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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
Praise for RITA® Award-winning author
LINDA WINSTEAD JONES
“Linda Winstead Jones has a magic touch with paranormal!”
—Linda Howard, New York Times bestselling author
“Non-stop action from start to finish. Jones’ characters are compelling, and her story is both exciting and original. Readers won’t want to put it down!”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Raintree: Haunted
Praise for New York Times bestselling author
BEVERLY BARTON
“Page-turning suspense and an evolving romance make for a satisfying read.”
—Booklist on Dangerous Deception
“Smart, sexy and scary as hell. Beverly Barton just keeps getting better and better.”
—No. 1 New York Times bestselling author
Lisa Jackson on The Fifth Victim
Raintree
Linda Howard
Beverly Barton
Linda Winstead Jones
LINDA HOWARD says that whether she’s reading them or writing them, books have long played a profound role in her life. After twenty-one years of penning stories for her own enjoyment, Ms Howard finally worked up the courage to submit a novel for publication—and met with success. This Alabama native in now a multi-New York Times bestselling author.
BEVERLY BARTON has been an avid reader since childhood, writing her first book at the age of nine. After marriage to her own hero and the births of her daughter and son, Beverly chose to be a full-time homemaker, aka wife, mother, friend and volunteer. An author of more than fifty books, Beverly is a member of Romance Writers of America, and helped found the Heart of Dixie chapter in Alabama.
LINDA WINSTEAD JONES has written more than fifty romance books. She’s won the Colorado Romance Writers Award of Excellence twice, and she’s a three-time RITA® Award finalist and (writing as Linda Fallon) winner of the 2004 RITA® for paranormal romance. Linda lives in north Alabama with her husband of thirty-four years. To learn more, visit her website at: wwwlindawinsteadjones.com.
Inferno
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.
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
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.
Chapter 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 bigtime 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 his head. Five grand a week equaled two hundred sixty thousand dollars a year, and that was just from his casino. She probably hit all of them, careful to keep the numbers relatively low so she stayed under the radar.
He wondered how long she’d been taking him, how long she’d been winning a little here, a little there, before Al noticed.
The curtains were still open on the wall-to-wall window in his office, giving the impression, when one first opened the door, of stepping out onto a covered balcony. The glazed window faced west, so he could catch the sunsets. The sun was low now, the sky painted in purple and gold. At his home in the mountains, most of the windows faced east, affording him views of the sunrise. Something in him needed both the greeting and the goodbye of the sun. He’d always been drawn to sunlight, maybe because fire was his element to call, to control.
He checked his internal time: four minutes until sundown. He knew exactly, without checking the tables every day, when the sun would slide behind the mountains. He didn’t own an alarm clock. He didn’t need one. He was so acutely attuned to the sun’s position that he had only to check within himself to know the time. As for waking at a particular time, he was one of those people who could tell himself to wake at a certain time, and he did. That particular talent had nothing to do with being Raintree, so he didn’t have to hide it; a lot of perfectly ordinary people had the same ability.
There were other talents and abilities, however, that did require careful shielding. The long days of summer instilled in him an almost sexual high, when he could feel contained power buzzing just beneath his skin. He had to be doubly careful not to cause candles to leap into flame just by his presence, or to start wildfires, with a glance, in the dry-as-tinder brush. He loved Reno; he didn’t want to burn it down. He just felt so damn alive with all the sunshine pouring down that he wanted to let the energy pour through him instead of holding it inside.
This must be how his brother Gideon felt while pulling lightning, all that hot power searing through his muscles, his veins. They had this in common, the connection with raw power. All the members of the far-flung Raintree clan had some power, some heightened form of ability, but only members of the royal family could channel and control the earth’s natural energies.
Dante wasn’t just of the royal family; he was the Dranir, the leader of the entire clan. “Dranir” was synonymous with “king,” but the position he held wasn’t ceremonial, it was one of sheer power. He was the oldest son of the previous Dranir, but he would have been passed over for the position if he hadn’t also inherited the power to hold it.
