Raintree: Raintree: Inferno / Raintree: Haunted / Raintree: Sanctuary

“Did they argue?”

“No, they all turned around. No one panicked.” Except her. She’d barely been able to breathe, and it hadn’t been because of the smoke. The memory was becoming clearer, and she was amazed at how orderly the evacuation had been. No one had pushed; no one had been running. People had been hurrying, of course, but not being so reckless that they risked a nasty fall. In retrospect, their behavior had been damned unnatural. How could everyone have been so calm? Didn’t they know what fire did?

But she hadn’t run, either, she realized. She hadn’t pushed. She had gone at a steady pace, held to Raintree’s side by his arm.

Wait. Had he been holding her then? She didn’t think he had been. He’d touched her waist, sort of guiding her along, but she’d been free to run. So…why hadn’t she?

She had trooped along like everyone else, in an orderly line. Inside she’d been screaming, but outwardly she’d been controlled.

Controlled…Not self-controlled, but controlled like a puppet, as if she hadn’t had a will of her own. Her mind had been screaming at her to run, but her body simply hadn’t obeyed.

“Ms. Clay?”

Lorna felt her breath start coming faster as she relived those moments. Fire! Coming closer and closer, she didn’t want to go, she wanted to run, but she couldn’t. She was caught in one of those nightmares when you try to run but can’t, when you try to scream but can’t make a sound—

“Ms. Clay?”

“I—What?” Dazed, she stared up at him. From the mixture of impatience and concern on his face, she thought he must have called her name several times.

“What did you do when you got out?”

Shuddering, she gathered herself. “We didn’t. I mean, we got to the ground floor and Mr. Raintree sent the others to the right, toward the parking deck. Then he…we…” Her voice faltered. She had been fighting him, trying to follow the others; she remembered that. Then he’d said, “Stay with me,” and she had, with no will to do otherwise, even though she’d been half mad with terror.

Stay with me.

When he’d sat, she’d sat. When he’d stood, she’d stood. When he’d moved, that was when she had moved. Until then, she had been incapable of taking a single step away from him.

Just moments ago he’d said, “Don’t go far,” and she’d been able to leave his side then—but she hadn’t gone far before she’d stopped as if she’d hit a brick wall.

A horrible suspicion began to grow. He was controlling her somehow, maybe with some kind of posthypnotic suggestion, though when and how he’d hypnotized her, she had no idea. All sorts of weird things had been happening in his office. Maybe those damn candles had actually given off some kind of gas that had drugged her.

“Go on,” said Detective Harvey, breaking into her thoughts.

“We went to the left,” she said, beginning to shake. She wrapped her arms around herself, hugging the blanket close in an effort to control her wayward muscles, but in seconds, she was trembling from head to foot. “Into the lobby. The fire—” The fire had leaped at them like a maddened beast, roaring with delight. The heat had been searing for the tiniest fraction of a second. She’d been choking on the smoke. Then…no smoke, no heat. Both had just gone away. She and Raintree should have been overcome in seconds, but they hadn’t been. She’d been able to breathe. She hadn’t felt the heat, even though she’d watched the tongues of fire hungrily lapping across the carpet toward her. “The fire sort of w-whooshed across the ceiling and got behind us, and we were trapped.”

“Would you like to sit down?” he asked, interrupting his line of questioning, but considering how violently she was shaking, he probably thought sitting her down before she fell down was a good idea.

She might have thought so, too, if sitting down hadn’t meant sitting on asphalt littered with the debris of a fire and running with streams of sooty water. He probably meant sit down somewhere else, which she would have liked, if she’d felt capable of moving a single step beyond where she was right now. She shook her head. “I’m okay, just wet and cold and shaken up some.” If there was an award given out for massive understatement, she’d just won it.

He eyed her for a moment, then evidently decided she knew whether or not she needed to sit down. He’d tried, anyway, which relieved him of any obligation. “What did you do?”

Better not to tell him she’d felt surrounded by some sort of force field; this wasn’t StarWars, so he might not understand. Better not to tell him she’d felt a cool breeze in her hair. She must have been drugged; there was no other explanation.

“There wasn’t anything we could do. We were trapped. I remember Mr. Raintree swearing a blue streak. I remember choking and being on the floor. Then the firefighters got to us and brought us out.” In the interest of believability, she had heavily condensed the night’s events as she remembered them, but, surely, they couldn’t have been in the lobby for very long, no more than thirty seconds. An imaginary force field couldn’t have held off real heat and smoke. The firefighters must have been close to them all along, but she’d been too panic-stricken to notice.

