River of Eden

by Tara Janzen

  Will dodged the wet, gaping mouth and glistening teeth, his body running on pure, primordial adrenaline, his mind nearly completely shut down. He couldn’t think about what he was doing, because any thought he might have would freeze him solid with fear.

  The snake lunged twice more, hissing each time, while its tail glided in long, graceful arcs across the stairs, detached from the tension in high display along the rest of its body. After the third strike, the snake withdrew, keeping a slight distance from him and holding his gaze with its abysmally black eyes, while its body continued the slow steady climb to the platform.

  Will had to make a move. Annie had stopped screaming, and the silence pushed him to full-out panic. He leapt up the final stretch of stairs, certain the snake was coiling around her body, making it impossible for her to draw another breath, but before he could make the platform, he was tackled from behind, his legs banded in an iron grip.

  He fell to the stairs, twisting around, expecting to see the snake’s tail tightening around him, but instead he came face to face with the end of a gun barrel, the pistol in Corisco’s hand. The man weighed down on him, his other arm in a death grip around Will’s legs.

  “Let it have her,” the man rasped, cocking the pistol. “That was the plan.”

  Will didn’t think so.

  “The plan’s changed,” he growled, whipping his hand back and slinging his knife with a lightning-quick action.

  Corisco’s one open eye widened in shock, his blood flowing from where the blade stuck deep in his chest.

  Without wasting a second, Will reached down and jerked the knife free, before rolling over and scrambling the rest of the way to the platform.

  At the top of the stairs, he stopped, his way blocked by thick moving coils of dark-skinned green anaconda. The snake was the only thing moving. Annie was utterly motionless, nearly nose to nose with the monstrous reptile, transfixed by its unwavering gaze. From the back she looked like an angel, her arms outstretched and hanging from the ropes, her fingers curled in a supplicating pose, and the diaphanous swath of golden silk wafting about her.

  Cold dread washed through him. He didn’t know what to do, what move to make. He stood perfectly still, his heart racing, his hand clutching the knife, watching the snake and the woman hang in timeless limbo together.

  Incomprehensibly, the snake wasn’t attacking her, only staring, its body swaying in front of her, its black gaze taking her measure.

  The shot, when it came, caught him unaware. He didn’t hear it until after it had hit him, and when he fell, he fell forward... into the endless green coils of the giant anaconda.

  Annie jerked her head around, the spell broken, and saw Will collapse on top of the snake. Beneath him, the anaconda continued to bunch and move its powerful body. Corisco was oblivious to the danger, holding the pistol with a look of triumph flashing across his face, but his victory was brief.

  A second shot came quickly after the first, from out of the forest with all the force of a high-powered rifle. The bullet caught Corisco in the chest, and the man sank back against the stairs, his face contorted in shock and pain. Blood quickly spread down the front of his shirt – and in that instant, the snake turned its head, tongue flickering, tasting the air and finding fresh prey.

  Under the serpent’s gaze, Corisco let out a strangled sound, a guttural, primal cry of purest fear, and slowly... slowly, the beast uncoiled one heavy loop of its body after another to glide down the stairs.

  It slid past Will to hover over the dying man, and a long, breathless moment passed in which Annie feared any number of horrors might unfold, horrors echoed in Corisco’s terrified gaze—and then they did.

  With mesmerizing grace, the anaconda struck, throwing a loop around Corisco’s body even as its mouth opened wide over the bastard’s head.

  “No!” the man screamed, trying to block the beast’s lunging, gaping jaws, gasping and flailing. “No!”

  Then he was silenced, the upper half of him, down to his shoulders, disappearing from sight into the beast’s fierce maw.

  Never, Annie thought, recoiling from the unbelievable sight. Never ever ever. A skull was crushed. Bones snapped. Limbs twitched and jerked with their last flashing synapse of life. Snake jaws released and expanded inexorably, working the body deeper and deeper into the serpent’s mouth. When all was gone, the anaconda – gorged with the demon of Reino Novo – moved off the golden tower and disappeared into the forest.

