Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Six

Fifteen minutes later

Hotel Rio Nuevo, Belize Town

Adam Bates was exhausted, mosquito bitten, and covered in mud. At least, he hoped it was just mud.

He had acquired the filth earlier that morning when he had spent the better part of an hour hauling a mule out of a swamp. He had been on his way back from surveying a new land grant upriver when an iguana the size of a small pig wandered onto the trail and spooked the beast carrying Adam’s gear.

Adam had been sorely tempted to leave the mule out there for the vultures, but Aurelio would never rent any animals to him again if Adam lost yet another piece of his inventory.

Adam looked like hell. Given that he felt like hell, he supposed that was only fair. When he entered the Hotel Rio Nuevo, which had served as his home base for the last six years, he saw Diego Linares Rivas’ face fall into familiar lines of dismay and felt a slight twinge of regret.

In all honesty, Adam might’ve hopped into the river on his way back to wash off the worst of the muck instead of flaking little pieces of it across the lobby floor, but he had been too damned tired to bother. All he wanted was to crawl into his room and stop moving for a while.

“Dios te salve, María,” Diego muttered, his eyes rising dramatically to the ceiling as Adam approached.

“It’s not that bad, Diego,” Adam countered.

The hotelier answered him with a skeptically arched brow.

Diego’s wife, the lovely Ximena Castillo Ramirez de Linares, stepped into the lobby from the back office. Her dark brown hair was lightly streaked with silver and her white blouse contrasted with her brightly colored skirt.

She let out a sharp, high shriek, dropping the basket of laundry she was carrying.

“What are you—a swamp monster?” Ximena exclaimed.

“Kinda what it feels like at the moment,” Adam agreed, scratching at his hair. A chunk of mud came loose and dropped onto the floor.

“No!” Ximena protested, raising her hands. “Don’t touch it. Don’t touch anything.”

“We could take him out into the garden and throw buckets at him until he’s manageable,” Diego suggested.

The fact that the hotelier did so in English rather than Spanish made it clear that he intended the remark to be overheard.

“He will scare the other guests,” Ximena countered firmly, glaring at Adam. “He should go to his room, strip off all of those clothes, and give them to me to be burned.”

“This is a perfectly good shirt,” Adam protested.

He tugged the soaked garment away from his chest and frowned at it, trying to remember what color it had been when he had put it on last week.

Ximena drew in a breath, clearly striving for patience.

“Then I will wash it—but I am only touching it with a stick,” she declared. “Put it out on the veranda. All of it,” she emphasized sternly, her green-tinted brown eyes flashing with menace.

“Yes, ma’am,” Adam agreed. “Though I was kind of hoping to make use of that bath of yours.”

“You want to go into my washroom looking like that?” Ximena squeaked.

Adam shrugged. A few more flakes of mud shifted to the ground.

“It’s a bath, not an embassy dinner,” he noted.

Ximena stepped over the laundry basket and stalked up to him. Her head came roughly to his chin. She jabbed a finger at his chest, stopping just short of actual contact.

“My washroom is clean,” she seethed. “It is going to stay clean. You are not going to go anywhere near it until you have removed the swamp you are carrying around. ?Entiendes?”

“Claro, Se?ora,” Adam replied, forcing a straight face.

“Bien.” She pulled back her finger, treating him to a haughty look. “Now take off your shoes.”

Adam glanced down. His rugged leather boots were completely caked with filth. The mess looked even wetter and less appealing than the stuff on his shirt.

“Yeah, fair enough,” he acknowledged with a sigh.

Satisfied, Ximena pivoted back to collect her laundry basket. She set it on her hip and stalked down the hall.

“Just be glad she didn’t see that knife,” Diego said with a nod toward the sheath at Adam’s belt.

Adam’s hand moved automatically to his machete. The blade was eighteen inches long and sharp enough to split a palm frond down the middle.

“You know what she said she would do if she caught you wearing it in the hotel again,” Diego continued.

“It’s useful,” Adam countered, giving the top of the hilt a possessive little pat.

“Anyway, someone is already using the bath. You would be out of luck even if Ximena hadn’t forbidden you. I’ll have óscar bring you water.” Diego eyed Adam tiredly. “Lots of it.”

Adam crouched down to tug at the laces of his boots. He gingerly removed them. After a critical look at his socks, he took those off as well.

His toes looked all right.

Diego plucked a key from the rack behind the desk and handed it over. After the fifth time Adam had lost his key while out on a job, the hotelier had declared that it must be turned in for safekeeping anytime he left town.

Adam tossed the comfortable weight of it in his palm as he swung his boots over his shoulder, holding them by the laces. “Has anyone…?”

“Dios, no,” Diego asserted, looking mildly aghast. “Nobody goes in your room. Not after the crocodile fell out of the closet.”

“Stuffed crocodile,” Adam corrected him automatically as he dropped the key into his pocket.

“?Espera! Your mail.” Diego plucked a small pile of envelopes from a slot under the desk and handed them over.

Adam took a quick glance at them. They were return-addressed to San Francisco, which meant they were from his mother—more missives berating him for wasting his time in the colony when he should be preparing to take over the family business.

He mentally pictured himself walking into the boardroom of Robinson, Bates, and MacKenzie in his current state. It would almost be worth the trip just to see the look on the stockholders’ faces.

Diego’s eyes were already back on his registry book.

“Dinner is at seven,” he called without looking up.

“Aye aye, captain,” Adam replied.

He trudged down the hall, leaving a trail of flaking mud behind him—which he did feel a little bad about. Ximena de Linares ran a tight ship at the Rio Nuevo.

Adam spent so much time with termites and parrots for company out in the bush that he had a hard time remembering how ordinary people did things.

The rooms that lined the ground floor hall were quiet. At this hour, most of the Rio Nuevo’s guests were either out working or had lain down for a siesta—which was probably for the best. There would be fewer people to complain about a swamp monster roaming the hotel.

Adam paused outside the door to the washroom, allowing himself a sigh at the thought of what lay on the other side of it. The tub was large enough for even Adam to sink down into it, and he was a solid two inches over six feet. Without the Rio Nuevo’s steam-powered hot water generator, it would have required an hour just to boil enough to fill the thing.

The sign on the door had been flipped over. It read: Occupied / Ocupado.

“Woulda been nice,” Adam muttered.

He turned to go… just as a quick, feminine scream sounded from beyond the wooden barrier.

There was really only one reasonable way to respond to that. Adam dropped his boots, whipped the machete neatly from his belt, and kicked through the door.