Gideon was second to him in power; if anything happened to Dante and he died without a child who had inherited his abilities, Gideon would become Dranir—a possibility that filled his brother with dread, hence the fertility charm currently lying on Dante’s desk. It had arrived in the mail just that morning. Gideon regularly sent them, partly as a joke, but mainly because he was doing all he could to insure that Dante had offspring—thus upping the chances that he would never inherit the position. Whenever they managed to get together, Dante had to carefully search every nook and cranny, as well as all his clothing, to make certain Gideon hadn’t left one of his clever little charms in a hidden place.
Gideon was getting better at making them, Dante mused. Practice made perfect, after all, and God knows he’d made plenty of the charms in the past few years. Not only were they more potent now, but he varied his approach. Some of them were obvious, silver pieces meant to be worn around the neck like an amulet—not that Dante was an amulet kind of guy. Others were tiny, subtle, like the one Gideon had embedded in the newest business card he’d sent, knowing Dante would likely tuck the card into his pocket. He’d erred only in that the very power of the charm gave it away; Dante had sensed the buzz of its power, though he’d had the devil’s own time finding it.
Behind him came Al’s distinctive knock-knock on the door. The outer office was empty, Dante’s secretary having gone home hours before. “Come in,” he called, not turning from his view of the sunset.
The door opened, and Al said, “Mr. Raintree, this is Lorna Clay.”
Dante turned and looked at the woman, all his senses on alert. The first thing he noticed was the vibrant color of her hair—a rich, dark red that encompassed a multitude of shades from copper to burgundy. The warm amber light danced along the iridescent strands, and he felt a hard tug of sheer lust in his gut. Looking at her hair was almost like looking at fire, and he had the same reaction.
The second thing he noticed was that she was spitting mad.
Chapter Two
Several things happened so closely together that they might as well have been simultaneous. With his senses already so heightened, the quick lash of desire collided with Dante’s visceral reaction to fire, sending explosions of sensation cascading along all his neural pathways, too fast for him to control. Across the room, he saw all the candles leap with fire, the wicks burning too fast, too wild, so that the multiple little flames flared larger and more brightly than they should. And on his desk, Gideon’s damn little fertility charm began to buzz with power, as if it had an on/off switch that had suddenly been pressed.
What the hell…?
He didn’t have time to dissect and analyze everything that was going on; he had to control himself, and fast, or the entire room would be ablaze. He hadn’t suffered such a humiliating loss of control of his powers since he’d first entered puberty and his surging hormones had played hell with everything.
Ruthlessly, he began exerting his will on all that leaping power. It wasn’t easy; though he held himself perfectly still, mentally he felt as if he were riding a big, nasty-tempered bull. The natural inclination of energy was to be free, and it resisted any effort to tame it, to wrestle it back inside his mental walls. His control was usually phenomenal. After all, having power wasn’t what made a Dranir; having it and controlling it was. Lack of control led to devastation—and ultimately to exposure. The Raintree had survived the centuries due in large part to their ability to blend with normal people, so it wasn’t a matter to be taken lightly.
Dante had trained all his life to master the power and energies that ran through him, and even though he knew that as the summer solstice drew near his control was always stretched a bit, he wasn’t accustomed to this degree of difficulty. Grimly he concentrated, pulling back, clamping down, exerting his will over the very forces of nature. He could have extinguished the candles, but with an even greater force of will he left them burning, for to make the tiny flames wink out now might draw even more attention than lighting them in the first place.
The only thing that evaded his control was that damn fertility charm on his desk, buzzing and throbbing and all but sending out a strobe effect. Even though he knew Al and Ms. Clay couldn’t pick up on the energy the thing was sending out, not glancing at it took all his self-control. Gideon had outdone himself with this one. Just wait until the next time he saw his little brother, Dante grimly promised himself. If Gideon thought this was funny, they would both see how funny it was when the tables were turned. Gideon wasn’t the only one who could make fertility charms.
All the wildfires once more under control, he returned his attention to his guest.
