River of Eden

by Glenna Mcreynolds

  Skinny little garota. Juanio couldn't have been more wrong. She was like a bird-of-paradise with her white-blond hair and her green-gold eyes, her soft, pink skin and her surprisingly lush mouth.

  He hadn't kissed her. He'd wanted her begging for mercy, before he kissed her, and the woman had not begged, for mercy or anything else. This time, he would bend the rules.

  If she did come with Will Travers on his boat, Corisco would take the drunken ex-scientist as one of his cordeiros. Having two norte-americanos die in his jungle glade might garner him international attention. Others had killed thousands in the Amazon, the rubber barons being the worst, but no one had ever killed a hundred in a single night, and no one had offered their blood to the devil, a quasi-religious touch guaranteed to strike an extra chord of terror in those Corisco would bring to heel. He already had half of the northwestern frontier dreading his noite do diabo, his Night of the Devil, and he had his devil—his gaze flicked up to the house, to where the glass cage lay within the confines of his office.

  Everything was falling into place, and so would Annie Parrish. The altar he'd built for the sacrifice, El Mestre, was nearly complete, needing only Fat Eddie's emeralds and diamonds to finish the eyes—Los Olhos de Satanás, the Eyes of Satan. When those eyes gazed upon the good doutora, he would be triumphant.

  CHAPTER 16

  She knew. even before she came fully awake, Annie knew her fanny pack was missing. The hand that automatically went to her waist only confirmed the truth: Will Travers had taken her orchid.

  But he hadn't taken it very far. Halfway out of the hammock, she spied her pack hanging from a hook above the stove. She reached up and slipped it off. A quick check inside proved he'd taken nothing, except her exclusive knowledge that the flower even existed.

  Or nearly exclusive knowledge, she amended, turning the specimen jar over in her hand. She'd showed it to Mad Jack in Belize, and Corisco Vargas knew about the Epidendrum luminosa. The bastard had stolen one from her in Yavareté.

  With a soft curse, she set the orchid aside and made quick work out of her morning ablutions. Her green pack was lying next to the galley's small sink, with everything she needed inside except a comb. She did the best she could with her fingers and poured herself a cup of coffee, before picking up the orchid jar again. She couldn't help but wonder what Will had thought when he'd first seen her prize. Mad Jack had been impressed, damned impressed. He'd also told her it wasn't worth dying for, and if he got so much as an inkling as to where she'd gone after leaving his place, he would have her butt in a sling so fast it would make her head swim.

  She turned the jar to better catch the light. When she'd been released from Yavareté, Gabriela had helped her gather up all her botanical specimens, but the orchids hadn't been among them. More than her physical condition, the loss had come close to sinking her into despair. Then, just before she'd boarded the plane, Vargas had pressed a wrapped package into her hand. Why he'd given it to her, she still didn't know, but she'd known exactly what it was, and hadn't let it out of her sight since.

  If she could find more blooming orchids, she would let the one he'd taken go. She'd promised herself as much in Wyoming, that she wasn't coming back to Brazil with a vendetta in mind.

  But if she couldn't find another one—and the odds were against her—she might have to reconsider her plan to avoid Vargas at any cost.

  The muscles in her back twitched, an involuntary and unnecessary reminder of Yavareté, and her mouth tightened. In Wyoming, everything had seemed so clear. In Wyoming, all she'd wanted was more orchids: whole flowers, cuttings, dried specimens, roots, stems, leaves, seeds, everything. On the Rio Negro, nothing was clear, least of all what she wanted.

  She thought back to the previous night, her hand going to the large chunk of rock crystal hanging around her neck. The jaguar fangs on either side curved against her fingers.

  He'd kissed her. Twice. And everything Corisco Vargas had beaten out of her was coming back. She'd sworn off men, so help her God, but Will Travers kissed like an angel, his mouth so hot, and sweet, and tender. He made her feel like a woman, and that was the one thing she couldn't afford. Because, quite simply, it wasn't safe to be a woman in the Amazon. She'd known it long before Vargas had spent three days proving it to her.

