Raintree: Inferno by Linda Howard

Author:Linda Howard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Paranormal, General, Romance, Fantasy, Fiction, Contemporary
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Dante began making calls, starting with Al Rayburn. Lorna

was right: something hinky was going on, and he was pissed

that she‟d had to point it out to him. He should have thought of

that detail himself. Instead of answering the detectives‟

questions, he should have been asking them his own, such as:

What were they doing there? A fire scene wasn‟t a crime scene

unless and until the cause was determined to be arson or at the

very least suspicious. Uniformed officers should have been

there for crowd control, traffic control, security—a lot of

reasons—but not detectives.

He didn‟t come up with any answers to his questions,

but he hadn‟t expected to. What he was doing now was

reversing the flow of information, and that would take time.

Now that questions were being asked—by Al, by a friend

Dante had at city hall, by one of his own Raintree clan

members who liked life a little on the rough side and thus had

some interesting contacts—a lot of things would be viewed in

a different light.

Whatever was going on, however those two detectives

were involved, Dante intended to find out, even if he had to

bring in Mercy, whose gift of telepathy was so strong that she

had once, when she was ten and he was sixteen, jumped into

his head at a very inopportune moment—he‟d been with his

current girlfriend—and said, “Eww! Gross!” which had so

startled him he‟d lost his concentration, his erection and his

girlfriend. Sixteen-year-old girls, he‟d learned, didn‟t deal well

with anything they saw as an insult to their general desirability.

That was the day when he‟d started blocking Mercy from his

head, which had infuriated her at the time. She‟d even told

their parents what he‟d been doing, which had resulted in a

very long, very serious talk with his father about the

importance of being smart, using birth control and taking

responsibility for his actions.

Faced with his father‟s stern assurance that Dante would

marry any girl he got pregnant and stay married to her for the

rest of his life, he had then become immensely more careful.

The Raintree Dranir most definitely did not have a casual

attitude about his heirs. A Raintree, any Raintree, was a

genetic dominant; any children would inherit the Raintree

gifts. The same was true of the Ansara, which was why the

Ansara had immediately killed any child born of a Raintree

and Ansara breeding. When two dominant strands blended,

anything could be the result—and the result could be

dangerous.

Mercy‟s gift had only gotten stronger as she got older.

Dante didn‟t think her presence would be required, though; the

Raintree had other telepaths he could call on. They might not

be as strong as Mercy, but then, they wouldn‟t need to be.

Mercy was most comfortable at Sanctuary, the homeplace of

the Raintree clan, where she didn‟t have to almost shut down

her gift because of the relentless emotional and mental assault

by humans who had no idea how to shield. Occasionally she

and Eve, her six-year-old daughter, would visit him or

Gideon—Mercy was completely female in her love of

shopping, and he and Gideon were always glad to keep Eve the

Imp while her mother indulged in some retail therapy—but

Mercy was the guardian of the homeplace. Sanctuary was her

responsibility, hers to rule, and she loved it.

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