Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Ten

Ellie stalked back to the Hotel Rio Nuevo. Outrage fired through her blood so hot and fast that she was surprised it didn’t come out of her ears in the form of steam.

How dare that man follow her? How dare he have the gall to offer to take her to the mountains—as if she would ever agree to travel with some muleheaded surveyor who thought he knew better than everybody else—only to take it back a breath later!

She hoped he stepped on a nettle. Were there nettles in British Honduras?

Something spiky and itchy, at any rate. Ellie hoped he walked through a whole patch of it. She pictured his arrogant face with its unjustly strong cheekbones breaking out in hives, and felt a little burst of satisfaction.

Her conversations with the two guides whom Mrs. Linares had recommended had been frankly disheartening. Both men had seemed honest and well-informed, and both had actively tried to dissuade her from undertaking the journey.

Ellie refused to give up so easily on the promise the map offered. She would find another way to get where she needed to go. She had five days before she risked Jacobs turning up. That was plenty of time to figure something out.

It didn’t help that she was also bone-tired. Her sleep the night before had been broken by strange dreams, none of which she could remember clearly.

She had been dreaming more often than usual ever since leaving London. She hoped it wouldn’t prove a pattern. If she was going to succeed in securing a guide and navigating her way to the interior, she would certainly need to get her rest.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Nitherscott-Watby,” Mr. Linares said from his place behind the front desk. “Will you be joining us for dinner this evening, or would you like another tray sent up?”

Ellie heard Bates enter the lobby behind her.

She would prefer to take a tray in her room—but she wasn’t about to let that infuriating man think that she was crawling away in defeat.

“I will, thank you,” she replied, making sure that her words were clear enough to be overheard.

“I shall put you at the Reverend Greene’s table,” Mr. Linares replied. “His sister, who is traveling with him, is the other lady in residence at the hotel. She may help you feel more comfortable.”

“That’s very kind,” Ellie replied. “If you’ll excuse me.”

She turned from the desk, refusing to spare Bates so much as a glare as she stalked through the door into the guest wing.

Dinner was an ordeal.

As promised, Ellie had been seated with a Methodist reverend. His sister had spent the entirety of the meal glaring at Ellie as though expecting her to sprout horns. Clearly, the fact that Ellie was here in the colony without a man made her suspect, despite her widowish cover story.

The reverend himself was a gloomy and apocalyptic sort. Ellie’s other dinner companions were hardly better. Two of them were the pair of oversized English schoolboys she had glimpsed in the billiards room when she arrived the day before. Their names were Galle and Tibbord, and they clearly considered staying at the Rio Nuevo rather than the hotel across town to be ‘roughing it.’ The two men were on a tour of the region, and they had the sunburns to prove it. Mr. Tibbord—taller, plumper, and less confident—was apparently writing a book about their experiences. Mr. Galle—short, trim, and sporting a carefully waxed mustache—declared that he had provided all of the anecdotes worth mentioning. Based on the blatant hints he dropped, those mostly consisted of excessive alcohol consumption and trips to brothels.

Finally, their company was rounded out by Col. Jeremiah Tuttle, formerly of the Confederate Army, who spent the entirety of the meal arguing that the war between the states had been motivated by “federal overreach” rather than by the shameful economics of slavery. Apparently, British Honduras was afflicted with an entire cohort of Tuttle’s fellow rebels, who had fled here after the war to re-establish their plantations. Though slavery was illegal in the colony, as it was in all British holdings, Tuttle bragged about the benefits of cheap South Asian indentured labor in a way that made Ellie wonder whether there was really much difference.

Meanwhile, across the dining room, Adam Bates sat at a table by the veranda, which kept bursting out into raucous laughter. Everyone over there was clearly having a grand time. Based on the froth at the top of his glass, he was drinking a beer. Ellie had never been very interested in beer, but she fought back a twinge of jealousy all the same as she wondered whether it might taste better than the wine she had been automatically served—which was unpleasantly sweet.

Ellie still consumed more of the stuff than she normally would have (which was more or less none at all). The grating tones of Bates’s laugh and the hive-less state of his cheekbones kept driving the glass to her lips.

The alcohol made her thoughts a bit fuzzy at the edges as she climbed the stairs to her room on the hotel’s upper floor. She would probably have a headache tomorrow. She decided to blame Bates for that as well.

Ellie fumbled with her key as she inserted it into the lock. It turned oddly, and she cursed, twisting it again before she pushed the door open and stalked inside.

She froze as she realized that her room was not empty.

