Линда Ховард – Raintree: Raintree: Inferno / Raintree: Haunted / Raintree: Sanctuary (страница 24)
“Come up here,” he called down. “I’ll be outside.”
His bedroom had a deck—or was it a balcony, too?—that faced east. She had looked at it yesterday, but hadn’t gone out, because his damn command had kept her from stepping outside. There were two comfortable-looking chairs and a small table out there, and she’d thought it must be a comfortable place to sit in the afternoon when the sun had passed its apex and that side of the house was shaded.
She went up the two flights of stairs to his bedroom. His bed, she noticed, had been stripped; that gave her a sense of satisfaction. She could see him sitting in one of the chairs outside, so she went to the open French door. Coffee cup in hand, he sat with his head tilted back a little, his eyes almost closed against the brilliance of the bright morning sun, the expression on his face almost…blissful.
“You’re handy with the salt, aren’t you?” he said neutrally, sipping the coffee, but she sensed he wasn’t angry. Of course, the coffee from the kitchen wasn’t dirt-flavored. When he made the next pot of coffee in here, he might not be as sanguine about things.
“Payback.”
“I guessed.”
He didn’t say anything else, and after a moment she shifted her weight. “Was that all you wanted, just to say that?”
He looked around, as if he’d drifted off into a reverie and was faintly surprised by her presence. “Don’t just stand there, come out here and sit down.”
Just thinking about doing so gave her the sense of running into a wall. “I can’t.”
That got a quick smile from him as he realized she was still housebound. He didn’t say anything, but immediately the mental wall disappeared.
“Crap,” she said, stepping outside and going to sit beside him.
“What?”
“You didn’t say anything, you just thought it. I’d hoped you had to speak the command out loud, that I had to
“Sorry. All I have to do is think it. I was tempted to use the gift yesterday afternoon and tell a few people to go jump in the lake, but I restrained myself.”
“You’re a saint among men,” she said dryly, and he gave her a quick grin.
“I was dealing with the media, so, considering the level of temptation, I tend to agree with you.”
Media, huh? No wonder he had refused to take her with him.
“I called last night to tell you I wouldn’t make it back until late, but you didn’t answer the phone.”
“Why would I? I’m not your secretary.”
“The call was for
“I didn’t know that, did I?”
“I left a message for you.”
“I didn’t hear it.” The answering machine was in the kitchen; she’d been in his bedroom when the last phone call came in, which must have been him calling her.
“That’s because you didn’t bother to play it back.” He sounded annoyed now.
“Why would I? I’m not—”
“My secretary. I know. You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”
“I try,” she said, giving him a smile that was more a baring of her teeth than anything related to humor.
He grunted and sipped coffee for a while. Lorna pulled her bare feet up in the chair and looked out over the mountains and broad valleys, enjoying being outside after an entire day cooped up in the house. The morning was cool enough to make her wish she had on socks, but not so cool that she was forced to go inside.
“Do you want to go with me today?” he finally asked, with obvious reluctance.
“Depends. What are you doing?”
“Overseeing cleanup, talking to insurance adjusters, and I still don’t have an answer to why two detectives were asking questions immediately after the fire, so I’m pursuing that by going directly to the source.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“I’m glad someone thinks so,” he said wryly. “Get ready and we’ll eat breakfast out. For some reason, I don’t trust the food here.”
Chapter Sixteen
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.”
“—
“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
“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 this 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.”