by Tara Janzen
He glanced over to a box lying open on the corner of his desk. A week ago, infinitely sure of success, he’d bought her a present, a little something his São Paulo tailor had sent up the river, a dress for her to die in.
He leaned over and lifted a handful of the silk. Gold and glittering, it would have been the perfect foil for her blond beauty.
His gaze came back to the cylinder in his hand. The orchids’ location would remain a mystery now, and that was the true loss. He’d searched for the meaning of the flower’s light in his uyump visions, and been denied an explanation. So be it. Many of the riches shown to him through the visions had come to him, and if at moments he remembered fleeting traces of a time before he’d partaken of the tiny frog devils, when his mind had been different, he didn’t dwell on them for long. He’d chosen his path, and even a cursory look around would prove that he had chosen well.
And yet the orchid, he thought, watching it float inside its glass container. The orchid was more than it seemed, much more. He’d spent hours mesmerized by its vacillating light, many nights to the point where he’d been certain the plant had relayed something to him. But then he would come to himself, out of the trance, and realize he’d been drifting in dreams, not really paying attention, and the moment and the sensation would be gone.
For now, his chance to find more of the flowers was lost, as was his chance to have Annie Parrish, but he still had his cordeiros, his lambs, and he would not shirk his duty to them. Their sacrifice would make him infamous and bring him glory; the least he could do was go down and sort the new arrivals. The strong ones would go to the mines, the weak and the lame and the old would all go to El Mestre.
A loud bang against the glass cage drew his attention to the far wall of his office. The giant snake threw his body against the glass again, and something in the wall creaked, as if it might give way. With the anaconda’s next attack, the wall actually bowed out.
Corisco smiled. Poor thing. He knew exactly what the beast’s problem was—hunger, a hunger that would only be assuaged in the jungle glade on the Night of the Devil.
CHAPTER ~ 26
Will caught Annie as she raced by, dragging her close with a hand over her mouth in case she screamed.
She didn’t, recognizing him instantly. Her eyes were wide, though, wide with fear.
“There are men coming up behind us, out of the forest,” she said, when he removed his hand. “Not Indians. They’re making too much noise.”
He met her eyes. “Fat Eddie.” He couldn’t believe it. Tenacious didn’t begin to describe the fat man.
“The cages are just ahead, but let me warn you, Annie, the glint of gold you saw through the forest the last time you were here has gotten a lot bigger and taken shape.”
“What kind of shape?”
“Snake.” He was blunt. “Big snake.”
Bigger than he would have dreamed possible. It was an unbelievable amount of gold to have all in one place, and Will could only wonder at the power Vargas wielded to keep his soldiers and the garimpeiros from stealing it by the handful. Fear would do it, an ungodly amount of fear, the kind of fear that made Will wonder what in the hell they were actually going to come up against, if they couldn’t get out of Reino Novo as easily as they’d gotten in.
She swore, and swore again. He’d expected it. The woman did not like snakes.
“There are two guards at the cages, both well armed, and one of them has a ring of keys. I don’t want you to shoot, unless it’s in self-defense. Bringing a bunch of soldiers and garimpeiros down on us is the last thing we want to do?”
“Right.”
They moved out, and Will couldn’t begin to describe how awful he felt having her with him. Sometime, somewhere, over the last seven days, he should have been able to find a place to keep her safe. Her own damned insistence on coming had been part of the problem, but the rest of it was feeling like pure bad luck.
What in the hell, he wondered, had happened to his neat plan of gliding into Reino Novo on the Sucuri, an invited smuggler for God’s sake, and taking a look around, seeing what had to be done, formulating a plan for doing it, doing it, and getting out.
Amazon Annie had happened, came his answer, and he knew in his heart that he wouldn’t have missed her for the world, but he wished like hell that she was anyplace else but with him.
