Raintree Read online

  “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 contemptuously. “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 Dante Raintree is dead. And while you’re at it, kill the woman, too.”

  Cael slammed down the phone. Ruben replaced the receiver more slowly, then pinched the bridge of his nose. Tactically, killing the royal Raintrees first was smart. If you cut off the head of a snake, taking care of the body was easy. The comparison wasn’t completely accurate, because any Raintree was a force to be reckoned with, but so were the Ansara. With the royals all dead, the advantage would be theirs and the outcome inevitable.

  The mistake they’d made two hundred years ago was in not taking care of the royal family first, a mistake that had had disastrous results. As a clan, the Ansara had almost been destroyed. The survivors had been banished to their Caribbean island, where most of them remained. But they had used those two hundred years to secretly rebuild in strength, and now they were strong enough to once more engage their enemy. Cael thought so, anyway, and so did Ruben. Only Judah had held them back, preaching caution. Judah was a banker, for God’s sake; what did he know about taking risks?

  Discontent in the Ansara ranks had been growing for years, and it had reached the crisis point. The Raintree had to die, and so did Judah. Cael would never let him live, even in exile.

  Ruben’s power was substantial. Because of that, and because he was Cael’s cousin, he’d been given the task of eliminating the most powerful Raintree of all—a task made more difficult because Cael insisted the death look accidental. The last thing he wanted was all the Raintree swarming to the homeplace to protect it. The power of Sanctuary was almost mystical. How much of it was real and how much of it was perceived, Ruben didn’t know and didn’t care.

  The plan was simple: kill the royals, breach the protective shields around Sanctuary and take the homeplace. After that, the rest of the Raintree would be considerably weakened. Destroying them would be child’s play.

  Not destroying the Ansara homeplace two centuries ago, not destroying every member of the clan, was the mistake the Raintree had made. The Ansara wouldn’t return the favor.

  Ruben sat for a long time, deep in thought. Getting to Raintree would be easier if he was distracted. He and the woman, Lorna Clay, were evidently lovers; otherwise, why take her home with him? She would be the easier of the two to take out, anyway—and if she were obviously the target rather than Raintree, that wouldn’t raise the clan’s alarm.

  Cael’s idea had been a good one: kill the woman.

  FOURTEEN

  Monday afternoon

  “What happens if you die?” Lorna asked him, scowling as, car keys in hand, he opened the door to the garage. “What if you have a blowout and drive off the side of the mountain? What if you have a pulmonary embolism? What if a chicken-hauler has brake failure and flattens that little roller skate you call a car? Am I stuck here? Does your little curse, or whatever, hold me here even if you’re dead or unconscious?”

  Dante paused halfway out the door, looking back at her with a half amused, half disbelieving expression. “Chicken-hauler? Can’t you think of a more dignified way for me to die?”

  She sniffed. “Dead is dead. What would you care?” Then something occurred to her, something that made her very uneasy. “Uh—you can die, can’t you?” What if this situation was even weirder than she’d thought? What if, on the woo-woo scale of one to ten, he was a thirteen?

  He laughed outright. “Now I have to wonder if you’re planning to kill me.”

  “It’s a thought,” she said bluntly. “Well?”

  He leaned against the door frame, negligent and relaxed, and so damned sexy she almost had to look away. She worked hard to ignore her physical response to him, and most of the time she succeeded, but sometimes, as now, his green eyes seemed to almost glow, and in her imagination she could feel the hard, muscled framework of his body against her once more. The fact that, twice now, she’d felt his erection against her when he was holding her only made her struggle that much more difficult. Mutual sexual desire was a potent magnet, but just because she felt the pull of attraction, that didn’t mean she should act on it. Sometimes she wanted to run a traffic light, too, because it was there, because she didn’t want to stop, because she could—but she never did, because doing so would be stupid. Having sex with Dante Raintree would fall into the same category: stupid.

  “I’m as mortal as you—almost. Thank God. As much as mortality sucks, immortality would be even worse.”

  Lorna took a step back. “What do you mean, almost?”

  “That’s another conversation, and one I don’t have time for right now. To answer your other question, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”

  She was almost swallowed by outrage. “What? What? You don’t know whether or not I’ll be stuck here if something happens to you, but you’re going to go off and leave me here anyway?”

  He gave it a brief thought, said, “Yeah,” and went out the door.

  Lorna leaped and caught the door before it closed. “Don’t leave me here! Please.” She hated to beg, and she hated him for making her beg, but she was suddenly alarmed beyond reason by the thoug