River of Eden

by Glenna Mcreynolds

  “Here,” he said, removing the crystal on its cord from around his neck. “Wear this, and I promise you, you won't dream, at least not about snakes.”

  She looked over at him, surprised, and for a moment, he thought she would refuse. Then she took the necklace, and he helped her slip it over her head, the backs of his fingers grazing the silky strands of her hair, the jaguar teeth clinking softly against the clear chunk of quartz.

  “Thanks,” she said when it settled on her chest. “I… uh, know you aren't in a position to cast doubts on my sanity.” How very generous of her, he thought, thoroughly put in his place. “But I know what I saw. I'm just not sure why I saw it, or if it was real or not. I have a friend who did his research down here, and Gerhardt always said that sometimes the metaphor isn't a metaphor at all in the Amazon.”

  “Anthropologist, right?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted with a look as if to say who else but a soft-science anthropologist would have come up with such a idea. “Gerhardt would say a giant snake looming up out of the dark and then disappearing might be exactly that and not a fear-induced hallucination imposed on a susceptible mind, and maybe he's right. Maybe science simply hasn't caught up to this place yet.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed, because of course, science hadn't caught up to him in the last three years, either.

  “That doesn't mean what I saw doesn't scare me.”

  “It just doesn't scare you off.” He was beginning to figure her out.

  “No,” she said softly, fingering her shaman's crystal, her gaze slipping ever so artlessly to his mouth.

  His reaction was swift and mysteriously profound, something deep inside him shifting, an emotion he couldn't name beyond surprise. He hadn't expected her to want a kiss, his kiss.

  Without a word, he closed the distance between them and pressed his mouth to her brow. He knew the comfort of a kiss, the reassurance to be found in a simple act of contact. Her hand came up to his waist, and he moved his mouth to her cheek, skirting the golden fan of her lashes with his lips, inhaling the lovely scent of her skin. Sliding his nose down the length of hers, he felt her soften even more deeply into his arms, and he wanted to say, Stay with me, Annie Parrish, open your mouth for me, make love with me.

  But she wasn't just softening in his arms, she was falling asleep on her feet.

  “Hold on,” he said, releasing her long enough to unhook his hammock from the wall and string it across the cabin. “Sleep here tonight. Then if anything happens, I won't have to go looking for you.”

  It was a polite excuse to keep her close, and to keep her from having to ask. He was sure she didn't want to be alone in the aft cabin any more than he wanted her to be back there by herself.

  Once she settled in, she drifted off to sleep almost immediately, an overly tousled, strung-out botanist curled up in a pool of moonlight with her arms wrapped around his pillow and her little black fanny pack snug around her waist.

  It really was the only thing she owned that he hadn't gone through, and it wasn't where she kept her passport. He'd found all her papers in her green backpack.

  He hesitated, but for no more than a few seconds, before he gave in to his common sense and reached for her pack. He couldn't afford for her to have secrets, any secrets. With a few deft moves, he unsnapped the pack and slipped it from around her waist. She didn't so much as sigh in her sleep.

  Carrying it back to the helm, he adjusted the boat's course, before unzipping the top. Inside was another zippered bag, this one also black. He took it out and immediately realized there was a specimen jar inside. Aganisia cyanea, he figured, the blue orchid she was so intent on collecting again up on the Marauiá. Considering that she'd been gone a year, he didn't expect the flower to be in very good shape.

  Neither did he expect it to glow—but the moment he unzipped the bag, light leaked out and bathed his hand.

  Carefully, he lifted the jar out, and a sense of wonder slowly infused his senses. My God, he thought, turning the container over in his hand. No wonder she'd come back. No wonder she was so damned determined to stay.

  The orchid inside the jar was not Aganisia cyanea. He didn't know what it was other than exquisite, a biological anomaly. Bioluminescence in and of itself was not so unusual, but the quality of light coming off the orchid was remarkable. It wasn't static, but vacillating in waves, creamily golden waves tinged with green. The petals were midnight-blue with a cream-colored frill, the sepals pure midnight-blue, elongate and twisting, the whole perianth dusted with gold flecks. He'd never seen anything like it.