A stranger stood in the dim light of the oil lamp on her dressing table—a white man of perhaps fifty with ginger hair and a beard that tended toward gray. Ellie’s valise lay open beside him, its contents scattered.

The intruder was middling in height, soft in the middle, and a bit slumped in the shoulders like someone who spent most of his time at a desk. Ellie might almost have assumed that she had stumbled into the wrong room by mistake… if he had not been in the process of shaking out one of her skirts.

“Ah,” he said, looking up as she came in. “You must be Miss Mallory.”

Something slammed into her from the side.

The tackle thudded her into the wall, jolting the wooden boards under her shoulders. She twisted, opening her mouth to scream—only to have a wad of fabric shoved into it.

Ellie gagged on the cloth as someone wrenched up her arms and pinned her to the wall.

She found herself face to face with Jacobs.

How could he be here? It should have been impossible. Ellie had studied the steamer routes. Certainly, he might have taken a more immediate boat to Cuba or Jamaica from London, but there were no direct connections to Belize Town from any of those ports.

He must have hired a charter. It would have been expensive, and there would be regulatory hurdles and permits to acquire… unless Jacobs had outright smuggled himself into the colony.

Ellie forced her wildly spinning thoughts to a stop. None of that mattered. He was here now, and he had caught her.

“Give me your tie,” he ordered.

It took Ellie a moment to realize that he was speaking to the ginger-haired man, who was looking distinctly uncomfortable with the situation.

“Is that really necessary?” the stranger asked.

“Tie, Dawson,” Jacobs ordered.

The ginger man—Dawson—jumped, obviously intimidated by his partner. He rapidly removed the garment in question.

Jacobs switched his grip, pinning Ellie with a single hand and grabbing the length of paisley silk with the other. Ellie strained against him with rising desperation as he wrapped the tie around her wrists, then knotted it.

He shoved her onto the bed.

Ellie fought a wilder wave of panic, but it was immediately clear that Jacobs only cared about eliminating the threat posed by her legs. He secured her shins to the mattress with a knee and used a spare stocking from the scattered pile of her clothes to bind her ankles. He wrapped another one around her head to tie the gag in place, then rose, neatly straightening his coat.

“It isn’t in the valise,” Dawson announced as he watched the proceedings with a distinctly awkward air. “Perhaps you might ask her where she hid it.”

His accent was Scottish and a bit posh.

Yes, Ellie thought frantically. They should ask her… because if they took the gag from her mouth for her to answer, she was going to scream bloody murder for help.

Jacobs sat down beside her on the bed, looking entirely unflustered.

“Still have the map?” he asked.

Ellie blinked at him, then made a sound through the gag, signaling her inability to answer.

“Shake of the head will do,” Jacobs returned easily.

She narrowed her eyes to a glare.

He leaned closer.

“This could get quite a bit more uncomfortable, if you like,” he noted casually.

Ellie glanced over at his companion. Dawson didn’t look at all happy about the situation, but he said nothing. She wouldn’t be getting any assistance from that quarter.

She forced herself to take a breath. She had to stay calm. She could get through this.

Ellie shook her head.

“She has it,” Jacobs announced.

Her eyes widened. She shook her head more pointedly. That had very clearly been a no.

Jacobs watched her with an uncomfortable level of focus.

“Is it here in the room with us?” he asked mildly.

Ellie had to get the pair of villains out of here. If she could send them away, then perhaps she could find a way out of her restraints, or make enough of a racket for someone to come looking.

She shook her head again—another sharp no.

“Are we going to play guessing games over this all night? She might have squirreled it away anywhere in the colony,” Dawson complained.

“It’s here,” Jacobs replied calmly, still watching her with dark eyes that reminded her of the way an owl looked at a mouse.

Desperately, Ellie nodded her head toward the door. Out, she signaled.

“No,” Jacobs silkily countered. “That’s not quite right. Is it, Miss Mallory?”

A darker, more uncomfortable fear itched along Ellie’s spine. Jacobs seemed to have an uncanny ability to see right through her answers—but how was that possible? How could the man tell she was lying when the only clue she gave him was a shake of her head?

“I suppose she might have it on her person,” Dawson suggested uncomfortably.

“How very logical of you,” Jacobs replied.

Ellie wondered whether Dawson had noticed the slight edge of sarcasm in Jacobs’ response.

Jacobs’ hands moved neatly and impersonally to the pockets of her skirt, checking their contents. His examination slipped to her waist and then up her torso.

Dawson looked away, reddening a bit.

“Ah,” Jacobs said as his fingers patted against the stiffer portion of Ellie’s corset through the fabric of her blouse. With neat professionalism, he opened the top three buttons of her shirt and plucked the folded packet of the map from the pocket she had cut into the lining of her undergarment.