There was something else, probably that worrisome niggle of memory, that she couldn’t quite grasp. Something else had happened. She knew it; she just couldn’t think what it was. Maybe after she showered and washed her hair—several times—and got twenty or thirty hours of sleep, she might remember.

Detective Harvey glanced over her shoulder then flipped his little notebook shut. “You’re lucky to be alive. Have you been checked for smoke inhalation?”

“Yes, I’m okay.” The medic had been puzzled by her good condition, but she didn’t tell the detective that.

“I imagine Mr. Raintree will be tied up here for quite a while, but you’re free to go. Do you have a number where you can be reached if we have any further questions for you?”

She started to ask, Like what? but instead said, “Sure,”and gave him her cell-phone number.

“That local?”

“It’s my cell.” Now that cell numbers could be transferred, she no longer bothered with a landline so long as she had cell-phone service wherever she temporarily settled.

“Got a local number?”

“No, that’s it. Sorry. I didn’t see any point in getting a landline unless I decided to stay.”

“No problem. Thanks for your cooperation.” He nodded a brief acknowledgment at her.

Because it seemed the thing to do, Lorna managed a faint smile for him as he strolled back to the other detective, but it quickly faded. She was exhausted and filthy. Her head hurt. Now that Detective Harvey had finished interviewing her, she was going home.

She tried. She made several attempts to walk away, but for some reason she couldn’t make her feet move. Frustration grew in her. She had walked over here a few minutes ago, so there was no reason why she shouldn’t be able to walk now. Just to see if she could move at all, without turning around, she stepped back, moving closer to Raintree. No problem. All her parts worked just as they should.

Experimentally, she took a step forward, and heaved a sigh of relief when her feet and legs actually obeyed. She was beyond exhausted if the simple act of walking had become so complicated. Sighing, she started to take another step.

And couldn’t.

She couldn’t go any farther. It was as if she’d reached the end of an invisible leash.

She went cold with disbelief. This was infuriating. He must have hypnotized her, but how? When? She couldn’t remember him saying, “You are getting sleepy,” and she was pretty certain hypnosis didn’t work that way, anyway. It was supposed to be a deep relaxation, not a do-things-against-your-will type of thing, regardless of how stage shows and movies portrayed it.

She wished she’d worn a watch, so she could have noticed any time discrepancy from when she’d gone into Raintree’s office and when the fire alarm had sounded. She had to find out what time that had been, because she knew roughly what time sunset was. She’d been in his office for maybe half an hour…she thought. She couldn’t be certain. Those disconcerting fantasies could have taken more time than she estimated.

Regardless of how he’d done it, he was controlling her movements. She knew it. When he said, “Stay with me,” she’d stayed, even when faced with an inferno. When he said, “Don’t go far,” she had been able to go only so far and not a step farther.

She turned her head to look at him over her shoulder and found him standing more or less alone, evidently having finished answering whatever questions the other detective had asked. He was watching her, his expression grim. His lips moved. With all the background noise she couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she read his lips plainly enough.

He said, “Come here.”

Chapter Six

She went. She couldn’t stop herself. Her scalp prickled, and chills ran over her, but she went, her feet moving automatically. Her eyes were wide with alarm. How was he doing this? Not that the “how” mattered; what mattered was that he was doing it. Being unable to control herself, to have him in control, could lead to some nasty situations.

She couldn’t even ask for help, because no one would believe her. At best, people would think she was on drugs or was mentally unstable. All sympathy would be with him, because he’d just lost his casino, his livelihood; the last thing he needed was a nutcase accusing him of somehow controlling her movements. She could just see herself yelling, “Help! I’m walking, and I can’t stop! He’s making me do it!”

Yeah, right. That would work—not.

He gave her a grim, self-satisfied little smile as she neared, and that pissed her off. Being angry felt good; she didn’t like being helpless in any way. Too street-savvy to telegraph her intentions, she kept her eyes wide, her expression alarmed, though how much of her face he could see through all the soot and grime was anyone’s guess. She kept her right arm close to her side, her elbow bent a little, and tensed the muscles in her back and shoulder. When she was close, so close she could almost kiss him, she launched an uppercut toward his chin.

He never saw it coming, and her fist connected from below with a force that made his teeth snap together. Pain shot through her knuckles, but the satisfaction of punching him made it more than worthwhile. He staggered back half a step, then regained his balance with athletic grace, snaking out his hand to shackle her wrist with long fingers before she could hit him again. He used the grip to pull her against him.

“I deserved one punch,” he said, holding her close as he bent his head to speak just loud enough for her to hear. “I won’t take a second one.”