  No one ever had—except for Annie Parrish. She'd offered him money, told him he could set his own price to take her to Santa Maria, and she'd been right. She had a fortune's worth of orchid in her pack, if she could find more.

  He glanced over at her, knowing now what had driven her to return, no matter what had happened in Yavareté.

  She'd lied to him, though, and a wry smile curved his mouth at the realization. Facing off with him in the Barcelos cantina, thinking the plane was coming to take her away and having nothing else to lose, she'd still lied to him about what she was after.

  He couldn't say he blamed her. At any other time in his life, a botanical specimen of such stunning genetic rarity would have demanded his full attention and commitment—and caution. It was an unprecedented find.

  She was good. He had to give her that, and she was bloody single-minded, but orchid or no orchid, by the time she finally got frightened enough to be scared off, he was afraid Fat Eddie would already have her under his knife with Corisco standing in line.

  Anybody else would have bailed out in Manaus, or after they'd seen Johnny Chang's head, or after seeing the snake in the cabin.

  Okay, he thought, remembering. She had tried to bail out after the snake, and he hadn't let her, but hell, Barcelos had not been the place to leave her. Still, nobody else had walked the Vaupes or earned the damned nickname of Amazon Annie, and nobody else had a damned Vulcan death grip.

  Hell, he was scared, but he had to go up the Cauaburi. He had to stop Vargas or the last three years and his deal with Tutanji all meant nothing. He could not fail, not for his own sake, not for anybody's—which still didn't tell him what in the hell he was going to do with Annie Parrish or what he was going to do about her amazing orchid.

  He turned his gaze back to the jar in his hand and again felt a sense of wonder flow through him. The light was magical, curiously mesmerizing, the pulsing brightness like a beacon.

  Glancing up, he checked the boat's position, before allowing his attention to return to the orchid. The light moved in drifting waves along the edge of the petals, cresting on gold and falling off into troughs of deeper green, and the longer he watched, the more intrigued he became.

  Hours and miles of river later, he carefully put the specimen jar back into her fanny pack, then stood for a long time staring out into the night, watching the river ebb and flow beneath a shimmering cast of moonlight, looking upward into the sky and tracking the course of the Milky Way across the depths of deep space, millions and billions of bright points of light layered into infinity.

  Plants had always fascinated him, how they turned sunlight into food, the sheer, unbelievable variety of them, and their colors, from the most amazing shades of blues, reds, and yellows to everything in between and their thousands of shades of green. He'd spent his life studying plants, appreciating them and being in awe of their delicate complexity, from the giant Sequoia sempervirens of the Pacific Northwest to a single blade of grass in any backyard lawn. He'd collected plants, held them, dissected them, classified and contemplated them for hours on end, and he'd talked about them ad nauseum in lecture halls and during fieldwork. But never, not once in all his years of research, had he ever felt even the remotest possibility of a plant talking back—not until tonight.

  CHAPTER 15

  Fernando hauled the chubby garimpeiro into the courtyard by the scruff of his neck and let him drop like a stone at Corisco
's feet.

  “The message from Losas,” the hulking man said. “And one from Manaus.” He held out an envelope.

  “Interesting,” Corisco drawled, looking the man over while taking another sip of his morning coffee. He held out his other hand for the envelope, and Fernando carefully laid it in his palm. A servant girl dressed in yellow set a plate of fresh rolls on the table and gave a slight curtsy before retreating back into the house. Four soldiers guarded the perimeter of the patio—four ramrod-straight, well-armed men standing beneath the lush palms shading the breakfast table from the tropical sun. The fountain bubbled and babbled in the background, helping to disguise, if not drown out, the noise of the generators and hydraulic pumps used in the mining pit down at the river's edge.

  Setting his coffee aside, Corisco tore open the envelope and retrieved the paper from inside. He snapped it open, read it, and his mood instantly soured.

