Raintree

by Linda Howard

  They were cruising in the middle lane. A car with a loud muffler was coming up from the right, and she saw him glance in the rearview mirror. “Idiots,” he muttered, smoothly accelerating into the left lane. Lorna turned her head to see what he was talking about. A battered white Dodge, gray smoke belching from its exhaust, was coming up fast. She could see several people inside it. What had prompted Dante to move over and give them plenty of room was the blue Nissan right on the bumper of the Dodge.

  “That’s an accident waiting to happen,” she said, just as the blue Nissan swung into the middle lane, the one they had just vacated, and shot forward until it was even with the white Dodge. The Nissan swerved toward the Dodge, and the driver of the Dodge slammed on his brakes, setting off a chain reaction of squealing brakes and smoking tires behind him. The Nissan’s motor was screaming as the car drew even with Dante and Lorna. Inside, she could see four or five Hispanics, laughing and pointing back at the Dodge.

  Traffic on the interstate was fairly heavy, as usual, but not so heavy that the driver of the white Dodge wasn’t now rapidly gaining on them.

  “Gangs,” Dante said in a clipped voice, braking to let the rolling disaster that was unfolding get ahead of him. He couldn’t go faster, because there was a car ahead of him; he couldn’t get around the car, because the blue Nissan was right beside them, boxing him in. No one in the Nissan seemed to be paying attention to them; they were all watching the Dodge. If anything, the Nissan’s driver let up on the gas pedal, as if he wanted the Dodge to catch up.

  “Shit!” Dante swerved as far as he could to the left as the Dodge pulled even with the Nissan. Lorna saw a blur as the left rear passenger in the Dodge rolled down his window and stuck out a gun; then Dante’s right hand closed over her shoulder in a grip that seemed to go to the bone, and he yanked her forward and down as the window beside her head shattered in a thousand pieces. There were several deep, flat booms, punctuated by lighter, more rapid cracks, then a soul-jarring impact as Dante spun the steering wheel and sent them skidding into the concrete barrier.

  EIGHTEEN

  Somehow Dante had pulled her shoulder free of the seat belt’s shoulder strap, but the lap belt tightened with a jerk. Something grazed the right side of her head and hit her right shoulder so hard and fast it slammed her backward, and she ended up facedown, with her upper body lying across the console and twisted between the bucket seats. All the horrible screeching noises of tires and crushed metal had stopped, and a strange silence filled the car. Lorna opened her eyes, but her vision was blurred, so she closed them again.

  She’d never been in a car accident before. The sheer speed and violence of it stunned her. She didn’t feel hurt, just…numb, as if a giant had picked her up and body-slammed her to the ground. The hurting part would probably arrive soon enough, she thought fuzzily. The impact had been so ferocious that she was vaguely surprised she was alive.

  Dante! What about Dante?

  Spurred by that urgent thought, she opened her eyes again, but the blurriness persisted and she couldn’t see him. Nothing looked familiar. There was no steering wheel, no dashboard….

  She blinked and slowly realized that she was staring at the back seat. And the blurriness was…fog? No—smoke. She heaved upward in abrupt panic, or tried to, but she couldn’t seem to get any leverage.

  “Lorna?”

  His voice was strained and harsh, as if he were having difficulty speaking, but it was Dante. It came from somewhere behind and above her, which made no sense.

  “Fire,” she managed to say, trying to kick her legs. For some reason she could move only her feet, which was reassuring anyway since they were the farthest away; if they could move, everything between there and her spine must be okay.

  “Not fire—air bags. Are you hurt?”

  If anyone would know whether or not there was a fire, Dante was that person. Lorna took a deep breath, relaxing a little. “I don’t think so. You?”

  “I’m okay.”

  She was in such an awkward position that pain was shooting through her back muscles. Squirming, she managed to work her left arm from beneath her and push with her hand against the back floorboard, trying to lift herself up and around so she could slide back into her seat. “Wait,” Dante said, grabbing her arm. “There’s glass everywhere. You’ll cut yourself to shreds.”

  “I have to move. This position is murder on my back.” But she stopped, because the mental image of what sliding across broken glass would do to her skin wasn’t a good one.

  There were shouts from outside, coming nearer, as passersby stopped and ran to their aid. Someone beat on Dante’s window. “Hey, man! You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Dante raised his voice so he could be heard. She felt his hand against her side as he tried to release his seat belt. The latch was jammed; he gave a lurid curse, then tried once more. On the third try, it popped open. Freed from its restraint, he shifted around, and she felt his hands running down her legs. “Your right foot’s tangled in the air bag. Can you move…” His hand closed over her ankle. “Move your knee toward me and your foot toward your window.”

  Easier said than done, she thought, because she could scarcely maneuver at all. She managed to shift her right knee just a little.

  The man outside Dante’s window grabbed the door handle and tried to pull it open, shaking the car, but the door was jammed. “Try the other side!” she heard Dante yell.

  “This window’s busted out,” said another man, leaning in the front passenger window—or where it had been—and asking urgently, “Are you guys hurt?”

  “We’re okay,” Dante said, leaning over her and pushing on her right ankle while he turned her foot.