Lorna once again tried to twist her arm away from the gorilla holding her, but his grip was just strong enough to hold without applying undue pressure. While a small part of her appreciated that he was actively trying not to hurt her, by far the largest part of her was so furious—and, yes, scared—that she wanted to lash out at him with all her strength, clawing and kicking and biting, doing anything she could to get free.
Then her survival instinct kicked into high gear and her hair all but stood on end as she realized the man standing so silent and still in front of the huge windows was a far greater threat to her than was the gorilla.
Her throat closed, a fist of fear tightening around her neck. She couldn’t have said what it was about him that so alarmed her, but she had felt this way only once before, in a back alley in Chicago. She was accustomed to taking care of herself on the streets and had normally used the alley as a shortcut to her place—a shabby single room in a run-down building—but one night when she had started down the alley, alarm had prickled her scalp and she’d frozen, unable to take another step. She couldn’t see anything suspicious, couldn’t hear anything, but she could not move forward. Her heart had been hammering so hard in her chest she could barely breathe, and she had abruptly been sick with fear. Slowly she had backed out of the alley’s entrance and fled down the street to take the long way home.
The next morning a prostitute’s body had been found in the alley, brutally raped and mutilated. Lorna knew the dead woman could have been her, if not for the sudden hair-raising panic that had warned her away.
This was the same, like being body-slammed by a sense of danger. The man in front of her, whoever he was, was a threat to her. She doubted—at least on a rational level—that he would murder and mutilate her, but there were other dangers, other destructions she could suffer.
She felt as if she were smothering, her throat so tight very little air could get past the constriction. Pinpricks of light flared at the edges of her vision, and in silent horror she realized she might faint. She didn’t dare lose consciousness; she would be completely helpless if she did.
“Miss Clay,” he said in a calm, smooth-as-cream voice, as if her panic were completely invisible to him and no one else in the room knew she was on the verge of screaming. “Sit down, please.”
The prosaic invitation/command had the blessed effect of snapping her out of the trap of panic. Somehow she managed to take a breath without audibly gasping, then another. Nothing was going to happen. She didn’t need to panic. Yes, this was mildly alarming and she probably wouldn’t be coming back to the Inferno to gamble, but she hadn’t broken any laws or casino rules. She was safe.
Those pinpricks of light flared again. What…? Puzzled, she turned her head and found herself staring at two huge pillar candles, each of them easily two and a half feet tall, one on the floor and the other perched on a slab of white marble that served as a hearth. Flames danced around the candles’ multiple wicks.
Candles. She hadn’t been about to faint. The flickers of light at the edge of her vision had come from those candles. She hadn’t noticed them when she’d been literally dragged into the room, but that was understandable.
The candlelights were dancing and swaying, as if they stood in a draft. That too was understandable. She didn’t feel any noticeable movement of air, but this was summertime in Reno, and the air-conditioning would be running full blast. She always wore long sleeves when she went to a casino anyway; otherwise she was too cold.
With a start she realized she was staring at the candles and had neither moved nor replied to the invitation to sit. She jerked her attention back to the man standing at the window, trying to recall what the gorilla had called him. “Who are you?” she demanded sharply. Once more she jerked her arm, but the gorilla merely sighed as he held her. “Let go!”
“You can let her go,” the man said, sounding faintly amused. “Thank you for bringing her here.”
The gorilla instantly released her, said, “I’ll be in the security center,” and quietly let himself out of the office.
Instantly Lorna began assessing her chance of making a run for it, but for now she stood her ground. She didn’t want to run; the casino had her name, her description. If she ran, she would be blacklisted—not just in the Inferno, but in every casino in Nevada.
“I’m Dante Raintree,” the man said, then waited a beat to see if she gave any reaction to the name. It meant nothing to her, so she merely gave a slight, questioning lift of her brows. “I own the Inferno.”
Crap! An owner carried serious weight with the gaming commission. She would have to tread very carefully, but she had the advantage. He couldn’t prove she’d been cheating, because the simple fact was, she hadn’t been.
