Raintree. Linda Winstead Jones

      “We don’t know—not exactly. Everything went perfectly from our end. Elyn was connected to me, Stoffel and Pier, drawing our power and feeding the fire. She said they had Raintree overmatched, that he was losing ground—and fast. Then…something happened. It’s possible he saw he couldn’t handle the fire and retreated. Or he’s more powerful than we thought.”

      Cael was silent, and Ruben shifted uneasily on the motel bed. He’d expected Cael to leap on the juicy possibility that the mighty Dante Raintree had panicked and run from a fire, but as usual, Cael was unpredictable.

      “What does Elyn say?” Cael finally asked. “If Raintree ran, if he stopped trying to fight the fire, without his resistance it would have flashed over. She’d have known that, right? She’d have felt the surge.”

      “She doesn’t know.” He and Elyn had discussed the events from beginning to end, trying to pinpoint what had gone wrong. She should have felt a surge, if one had happened—but she not only hadn’t felt a surge, she hadn’t felt the retreat when the fire department beat back the flames. There had to have been some sort of interference, but they were at a loss to explain it.

      “Doesn’t know? How can she not know? She’s a Fire-Master, and that was her flame. She should know everything about it from conception on.”

      Cael’s tone was sharp, but no sharper than their own tones had been when he and Elyn had dissected the events. Elyn hadn’t wanted the finger of blame pointed at her, of course, but she’d been truly perplexed. “All she knows is, just as she was drawing the fire into the hotel, she lost touch with it. She could tell it was still there, but she didn’t know what it was doing.” He paused. “She’s telling the truth. I was linked to her. I could feel her surprise. She thinks there had to be some sort of interference, maybe a protective shield.”

      “She’s making excuses. Shields like that exist only at homeplace. We’ve never detected anything like that on any of the other Raintree properties.”

      “I agree. Not about Elyn making excuses, but about the impossibility of there being a shield. She simply asked. I told her, no, I’d have known if one were there.”

      “Where were the other Raintree?”

      “They were all accounted for.” None of the other Raintree had been close enough for their Dranir to link to them and use their power to boost his own, as Elyn had done by linking to him and the others. They’d pulled in people to follow the various Raintree clan—members in Reno. There were only eight, not counting the Dranir, and none of them had been close to the Inferno.

      “So, despite all your assurances to me, you failed, and you don’t know why.”

      “Not yet.” Ruben ever so slightly stressed the yet. “There’s one other possibility. Another person, a woman, was with Raintree. None of us saw them being brought out because the fire engines blocked our view, but we’ve been posing as insurance adjusters and asking questions.” They hadn’t raised a single eyebrow; insurance adjusters were already swarming, and not just the ones representing Raintree’s insurance provider. Multiple vehicles had been damaged. Casino patrons had lost personal property. There had been injuries, and two deaths. Add the personal injury lawyers to the mix, and there were a lot of people asking a lot of questions; no one noticed a few more people or questions, and no one checked credentials.

      “What’s her name?”

      “Lorna Clay. One of the medics got her name and address. She wasn’t registered at the hotel, and the address on the paperwork was in Missouri. It isn’t valid. I’ve already checked.”

      “Go on.”

      “She was evidently with Raintree from the beginning, in his office in the hotel, because they evacuated the building together. They were in the west stairwell with a lot of other people. He directed everyone else out, through the parking deck, but he and this woman went in the other direction. Several things are suspicious. One, she wasn’t burned—at all. Two, neither was Raintree.”

      “Protective bubble. Judah can construct them, too.” Cael’s tone went flat when he said Judah’s name—Judah was his legitimate half brother and the Ansara Dranir. Envy of Judah, bitterness that he was the Dranir instead of Cael, had eaten at Cael all his life.

      Ruben was impressed by the bubble. Smoke? Smoke had a physical presence; any Fire-Master could shield from smoke. But heat was a different entity, part of the very air. Fire-Masters, even royal ones, still had to breathe. To somehow separate the heat from the air, to bring in one but hold the other at bay, was a feat that went way beyond controlling fire.

      “The woman,” Cael prompted sharply, pulling Ruben from his silent admiration.

      “I’ve seen copies of the statement she gave afterward. It matches his, and neither is possible, given what we know of the timetable. I estimate he was engaged with the fire for at least half an hour.” That was an eternity, in terms of survival.

      “He should have been overwhelmed. He should have spent so much energy trying to control the fire that he couldn’t maintain the bubble. He’s the hero type,” Cael said contemp-tuously. “He’d sacrifice himself to save the people in the hotel. This should have worked. His people wouldn’t have been suspicious. They would have expected him to do the brave and honorable thing. The woman has to be the key. She has to be gifted. He linked with her, and she fed him power.”

      “She isn’t Raintree,” said Ruben. “She has to be a stray, but they aren’t that powerful. If there had been several of them, maybe there would have been enough energy for him to hold back the fire.” He doubted it, though. After all, there had been four powerful Ansara, linked together, feeding it. As powerful as Dante undoubtedly was, adding the power of one stray, even a strong one, would be like adding a cup of water to a full bathtub.

      “Follow your own logic,” Cael said sharply. “Strays aren’t that powerful, therefore she can’t be a stray.”

      “She isn’t Raintree,” Ruben insisted.

      “Or she isn’t official Raintree.” Cael didn’t use the word “illegitimate.” The old Dranir had recognized him as his son, but that hadn’t given Cael precedence over Judah, even though he was the elder. The injustice had always eaten at him, like a corrosive acid. Everyone around Cael had learned never to suggest that maybe Judah was Dranir because of his power, not his birthright.

      “She’d have to be of the royal bloodline to have enough power for him to hold the fire for that long against four of us,” said Ruben dubiously, because that was impossible. The birth of a royal was taken far too seriously for one to go unnoticed. They were simply too powerful.

      “So maybe she is. Even if the split occurred a thousand years ago, the inherited power would be undiminished.”

      As genetic dominants, even if a member of one of the clans bred with a human—which they often did—the offspring were completely either Ansara or Raintree. The royal families of both clans were the most powerful of the gifted, which was how they’d become royal in the first place; as dominants, their power was passed down intact. To Ruben’s way of thinking, that only reinforced his argument that, no matter what, a royal birth wouldn’t go unnoticed for any length of time, certainly not for a millennium.

      “Regardless of what she is, where is she now?”

      “At his house. He took her there last night, and she’s still there.”

      Cael was silent, so Ruben simply waited while his cousin ran that through his convoluted brain.

      “Okay,” Cael said abruptly. “She has to be the key. Wherever it comes from, her power is strong enough that he held the four of you to a draw. But that’s in the past. You can’t use fire again without the bastard getting suspicious, so you’ll have to think of something else that’ll either look accidental or can’t be linked to us. I don’t care how you do it, just do it. The next time I hear your voice, you’d better be telling me that