  Swearing softly to herself, she slipped her hand to the back of her neck and turned her head to stretch out a kink. She ached from all the tension she was holding in her body. Nothing was going the way she'd planned, not a single damn thing.

  “It's incredible,” Will said behind her.

  Once again, she hadn't heard him approach. She lowered her hand before turning to find him standing in the cabin's doorway, the afternoon light streaming in behind him. She'd slept most of the day away.

  “I know.” She didn't feel guilty for having lied to him. She was beyond guilt—but not suspicion, not after he'd seen her orchid. Wearing low-slung black shorts, a half-buttoned white shirt, and a pair of old flip-flops, he was obviously dressed to go somewhere, and they were in the middle of nowhere.

  “Did you dream?”

  “No,” she said, surprised to realize she hadn't. She would have expected at least Johnny Chang's severed head to have haunted her sleep. “Thanks. I guess your crystal works.” It was a small concession to make after everything they'd been through—two close calls, two escapes, and those two kisses, one sweetly hot, the other surprisingly tender.

  She hadn't had much tenderness in her life, and she would not have suspected that Will Travers would turn out to be a source. It was disconcerting, to have breached that small barrier with him.

  “Actually, I think the jaguar teeth are what holds nightmares at bay.” His face was in shadow, unreadable, but the tone of his voice was oddly flat.

  “And why's that?”

  “Because the night I cut them out of the big cat's skull was the night I quit having mine,” he said, moving out of the doorway, toward the stove and the pot of coffee.

  “You killed a jaguar?” Her eyebrows went up. “This jaguar?” Her hand went to the necklace, her fingers curling around the huge teeth. It was hard to believe an educated scientist would come down to the Amazon and kill an endangered species to cut it up for talismans. They would be drummed out of every respectable—She stopped right there. The words “Will Travers” and “respectable” hadn't been mentioned in the same breath for three years.

  He turned to face her, a steaming cup of coffee in hand.

  “Ran him down, cut out his heart, and drank his blood.” He took a sip of coffee—and Annie could only stare.

  He was serious. He'd done it. He'd drunk jaguar blood, hot and fresh, right out of the cat's body.

  “Are you trying to scare me?”

  “Yes.” He was unequivocal.

  “Why?”

  “We're about an hour and a half out of Santa Maria, partway up the Marauiá. There's a plane at the mission. It might be somebody who can get you out of here.”

  “And you think if you can prove to me that you're practically crazy, I'll be happy to turn tail and run?” No wonder he was all dressed up.

  “Yes.” He took another sip of coffee, his gaze unflinching.

  She returned the favor, looking him over and trying like hell to find some resemblance to the man on the book jackets.

  There was damn little. The photograph had been meant to convey his authority and his scholarship, and he'd pretty much lost both of those. His most noticeable aspects now were physical—the lean dynamics of his body, the clarity of his dark-eyed gaze, which was too often set off by the sardonic arch of one of his eyebrows. He'd lost his expensive, razor-cut hairstyle years ago. Long and silkily disheveled, his hair was purely pagan now, the top layer bleached even more by the sun, the layer beneath richly dark and feathered down the length of his neck.

  And he had those tattoos on his back. They sure as hell hadn't been there in his Harvard days.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe she'd be the crazy one, if she we
nt on.

  God help her. To have come all this way for nothing.

  She rubbed the back of her neck again, turning her attention out the window.

  “You saw the orchid. You know what I'm after—or have you decided to try for it yourself?”

  “Sure, I want it,” he admitted, “but I'm not going to take it away from you, Annie. I just figure you've got a better chance of finding it if you're alive.”

  “It could be one of Vargas's planes,” she said, believing him for now.

  “Could be,” he conceded. “He's got a network of spies running the length of the Rio Negro. I thought I'd go in, check it out. If it's missionaries or a cargo run, I'll get you a seat on it.”

  “Going where?”

  “Bogotá or bust. You've got to be out of the country, not just off the river.”