  ~ * ~

  “Craziest bloody thing I ever saw,” Mad Jack said, ripping open another sterile bandage to press over Annie’s cut and bleeding wrists, doing a quick job of bandaging the raw wounds left by the ropes that had bound her. “A snake big enough to eat my horse and you hanging there like friggin’ Fay Ray out of King Kong. God, Annie, I ought to tie you up myself and send you home on a slow boat. What’s his name? The one who was going up the stairs with just a knife, for Christ’s sake, to save you.”

  “Will. William Sanchez Travers,” she said, though she truly wasn’t paying any attention to him. Her throat throbbed from screaming so much. Mad Jack had brought three men and a woman with him, all heavily armed, and the four of them were up in the golden mouth, working quickly and efficiently to put Will in a body sling and lower him over the side of the tower to the plaza.

  “The scientist guy who disappeared? I’ve heard of him. Don’t worry, honey. I’ve got a floatplane on the river. We’ll have him in Manaus in a couple of hours. We just have to get the hell out of here, before the soldiers decide to come back. There’s another group working around these mines, but they’re too busy stealing gold to bother with us.”

  Fat Eddie, she thought, but what really got her attention was Mad Jack calling her “honey.”

  He never called her “honey.” For years he’d called her “Pip Parrish,” as in “pipsqueak,” and during his teenage years, he’d called her “Pain Parrish,” as in pain-in-the-butt-Parrish-quit-following-me-around. She’d been twenty before he’d started calling her “Annie” on a regular basis, and for the last four years he’d taken great pride in calling her “Doc,” as in Dr. Parrish.

  But he never called her “honey.”

  She must look worse than she thought, and she knew she felt worse than she looked—all wobbly inside, really wobbly, from her brain to her toes.

  “I’m in shock.”

  “You’ve got that right, Doc,” he said, flashing her a quick glance. He looked worried. Worried as hell. He finished a cursory check of her body, then took off his shirt and put it around her shoulders. “You stay put.” He jacked another round into his rifle and laid it across her lap, before rising to his feet. “I’ve got to help your friend, Will.”

  “Sure,” she said, and her voice sounded weak, even to her.

  Frowning in concern, Mad Jack kneeled back down. A swath of midnight-black hair fell forward across his brow, and he brushed it back with a quick, restless gesture. “Annie. I’m going to get you out of here. You can count on that, and you know it, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. Mad Jack never let a person down.

  “And you know I love you.”

  She nodded again. He’d always loved her, always been there, from as far back as she could remember, and after her mother had hightailed it out of Wyoming, Mad Jack had still been there, all of eight years old and ready to fill in the void her father had been too angry and too proud to notice.

  “Good,” he said. “So I know you won’t take this wrong.”

  She watched as his gaze strayed past her to a sight she knew she couldn’t handle – the trail the giant anaconda had taken into the rain forest.

  After a brief, intense moment, Jack’s gaze came back to her, his eyes a blue so dark they bordered on a no-man’s-land between black and slate-gray.

  “Annie, I know holding on to people is not your specialty,” he said, “but whoever this guy is, you might want to consider holding on to him. I love you, but there’s no way in hell I would hav
e gone after a thirty-six-foot anaconda with just a knife to save you.”

  She gave him another little nod.

  “You need to remember that, Doc.” He was frightfully serious, his voice low. “There are lines you can’t cross without getting hurt, and I thought I taught you where those lines are.”

  He had.

  “And I thought I told you that if you wanted me to come back and take care of Corisco Vargas to let me know, and that I would see to it.”

  He had.

  “And I thought I told you to stay the hell out of Brazil.”

  He most definitely had.

  He swore, one succinct word, and then his gaze softened the slightest degree.

  “And I taught you to stand on your own two feet. Cover me, Annie. I’ll be back.” He stood up and strode toward the tower, where two of the men were holding a belaying rope, while the other man and the woman were putting Will over the side in the body sling.

  Annie started to tremble. She was in shock, and she was in love, and more than anything else, she wanted to hold Will.

