Raintree: Inferno Read online

  Praise for New York Times bestselling author

  LINDA HOWARD

  “You can’t read just one Linda Howard!”

  —Catherine Coulter, New York Times bestselling author

  “This master storyteller takes our breath away.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “Linda Howard knows what readers want.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  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 (There was a young man from Paducah…), which of course had nothing to do with the Raintree books.

  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.

  Linda Howard

  LINDA HOWARD

  RAINTREE: INFERNO

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  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.

  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 otherness, to take what they wanted from the weaker humans, and those who wanted to live in harmony with the Ungifted. Over seven thousand years ago they split into what became two tribes, and then two kingdoms: the Raintree and the Ansara.

  The two kingdoms then locked into eternal war, and earth in all her dimensions became the battleground.

  So it was, and so it is.

  ONE

  Sunday

  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 still she was. She didn’t fidget, or play with her chips, or look around at the other players. She peeked once at her down card, then didn’t touch it again, signaling for another hit by tapping a fingernail on the table. Just because she didn’t seem to be paying attention to the other players, though, didn’t mean she was as unaware as she seemed.

  “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 were those rare individuals who could calculate the odds even with multiple decks.

  “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 big-time 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