Annie wished she was someplace else, too, anyplace other than heading toward a giant gold snake in the middle of a hellhole, with a gun strapped over her shoulder, and her heart beating so fast she was afraid Corisco Vargas could hear it above the sound of the pumps and the hoses and the hundreds of men he had working around the clock to mine more gold. Fernando for sure could hear it. He wasn’t that far away, coming out ahead of them on the path into a circle of bright light.
As she and Will caught up to the group, she realized it wasn’t a circle of bright light at all, but the reflection of a few torches on an unbelievable amount of gold. Vargas had literally paved a plaza with gold, and in the middle of the plaza he had erected the most stunningly unbelievable representation of her giant anaconda that she had ever seen.
“Will. Will,” she whispered, pulling him to a stop. “Don’t you recognize her?”
“Who?”
“The snake, the gold snake.”
A trace of bafflement narrowed his gaze. “It’s a snake.”
“My snake, Will. The one that strangles me in my dreams, and it’s your snake, too, the one on your boat.”
That was the absolute last thing Will had wanted to hear.
“Don’t tell me this, Annie. Please.” He’d never seen her vision snake. Hell, he’d never even seen his vision snake. The only anaconda he’d ever seen up close and personal was the one that had sunk its teeth into his shoulder and bled all over him, and that snake had not been a vision.
“My God,” she said, her voice full of awe as she looked up at the damned thing. “It’s incredible.” Neither was that the reaction he was looking for.
“I’ve got three darts left, and four soldiers, including Fernando. Let’s do this, Annie, and get the hell out of here. Get the bow ready.”
“Take Fernando first,” she suggested, tearing her gaze away from the golden, snake-shaped tower. “He’s got a Galil.”
Excellent advice.
As they came up on the cages, a murmur of hope swept through the captives. Will said only one word, “freedom,” and he said it in two languages, and three Indian dialects.
The stir put the soldiers on their guard, including Fernando and his last soldier, who had just reached the others and were quickly realizing that they’d lost a couple of men on the trail.
Fernando’s realization was cut pretty damn short, though, when a curare-tipped blowgun dart caught him in the neck. Will downed the next man before he had a chance to shoot his gun. The third man was momentarily dumbstruck by his comrades all falling helpless to the ground for no apparent reason, and by the time he figured out that he was under attack, he had a dart sticking out of his chest.
He clawed at his shirt, trying to rip the dart out of his skin, but to no avail. As the curare took hold, his knees buckled and he fell to the plaza.
For Annie it was like watching a nightmare unfold in slow motion, the men crumbling, their cries of surprise as they were hit, and the grunts of terror when they realized what had hit them and that they were going to die. She felt her own breath slow in her throat, until a shot rang out, the last guard firing at them.
She reacted in an instant, swinging her rifle up and pulling the trigger, her own shot echoing around the plaza followed by the guard’s scream of pain.
“Will.” She turned and found him holding his arm. Blood leaked through his fingers. He’d fallen to his knees.
“Will,” she gasped.
“Get the keys, Annie! Now!” He ground the words out between his teeth, forcing himself to his feet.
Annie ran across the plaza. The man she’d hit was writhing on the ground. The others
weren’t even twitching. Their muscles were paralyzed by the curare, their eyes locked open in terror as they slowly asphyxiated to death, their lungs no longer capable of moving air in and out.
Murmurs of excitement ran through the cages. The Indians and caboclos had been saved. All Annie needed was the key to release the locks bolting the iron doors, before more guards came running, alerted by the gunfire. All she needed was to wrestle the keys off the belt of the man she’d shot, while he twisted and jerked in agony at her feet, blood gushing from his stomach.
Oh, God. She was going to be sick, but she kneeled anyway and unclipped the ring of keys from his belt.
“Annie!” Will’s warning cry rang out, but not before a meaty fist got a hold of her ankle and jerked her to the ground. She landed with a heavy thud, the wind knocked out of her as a half-paralyzed Fernando tried to roll her beneath him.
She kicked and swore, the arm she’d landed on throbbing in pain, the beast all over her, grappling her around. The keys! She’d lost the keys.
