Linda Howard: Raintree: Raintree: Inferno / Raintree: Haunted / Raintree: Sanctuary

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.

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 she 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 un

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