River of Eden (28 page)

Minutes later, he slipped free of her body, and still felt as if he'd been hit by a freight train. Annie had fallen asleep on top of him and was softly snoring in his ear, completely oblivious to the fact that they'd just set some sort of world record for a quickie in a hammock with one partner asleep.

That had been sex, pure, unadulterated sex. Animal need had met animal need and refinements had gone out the window. Tutanji had been right, though. She was about as calmed down as he'd ever seen her. For that matter, so was he, more relaxed than he'd been in years.

With a little bit of effort, he got her shorts back on her and zipped and buttoned without precisely waking her up. She'd mumbled a little bit, and complained, and made him feel like some sort of pervert for having unadulterated sex with someone who hadn't been precisely awake—but then he remembered where her hands had been before he'd even thought about her shorts, and absolved himself of all guilt.

Amazon Annie.

Good God, he thought, a tired grin spreading across his face. They were a long way from a first-class hotel suite with hot towels, clean sheets, and room service, but she was reminding him of all the luxuries he'd been so long without, and of a luxury he'd never had.

Her, with her tough-girl reputation, her Israeli rifles, and the softest mouth he'd ever kissed. He hoped like hell she didn't hate him in the morning when she realized what had happened, because he was afraid he'd just fallen in love in a hammock.

CHAPTER 21

C
orisco walked along a jungle
path bordered by a hundred flaming torches, one for each
cordeiro
to be sacrificed on the
noite do diabo.
He was carrying a well-wrapped package close to his chest. Soot wafted up into the trees in smoky ringlets, blending into a night lit by a bare sliver of moon. In two nights, there would be no moon at all, only a dark circle in the sky, an opening to the netherworld and the hell he would bring into the glade.

Excitement thrummed through his veins. His long years of labor would soon be rewarded. Major Vargas would no longer exist. In his place would be King Corisco, sovereign of four thousand miles of river and three million square miles of mountains, and forest, and plains. Fear would rule where politics forever failed.

No government truly understood power. Bureaucracy tied their hands and their minds. He'd been in the army long enough to see firsthand what kind of mess
bureaucracy created. Half-measures were the hallmark of government.

But not in Reino Novo. In Reino Novo, he ruled, and because he ruled, he was creating what other men had only imagined—a true El Dorado, its central plaza already in place, the keystone of all that would come, and all of it in gold.

The path flared at the end, opening onto the golden plaza, the torches continuing around its outer edge, their light caressing the sinuously curved statue rising out of the middle of the square—
El Mestre
in the shape of a truly giant anaconda, ten feet wide and towering twenty feet above the forest floor, its mouth open and gaping, its fangs—like the rest of it—glinting gold in the flickering light.

The emeralds and diamonds Fat Eddie had brought had been added to the statue's eyes, completing
Los Olhos de Satanás
, making them shine with demonic life. The coils of the snake made up the base of the building. A spiral of stairs incised into the snake's scales led to a door in the serpent's throat.

All around the plaza, he heard the sounds of fear, wailing women and the mutterings of old men. Indians and
caboclos
alike became afraid when he lit the torches at night. In a very real way, the torches illuminated their fate, to be consumed by
El Mestre
, their blood to flow over the plaza. He knew they whispered of it. How could they not? He'd made no secret of his plans.

The cages ringed the plaza, a circle of iron bars set into concrete pilings. As a concession to the weather, he'd had thatch roofs laid on top of the top bars to keep out the rain. In the short time since he'd constructed his prison, the rain forest had added its own touches,
sending up shoots and vines to twine around the rusting bars and leaf out, making the whole thing nearly picturesque.

He took the stairs up the snake tower to the first level and the small room he'd had built into the golden anaconda's throat. The upper level was the snake's mouth, built like a platform and flanked on either side by seven-foot-high fangs. He'd killed a small paca earlier in the day, using the slightest amount of ground beetle carapace, and the bowl of blood would be well congealed by now. He would build a fire under it, get it boiling and steaming, add a few select ingredients, some powders and pastes he made himself from jungle plants, and one highly poisonous and highly hallucinogenic frog skin. It was a risk to drink the blood potion. It was always a risk, but he was in need of visions, of a night given over to strange pleasure and carefully skirted terror.
Uyump
the frogs were called, vision beasts—and the visions they gave were beastly, indeed. Less than an inch long, the tiny frogs exploded a man's mind into an infinite number of pieces. Only the truly strong came back whole.

He had… barely. After the first time, he'd had to struggle to regain his sanity, and yet he'd been drawn back to the shaman's shack up on the Rio Papurí again and again, until one night he'd seen his shining path to greatness open up and spread out like a path of stars.

He opened the door to his sanctuary and was greeted by a heartening sight. Beetles, everywhere, scuttling over tables and walls. Thousands of five-inch-long kingmaker beetles, their iridescent carapaces adding a surreally colored and ever-shifting surface to everything inside the room.

Hungry beetles, he thought, moving to the nearest
table and ripping open the package. A pile of raw and bloody monkey parts spilled out, and the beetles descended in a horde to feed on the fresh kill.