He extended the parchment back toward the ginger-haired man without looking at him.

“Professor?” Jacobs prompted when Dawson did not immediately move.

“Right. Yes.” Dawson snapped to attention and took the map. He opened it and scanned the page.

“Ecclesiastical Latin,” he muttered, bringing the document closer to the lamp. “Sixteenth or seventeenth century, though I should have to examine the fibers in order to be absolutely certain…”

He began walking absentmindedly toward the door with his eyes still glued to the parchment.

“You’re forgetting something,” Jacobs announced flatly

Without taking his eyes from Ellie’s face, he grasped the ribbon around her neck and gave it a quick, sharp tug.

The string snapped loose. He drew the black amulet out from under her blouse and tossed it to the professor.

Dawson fumbled to catch the disk, nearly dropping the map in the process. His eyes widened as he turned the stone in his hands.

“Marvelous,” he exclaimed quietly, blinking with surprise.

He jumped a bit as he remembered that Ellie was still there and looked toward her guiltily.

“What about the woman?” he pressed tentatively.

Jacobs stood. The mattress shifted with his movement.

“Check the hallway,” he ordered.

Dawson held the map and medallion to his chest, stiffening.

“This really isn’t the sort of thing I do…” he began.

“The hall,” Jacobs repeated flatly.

Dawson grimaced but hurriedly dodged out of the room. He reappeared a moment later.

“It’s clear,” he reported.

Jacobs hauled Ellie off the bed and tossed her over his shoulder like a fainting damsel. Though he wasn’t a particularly large man, his body felt like iron under her gut.

He stalked from the room into the deserted hallway, carrying Ellie along it until he neatly kicked his way through another door.

This suite was larger than Ellie’s, consisting of two adjoining spaces. The room they entered was a small parlor with a table and chair, lit by a single lamp. Beyond it was a bedchamber, swathed in gloom from the falling twilight.

“Why have you brought her to my room?” Dawson protested.

“You have work to do on the map,” Jacobs replied as he slid Ellie off his shoulder and dropped her onto the floor.

“But what are you going to do with her?” Dawson pressed.

“I’ll dispose of her later when there are fewer people about,” Jacobs replied.

The remark was not particularly bragging or vicious. Jacobs made Ellie’s demise sound as ordinary as taking out the rubbish.

A sharp, cold bolt of terror shot through her.

“Surely you aren’t going to—you know—right now,” Dawson complained. “You can’t expect me to work in here with a… a deceased person.”

Jacobs’ only answer was a raised, weary eyebrow.

“Well?” Dawson prompted stubbornly as he crossed his arms.

Apparently doing his job with a murdered woman on the floor was a hard line for the professor.

“Fine,” Jacobs gracelessly conceded.

He grabbed Ellie by one of her bound arms and dragged her across the floor into the bedroom. The bed inside was built with a squared canopy frame that was meant to be draped with mosquito netting at night.

Jacobs considered her as she glared up at him from the floor.

“A little extra precaution, I think,” he concluded.

He hauled her upright by her bound wrists, then knotted the loose ends of Dawson’s paisley necktie neatly around the canopy beam. Ellie found herself anchored there, her hands raised above her head.

Jacobs considered the arrangement for a moment—and then walked away, apparently satisfied with it.

Dawson’s wide gray eyes watched Ellie from the adjoining room, then disappeared from view as Jacobs pulled the bedroom door shut behind him, leaving her to the gloom.

He didn’t bother to lock it.

Ellie’s frustrated scream was little more than a choked groan through the fabric of the gag.

Ellie cursed herself roundly. How could she have been so careless?

She had thought she was being terribly clever. It had simply never occurred to her that someone like Jacobs would have the resources to overcome the timetables and forge his own path to the colony.

Now, she might pay for that mistake with her life.

No—Ellie refused to allow that. She would find a way out of this.

The canopy frame was a box fixed to posts at each corner of the bed. Though Ellie could slide herself along the beam to which she had been tied, there was no gap through which she could wriggle her bindings in order to free herself.

Ellie yanked herself closer to one of the posts, trying to study it in the dim light. The bed was perhaps four and a half feet wide. Both post and beam were made of sturdy hardwood, but Ellie couldn’t feel any nails. The structure must have been fitted together with wooden dowels and glue.

Dowels were less sturdy than nails. An idea began to take shape in her mind.

Ellie could hear the murmur of low voices through the door to the next room, along with the scrape and shuffle of furniture. She would need to be quiet.

She climbed up to kneel on the mattress, then tugged herself along the beam until her back was pressed up against one of the posts.