  They’d survived. Against all the odds, they’d saved the Indians and caboclos, destroyed Corisco Vargas, and survived Reino Novo.

  She’d lost her orchid, though, her beautiful, luminous orchid. Vargas had left both of the specimens in his office, and his whole house had gone up in flames when Mad Jack’s team had blown the fuel depot.

  She lifted her gaze to where Will was being belayed off the broken snake tower, and in her heart, she let the orchids go. They didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered—except Will.

  ~ EPILOGUE ~

  Six months later—

  Location Unknown

  “Mmmm, gato,” Annie purred as Will slowly pulled her into his arms.

  He met her gaze in the deepening twilight, his eyes dark and slumberous, before he lowered his mouth to take hers in another deep kiss. She tasted herself on his tongue. She smelled herself on his skin.

  She’d marked him. Every time they made love, she marked him as hers, letting him absorb her until she was a part of him. And he was doing the same to her, in the most intensely physical way possible.

  Still kissing her, he smoothed his hand over the curve of her stomach, letting his hand rest on the place above her womb.

  A son, Tutanji had said, the only other person in the world who knew where they were. The old shaman had brought them in over the mountains, the promise he’d made to Will fulfilled. Some days, looking out over the ancient, rounded hills and the dark green canopy of the rain forest flowing to the horizon, even Annie forgot where they were. She forgot the place they called home was connected to the rest of the world. Some days she wondered if it really was, or if they had somehow disconnected and were floating free.

  Not even Gabriela knew where they were. Their supply drop-off was miles and miles from where Tutanji had led them after Will had healed. There was only one way in to their lost world, and it was not a trail for the faint of heart.

  He broke off their kiss, and she sighed in contentment, running her hands up along his scalp, holding him close. He’d loved her well. He was the jaguar, more so now than ever, and she was the cat’s favorite snack, all of her.

  Will knew when she drifted into sleep, and he pulled her close to hold her next to his body. Looking over her shoulder, he checked the sky. She wouldn’t get much of a nap, but he would let her have what she could. She would never forgive him if he let her sleep into the dark hours of the night.

  That time was for them, for the work they did, and it tied them together in a way as profound as their lovemaking. When the sun fell only a few minutes later, he kissed her ear and gave her a gentle shake.

  “Annie.”

  “Mmmm,” she murmured, lazily opening her eyes and stretching.

  A smile curved his mouth. She was going to get loved again, if she wasn’t careful. It had happened more than once, and they’d lost a night’s work.

  “It’s time, querida.”

  In minutes, they’d thrown on some clothes and moved to the highest platform in their five-tiered tree house. Tonight was for panorama pictures, not for collecting. When the cameras were set up and ready, they sat down together on the edge of the deck. Walkways and ladders connected the tiers of the tree house together. Each platform was strung with ropes and, where necessary, safety nets. Each held its cadre of supply cabinets and lab equipment, food caches and cisterns.

  Below them, on the forest floor, a silver ribbon of water wound its way to the horizon, illuminated by starlight. At the edge where earth gave way to sky, the river made a subtle transition between this world and the other, seeming to lift into the dark forest of space and flow into the starry wonder of the Milk River.

  With Corisco dead and Fat Eddie busy counting his gold in Manaus, their lives had drifted into the quieter rhythms of peaceful days.

  Slowly, as the night deepened, the forest of trees began more and more to resemble the Milky Way, thousands of small lights appearing where before they’d been outshone by the sun. Epidendrum luminosa, Annie’s orchid, the Messenger in Tutanji’s language. All plants talked, Tutanji had told them, but truly, he’d said, not all of them have a lot to say. The Messenger was different; its language more complex; its knowledge going back to the beginning, when it first opened its petals in the first misty morning of an Amazonian Eden, a gift from above.

  Listen to the light, he’d said, and a lifetime’s work had been born. A hundred flowers had been catalogued, the photons of light emitted by their DNA measured and graphed in anticipation of the day when the Messenger’s message would be heard.