Then Will was there with a knife, jerking Fernando’s head back and slitting his throat.
Annie scrambled backward, revulsion turning into panic in her veins. Blood was everywhere, pumping out of Fernando’s throat, running off Will’s arm, pouring out of the gut-shot soldier. She dropped her rifle, trying to get away, her eyes riveted to the blood flowing onto the gold brick plaza. It slipped into the gold-mortared grooves, forming a tracery of blood, red veins running their course across the expanse of gold to the shallow indention in the middle of the plaza, a bowl, four feet across, with all the blood collecting in its golden pan.
Corisco drank blood. She remembered now. He cooked it into a hallucinogenic elixir with uyump frog skins. Devil frogs, the Indians called them, and a straighter road to hell had never been devised.
Will had drunk blood, too. Jaguar blood. She had blood smeared on her clothes and her skin, staining her shoes and getting all over everything. She’d lost the keys. Lost her rifle.
Merda. The keys. They were probably covered in blood from all the dying men.
“Will.” She stopped her retreat, stopped sliding and pushing herself away from the dead guards. She lifted her gaze to where he was rising to his feet, one of the soldiers’ knives still in his hand. “Help me, Will. We have to—”
Something behind her caught his eye, and the instant change in him warned her something was wrong.
“Will, we have to—”
“Stop, Annie,” he said, keeping her from saying anything more. “it’s too late.”
“Too late, indeed,” said another voice coming from behind her, a voice Annie knew down to the marrow of her bones.
She froze where she was on the ground, hardly breathing for the sudden fear gripping her heart. Corisco.
Soldiers crossed from behind her to go and stand on either side of Will. One took the knife from his hand. Two more grabbed his arms while three kept him in the sights of their rifles.
With a measured tread, Corisco slowly circled her, coming into her line of sight. Without meaning to, she drew herself back, her instincts more powerful than any source of pride or arrogance.
He was worse than she’d remembered—slicker, even more diabolical looking, with his black eyepatch and the bizarre white streak running back through his coal-black hair. His face was thin, nearly cadaverous, his uniform impeccably neat.
“Welcome to Reino Novo, Dr. Parrish,” he said, his smile a sardonic curve. “Or should I say, welcome back?”
Corisco turned away, and Annie saw his gaze slide down Will’s mostly naked body, one eyebrow quirked in disdain.
“I’d heard you’d spent some time with the Indians, Dr. Travers, but I seem to have underestimated the affinity I’d heard you felt for the native peoples. Are the other rumors true as well? The sucuri? A lost city of gold? People say you found one in the forest.”
“This is the lost city of gold,” Will said through gritted teeth, the soldiers holding his arms tightly behind his back.
To Annie’s surprise, Vargas laughed.
“How very astute of you, Doctor. It is, indeed. Reino Novo, the new El Dorado. Lock him up.” Vargas’s smile faded as he turned his gaze back to her. “And bring the woman with me. We have much to... discuss... don’t we, Dr. Parrish?”
Will lunged forward, but the soldiers held him back, and when he continued to struggle, one of them stepped forward and rapped him sharply on the head with the butt end of his rifle.
He collapsed like a stone, and Annie felt her life starting to flash before her eyes.
“Come, doctor,” Vargas said to her. “We’ll go up to the house. I believe you have a number of things you want to tell me.”
Oh, God. She was going to die.
~ * ~
From where he sat in his chair in the jungle, nearly catatonic with surging waves of greed, his men laboring mightily below him on his chair’s poles to make even the slightest headway, Fat Eddie watched Vargas take the little cat away. The lost ten thousand reais meant nothing to him now, in light of the most magnificent mountain of gold he’d ever seen. A small measure of pride seeped through his greed. He had brought diamonds and emeralds for the eyes of the stupendous piece of work, and he would be careful not to lose a single one when he tore the whole thing down and had it shipped to Manaus. His men were already moving into place, securing the river and setting charges along the docks and in the fueling station.