Letting her bound wrists take her weight, Ellie swung her feet up and thrust them out toward the opposite post… and missed.

Her shoulders wrenched as she half-fell off the bed. Holding her breath, she froze, listening to the noises from the next room.

No outcry broke the rustling quiet—only the click of a closing door.

She climbed back into place and tried again. This time, her boots connected with the post. Ellie braced herself there, suspended awkwardly over the end of the mattress.

She pushed.

The effort took every muscle in her body—shoulders, abdomen, thighs—all focused precariously on forcing her body into a straight line.

The frame of the bed creaked in protest… and then gave way as the joint between the post and the beam separated with an audible crack.

Ellie slid down the length of the wood and collapsed onto the floor, her heart pounding madly in her chest.

Scrambling to her knees, she tugged her bound wrists free of the beam, then brought up her legs, shoving aside the awkward folds of her skirt to work at the stocking that bound her ankles. She loosened it and kicked her way free of the makeshift rope.

She tried to pull on the gag, but Jacobs had tied it too tightly. With her hands bound, she couldn’t reach the knot at the back of her head.

That didn’t matter. She didn’t need to scream… not if she could run.

Ellie crept to the door, conscious of every subtle creak of the old floorboards. There was no sound from the other side save for the short scrape of a chair adjusting position and the rustling of a few papers.

Silently, she twisted the knob, opened the door the tiniest crack, and peeked through it.

Dawson sat at the table in the parlor. He was bent over some object of study—the map, presumably—scratching away in a notebook with an expression of intense concentration.

Ellie widened the crack in the door and risked a better look. The professor was alone.

The room was stuffed with trunks and cases. Jacobs and his companion had clearly planned on an extended stay in the colony. In fact, some of the equipment she could see strewn about indicated that they had packed for an expedition.

And why wouldn’t they, when only a woman stood between them and what they wanted?

The thought sparked a bolt of indignant fury. Ellie supposed they wouldn’t have any trouble at all finding a guide.

Most of the gear looked brand new. Ellie could also see an entire crate full of books. Books! She couldn’t imagine how expensive the freight tariffs on a crate of books must have been.

Whoever Dawson and Jacobs were, they had far more resources at their disposal than Ellie would have suspected for a pair of rogue thieves. The thought was an unsettling one.

A window near the bed behind her opened onto the veranda. Ellie could easily climb through it and dash—but then where would she go? The local constabulary? They would only have Ellie’s word that Dawson and Jacobs were criminals. How would she explain where she herself had come by the map and medallion if the pair tried to turn the tables on her?

She couldn’t. She’d stolen it herself, more or less—rather more, she admitted ruefully, even if she’d been boxed into it. Who were the colonial authorities here in Belize Town most likely to believe? A lone woman or two well-dressed gentlemen, one of whom apparently boasted the title of professor and could afford to carry a crate of books across the sea with him?

The answer to that was obvious.

Dawson’s chair scraped again as he rose, muttering to himself. He crossed to the books and started shuffling through them, putting his back to the table.

Ellie’s pulse jumped as she realized that she was looking at an opportunity to do something more than simply escape before Jacobs returned to murder her.

She slipped through the door and moved silently behind the professor’s back to the makeshift desk.

The map and the medallion lay on top of it, just as she had known they would.

Ellie snatched up the two relics just as Dawson turned, his eyes widening with shock.

“What the devil!” he exclaimed—then jumped nervously at the sound of a key turning in the lock of the door that led into the hall.

Ellie shoved the map and medallion into her skirt pocket and whirled for the French doors at her back. They had been left open to ventilate the room, leaving her way onto the veranda blocked only by a length of mosquito netting.

She easily burst through it.

Voices rose behind her as she darted outside, her footsteps knocking hollowly against the boards of the elevated walkway.

Ellie didn’t think much of her chances of outrunning Jacobs. Back in Canonbury, her intimate knowledge of the terrain had given her an advantage. Here, it would all come down to speed—and Jacobs wasn’t running with his hands tied.

What she needed to do was disappear.

Thinking quickly, she hurried to the railing of the veranda. Grasping it with her bound hands, she swung an awkward leg over the side. Her skirts hampered the movement. Ellie tugged against them, biting out a curse through the gag.

The fabric loosened, and she nearly toppled. Catching herself, she shifted her grip from the banister to the rails.

Ellie crouched down as low as she could against the outside of the railing, then let her legs drop.

Her shoulders jolted with the impact, an ache shooting through her arms. Her boots dangled over darkness, her feet swinging as she searched for purchase. As her eyes continued to adjust to the deeper gloom, she glanced down to see the railing for the ground floor veranda just a few inches below the soles of her boots.

