Raintree. Linda Winstead Jones

      “Then I’ll handle it, just like I always have. Besides, you have your own trouble to handle, don’t you?”

      “The next few weeks will be tough, but not as tough for me as they will be for the people who lost someone. Another body was pulled out just after dawn. That makes two fatalities.” His expression went grim.

      “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the cops. Something hinky is going on there, because otherwise, why would two detectives be interviewing people before the fire marshal had determined if the fire was arson or accidental?”

      The expression in his eyes grew distant as he stared at her. That little detail had escaped his all-knowing, all-seeing gifts, she realized, but if there was one thing a hard life had taught her, it was how the law worked. The detectives shouldn’t have been there until it was clear there was something for them to detect, and the fire marshal wouldn’t make that determination until sometime today, probably.

      “Damn it,” he said very softly, and pulled out his phone. “Don’t go anywhere. I have some calls to make.”

      He’d meant that very literally, Lorna discovered when she tried to leave the kitchen. Her feet stopped working at the threshold.

      “Damn you, Raintree!” she snarled, whirling on him.

      “Dante,” he corrected.

      “Damn you, Dante!”

      “Much better,” he said, and winked at her.

      Chapter Twelve

      Dante began making calls, starting with Al Rayburn. Lorna was right: something hinky was going on, and he was pissed that she’d had to point it out to him. He should have thought of that detail himself. Instead of answering the detectives’ questions, he should have been asking them his own, such as: What were they doing there? A fire scene wasn’t a crime scene unless and until the cause was determined to be arson or at the very least suspicious. Uniformed officers should have been there for crowd control, traffic control, security—a lot of reasons—but not detectives.

      He didn’t come up with any answers to his questions, but he hadn’t expected to. What he was doing now was reversing the flow of information, and that would take time. Now that questions were being asked—by Al, by a friend Dante had at city hall, by one of his own Raintree clan members who liked life a little on the rough side and thus had some interesting contacts—a lot of things would be viewed in a different light.

      Whatever was going on, however those two detectives were involved, Dante intended to find out, even if he had to bring in Mercy, whose gift of telepathy was so strong that she had once, when she was ten and he was sixteen, jumped into his head at a very inopportune moment—he’d been with his current girlfriend—and said, “Eww! Gross!” which had so startled him he’d lost his concentration, his erection and his girlfriend. Sixteen-year-old girls, he’d learned, didn’t deal well with anything they saw as an insult to their general desirability. That was the day when he’d started blocking Mercy from his head, which had infuriated her at the time. She’d even told their parents what he’d been doing, which had resulted in a very long, very serious talk with his father about the importance of being smart, using birth control and taking responsibility for his actions.

      Faced with his father’s stern assurance that Dante would marry any girl he got pregnant and stay married to her for the rest of his life, he had then become immensely more careful. The Raintree Dranir most definitely did not have a casual attitude about his heirs. A Raintree, any Raintree, was a genetic dominant; any children would inherit the Raintree gifts. The same was true of the Ansara, which was why the Ansara had immediately killed any child born of a Raintree and Ansara breeding. When two dominant strands blended, anything could be the result—and the result could be dangerous.

      Mercy’s gift had only gotten stronger as she got older. Dante didn’t think her presence would be required, though; the Raintree had other telepaths he could call on. They might not be as strong as Mercy, but then, they wouldn’t need to be. Mercy was most comfortable at Sanctuary, the homeplace of the Raintree clan, where she didn’t have to almost shut down her gift because of the relentless emotional and mental assault by humans who had no idea how to shield. Occasionally she and Eve, her six-year-old daughter, would visit him or Gideon—Mercy was completely female in her love of shopping, and he and Gideon were always glad to keep Eve the Imp while her mother indulged in some retail therapy—but Mercy was the guardian of the homeplace. Sanctuary was her responsibility, hers to rule, and she loved it. He wouldn’t call for her help if he had other options.

      The whole time he was making calls, Lorna stood where he’d compelled her to stay, fuming and fussing and growing angrier by the minute, until he expected all that dark red hair to stand straight up from the pressure. He could have released her, at least within the confines of the house, but she would probably use that much freedom to attack him with something. As it was, he had to admit he rather enjoyed her fury and less-than-flattering commentary.

      The fact was, he enjoyed her.

      He’d never before been so charmed—or so touched. When he’d heard that pitiful little whimpering sound she made in her sleep, he’d felt his heart actually clench. What really, really got to him was that it was obvious she knew what sound she’d been making—she probably did it all the time—and yet she resolutely denied it. Snoring his ass.

      She refused to be a victim. He liked that. Even when something bad happened to her—such as himself, for instance—she furiously rejected any sign of vulnerability, any hint of sympathy, any suggestion that she was, in any way, weaker than King Kong. She didn’t bother defending herself; instead she attacked, with a ferocious valiance and sharp tongue, as well as the occasional uppercut.

      He’d been rough on her—in more ways than one. Not only had he terrified her, mentally brutalized her, he’d humiliated and embarrassed her by tearing off her clothes and examining her the way he had. If she’d only cooperated…But she hadn’t, and he couldn’t blame her. Nothing he’d done last night would have inspired trust in her, not that trust appeared to come easily to her in any case. He couldn’t even tell himself that he’d never intended her any harm. If the blue crescent birthmark of the Ansara had been on her back—well, her body would never have been found.

      The sharpness of his relief at not finding the birthmark had taken him by surprise. He’d wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her, though unless he bound her with a compulsion not to harm him, she would likely have taken his eyeballs out with her fingernails, and as for his other balls—he didn’t want to think what she would have done to them. By that time she hadn’t wanted anything from him except his absence.

      The way she’d been allowed to grow up was a disgrace. She should have been trained in how to control and develop her gifts, trained in how to protect herself. She had the largest pool of raw energy he’d ever seen in a stray, which meant there was enormous potential for her to abuse or to be abused.

      Now that he thought about it, her gift probably wasn’t precognitive so much as it was claircognitive. She didn’t have visions, like his cousin Echo; rather, she simply “knew” things—such as which card would be played next, whether a certain slot machine would pay off, how much her new shoes cost. Why she chose to play at casinos instead of buying a lottery ticket he couldn’t say, unless she had instinctively chosen to stay as invisible as possible. Certainly she had the ability to win any amount of money she wanted, since her gift seemed to be slanted toward numbers.

      Above all else, two sharp truths stood out:

      She annoyed the hell out of him.

      And he wanted her.

      The two should have negated each other, but they didn’t. Even when she annoyed him, which was often, she made him want to laugh. And he not only wanted her physically, he wanted her to accept her own uniqueness, accept him in all his differences, accept his protection, his guidance in learning how to shape and control her gift—all of which she rejected, which circled right back around