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“Taking over your power? No, I don’t know, but I can imagine.”
“No,” she said flatly. “You can’t.” The pain had been beyond any true description. If she said it had felt as if an anvil had fallen on her head, that would be an understatement.
“Again, I’m sorry. I had no choice. It was either that, or we were both going to die, along with the people still evacuating the hotel.”
“You have a way of apologizing that says you’d do the same thing again if the situation arose, so it’s really hard to believe the ‘sorry’ part.”
“That’s because you’re not only a precog, though an untrained one, you’re also very sensitive to the paranormal energy around you.”
Meaning he would do the same thing again, in the same circumstances. At least he wasn’t a hypocrite.
“Yesterday, in my office,” he continued, “you were reacting to energies you wouldn’t have sensed at all if you weren’t gifted.”
“I thought you were evil,” she said, and savagely bit into the bagel. “Nothing you’ve done since has changed my mind.”
“Because you turned me on?” he asked softly. “I took one look at you, and every candle in the room lit up. I’m not usually that out of control, but I had to concentrate to rein everything in. Then I kept looking at you and thinking about having sex, and damned if you didn’t hook into the fantasy.”
Oh, God, he’d known that? She felt her face burn, and she turned her embarrassment into anger. “Are you coming on to me?” she asked incredulously. “Do you actually have the nerve to think I’d let you touch me with a ten-foot pole after what you did to me last night?”
“It isn’t that long,” he said, smiling a little.
Well, she’d walked into that one. She slapped the bagel onto the plate and slid off the stool. “I don’t want to be in the same room with you. After I leave here, I never want to see your face again. You can take your tacky little fantasy and shove it, Raintree!”
“Dante,” he corrected, as if she hadn’t all but told him to drop dead. “And that brings us to the Ansara. I was looking for a birthmark. All Ansara have a blue crescent moon somewhere on their backs.”
She was so angry that a red mist fogged her vision. “And while you were looking for this birthmark on my back you decided to check out my ass, too, huh?”
“It’s a fine ass, well worth checking out. But, no, I always intended to check it out. ‘Back’ is imprecise. Technically, ‘back’ could go from the top of your head all the way down to your heels. I’ve seen it below the waist before, and in the histories there are reports of, in rare cases, the birthmark being on the ass cheek. Given the seriousness of the fire, and the fact that I couldn’t put it out, I had to make sure you hadn’t been hindering me.”
“Hindering you how?” she cried, not at all mollified by his explanation.
“If you had also been a fire-master, you could have been feeding the fire while I was trying to put it out. I’ve never seen a fire I couldn’t control—until last night.”
“But you said yourself you’d never used mind control before, so you don’t know how it affected you! Why automatically assume I had to be one of these Ansara?”
“I didn’t. I’m well aware of all the variables. I still had to eliminate the possibility that you might be Ansara.”
“If you’re so good at reading people when you touch them, then you should have known I wasn’t,” she charged.
“Very good,” he acknowledged, as if he were a teacher and she his star pupil. “But Ansara are trained from birth to manage their gifts and to protect themselves, just as Raintree are. A powerful Ansara could conceivably have constructed a shield that I wouldn’t be able to detect. Like I said, my empath abilities are mild.”
She felt as if she were about to explode with frustration. “If I’d had one of these shields, you idiot, you wouldn’t have been able to brain-rape me!”
He drummed his fingers lightly on top of the bar, studying her with narrowed eyes. “I really, really don’t like that term.”
“Tough. I really, rea
lly didn’t like the brain-rape itself.” She threw the words at him like knives and hoped they buried themselves deep in his flesh.
He considered that, then nodded. “Fair enough. Back to the subject of shields. You have them, but not the kind I’m talking about. The kind you have develop naturally, from life. You shield your emotions. I’m talking about a mental shield that’s deliberately constructed to hide a part of your brain’s energy. As for keeping me out—honey, there’s only one other person, at least that I know of, who could possibly have blocked me from taking over his mind, and you aren’t him.”
“Ooooh, you’re so scary-powerful then, huh?”
Slowly he nodded. “Yep.”
“Then why aren’t you, like, King of the World or something?”
“I’m king of the Raintree,” he said, getting up and putting his plate in the dishwasher. “That’s good enough for me.”