  Until then, he and Annie would stay in the place time and the world had forgotten.

  She reached over and slipped her hand into his, and he bent down to press his lips to her cheek. It was a sweet kiss in the dark, while below them, the wonders of the ages blossomed in the night.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ * ~ ~ ~ ~

  Thank you for reading River of Eden. Please visit my website, www.tarajanzen.com, and follow me on Facebook http://on.fb.me/mSstpd; and Twitter @tara_janzen http://twitter.com/#!/tara_janzen so you won’t miss the release of my upcoming eBooks.

  Read on for excerpts from Crazy Hot and Crazy Kisses, thrilling romances from my Steele Street series.

  Crazy Hot

  “Edgy, sexy and fast. Leaves you breathless!”

  – Jayne Ann Krentz, New York Times Bestselling Author

  LOVE HAS NEVER BEEN THIS WILD. THIS DANGEROUS. THIS HOT.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nothing moved in the shimmering heat.

  Good God, Regan McKinney thought, staring over the top of her steering wheel at the most desolate, dust-blown, fly-bit excuse for a town she’d ever seen. The place looked deserted. She hadn’t seen another car since she’d left the interstate near the Utah, Colorado border, and that had been a long, hot hour ago.

  “Cisco,” the sign at the side of the road said, confirming her worst fear: she’d found the place she’d been looking for, and there wasn’t a damn thing in it. Unless a person was willing to count a broken-down gas station with ancient, dried out pumps, five run-down shacks with their windows blown out, and one dilapidated barn as “something.”

  She wasn’t sure if she should or not. Neither was she sure she wanted to meet anybody who might be living in such a place, but that was exactly what she’d come to do—to find a man named Quinn Younger and drag him back to Boulder, Colorado.

  He was the only lead she had left in her grandfather’s disappearance, and if he knew anything, she was going to make damn sure he told the Boulder Police. The police were definitely tired of listening to her. In fact, she was pretty sure they’d stopped listening to her days ago. They never had believed that Dr. Wilson McKinney had disappeared. Since his retirement from the University of Colorado in Boulder, he’d made a habit of spending his summers moseying around the badlands of the western United States, and according to the results of their investigation, this year was no different.

&
nbsp; But it was different. This year he hadn’t checked in with her from Vernal, or Grand Junction, the way he always did, and he hadn’t arrived in Casper, Wyoming on schedule. It was true he was a bit absent-minded, but he’d never gone two weeks without calling home, and he would never, ever have missed his speaking engagement at the Tate Museum in Casper.

  Never.

  He loved nothing better than to rattle on about dinosaur fossil beds to a captive audience and get paid for doing it. At seventy-two, nothing could have kept him from his moment of glory—nothing except some kind of trouble.

  Quinn Younger, she mused, looking over the small collection of broken-down buildings clustered at the side of the road. Sheets of tarpaper flapped on every outside wall, loosened by the wind. Half the shingles on the roofs had been blown off. The two vehicles parked in front of the gas station were ancient. Over fifty years old, she’d bet, a pickup truck with four flat tires, and some kind of rusted out black sedan up on blocks.

  If Quinn Younger did live in Cisco, he was stuck there, and nothing could have made less sense. He was a former Air Force pilot, for God’s sake, a national hero. He’d been shot down over Serbia a few years back and made the covers of TIME magazine, NEWSWEEK, and the front page of every major newspaper in America. His survival behind enemy lines and daring rescue by the Marines had become the stuff of contemporary legend. He was a one-man recruitment poster for the United States military.

  Not a bad turnabout for someone who at sixteen had been on a fast track to juvenile hall and probably the state penitentiary, until a judge had put him in her grandfather’s field crew for a summer dinosaur dig on Colorado’s western slope. Wilson had been damn proud of the young man, one of the first to be pulled off the streets and out of the courts of Denver and given a second chance with him. Outlaws all, Wilson had called that first crew of boys, but over the long, hot summer, he’d begun the process of turning outlaws into men—and at least in Quinn Younger’s instance, he’d felt he’d succeeded.