  He'd heard the plane return from its nighttime sortie on the river. Two flights a day came in to the muddy hellhole of the camp, bringing in supplies, contraband, and a growing horde of deserters from the Brazilian army who came to Reino Novo for wages paid in gold—and messages, like the one from Losas lying at his feet, and the one inside the envelope from his man in Manaus saying Annie Parrish had disappeared.

  He crumpled the piece of paper. He would put out a bounty on her, a huge bounty. Every garimpeiro, caboclo, rubber tapper, and Indian in the northwest frontier would be out looking for her—and they would bring her to him for gold.

  “Fernando, do you still have the photographs you took in Yavareté?”

  The man hesitated, an unusual occurrence worthy of a withering glance.

  “Well? Do you?” he snapped.

  “Yes, Major.”

  “Make up a wanted poster for the woman. Offer ten thousand reais. I want every settlement south to Manaus covered by nightfall.”

  “Yes, Major.” The man turned to go.

  “And Fernando?”

  The giant stopped and glanced back. “Major?”

  “Make sure it's her face you use on the poster.”

  The faintest hint of color washed into the man's face— anger, not embarrassment, Corisco knew—before Fernando nodded and left.

  His morning thoroughly ruined, Corisco went back to drinking his coffee. She'd come back to Brazil almost exactly at the time of his sacrifice, and by all the devils he could bring to bear, that's exactly what she was going to be.

  Within the last year, the mining operation had boomed, with the pits around Reino Novo producing two kilos a day. The camp boasted three cantinas, two whorehouses, and at least one dead body a week for which he took no responsibility. Gold miners were a volatile group and quite capable of killing each other without any help from him. The deaths he did claim at least had a purpose, as the gold he took from the mines had a purpose.

  The garimpeiro groaned. Corisco used his foot to push the man over onto his back, and his interest was instantly piqued. He never forgot a face, and he knew this one.

  “Juanio,” he said. “It's good to see you again.”

  The man opened his eyes, and the color drained from his face.

  “M-Major V-Vargas,” he stuttered, then crossed himself, his lips moving frantically in a silent prayer.

  “Juanio, Juanio,” he implored, shaking his head. “Tell me you are not praying to God. God has no place here in the mines… ah, but you're not a miner anymore, are you? No, the last I heard, you and Luiz were working as jagunços for Senhor Eduardo in Manaus. He is a friend of mine, did you know?”

  A dead friend, if the fat man's cache of gemstones did not arrive as promised. Fat Eddie Mano was an abomination, a gross distortion of a human being who truly offended Corisco's refined sensibilities, but he did have his uses—or rather he had. Soon there would be only one power on the river, and all the petty bosses like Fat Eddie would find themselves cut out of the trade routes in illegal goods.

  Juanio shook his head, his ill-cut mop of coal-black hair flying.

  “As a matter of fact, he's on his way here to check on a shipment he's sent, a shipment on the boat that dropped you off at Losas.”

  If possible, the man paled even further.

  “I find it very interesting, Juanio, that you were on this boat with my diamonds and emeralds. Senhor Eduardo is also very interested, and very interested in what happened to his plane.” Apoplectic, actually. Corisco only feared the fat man might explode before he himself had a chance to make an example out of him.

  “It—it was Luiz, Major Vargas.” The man struggled to his knees, still trembling, and gave a pitiful imitation of a salute. “Luiz stole the plane. He made me get on the devil boat. I begged him not to make me. It was awful, just as the stories say. The snake, she was… was…”

  “Was?” he prompted.

  “Hungry.”

  Corisco nodded. He'd heard the stories about Will Travers and his boat and the vision snake that guarded it—a drunken gringo's conceit, if he'd ever heard one. At one time, the botanist had been an interesting potential adversary, but a year lost in the rain forest had robbed him of his senses. Corisco knew Fat Eddie derived a sort of perverse pleasure out of using the once famous derelict as a courier, but in this instance, the fat man had erred— possibly fatally, if the gems didn't arrive at Reino Novo.

  “What were you supposed to do on the devil boat?” he asked. “Not steal my gems, I hope.”

