as soon as they walked in the door. If Al thought she was cheating, then Dante would take action—and he wouldn’t be watching this tape now if something hadn’t made Al uneasy.
Al scratched the side of his jaw, considering. He was a big, bulky man, but no one who observed him for any length of time would think he was slow, either physically or mentally. Finally he said, “If she isn’t cheating, she’s the luckiest person walking. She wins. Week in, week out, she wins. Never a huge amount, but I ran the numbers, and she’s into us for about five grand a week. Hell, boss, on her way out of the casino she’ll stop by a slot machine, feed a dollar in and walk away with at least fifty. It’s never the same machine, either. I’ve had her watched, I’ve had her followed, I’ve even looked for the same faces in the casino every time she’s in here, and I can’t find a common denominator.”
“Is she here now?”
“She came in about half an hour ago. She’s playing blackjack, as usual.”
“Who’s the dealer?”
“Cindy.”
Cindy Josephson was Dante’s best dealer, almost as sharp at spotting a cheater as Al himself. She had been with him since he’d opened Inferno, and he trusted her to run an honest game. “Bring the woman to my office,” Dante said, making a swift decision. “Don’t make a scene.”
“Got it,” said Al, turning on his heel and leaving the security center, where banks of monitors displayed every angle of the casino.
Dante left, too, going up to his office. His face was calm. Normally he would leave it to Al to deal with a cheater, but he was curious. How was she doing it? There were a lot of bad cheaters, a few good ones, and every so often one would come along who was the stuff of which legends were made: the cheater who didn’t get caught, even when people were alert and the camera was on him—or, in this case, her.
It was possible for people to simply be lucky, as most people understood luck. Chance could turn a habitual loser into a bigtime winner. Casinos, in fact, thrived on that hope. But luck itself wasn’t habitual, and he knew that what passed for luck was often something else: cheating. Then there was the other kind of luck, the kind he himself possessed, but since it depended not on chance but on who and what he was, he knew it was an innate power and not Dame Fortune’s erratic smiles. Since his power was rare, the odds made it likely the woman he’d been watching was merely a very clever cheat.
Her skill could provide her with a very good living, he thought, doing some swift calculations in his head. Five grand a week equaled two hundred sixty thousand dollars a year, and that was just from his casino. She probably hit all of them, careful to keep the numbers relatively low so she stayed under the radar.