Footsteps pounded out onto the boards above her.

Ellie let go.

She landed neatly on the railing… and promptly toppled forward. Ellie had a brief moment to ready herself for a crash to the floor—which would undoubtedly reveal her position to Jacobs.

Instead, she slammed into something warm, solid, and decidedly un-floor-like.

An iron arm circled her waist. Her breath left her in a whoosh as her diaphragm hit a rock-hard shoulder. Ellie slid down the front of an intimidatingly large body until her feet met the ground once more.

She looked up into the shocked, twilight-shadowed face of Adam Bates.

“What in the actual black hell—” he began.

Ellie shoved her hands against his mouth and shook her head frantically.

Bates carefully grasped her bound wrists and pulled them back for a better look. His gaze went dark, and his eyes flashed up to the gag that still bound her mouth.

Above them, the footsteps stilled—then started up again with a quick, intentional pace.

Jacobs was heading for the stairs.

With a grim set to his mouth, Bates tossed the remains of a stubby cigar into a tin can by the chair in which he had been sitting. He plucked up a half-empty glass of some brown spirit in one hand, and with the other, he hauled Ellie unceremoniously through the French doors to the room that lay beyond.

He shoved her into the corner.

“Stay,” he ordered. His voice was a dangerous murmur, and his blue eyes sparked with threat.

Without so much as a brush of sound, he plucked a chair from the nearby table, whirled it about, and planted it by the opening to the veranda. He slid into it with his drink in his hand.

Ellie stayed where he had put her, pressed back against the wall. The position left her invisible to anyone who happened to pass the French doors, but she would be instantly exposed if someone actually stepped inside the room.

She tried once more to wrench loose the bindings on her hands, but they refused to give.

Even, relentless footsteps approached, stopping as they reached the threshold of the room. Jacobs’ voice carried to her from a mere three feet away.

“Good evening,” he said. “I was wondering if you had seen anyone come by just now.”

There was nothing untoward in his tone. He sounded as though he really were merely out for an evening stroll and not hunting for the woman he intended to murder.

Ellie waited, her heart pounding—and recalled the moment of tension when she had stood outside another door and listened to her supervisor eagerly sell her out.

Was Adam Bates about to do the same thing?

Ellie could see him perfectly well. He looked entirely at ease in his chair. He was stripped to his shirt, of course, with his white sleeves rolled up to expose his tanned forearms. The suspenders for his trousers hung at his sides. Bates had obviously shrugged out of them as soon as he had escaped the jacket he had condescended to don for dinner. At least he had shaved since Ellie had seen him that afternoon, but she could already discern the shadow of his beard reemerging along the sharp line of his jaw.

She didn’t know him. As far as she knew, he didn’t even like her very much.

Ellie held her breath as the gag pulled against the corners of her mouth.

“Only the mosquitoes,” Bates replied. “And some woman who dropped out of the sky.”

She froze. The surveyor didn’t so much as glance at her. His eyes were on the man in the doorway.

The bastard. The rotten, irredeemable bastard…

With a liquid grace, Bates rose from the chair. He stalked over to the doorway. The move put him close enough that Ellie could’ve reached out and touched him if she’d chosen.

He still held the drink. His voice, when he spoke, sounded richly, terribly dangerous.

“Looked to me like somebody put a gag in her mouth,” he said. “Tied up her hands.”

“Did it,” Jacobs countered flatly.

“A man has to wonder,” Bates went on with apparent calm as the spirits in his glass twisted into a little tornado. “What sort of fellow would be out looking for a woman trussed up like a goose?”

“Perhaps one concerned for her welfare,” Jacobs replied coolly.

“And why would a lady be running from a guy like that?” Bates returned.

A notion burst into Ellie’s head—one that was quite frankly bizarre. She willed it toward Bates regardless as though mere urgency could dart it into his brain.

Don’t lie, she thought furiously. Whatever you do, don’t lie to him.

Silence stretched, rich and thick as the night air. sion swirled around her like the electric potential of the moment before a lightning strike.

“Seems to me,” Bates continued softly. “If I had seen a woman like that, you might be the last goddamned person I would tell where she’d run off to.” He carefully set his glass down on the nearby table, then raised his gaze to the unseen man across the threshold. “And now I might suggest that you get yourself the hell off my doorstep before I take it in mind to make a more direct intervention in this situation.”

There was a pause the length of a breath as Jacobs considered his options.

“Sorry to disturb you,” he said at last—and a moment later, his footsteps moved away.