  The trap holding her foot relaxed a little, which let her move her knee a bit more. “This proves one thing,” she said, panting from the effort of that small shift.

  “Point your toes like a ballerina. What does it prove?”

  “I’m definitely—ouch!—not precognitive. I didn’t see this coming.”

  “I think it’s safe to say neither of us is a precog.” He grunted, then said, “Here you go.” With one last tug, her foot was free. To the man leaning in the window he said, “Can you find a blanket or something to throw over this glass so you can pull her out?”

  “I don’t need pulling,” Lorna grumbled. “If I can shift around, I’ll be able to climb out.”

  “Just be patient,” Dante said, turning so he could slide his right arm under her chest and shoulders and support her weight a little to give her muscles some rest.

  They could hear sirens blasting through the dry air, but still some distance away.

  A new face, red and perspiring, and belonging to a burly guy wearing a Caterpillar cap, appeared in the broken window. “Had a blanket in my sleeper,” he said, leaning in to arrange the fabric over the seat, then folding the excess into a thick pad to cover the shards of glass still stuck in the broken window.

  “Thank you,” Lorna said fervently as Dante began levering her upright into the seat. Her muscles were screaming from the strain, and the relief of being in a more natural position was so intense that she almost groaned.

  “Here you go,” said the truck driver, reaching through once more and grasping her under the arms, hauling her out through the broken window before she could do it under her own steam.

  She thanked him and everyone else who had reached out to help, then turned and got her first look at the car as Dante came out with the lithe grace of a race car driver, as if exiting through a window was something he did every day.

  But as cool and sexy as he made his exit look, what stunned her to silence was the car.

  The elegant Jaguar was nothing but crumpled and torn sheet metal. It had skidded almost halfway around, the front end crushed against the concrete barrier, the driver’s side almost at a T to the oncoming traffic. If another car had plowed into them after they hit the barrier, Dante would be dead. She didn’t know why no other vehicle had smashed into them; t
raffic had been heavy enough that it was nothing short of a miracle. She looked at the snarled pileup of cars and trucks and SUVs stopped at all angles, as if people had been locking down their brakes and skidding. There was a three-car fender bender in the right lane, about fifty yards down, but the people were out of their vehicles examining the damage, so they were okay.

  She wasn’t okay. The bottom had dropped out of her stomach, and her heart felt as if someone had punched her in the chest. She had a very clear memory of Dante spinning the steering wheel, sending the Jaguar into a controlled skid—turning the passenger side away from the spew of bullets and his side toward the oncoming traffic.

  She was going to kill him.

  He had no right to take that sort of risk for her. None. They weren’t lovers. They’d met less than forty-eight hours before, under really terrible circumstances, and for most of that time she would gladly have pushed him into traffic herself.

  How dare he be a hero? She didn’t want him to be a hero. She wanted him to be someone whose absence wouldn’t hurt her. She wanted to be able to walk away from him, whole and content unto herself. She didn’t want to think about him afterward. She didn’t want to dream about him.

  Her father hadn’t cared enough to stick around, assuming he’d even known about her. She had no real idea who he was—and neither had her mother. Her mother certainly wouldn’t have risked a nail, much less her life, to save Lorna from anything. So what was this…this stranger doing, putting his own life in danger to protect her? She hated him for doing this to her, for making himself someone whose footprint would always be on her heart.

  What was she supposed to do now?

  She turned her head, searching for him. He was only a few feet away, which she supposed made sense, because if he’d moved any farther away than that she would have been compelled to follow him. He wouldn’t lift that damned mind control he used to shackle her, but he’d risk his life for her—the jerk.

  He normally kept his longish black hair brushed back, but now it was falling around his face. There was a thin line of blood penciling down his left cheek from a small, puffy cut high on his cheekbone. The skin around the wound was swelling and turning dark. His left arm looked bruised, too; the span from his wrist almost to his elbow was a dark red. He wasn’t cradling his arm or swiping at his cheek, any of the things people instinctively did when they were hurt. His injuries might as well not exist for all the attention he paid them.

  He looked in complete command of himself and the situation.

  Lorna thought she might be sick, she was so angry. What he’d done wasn’t fair—not that he’d seemed concerned about fairness before now anyway.

  As if he were attuned to her thoughts, his head turned sharply and his gaze zeroed in on her. With two swift strides he was beside her, taking her arm. “You don’t have any color at all in your face. You should sit down.”

  “I’m fine,” she said automatically. A sudden breeze blew a curtain of hair across her face, and she lifted her hand to push it back. Two RPD patrol cars were approaching on the other side of the highway, sirens blaring, and she almost had to shout to make herself heard. “I’m not hurt.”

  “No, but you’ve had a shock.” He raised his voice, too, turning his head to watch the patrol cars come to a stop on the other side of the barrier. The sirens died, but other emergency vehicles were approaching, and the din was getting louder again.

  “I’m okay!” she insisted, and she was—physically, at least.

  His hand closed on her arm, moving her toward the concrete barrier. “Come on, sit down. I’ll feel better if you do.”

  “I’m not the one bleeding,” she pointed out.