  There was nothing deceptive about Juanio's blank gaze. The man was completely overwhelmed by the complexity of the answer required to save himself. The truth, which Corisco already knew, was easier to come by, but spelled certain doom, whereas a lie took more imagination than he could muster.

  Corisco let him struggle for a solid minute, before he relented.

  “And where is Luiz, my old piloto, do you think?” he asked.

  “Barcelos,” Juanio was quick to answer.

  A game answer, but woefully incorrect.

  Corisco snapped his fingers and heard a cart start rolling into the courtyard behind him. From the look on Juanio's face, he knew exactly when the little man recognized his compatriot. Luiz had been bound and gagged and caged and now awaited what was surely going to be a regrettable fate.

  “It was the woman,” Juanio said, thinking faster than Corisco would have thought possible. “I went on the boat to be with Travers's woman. Luiz, he wanted the esmeraldas, the diamantes, but me, I only wanted to be with the woman, the little blond garota. She was skinny, Senhor Major, so skinny and mean, but I thought I would try her.”

  “Woman?” The pilot who had picked up Juanio in Losas hadn't heard anyone mention a woman. “What woman?”

  “The one with all the questions and the big gun she kept poking in my face, the little, skinny, mean one with her hair all short and wild on her head. She shoved me off the boat above Losas, and I had to swim for the dock. It is a miracle I am alive today, Senhor Major, a miracle.”

  Corisco couldn't have agreed more or cared less, but Juanio had given him pause.

  “Do you know the name of this woman you would have tried?”

  “She didn't have a name,” Juanio said with conviction. “She was just a puta from Barcelos.”

  Ah, yes, Corisco wanted to say. Barcelos is full of blond-haired, gun-toting whores with the bolas to push a man overboard. Juanio was an idiot and would not be missed. As for the woman, he wouldn't describe Annie Parrish as either skinny or mean, but he had an aesthete's appreciation for slender curves and what intelligence did for a woman's mien. Little blond garota with a big gun and lots of questions was dead-on, though, and Annie Parrish didn't lack for courage—which left him with the intriguing thought that possibly, through some odd coincidence of timing and perhaps an old professional association, she might be on Will Travers's boat with Fat Eddie's cache of emeralds and diamonds, instead of on the RBC launch he'd been told she was taking to Santa Maria.

  How his man in Manaus had missed that piece of information made him
wonder about the reliability of his own network of spies and informants, and once more brought home the truth that good help was damn hard to find in the middle of nowhere.

  He sat back in his chair and snapped his fingers for more coffee. The Sucuri, as Travers's boat was known, had been impossible to find in the dark, though Corisco's pilot had made half a dozen passes on the river above Losas. His suggestion to Fat Eddie, when he'd tracked him down by radio in Santo Antonio, was that he get back on the river himself and find the gems, before someone else tried to steal them. The fat man had responded with all the fawning enthusiasm of a bought whore, but he would do it. He didn't dare not.

  It was interesting that Fat Eddie hadn't mentioned a woman being on the boat, Corisco thought. Either he hadn't known, which wasn't good. Or he'd known and deliberately withheld the information, which was far worse—which made Corisco wonder, not for the first time, what Fat Eddie had been doing in Santo Antonio. The fat man himself had been vaguely jovial about his little river romp. Too jovial and too vague for someone who seldom left his lair in the Praça de Matriz.

  Santa Maria, Corisco decided. She would stop at the mission, regardless of where else she was going, and if Fat Eddie was quick, he might be able to catch her and the gems there tonight.

  A rare smile curved a corner of his mouth. Annie Parrish and the gems in one fell swoop. The fates, indeed, were on his side.

  Sadly, the same could not be said for Juanio.

  “Fernando,” Corisco called out, and the huge man appeared. “Take them both to El Mestre and put them in the cages with the others. How many cordeiros will that give us?”

  “Ninety-one.” Fernando was always succinct. “A fair mix of Indians and caboclos.”

  Ninety-one sacrificial lambs to be offered up to the devil himself, more than enough to get the Brazilian media's attention. He only needed nine more to make an even hundred. Annie Parrish would definitely be one.