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, really 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.”
Strange, but of all the really weird things he’d said to her, this struck her as the most unbelievable. She buried her head in her hands, wishing this day was over. She wanted to forget she’d ever met him. He was obviously a lunatic. No—she couldn’t comfort herself with that delusion. She had been through fire with him, quite literally. He could do things she hadn’t thought were possible. So maybe—just maybe—he really was some sort of leader, though “king” was stretching things a bit far.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said wearily. “Who are the Raintree, and who are the Ansara? Is this like two different countries but inhabited only by weirdos?”
His lips twitched as if he wanted to laugh. “Gifted. Gifted. We’re two different clans—warring clans, if you want the bottom line. The enmity goes back thousands of years.”
“You’re the weirdo equivalent of the Hatfields and the McCoys?”
He did laugh then, white teeth flashing. “I’ve never thought of it that way, but…yeah. In a way. Except what’s between the Raintree and the Ansara isn’t a feud, it’s a war. There’s a difference.”
“Between a war and a feud, yeah. But what’s the difference between the Raintree clan and the Ansara clan?”
“An entire way of looking at life, I guess. They use their gifts to cheat, to do harm, for their personal gain. Raintree look at their abilities as true gifts and try to use them accordingly.”
“You’re the guys with the white hats.”
“Within the spectrum of human nature—yes. Common sense tells me some Raintree aren’t that far separated from some Ansara when it comes to their attitudes. But if they want to remain in the Raintree clan, they’ll do as I order.”
“So all the Ansara might not be totally bad, but if they want to stay in their clan, with their friends and families, they have to do as the Ansara king orders.”
He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “That’s about it.”
“You admit you might be more alike than you’re different.”
“In some ways. In one big way, we’re poles apart.”
“Which is?”
“From the very beginning, if a Raintree and an Ansara cross-bred, the Ansara killed the child. No exceptions.”
Lorna rubbed her forehead, which was beginning to ache again. Yeah, that was bad. Killing innocent children because of their heritage wasn’t just an opportunistic outlook, it was bad with a capital B. Part of her own life philosophy was that there were some people who didn’t deserve to live, and people who hurt children belonged in that group.
“I don’t suppose there has been much intermarriage between the clans, has there?”
“Not in centuries. What Raintree would take the chance? Are you finished with that bagel?”
Thrown off track by the prosaic question, Lorna stared down at her bagel. She had eaten maybe half of it. Even though she’d been starving before, the breakfast conversation had effectively killed her appetite. “I guess,” she said without interest, passing the plate to him.
He dumped the bagel remnants and put that plate in the dishwasher, too. “You need training,” he said. “Your gifts are too strong for you to go around unprotected. An Ansara could use you—”
“Just the way you did?” She didn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of her tone.
“Just the way I did,” he agreed. “Only they would be feeding the fire instead of fighting it.”
As she stood there debating the merits of what he’d said, she realized that gradually she had become more at ease with discussing these “gifts” and that somewhere during the course of the conversation she had been moved from denial to acceptance. Now she saw where he was going with all this, and her old deep-rooted panic bloomed again.
“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head as she backed a few steps away. “I’m not going to let you ‘train’