River of Eden (21 page)

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 went 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.”

Typically, he made it damn hard to hold his gaze, and she looked away.

“Okay,” she reluctantly conceded. “If you can buy me a place on that plane, I'll go. You can have the guns to give back to Fat Eddie, maybe get him off your back.”

The minute the words were out of her mouth, a knot formed in the pit of her stomach, as if she'd just made a huge mistake.

“Wait,” she said quickly. “Wait just a minute. Don't… don't give Fat Eddie both Galils. Keep one for yourself. Tell him I sold it in Barcelos or something.” That's what she needed to say—protect yourself.

“You want me to keep one of the Israeli rifles?” The look he gave her was slightly confused.

“Yes.” She was adamant now. “They're the best money can buy. Accurate, reliable. If you want, we can get one down, and I'll show you how it works. You'll want to keep at least fifty rounds of ammo, and maybe a couple of grenades, and—”

Will let a grin slowly spread across his face as he settled back against the counter and let her ramble on, extolling the virtues of her arsenal and how he could use it to save his ass. She was amazing.

“Everybody worth their salt in Colombia is using the Galil now. You won't have any trouble getting more ammunition. The dynamite is fairly lightweight for the
amount of punch you get, and it's easy to fit a stick or two in a pack. You might—”

“Annie,” he finally interrupted her, setting his coffee aside and pushing off the counter. “That's about the sweetest thing anybody has ever said to me.”

“Sweet?” Now she was the one who looked confused. “We're talking ordnance.”