  The rain started again, a soft wash of it dappling the surface of the water and streaking the windows around the helm. On the shore, two caimans slipped into the water, jacarés. The largest was near ten feet, big by normal standards, but still far smaller than one of the reported monster caimans of the Marauiá.

  “Missionaries and cargo flights don't normally leave Santa Maria for Bogotá, and I don't have enough money to convince anybody to do otherwise.” She looked back over her shoulder at him.

  “We'll let this one be on Fat Eddie,” he said, pulling the bag of gems out of his pants pocket and hefting it in his hand.

  “You're going to a lot of trouble to get rid of me.” And she wasn't going to ask why. She had a feeling the answer wasn't quite as simple as it had been before Barcelos.

  What he said next proved her right.

  With his dark eyes narrowed at her, he asked the million-dollar question. “Where in Wyoming are you from?”

  She let her gaze slide away. William Sanchez Travers and Amazon Annie were not a match. It was impossible, and she'd be damned if she would let herself think otherwise.

  “Laramie. But if you get out of here alive, don't come looking for me. I don't think I could survive the wait, if I thought you were coming.”

  “You don't have much faith in me, do you?”

  “No jaguar gave you the scars on your chest.” A jaguar who had gotten its teeth into him that deep would have taken off his shoulder.

  “No, it wasn't the jaguar,” he said. When he didn't offer more, she just waited.

  His gaze didn't waver from hers, not for a second— and suddenly she knew. A cold, disbelieving dread washed down the length of her body.

  “Sucuri.” She barely breathed the word.

  “I was camped up on the Cauaburi the night it happened,” he said, “and nothing has been the same since.”

  The snake had been huge, as big as the snake in her dreams, as big as the one in his cabin.

  “Are all the rumors true?”

  “Mostly.” He nodded. “Except for the one about having my head shrunk, but Fat Eddie is going to do his best to change that.”

  “The caapi?”

  “Drank my share and then some,” he admitted. “Wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It's not a recreational high, but you'll learn things you can't learn any other way.”

  “Things about plants?” She couldn't quite keep the interest out of her voice. The orchid had proven to her that there was more to learn in botany than she'd once ever dreamed possible.

  “Yes.” His voice remained perfectly neutral. “And things about fear and snakes and death, and your own terrifying insignificance that will forever change the way you look at the world. I was killed once by a jaguar in the Otherworld, a golden cat with black spots, and after I died, my spirit rose up as the sucuri and killed him.”

  There it was, the hoodoo, voodoo shamanistic sorcery she'd spent her career avoiding. Not that any shamans had offered to share the Otherworld with her, or given her a chance to have her skull crushed or her neck snapped in a vision dream starring Panthera onca. Woman weren't allowed to drink the yagé made from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, the vine of the soul, the sky rope that connected heaven and earth and revealed the secrets of the forest.

  “Must have been one hell of a fight.” She gave him that much.

  “Very real, very desperate, very terrifying,” he said, and she believed him. Banisteriopsis caapi was a powerful hallucinogen. That much was undeniable scientific fact.

  “But in this world, you killed the jaguar.” That was the true reality, the world she lived in.

  “And cut out his incisors to make a charm. That doesn't make me much of a scientist anymore, does it.” It was a statement of fact, not repentance, and he finished it off by taking another sip of his coffee.

  “What about the sucuri on the Cauaburi, the anaconda? Did you kill it, too?”

  “Cut it open with my bush knife, but don't ask me how. I nearly drowned in the blood. I did pass out, and when I came to, it was to the smell of roasting meat, the sound of an old man chanting, and pain. Pain everywhere, inside and out.”

  “The old man saved you?”

  He let out a short laugh and dragged his hand back through his hair, his first sign of emotion while telling his whole amazing story. “No.” He shook his head and laughed again, a dry, disparaging sound. “Tutanji didn't save me. He sicced that snake on me, and after it cracked two of my ribs and nearly asphyxiated me, he spent the rest of the night putting a tattoo on my back.”

  “Why?”