Gold. More gold than he’d thought existed anywhere in the world, and it would soon be his, nearly as soon as Corisco Vargas would be dead. Given Guillermo’s attachment to the woman, Far Eddie figured Vargas would be damned lucky if he survived his little Night of the Devil whether Eddie got to him or not. Eddie figured that despite all his elaborate plans, the only devil Corisco Vargas was going to conjure was already in the forest glade, knocked out and lying facedown in the grass.
He chuckled quietly to himself, his belly rolling. Oh, yes. Corisco had gotten himself a devil indeed, a brujo who would take him straight to hell.
CHAPTER ~ 27
Any doubts Corisco had held about his methods, designs, and goals were gone. She had come to him. Out of the dark of night and the deep forest of the northwest frontier, Annie Parrish had come to him.
He leaned back against his desk, sitting on the edge, his whole being awash with the pleasant glow of success and the early light of dawn. He had her, and now she would tell him what he wanted to know, or she would die. Behind her, the glass cage lay broken and empty, the occupant having become far too physically aggressive after its first bout of cage rattling early the previous evening. But Corisco even had that situation under control, the beast recontained in its alternate abode, awaiting its next meal.
And now its fated meal had arrived, in the shape and form of Annie Parrish.
He’d had her cleaned up, the mud washed from her face, the feathers removed from her hair. His servants had done a commendable job of restoring her to beauty—and the São Paulo dress was lovely on her, everything he’d hoped it would be, what little there was of it. “Death shroud” was perhaps a better description than “dress” for the diaphanous wisp of golden silk twisted artfully around her body. Plenty of skin had been left naked to the touch, her breasts barely cupped in a golden demitasse of a bodice, the rest of her torso left uncovered, the remaining silk wrapped once low around her hips and draping in a single fall to the floor down the middle of her legs. It was too bad the two of them wouldn’t have more time to enjoy it, but the forest had come alive with anarchy in the night and was going to require his attention. Fat Eddie had taken his invitation to return a little too seriously, and Reino Novo was actually under attack. No more than a few snipers, he’d been assured by his new captain, a man who had been with him nearly as long as Fernando had been, snipers who were systematically being taken out by his soldiers, but even the best-trained troops needed the firm hand of authority to guide them.
Cut down by a curare dart and a knife, Corisc
o mused. He could not have devised a more fitting death for his old captain—but he would have tried. He certainly would have tried. Failure was not an option in Reino Novo, and Fernando had failed. It had been Corisco’s own efforts that had brought Annie Parrish back to him. The truth had been in a small pack clipped around her waist.
He held up her orchid next to his own, the pair of them exquisite beyond belief. Having studied his for a year, he was very sensitive to any changes in it, and when held next to Annie’s orchid, his did change, its light—so subtle in its vacillations—instantly began cycling on a different frequency.
Power was all he’d ever wanted, the power of the devil frog visions, the power of fear, and the power of gold, but perhaps in truth, the greatest power he’d brought to himself was in his hands.
“You see it, don’t you?” he said, looking up at her.
And indeed she did. Her gaze was riveted to the pair of orchids. She’d had her year of studying her flower as well as he’d had his, and he didn’t doubt that her observations were at least as astute as his own, probably even more so, given her profession.
“Do you know what it means? What they mean?” he asked, pushing off the desk and walking toward her.
Her eyes never left the orchids. Her expression, though, was hard to read. Awe was there, and rightly so. He felt the same emotion coursing through him. Whether he understood them or not, he was certain the orchids were responding to each other. But there was something else in her face, and oddly enough, it took him a moment to realize that it was fear. Not fear for herself, he would have recognized that instantly. She was afraid for the orchids, which left him slightly nonplussed. What did she think he was going to do? Smash the glass holding them?
A smile curved his mouth, condescending in its humor. “I won’t destroy them, you know.”
Finally, her gaze flicked up toward his.
“You won’t understand them, either.”