  He touched his cheek, as if he’d forgotten all about the cut, or maybe had never noticed it in the first place. “Then come sit down with me and keep me company.”

  As it happened, neither of them got to sit down. The cops were trying to find out what had happened, get traffic straightened out and moving again, albeit very slowly, and get any injured people transported to a hospital to be checked out. Soon a total of seven patrol cars were on the scene, along with a fire engine and three medic trucks. The drivers of the damaged cars that were still drivable were instructed to move their vehicles to the shoulder.

  There were several witnesses to what had happened. No one knew whether road rage had caused the shooting or if the whole thing had been a conflict between rival gangs, but everyone had an opinion and a slightly different version of events. The one thing they all agreed on was that the people in the white Dodge had been shooting at the Nissan, and the people in the Nissan had been shooting back.

  “Did anyone get the plate number of either vehicle?” a patrolman asked.

  Dante immediately looked at Lorna. “Numbers?”

  She thought of the white Dodge and three numbers came into sharp focus. “The Dodge is 873.” Nevada plates were three digits followed by three letters.

  “Did you get the letters?” the patrolman asked, pen at the ready.

  Lorna shook her head. “I just remember the numbers.”

  “This will narrow the search considerably. What about the Nissan?”

  “Hmm…612.”

  He jotted that down, too, then turned away as he got on the radio.

  Dante’s cell phone rang. He fished it from the front pocket of his jeans and checked the caller ID. “It’s Gideon,” he said, flipping the phone open. “What’s up?” He listened a moment, then said, “Royally screwed.”

  A brief pause. “I remember.”

  They talked for less than a minute when Lorna heard him say, “A glimpse of the future,” which made her wonder what was going on. He had just laughed at something his brother said when she suddenly shivered, wrapping her arms around herself even though the temperature was rapidly climbing toward the nineties. That awful, bone-aching chill had seized her as suddenly as if she’d been dropped into a pool of ice water.

  Dante’s gaze sharpened, and he abruptly ended the call, tucking the phone back into his pocket.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, keeping his tone low as he pulled her to the side.

  She fought waves of dizziness, brought on by the intense cold. “I think the depraved serial killer must have followed us,” she said.

  NINETEEN

  Dante put his arms around her, pulling her against the heat of his body. His body temperature was always high, she thought, as if he had a permanent fever. That heat felt wonderful now, warming her chilled skin.

  “Focus,” he said, bending his head so no one else could hear him. “Think of building that shelter.”

  “I don’t want to build a damn shelter,” she said fretfully. “This didn’t happen before I met you, and I want it to stop.”

  He rubbed his cheek against her hair, and she felt his lips move as he smiled. “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, if you don’t want to build shelters, see if you can tell what’s causing the problem. Close your eyes, mentally search around us, and tell me if you’re picking up anything, like any changes in energy patterns from a particular area.”

  That suggestion seemed a lot more practical to her than building imaginary shelters for imaginary mirrored crystals. She would rather be doing something to stop these sudden sick feelings instead of merely learning how to handle them. She did as he said, leaning into him and letting him support part of her weight while she closed her eyes and began mentally searching for something weird. She didn’t know what she was doing, or what she was “looking” for, but she felt better for doing it.

  “Is this really supposed to work?” she asked against his shoulder. “Or are you just distracting me?”

  “It should work. Everyone has a personal energy field, but some are stronger than others. A sensitive has a heightened awareness of these energy fields. You should be able to tell where a strong one is coming from, sort of like being able to tell from which direction the wind is blowing.”

  That made sense to her, put it in terms sh
e could understand. The thing was, if she was a sensitive, why didn’t she sense stuff like this on a regular basis? Other than the time in Chicago when she’d been suddenly terrified of what lurked in that alley, she’d never been aware of anything unusual.

  Some are stronger than others, Dante had said. Maybe she had been around mostly normal people all her life. If so, these feelings must mean that there were now people near her who weren’t normal and had very strong energy fields.

  The strongest of all was holding her in his arms. Concentrating like this, she decided to use him as a sort of standard, a pattern, against which she could measure anything else she detected. She could physically feel the energy of his gifts, almost like static electricity surrounding her entire body. The sensation was too strong to call pleasant, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Rather, it was exciting and sexual, like tiny pinpoints of fire reaching deep into her body.

  Keeping a part of the feeling in the forefront of her consciousness, she began widening her awareness, looking for the places that had stronger currents. It was, she thought, like trout fishing.

  At first there was nothing other than a normal flow of energy, albeit from many different people. She and Dante were surrounded by police officers, firemen, medics, people who had come to their aid. Their energy flow was warm and comforting, concerned, protective. These were good people; they all had their quirks, but their baseline was good.

  She expanded her mental circle. The pattern here was slightly different. These were the onlookers, the rubber neckers, the ones who were curious but weren’t moved to help. They wanted to talk about seeing the accident, about being stuck in traffic for X number of hours, as if it were a great hardship to endure, but they didn’t want to put out any effort. They—

  There!

  She started, a little alarmed by what she felt.

  “Where is it?” Dante whispered against her hair, his arms tightening. Probably the people around them thought he was comforting her, or that they were clinging to each other in gratitude that they’d been spared any harm.