A thoroughly satisfied smile curved the corners of his lips. Even without his gold, he was a rich man, a very rich man—and he was unstoppable.

CHAPTER 22

A
nnie was awakened at dawn by a
soft touch on her shoulder, the woman Ajaju coming to take her to the river as she had every morning. She looked around as she swung her legs over the side of the hammock. The camp was breaking up, everyone packing and shouldering whatever they would carry for the day.

At the river, the same sense of urgency prevailed. Children were part of the women's morning time, and mothers quickly washed their broods in the pool of clear water below the waterfall rushing over a rocky ledge in the river.

The morning was lovely and cool, with mist pooling along the forest floor and rising off the water. Birds were awake and taking to the air from their nighttime roosts.

With the children washed up, the women hurried back to the camp. Being the only one with clothes to put on left Annie alone at the riverbank, a surprising occurrence it took her a moment to realize. She hadn't been alone since the Indians had caught her. The possibilities
weren't lost on her, but as she slipped on her shorts and looked around the forest, the realities weren't lost on her, either. Striking off on her own might not be in her best interest. The Indians hadn't harmed her, and Will—

Will.

She stopped with her shirt only half on.

Will had come into the camp.

How could she not have remembered? She'd been so relieved to see him. So incredibly relieved.

Maybe too relieved.

She finished slipping on her shirt, and clipped her fanny pack back around her waist, her gaze going to the trail the women had followed back to the camp. A warm blush coursed up her cheeks. She'd had a dream in the night, an incredibly erotic dream in which William Sanchez Travers had played the starring role, his body lithe, and lean, and hard—and for a few, brief, wondrous minutes, a part of hers.

Inexplicably, a warm blush coursed over her cheeks. The dream had felt real, damned real.

Maybe too damned real.

A birdcall to her right brought her gaze back to the waterfall just as a flock of egrets burst out of the trees on the shore. As one the birds took flight, flashes of white against the blue sky, dipping over the misty falls to the water, and then rising again against a backdrop of lush, green forest. At the top of the canopy, they turned, changing direction, and came flying down the river.

And there he was, standing on a slab of rock jutting into the water at the top of the falls, nearly invisible within the rising mist of early morn and the long shadows of the rain-forest trees. Her heart slowed in her chest. He had feathers tied into his hair, green parrot and
blue macaw, and long, black toucan. His face had been painted with
genipa
stripes on both cheeks. Another line of paint went down the whole side of his body, all the way to his foot. He was armed with a spear and his machete, its long blade hanging down the length of his thigh tied by a strip of twisted cloth, a line of white against his body. A bamboo quiver and a bow were slung diagonally across his chest.

He was naked except for a loincloth, and the sight of him started a tumult of longing inside her.

It had been no dream. Looking at him, she knew. They had made love, and it had been wonderful—the taste of his mouth, being cradled in the strength of his arms, that first slow thrust of his body into hers.

The memory washed through her, turning longing into an ache of desire she wouldn't have believed herself capable of feeling, not after Yavareté.

From where he stood on a rock in the river, he turned and caught her gaze with his own. A warm blush coursed up her cheeks. They had made love. It seemed impossible to her that she'd let him get that close, even more impossible that she might have been the one to initiate their closeness—but she remembered the way he'd felt beneath her hands, the tautness of his muscles, the silken softness of his skin, all of him hers to explore—and explore him she had.

Her blush deepened. The more she looked at him, the more she remembered.

He started down the rocks at the side of the falls, and she let herself look her fill, her gaze trailing over a landscape of lean muscles and brown skin to his face. He was beautiful, physically elegant, an animal in his prime, and looking at him, she was afraid what she was feeling was
more than lust, a truly disturbing turn of events. She hadn't been in love with the wrangler in Wyoming. She'd been in the midst of a teenage crush, but when the pro rodeo circuit had called him back, she'd also been relieved at how easily she'd gotten out of the relationship. She and the professor had shared a passion that was more intellectual than physical, at least on her side. It had been his mind that had attracted her, and her heartbreak had been pretty damned minimal when he'd dumped her for the next coed in line.

Coming up off the trail, Will stopped in front of her, his body sheened with morning mist.

“Good morning,” he said.
“Tudo bem?”

“Vou bem.”
With him standing close, she was fine.

She had an intellectual passion for his mind, too, and had for years, ever since she'd first read his
Medicines of the Milk River and the Healing Forest
, long before they'd started putting his photograph on his book jackets. But it wasn't the thought of having intellectual discourse with him that was making her heart race. It was the way he smelled—very warm and masculine, very different from her, like
genipa
and earth with traces of smoke from the morning fires. It was his hands and the tendons that ran down his forearms and met like the confluence of a river at his wrist. All she had to do was look at the taut plane of his abdomen and the arrow of dark hair that started at his navel and disappeared beneath his loincloth, and her mouth went dry.

There were probably dozens of scientifically biological reasons for what she was feeling. She'd read some of the published material on the genetic forces at work in mate selection, the literal chemistry of sexual attraction— and at the moment couldn't have cared less.