“Dante. Inferno. I get it,” she replied with a little edge of so what? in her tone. He was probably so rich he thought everyone should be awed in his presence. If he wanted to awe her, he would have to find something other than his wealth to do the job. She appreciated money as much as anyone; it certainly made life easier. Now that she had a little financial cushion, she was amazed at how much better she slept—what a relief it was not to worry where her next bite was coming from, or when. At the same time, she despised people who thought their wealth entitled them to special treatment.
Not only that, his name was ridiculous. Maybe his last name really was Raintree, but he’d probably chosen his first name for the drama and to fit the name of the casino. His real first name was probably something like Melvin or Fred.
“Please have a seat,” he invited again, indicating the creamcolored leather sofa to her right. A jade coffee table sat between the sofa and two cushy-looking club chairs. She tried not to stare at the table as she took a seat in one of the chairs, which was just as cushy as it looked. Surely the table was just the color of jade and not actually made of the real stone, but it looked real, as if it were faintly translucent. Surely it was just glass. If so, the craftsmanship was superb.
Lorna didn’t have a lot of experience with luxury items, but she did have a sort of sixth sense about her surroundings. She began to feel overwhelmed by the things around her. No, not overwhelmed; that wasn’t the right word. She tried to nail down what she was feeling, but there was an alien, unknown quality to the very air around her that she couldn’t describe. This was unfamiliar, and it definitely carried the edge of danger that had so alarmed her when she’d first become aware of it.
As Dante Raintree strolled closer, she realized that everything she was sensing centered on him. She’d been right; he was the danger.
He moved with indolent grace, but there was nothing slow or lazy about him. He was a tall man, about eight or nine inches taller than her own five foot five, and though his excellently tailored clothing gave him a lean look, there was no tailor skilled enough to completely disguise the power of the muscles beneath the fabric. Not a cheetah, then, but a tiger.
She realized she had avoided looking him full in the face, as if not having that knowledge would give her a small measure of safety. She knew better; ignorance was never a good defense, and Lorna had learned a long time ago not to hide her head in the sand and hope for the best.
He sat down across from her, and with an inward bracing she met his gaze full-on.
The bottom dropped out of her stomach.
She had a faint, dizzying sensation of falling; she barely restrained herself from gripping the arms of the chair to steady herself.
His hair was black. His eyes were green. Common colors, and yet nothing about him was common. His hair was sleek and glossy, falling to his shoulders. She didn’t like long hair on men, but his looked clean and soft, and she wanted to bury her hands in it. She shoved that idea away and promptly became snagged by his gaze. His eyes weren’t just green, they were green, so remarkably green that her first thought was that he was wearing colored contacts. A color that darkly rich and pure couldn’t be real. They were just very realistic contacts, with tiny black striations in them like real eyes. She had seen ads for those in magazines. The only thing was, when the candles flared and his pupils briefly contracted, the color of his irises seemed to expand. Could contacts give that appearance?
He wasn’t wearing contacts. Instinctively she knew that everything she saw, from the sleek blackness of his hair to that intense eye color, was real.
He was drawing her in. Some power she couldn’t understand was tugging at her with an almost physical sensation. The candle flames were dancing wildly, brighter now that the sun had set and twilight was deepening outside the window. The candles were the only light in the now gloomy office, sending shadows slashing across the hard angles of his face, and yet his eyes seemed to glow brighter with color than they had only a few moments before.
They hadn’t said a word since he’d sat down, yet she felt as if she were in a battle for her will, her force, her independent life. Deep inside, panic flared to candlelight life, dancing and leaping. He knows, she thought, and tensed herself to run. Forget the casinos, forget the very nice money she’d been reaping, forget everything except survival. Run!
Her body didn’t obey. She continued to sit there, frozen…mesmerized.
“How are you doing it?” he finally asked, his tone still as calm and unruffled as if he were oblivious to the swirls and surges of power that were buffeting her.
Once again, his voice seemed to break through her inner turmoil and bring her back to reality. Bewildered, she stared at him. He thought she was doing all this weird stuff?
“I’m not,” she blurted. “I thought you were.”
She might have been mistaken, because in the dancing candlelight, reading an expression was tricky, but she thought he looked slightly stunned.
“Cheating,” he said in clarification. “How are you stealing from me?”