  “To make me into what he needed, a weapon to use against his enemies.”

  Annie's dread deepened. “Have you killed for him?”

  “Not yet. But it's starting to look like an inevitability.”

  “Vargas.” She said it without thinking.

  He nodded. “Your timing is awful, Annie. You've shown up at the end. If you were just a botanist doing research on peach palms at Santa Maria, I could take you there, and you would be well out of it. Very few people in the rest of Brazil are ever going to know what happens up on the Cauaburi, and by the time Carnaval hits Rio, it will all be over, one way or the other.”

  “But I'm not just a botanist,” she said.

  “No. You're not. You're trouble, the most amazing amount of trouble I've ever seen.”

  This from a man who'd been bitten by a giant anaconda? And lived to tell the tale? Annie was pretty sure she'd just been insulted.

  “I think you've got bigger problems than me.”

  “Probably, but right now it doesn't feel like it.”

  She looked back out the window. Bogotá.

  If she left, the dream was over. Vargas would win. But the price of staying could very well be her life.

  Her fingers tightened around the small jar in her hand. She could feel the heat coming off the orchid. It was ever so slight, but it was there, a faint bit of warming from the miraculous light emanating from the petals. It was to have been her chance for glory and world renown: Annie Parrish, Queen of the Tropics, discoverer of the Epidendrum luminosa.

  It was to have been her redemption. Why else would she have spent most of her adult life alone in the wilderness of South America, if not to finally come home with a prize?

  Home. The word went through her mind shadowed by an old ache. She had no home. She hadn't had one since her mother had walked out on her when she'd been five years old, walked out and never looked back.

  She dropped her face into her hand and swore softly. Now was not the time to be hashing over old emotional baggage, not when she was literally up the creek without a paddle.

  She lifted her gaze to the jar in her hand. As always, the flower inside filled her with wonder. It wasn't just light coming off the orchid. It was waves of light, creamily golden light tinged with a border of green, and within its vacillating luminescence was a message. She knew it as much by scientific observation as by intuition. She just hadn't been able to crack the code. She'd spent her year of exile studying all forms of bioluminescence, and the orchid was different. It didn't fit the norms. The only thing she'd ever seen that even came close to it
wasn't biologically luminescent at all.

  It was the aurora borealis, those far northern lights that draped the sky above the frozen lands at the top of the world. And here was its sister, locked in the steaming jungle of the equatorial tropics, the orchid's long, midnight-blue sepals twisting in a delicate Art Nouveau spiral, the cream-colored frill spilling off the edges of lushly dark petals flecked with gold.

  “You can come back in a year,” he said next to her. “I have relatives in Venezuela. Fly into Caracas, and I'll bring you in over the mountains and down to the Marauiá.”

  “No,” she said on a sigh, rubbing a hand across her forehead. “I lied about that, too. I found the orchid on the Cauaburi, near the place Vargas calls Reino Novo, not on the Marauiá.” She put the orchid jar back in her fanny pack and zipped it up.

  He was silent for a long moment. She could just imagine what he was thinking, but all he said when he finally spoke was, “All the more reason for you to leave now. There's nothing but danger waiting in Reino Novo. When you come back, the Brazilian government doesn't have to know where you are or what you're doing. If you find what you're looking for, I've still got legal status as a researcher for RBC. We can collect and ship anything you want and be in compliance with the law as long as Gabriela and the Brazilians get their share.”

  It was a long shot, a very long shot, that his plan would work, and she could get back into the country undetected, find the orchid, and get back out with everything she needed, while he funneled specimens through RBC. But maybe it was a better plan than going up against Vargas and his Night of the Devil, and all these damn snakes that seemed to be everywhere, and Fat Eddie Mano with his piranha teeth and shrunken-head plan.

  “And what do you get out of all this?” she asked, slanting him a long look.

  He laughed, a low chuckle. “If I'm still alive this time next year to bring you in over the border, I'll call it good. Don't worry, if I was going to ask you for something, it wouldn't be your orchid.”